Owl on the Prowl

What is up with websites making you become a member to shop on them? That is annoying as fuck. Who came up with that brilliant idea? I also hate it when I have to create an account. i don’t fucking want to. I just want some GD shoes.

Yay! Finally, a bowling episode on Parks and Recreation. and guess what? I bowl exactly the way Ron does. Straight bowling, right down the middle. No fancy stuff. He even gets mad (like myself) when people bowl all fucked up (i.e.- Tom rolling granny style) and still do well. That is mega annoying. I knew Ron and I were kindred spirits.

I had some strange dreams again last night.

Dream 1: Kristen Wiig, another man and woman were my upstairs neighbors. Todd was scared to talk to them, but I became a fast friend. We hung out on the stoop. Also, they were being audited so they kept giving me their paychecks to hide.

Dream 2: A “bad guy” for lack of a better word, turned all the continents into ice and then broke them apart in to tiny pieces. I was separated from my family, but was with 2 friends, who were the same kind of Jew as me. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to stay with them, or go off in these questionable rockets to find my family. I kept going up and down elevators in a dystopian airport.

What is wrong with me?!?!

Rock songs can be made better by some strategically placed “soul claps”. I got the term “soul claps” from an old boyfriend, and it’s really the perfect term for the few claps in rock songs that everyone notices. We have to throw “soul” in there because that’s where these rockers get the idea, from soul music. Some songs have them through out, but some only in one spot, but you can’t imagine them not being there.

Last night, after work, I decided to have Brewskie practice. Not sure if you know that Brewskie is my duo group with my old man. I play rhythm guitar and sing and he plays lead guitar and sings backups. Our set list includes some Seger, BOC, Kiss, The Band, Aerosmith, etc… I wanted to get some new material so I looked up Badfinger No Matter What. That song has some killer soul claps in the last little bit. They are perfect.

After that I decided I wanted us to harmonize like the Beach Boys (fat chance, I know) so I looked up my favorite BB song I Get Around. Also has soul claps (during the verse)! Another one is Dobie Gray’s Drift Away. I used to have a whole list of songs with soul claps but I can’t find it. Can you help me out?

This month, I can’t get enough Viggo Mortensen. I think it’s maybe cause I bought the LOTR trilogy for Todd and we watched them all at once. Damn, he is good looking! I would totally hit that. Also, I found out recently, that, as weird as this sounds, he has a child with/was married to Exene Cervenka. How crazy is that?

Last night I dreamt I was at an Iggy Pop show. I had a spot on the stage (I think I got this through my job) to view him from. He was rocking out and then he just died, on stage, mid show. The weird part is, no one seemed to really be surprised or care. They just got up and left like it was no big deal.

There it is! My first cake of the year, German Chocolate Cake. As I stated in a previous post, I am going to bake a cake every month this year. I decided to start with a challenging one. Before tackling this behemoth, I read up on it. Did you know that German Chocolate Cake is not German? I did not. According to Wikipedia, the world’s most trusty source of information:

“Its roots can be traced back to 1852 when American Sam German developed a brand of dark baking chocolate for the American Baker’s Chocolate Company. The product, Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate, was named in honor of him. In 1957, the original recipe for “German’s Chocolate Cake” was sent by a Dallas, Texas, homemaker to a local newspaper. This recipe used the baking chocolate introduced 105 years prior and became quite popular.”

So there you have it. Not German at all. After these startling facts were revealed, I went on a search for the perfect recipe. I don’t know about youse, but I enjoy a moist cake that has a good ratio of icing to cake to filling. I ended up going with a David Lebovitz recipe which I tweeked a little to make it more traditional.

As you can see, this cake has an assload of ingredients, even with the few I omitted. Instead of the 2 kinds of chocolate in the DL cake part, I opted to use the original “German’s” chocolate. Hello! The freakin cake is named after his chocolate. Show the man some respect.

All in all, I think this dumbass cake cost about $25 between the 3+ sticks of butter, pecans (why are they so expensive?), coconut, buttermilk (why do they only sell quarts of that?), chocolate and other miscellany (some of which I already had). I got everything out, prepared my cake pans and preheated the oven. The making of the cake batter was quite a work out. You had to melt chocolate, beat egg whites to a stiff peak, fold them in, mix everything…my arm was hurtin’. Here is how everything turned out.

While the cakes were in the oven, I made the filling and icing. I decided to leave out the rum syrup from the DL recipe. I figured, this cake already has 2 1/4 cups of sugar, 3+ sticks of butter and corn syrup in it, does it really need rum syrup too? No. Lebovitz must be a fat moo…haha.

All the components had to cool completely before assembly so I kitty proofed them and went to sleep. This morning I woke up determined to finish the cake. I proceeded to carefully cut them in half, spreading the coconut pecan filling between each layer. After they were all stacked nicely (four layers!), I spread the chocolate icing on the sides as evenly as I could and piped a half ass design around the edge. Then I used my decorating comb to make ridges in the side and that was it. First cake of the year, didn’t turn out too bad. It is moist, it stayed whole and it tastes pretty damn good.

I had eventful day yesterday. It started at 7am and me having Jury Duty! I got myself to downtown Brooklyn by 8:30 and got cozy in the waiting room where I stayed for 8 HOURS! They never called my name. What a gyp! I actually would have liked to be a juror. At least I don’t have to go back for 8 years…and they showed a hilarious video with re-enactments of how justice was done back in the day, featuring Diane Sawyer, Todd’s favorite anchorwoman (she’s hot).

After going home, showering and resting for about 10 minutes, I hurried back into the city for Sleep no More. Luckily, my friend Masha had gotten there early and was at the front of the line, which moved inside just as I arrived.

***Let me preface my entry here by saying that this experience was AMAZING. I would highly recommend you go yourself…and also to read no further, so you will be surprised as to what you see. ***

When you enter the building, the first thing you notice is that you can’t see shit. It is dark as fuck. They take your coat and bag and send you to “check in” where you receive a playing card, which is your “room key”. You then walk up stairs and through a dark labyrinth of a hallway all the while listening to a Hitchcock soundtrack, and you end up here:

It’s the bar. A 1930s/40s bar complete with jazz band, smoke, a fortune teller and tiny round tables. You can get a drink while you wait for your number to be called to enter the hotel.

When they call your number, you receive a mask and head into a small room. There you are told to always where your mask and that there is no more talking from here on out. Everyone gets in the elevator. The man running the elevator stops on random floors and lets one or maybe a few people out at a time. This is where I lost Masha and Charles. I was on my own.

The first floor i got off on had some children rooms, an elaborate graveyard and a large room encased in french doors which had a clawfoot tub on a platform in the middle of it. In this “hotel” you are allowed to do whatever you want. You can sit on the furniture, you can open drawers, you can eat candy, bang the walls, read the books. It’s a free for all. 

The different areas were designed and decorated with the utmost expertise. The furnishings are all antique gorgeousness (I want to raid that place when they are done) from the wallpaper to the books. Some of the rooms include an apothecary (below), a candy shop, the hotel lobby, a hospital wing, a taxidermist, a mental hospital, an embalmer’s office, etc… You basically wander this building’s five floors in anyway you want exploring the rooms for any amount of time and in as much detail as you like. And as you wander, there are soundtracks that accompany each area. A lot of old jazz (think The Shining style) and scary noise.

As you maneuver the space, you occasionally see the actors. The first one I happened upon was a woman crying and eventually stripping and getting into a tub to wash the blood off herself (the whole thing is based on Macbeth). I then saw a couple dancing in a bar-like room with a pool table. Their choreographed dance was mesmerizing. At the end of it, they separated and you could follow either one of them wherever they went. I followed the man into the embalming room. The woman grabbed a guest and started to dance with him. I didn’t notice this, but apparently, some chosen guests were taken into rooms by them selves and locked in there. I’m glad that didn’t happen to me. There friends were left to bang on the door which they were soon ushered away from by the people in black masks as if to say, “Nothing is happening here. Move on.”

I don’t want to give it all away now, there is so much more! All I can say is the music and atmosphere paired with the acting, smoke, everyone in masks and darkness make for an ultra creepy experience. You should totally throw down eighty bucks and go.