Tusca - If you like bad service, here's your place

As I stated in the last post, DB~ and I went down to the South Side last night to do a little pre-race scouting of the territory. After we were done it was 8 p.m. and we were hungry. We saw a cool looking new place on Carson (around 14th'ish Street) called Local, but we couldn't find a parking spot. We turned down Dish Osteria because we wanted to save it for a dinner with her aunt. Eventually we headed back to our starting point at South Side Works and landed at Tusca.

The only other time I was a Tusca was in early December 2007. I went with one of my married couple friends to see an uplifting little movie called There Will Be Blood. After the movie, the 3 of us went to Tusca to have some dinner. At that time, we just got some tapas (small plates) to share between the 3 of us. That night my friend and I dubbed that place as There Will Be Hunger, because tapas is a rip-off. You pay way more money than just getting an entree and you're still not full.

But this time DB~ and I went thinking we would get entrees instead. Things started off promising with our female server. She greeted us and got our drinks relatively quickly. That would be her high point. DB~ got the Mediterranean Salmon and I order the Shrimp with Polenta. Her salmon dish came out from the kitchen and we waited for mine....and waited...and waited...and waited until at least 8 minutes passed by. Our server didn't seem the least bit apologetic/enthused/interested when she flopped my "entree" down on the table. I had told Squiggle to start eating, but she still held back a little, making her dish not optimal temperature.

My dish was tiny. It had 4 small shrimp served on a bed of flavorful polenta, but the whole thing was on an appetizer plate for $16. No side dish, no salad, just this. DB~'s salmon was awful according to her. The texture and feel of the salmon was not well-prepared. The seasoning was OK she said, though. She did have a nice creamy risotto with her dish.

The worst part is that our server never came back once. Not to check on our dinners, not to refill our drinks. The place wasn't full when we got there and by 9 p.m. certainly wasn't that busy. She just was a terrible server.

She dropped off our check without ever asking if we wanted dessert, coffee, or an after dinner drink. And then after we had our credit card in the holder and she back for the check, she asked if she could clear our plates (which had been sitting there for at least 15 minutes...a huge peeve of mine).

DB~ and I agreed to only leave a 15% tip exactly, which is basically a huge middle finger nowadays to a server. Congratulations, you are in my top 5 worst servers ever.

Tusca -- There Will Be Hunger and Bad Service

Go on, I Dare you

It's pretty well established at this point that DB~ and I are huge nerds, but we're also athletic (sort of) nerds too. We enjoy hiking, geocaching, kayaking, watching DB~ stomp me at basketball, that kind of stuff. But we really enjoy competition first and foremost, especially if it is modeled after The Amazing Race, DB~'s favorite show.

Last year we teamed up to do Urban Dare Pittsburgh (15th out of 95 teams) and Diamond Dash (8th out 200+ teams) within a month of each other. In October of 2009, we recruited one of my friends and one of her brothers to come in 1st place at Transit Treasure Hunt in downtown Pittsburgh. Each of these combines solving puzzles or clues and doing challenges then quickly either running the course around the city or riding a bike, like during Diamond Dash.

This year, Urban Dare is on Saturday, Diamond Dash is May 21st, and Transit Treasure Hunt (after a year hiatus) is in mid-June, so we're pretty psyched for these three. We just got back from doing some scouting of the South Side. We catalogued key memorials, pieces of public art, restaurants and bars with funny names, churches, and parks.

Both of us felt we didn't give our best effort last year. DB~ tripped and did a yard sale 10 minutes into it on the North Side, right by Bettis 36. She ripped her jogging pants and bloodied her knee. I wrenched my knee pretty awful about halfway through and peg-legged it the rest of the way. We also should have planned our route better at the start of Urban Dare.

If you are reading this and did Diamond Dash last year (there's approximately a 0.002% chance of both those things occuring), we were the team where the guy did the whole race on an adult tricycle, due to my irrational dislike of bicycles. I broke my leg when I was 10 after falling off my bike and have never been on one since, but because I love DB~ so much I told her I would ride a trike for Diamond Dash. She rode a bike like a normal person and I rocked the heck out of that trike.

But first things first and that's Urban Dare. I want a top 5 finish this year!

Cleaning out the Fridge (again, with more success)

Sometimes in the middle of the week I just stare into the fridge and think "what am I going to eat out this hodgepodge?" It's like I'm on a one-man, unjudged version of Chopped on Food Network.

I had a pork tenderloin thawed in the fridge, so I knew that was going to be the centerpiece, but my creativity tank was a little low. I decided to brush it with olive oil to minimize the charring and infuse moisture when I put it in the oven. After thinking of some lame sauce ideas, I decided to just rub the whole 1 pound pork loin with one of my favorite seasonings, Luzianne's Cajun Seasoning. It's a nice blend of paprika, cayenne pepper, garlic, and salt.

I roasted this at 400 degrees for 1 hour. At the end of that hour, I took it out of the oven and let in rest covered in the baking dish for 20 minutes while I continued working on the side dishes.

I had a box of lentil rice pilaf, but it said it was going to take 40 minutes to cook and I didn't feel like waiting that long. So I got some plain white rice and started that going on the stove. I went back to the fridge and saw some pureed tomato sauce that I had left over and wanted to get rid of. It was just a little too harsh of a bite, though, to put into the rice by itself. Went with a nutty, robust theme by adding a few shakes of and crushing some pecans I wanted to get rid of into the boiling rice. The tomato sauce had an interesting reaction once added -- it turned the rice a burgundy-brown. The rice absorbed the water and tomato sauce nicely and this turned out well.

I cracked a can of green beans and heated them on the stove, but I wanted to augment them too. I thought some crumbled blue cheese (also something I wanted to move out of the fridge) melted on top would be tasty. That prognostication came true.

I bias-cut the pork tenderloin and plated it with the rice and green beans. The tenderloin was cooked perfectly and had plenty of spice and flavor. Not bad for having no idea what I was going to make at 5 pm when I walked in the door. The judges on Chopped would have been proud.

The 2008 Draft - A One Year Too Early Look

It's commonly said that it takes 4-5 years to properly evaluate a baseball draft. So naturally, let's take a look at Neal Huntington's first draft one year too early.

The scouting rule of thumb is:
Draft 50 players
Sign 30 players
Get 20 to AA
Get 1 starter and 1 bench/bullpen guy from each draft class

Let's see how the Pirates 2008 draft class has done so far:
Drafted 50 players (check)
Signed 32 players (check)
Got 8 to AA so far (not great)
Got Alvarez to the majors as a starter (very good, even if he is starting slow this year)

There are 6 more players that have the strong possibility of getting to AA in the form of Robbie Grossman, David Rubinstein, Jarek Cunningham, Quinton Miller, Benji Gonzalez, and Calvin Anderson. That would make 14 players, which is still less than the rule-of-thumb, but would be a good group of 14 players from the draft.

Right now Chase d'Arnaud, Justin Wilson, and Matt Hague are in the holding tank at AAA awaiting a callup. It's quite possible that 1 of the 3 will at least be a bench guy and 1 guy will be a starter. That would be 2 starter and 1 bench/bullpen guy. That doesn't even account for the 6 guys mentioned above that have yet to reach AA. It's quite possible that 2 of the 6 will reach the majors and be at least a bench player.

So out of Huntington's first draft, it's very realistic to see 2 starters and 3 bench guys, at worst. That would be a very successful draft class and give us all confidence that future draft classes will be as fruitful.

PlanIT Valley - Bring on the Arcologies

When I was a young nerd in my early 20's, fresh out of college with an engineering degree, I became addicted to Sim City 2000. It was a computer game in which you were given a empty canvas with terrain and were able to build a city from the ground up. Roads, power lines, water pipes, power plants, the whole nine yards. You designated what areas were zoned residential, commercial, and industrial and the appropriate types of structures to build. You needed to account for the proper amount of schools, police departments, and fire departments.



In short, you were god of this little city and could watch it grow before your very eyes, as long as you kept things running smoothly. The citizenry could riot against you, cause fires, floods may occur, even an alien invasion if you were so inclined.

I guess Sim City 2000 was popular in Portugal in the late 90's, too, because outside of Parades, Portugal is growing an eco-city called PlanIT Valley. The city in its built-out state will serve 225,000 people in an array of eco-friendly buildings that are embedded with a host of sensors to monitor environmental conditions and adjust accordingly. The green building techniques and the energies that will power this city will make PlanIT Valley a zero carbon footprint community...a completely green city.

All this for the low, low price of $10 billion dollars, while the world is in the midst of the biggest worldwide recession in decades. However, PlanIT Valley has some backers already in the form of Microsoft and Cisco, with Microsoft reportedly putting $300M into the kitty.

The city will be a testing lab for the integration of information technology, urban planning, and construction. I'm not sure if I could handle the sensation of feeling like a lab rat being studied by someone remotely as I went about my daily business. In order to put 225,000 people on 4,000 acres, along with all of the necessary functions like schools/police/fire departments/etc, PlanIT Valley will be a densely built environment.

This reminds me of when your city matures in Sim City 2000 to the point that arcologies are introduced. Arcologies (a combination of architecture and ecology) were a city-within-a-city in the game. They were a way for you to fit 20,000 people into a small area by building vertically and containing functions within that arcology. Most of the arcologies available were benign and pleasant, but there was one that was dark and forboding. It did not have a lot of natural light and it affected your citizens. They almost became a sub-set of humans, it was said.

Reports are circulating that the world's population is expected to double from 6 billion to 12 billion in the next 30 years. That's unfathomable to me. It seems that some glass ceiling will be hit long before that happens. The Earth can simply not support that many people. As it stands now, there are vast tracts of land unable to grow food and clean water is scarce. How are we going to jam 6 billion more onto this little blue marble and have any semblance of life? I'm not even talking about the United States. Look at some of the cities in India and China...that's not exactly the model of good urban living over there. It will be primarily that part of the world experiencing the bulk of the population increase, too.

I watch and enjoy a lot of movies that have dystopian, post-apocalyptic futures. I fear that these escapes from reality are primers for what we are moving towards at a breakneck pace.

I'm not sure if PlanIT Valley is something to be admired for its vision or feared for it's depressing look into what our future may become. A race of people jammed into cities-within-cities like files in a filing cabinet. Unable to breathe the air, drink the water, or have more than a 10 foot radius of personal space.

New Stat - Wins Above John Russell

After watching the first 15 games of the season (well, watching and reading about the first 15 games of the season) it seems obvious to me that the Pirates have a different attitude and swagger about them. They had a pretty wretched homestand after losing 3 of 4 to the Rockies and then both games of the rain-shortened series to the Brewers. In recent years, that was the clarion call to begin The Suck.

But the Pirates went to Cincinnati and won 3 of 4 games against the division leader. Repeat -- on the road. The same place where they went 17-64 last year. In addition to the maturation of The Core Four of Alvarez, McCutchen, Tabata, and Walker there is a new man at the helm in the form of Clint Hurdle.

I was a fan of his from the moment I saw his confidence fill the room at the Pirate Fan Fest in January. He is a leader and has already shown that he will stand up for his team. He supports them when necessary and reprimands them when needed. In short, he is nothing like what John Russell was as manager.

After watching Hurdle lease, with the option to buy, space inside of Jim Tracy's head during the 14 inning game against the Rockies (in which Hurdle put McCutchen in the on-deck circle to psych out Tracy), I realized that there was no way in hell that Russell would have ever thought of that move. You could have gone 4 levels down into his sub-conscious like in the movie Inception and you still couldn't have convinced him to do that move.

This led me to conceive a new tracking stat...Wins Above John Russell (WAJR). It even has a cool pronunciation like "wager". Very similar to the widely-used Wins Above Replacement (WAR) which tracks how a player does versus a hypothetical replacement-level player fresh from AAA, WAJR will see how Hurdle does versus a replacement-level manager in the form of John Russell.

Every time Hurdle pulls a pitcher who's struggling, instead of "saving his bullpen" for the potential that he can use his set up man and closer for a mythical situation...that's a partial WAJR. When you start a guy who's hot, even if it's because of your gut feeling...that's a partial WAJR. When you own Jim Tracy in extra innings...that's almost a full WAJR.

By my rough estimate we are at 1.5 WAJR already, which would project to 16 more wins than last year. It's yet to be determined if Russell will lead the Pirates to a championship, but he already has them respecting themselves and giving them confidence. Eventually that will lead to gaining respect from the rest of the league. That might be worth a WAJR or two.

Development around PNC Park over 10 years

I have a poster in my basement of an aerial view of PNC Park and the surrounding North Shore on opening day in April 2001. The jewel that is PNC Park looked the same back then as it does today. Not a single thing has slipped at this park. But surrounding the park is a sea of jet black asphalt parking lots.

Last night I went to my first Pirate game of 2011. A friend of mine was coming in from Columbus and we set this up last month; I had no idea at the time that it would be the opening night of the Penguins playoff run!

As I was walking to the game from a parking lot adjacent to Heinz Field, I drank in all of the buildings that have sprouted up in the 10 year period of PNC's existence. The development by the Sports and Exhibition Authority, Steelers and Pirates, and Urban Redevelopment Authority has accelerated greatly in the past 5 years. The General Robinson Parking Garage was built to account for the loss of surface parking, due to the development of other various buildings such as Hyatt Place Hotel, Marriott Spring Hill Suites Hotel, Stage AE concert area, and two office buildings (one houses Root Sports/bars/restaurants, the other Starkist operations).

Obviously, it is better to have development instead of a sea of parking. That's part of what doomed Three Rivers Stadium -- the white elephant effect. It's almost as if the Pirates, whether consciously or not, are trying to replicate a Wrigley Field effect at PNC Park. Nowadays PNC Park is nestled into the North Shore, rather than standing out stark for all to see. Not that you overlook it, but it's just a lot more protected than in 2001.

As for the game itself, my friend sprung for seats in the Pittsburgh Baseball Club section, so we got some relief from the cold night by ducking into the interior bar and lounge area (which enabled me to check the Penguins score too). However, after the 7th inning we made a pilgrimage to Manny's BBQ behind CF. My prey was the new Pulled Pork Pierogie Stacker sandwich. How could I be disappointed in two of my favorite things combined into one sandwich? I envisioned making a love sonnet to this sandwich of ecstacy. I wondered if DB~ would feel that I was cheating on her if I professed my love to this delectable treat.

Much like the 6-0 loss to the Brewers, this sandwich was a big disappointment. Here's a cross-section of it after I put some of it in my CAKE CRUNCHER (that's for you 5'ish):



The pork didn't have a lot of flavor. It didn't have a lot of BBQ sauce, nor did it have a dry rub to keep the mess down and the flavor up. Also, the pierogie was extremely salty. The bun was fantastic. It hailed from the brioche family...maybe a 3rd cousin of some sort. The Pulled Pork Pierogie Stacker is going up against a Spicy Sausage/Provolone sandwich. I fear that in the second half of 2011 Cheese Chester, Oliver Onion, Jalapeno Hannah, and Sauerkraut Saul will not have to hear the tortured wailings of their cousins being devoured while they run the bases.