CleverDonkey.com …Musings, Commentary, Opinions, and Drivel

You probably wouldn't remember, I probably couldn't forget

Today I was sitting in the car in the car wash listening to tunes, and I heard an old favorite – “Jungle Love” by The Steve Miller Band, from 1977.  The song sounds kind of pop-y and like a confection, but the lyrics have, to me, always been more poetic and abstract than the tune and the refrain.  Here are the lyrics, as best as I can decode them (leaving out the refrains):

I met you on somebody’s island
You thought you had known me before
I brought you a crate of papaya
They waited all night by your door
You probably wouldn’t remember
I probably couldn’t forget
Jungle love in the surf in the pouring rain
Everything’s better when wet

But lately you live in the jungle
I never see you alone
But we need some definite answers
So I thought I would write you a poem
The question to everyone’s answer
Is usually asked from within
But the patterns of the rain
And the truth they contain
Have written my life on your skin

You treat me like I was your ocean
You swim in my blood when it’s warm
My cycles of circular motion
Protect you and keep you from harm
You live in a world of illusion
Where everything’s peaches and cream
We all face a scarlet conclusion
But we spend our time in a dream

Now, I’ve only seen a few random episodes of the TV show “Lost”, but during the leadup to the recent finale my daughter was home from college catching up on episodes so that she’d be ready for a finale viewing party, so I got some summary information about the show, the characters, the plot, the show structure, etc.

And I have to say, based on my limited information about the show, the lyrics above sure seem to evoke the vibe of the series.  Specific examples include this lyric:

I met you on somebody’s island, you thought you had known me before

Which almost seems like almost a one-line summary of the series.  Everybody is flashing forward and backward, into and out of parallel universes, vaguely remembering or forgetting each other.

And this one:

You treat me like I was your ocean, you swim in my blood when it’s warm

They are on an island surrounded by water, regularly in the ocean trying to escape or move between islands, spilling a lot of blood in the process – so much that you might say they were…swimming…in it?

Then there’s this one:

My cycles of circular motion protect you and keep you from harm

Isn’t that the crux of the show, every X number of minutes somebody has to go down the hatch and push a button or something, and in doing this repetitive, circular process they are protecting everyone and keeping them from harm?

And then the final lines:

You live in a world of illusion
Where everything’s peaches and cream
We all face a scarlet conclusion
But we spend our time in a dream

Sounds like “world of illusion” is a correct description of the island, “we all face a scarlet conclusion” could mean that everybody dies, and “we spend our time in a dream” seems to accurately describe what it must be like for the characters, at least as I understand it.

So, I’ll put it to you Lost fan(atic)s out there – do you see any parallel between these lyrics and the show?

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"If you could make God bleed, people will cease to believe in Him."

Iron Man 2 is a not-disappointing sequel, however it’s also not as entertaining as the original.  But, there have been only a very few sequels that equaled or surpassed their predescessors, so that’s not surprising. 

What was surprising, for me, was the understated performance by Mickey Roarke as Ivan Vanko (right), Iron Man’s nemesis with a family grudge in this installment.  Calling his performance “understated” is an…well…understatement, because Vanko is of course a larger-than-life comic book villain.  However, within that context, Roarke’s performance is carefully restrained and excellently realized.

Also well cast and well characterized are Sam Rockwell as Justin Hammer, head of a competing defense contracting firm, and Garry Shandling (Garry Shandling?!??!?) as Senator Stern, Iron Man’s foe in the Senate who is looking to have the government own (and exploit) the underlying Stark technology.  Scarlett Johansson also does a good job as Natalie Rushman, Tony Stark’s new assistant who is “from legal”.

The story…well…the story gets us from Point A to Point B very effectively, but it felt like a transition piece instead of a complete story.  That may be the way it has to be for movies based on comic books, since the comics have been around for decades and have much more story material than can be compressed into a movie (or two, or three).  However, it seems like a movie of this caliber should at least strive to end at a more momentous and climactic juncture.

The film-making is also sloppier than in the first one.  As an example, there is a sequence where Tony Stark appears as Iron Man at his own Expo (about the size of a World’s Fair) and is attacked by an army of drone robots.  These drone robots are similar to Iron Man, can fly, and are packed with advanced weaponry.  Iron Man takes off with the fleet of drones in hot pursuit, launching a continuous stream of weapon fire at him.  Does Iron Man fly as far away from the gathered expo-attendees?  No, he spends five minutes swooping and diving around the Expo, causing the drone-fire to strafe the crowds of innocent bystanders below, over and over and over and over again. 

He has no reason to hang around the Expo, there’s nobody he needs to rescue, nothing he needs to disarm or defeat, and if he had simply headed as far and as fast away from the Expo as he could he would have saved many, many lives.  In fact, after his 5 minutes of induced-strafing-of-the-innocents, he finally wises up and says something like, “Holy crap, I better get away from the Expo!”, and then zooms off.  Narcissistic personality disorder, indeed.

But, overall, it doesn’t disappoint, which is a bit of faint praise, but also a bit of a relief.  I really liked the first film, and was very worried that the sequel would go off the rails.  It didn’t.  It also didn’t blaze any new trails, but that’s okay.  This is one of the few sequels that left me wanting to see the third installment, and was definitely worth the price of a non-matinee, first-run movie theater ticket price.

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Dogs eat it, flies swarm to it

I thought I’d try to be a little more gentle on the environment and use an ‘organic’ fertilizer for our yard.  I found Scotts® Organic Choice® Lawn Food at the local Home Depot and decided to give it a try.  I just spread it this weekend so I can’t speak to its greening or healthifying effects on the lawn, but I can state, unequivocally, that my three dogs and every fly in the general area *love* it.

I first spread it on the front lawn, without any drama, and the only slight warning sign was the very…er…’organic’ smell of the stuff.  However, it smelled like it could be a rich source of nutrients, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

Then I spread it in the back yard, where our dogs have access to the fenced yard.  I locked them in the house while I spread it, and as soon as I finished and let them back out all three of them started snuffling around the entire yard like prized truffle pigs.  Things took a turn for the worse when I noticed that all three of them were also licking the grass and ground and ingesting the fertilizer grains.

I also noticed that there were flies all over the yard, landing randomly all over the grass, apparently drawn in by the organic lawn food.  Note that I’m pretty meticulous about keeping our yard clean of doggie bombs, so the appearance of swarms of flies is not normal.  Also, the flies weren’t hanging around any dog piles, they were all over the yard.

I locked the dogs back in the house and figured I’d try watering the Scotts into the yard and see if that would help.  It didn’t, it only seemed to add an irresistable ‘gravy’ to the granules and made even more attractive to my dogs and the flies.

So, now, here I sit with my dogs locked in the house, waiting for the time when (I hope) the Scotts has lost its mojo enough that my dogs won’t continually graze on it.  The stuff claims to be safe for kids and pets, and there’s even a picture of a kid and a pet laying in a grassy yard on the label, but I bet this stuff isn’t designed to be a dietary supplement. 

I checked the Scotts site here, but they don’t have any helpful information, and as of the time of this posting the “View Label” button on that page returns:

“We apologize for the inconvenience, but this information is no longer current and accessible.”

Similarly, the ‘FAQ & Help’ tab says:

“Sorry, no F.A.Q. material for this product is available.  If you have product questions Scotts experts are available by email and phone in our Help Center.”

Which neither answers my questions nor is helpful.

So, if you’re like me and you’re exploring more natural ways to keep your lawn green, and you’re wondering about Scotts® Organic Choice® Lawn Food and your dogs, I can tell you that I won’t be using it again.  My dogs haven’t seemed to suffer in ill effects, but still, I don’t want them eating this stuff.  Also, the flies were just the icing on the cake and completed my disappointment in this product.  I mean, even if I didn’t have dogs, who wants to have a fly-infested green lawn?

Not me.

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Nobody puts crazy in a corner...

Marie and I decided to play multiplex roulette today, where we spontaneously stop at the movie theater and watch the most appealing next show.  There aren’t a lot of rules to Theater Roulette, but we reserve the right to veto and play again another day if nothing seems worthwhile.

Today’s winner was The Crazies, a remake of the George Romero film from the 1970’s with the same name and storyline.  Neither of us knew anything about the film, other than I recalled a vaguely non-terrible mention of it from somewhere, but not even a full-fledged review.

I’ve never seen the original, so can’t compare them, but the current version is an interesting twist on the zombieless zombie film.  The basic storyline is that a government plane carrying biological weapons has crashed upstream of a small farm community, and the infectious agent has seeped into the town’s water supply.  The infection causes people to go catatonic, then go crazy, then go homocidal, and was designed to destabilize the society of our enemies. 

The story focuses on the local sheriff, his wife, and an ever-decreasing band of survivors.  The sheriff and his deputy piece together what’s happening just in time to find their town completely isolated – no landlines, cell phones, internet connections, nothing.  The roads are blocked and an overwhelming force of highly uninformative government agents and soldiers take over, separating everyone into the infected or non-infected holding areas. 

The sheriff goes to one, his pregnant wife goes to the other, and thereby hangs the tale.  If you’ve ever seen a zombie/infected-people movie you’ll get the gist of the overall story, but The Crazies brings a good deal of art and craft to the telling.  As an aside, I find it amusing that people will dismiss “zombie movies” as something that have been done before, but to me that would be like dismissing all rom-coms or cop procedurals for the same reason.  The entertainment with these genre films isn’t in the uniqueness of the story, but in the nature of the telling.

For example, I grew up in a small town, and I live in a small town, so I know what small towns are like, and the director (Breck Eisner, son of Michael) nailed it perfectly.  The small town looks like a small town, not like what some Hollywood production designer might imagine a small town would look like, if they ever saw one other than out of the window of their coast-to-coast flights.

And the characters are small-town.  The sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) is polite and taciturn, but he’s not a dummy.  His wife (Radha Mitchell) is the town doctor, and his deputy (Joe Anderson) looks and talks like he grew up playing banjo on the porch, but when the chips are down he takes care of business.  The acting is excellent throughout the cast, and the effects are subtle and well-done.

Put it all together and The Crazies is fun (if you are the type who can see a zombie film as being “fun”), smart, unpredictable, and even humorous in parts.  Well worth the ticket price for any aficionado of the genre.

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"I'm sorry, Dave, that's prior art..."

"Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device..."

The first picture is of Apple’s new (unfortunately named) iPad, the second picture is from the film 2001:A Space Odyssey, showing a remarkably similar device being used by astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole as they eat their delicious, extruded paste meals.

I wonder if Apple and/or Steven Jobs have thought about throwing Arthur C. Clarke and/or Stanley Kubrick some scratch for finally bringing their design to market?  There is precedent for “new” inventions being denied patents based on prior description in science fiction works (e.g. waterbeds described by Robert Heinlein).

Even if not legally required, I think it would be a public relations coup for Apple to at least make the gesture of offering something to the originators (or, populizers, at the very least) of the pad screen concept.  In fact, tying in the marketing of the iPad with an undeniable cinematic masterpiece like 2001 sounds like a pretty Apple-y thing to do, and I think would show some class.

However, I’m not holding my breath…back in the dark ages, Steve Jobs got a tour of Xerox’s legendary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where he saw prototype computer systems based that had a graphical user interface made up of windows, menus, radio buttons, check boxes and icons, and which also utilized a moveable pointing device.  These elements were shortly brought to market by Apple in the Lisa in 1983, and then in the legendary and world-changing Macintosh in 1984.

I’m not denying the design and marketing brilliance of Steve Jobs and Apple in popularizing these products, but it would be nice to see some humility and respect paid to the originators of the ideas they are getting rich producing.

Update 8/26/2011:  Adding additional image below showing a closer view of the device, which clearly shows that it is not integrated into the desktop, and is a separate device, and is obviously hanging over the rim of the table at a jaunty angle:

JauntyPad is jauntily laid...

It’s also easy to find other examples with Google image search, fyi.

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The Crotch Bomb

The Christmas Day Crotchbomber was simply the latest in a long, long string of airline terror attacks, including the Shoebomber, Lockerbie, 9/11, etc…the list goes on and on.  There is now talk of using full body scans as part of our increasingly intrusive and futile airport security procedures.

So the TSA makes us throw out our shampoo, but that does nothing to prevent continue threats to air travel.  Even full body scans won’t do much, particularly if the terrorists know about them.  What’s next, full body x-rays, CAT scans, and MRIs to look for ingested, explosive-filled balloons?

The issue is that, given the nature and purpose of air travel, we simply do not have a technical solution to preventing airline terror attacks.  There are no security screens, scanners, sniffers, or profilers that can block every potential vector.  Everybody on the plane is wearing clothes, carrying bags, using electronics, eating food, holding books, etc, any or all of which could contain the tiny amount of explosives necessary to poke a hole in the thin, light skin of a jetliner.

And that, to me, is the crux of the issue.  We are flying around in what amounts to reinforced mylar tubes, and all that is needed to bring one of them down is a small explosion.  And punching a hole in the airframe is usually all that is necessary to cause the horrific death of every single passenger and crew member.

However, what if we were to design our aircraft to not be so vulnerable?  What if blowing a hole in the skin simple meant that a handful of people in the blast radius might be injured or killed, but the rest of the passengers survived?  Still a tragedy, but not the horrifying, fiery mass-murder that feeds the tidal wave of fear that the terrorists hope to create.

There are many ways to solve this, but the most feasible (to me) is the use of detachable passenger cabins with parachutes, which can be ejected in the event of an airborne incident and float to the ground/water below (presuming some type of flotation capability, as well).  Picture a jet that looks pretty much like today’s jets, but that the passenger compartment sort of snaps into place, perhaps even in multiple sections, making for lighter payloads and multiple pathways to survival.  This is not my original idea by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it’s something we need to consider.

Part of the issue is that the airline corporations don’t have any real motivation to do this.  It remains cheaper for them to settle lawsuits than to swap out their entire fleets of aircraft, so human lives are lost to the balance sheet.  This might be an area where the government has to step in, like they did with seatbelts, anti-lock brakes, and airbags.

It’s also possible to make the argument that terrorists would simply move on to other targets if airliners became less fruitful fear generators.  This is true in some respects, but airline travel is a fairly unique and one-of-a-kind target.  Humans have a genetic fear of great heights, and even the coolest traveler will still sometimes get that jolt of panic at being at such a height and having no control over their destiny.  If you blow a tiny hole in a jetliner you’ve sentenced every passenger to a terror-filled, certain death.

And there are no other targets that have the psychological impact of a downed passenger jet.  Air travel is something that most of us do on at least a semi-regular basis, and every air travel related incident becomes front-page news even when nobody dies or is even injured (think Sully Sullenberger and the Hudson River Miracle).  Terrorists know that airline tragedies are *huge* newsmakers, and they get the double win of striking fear and also (to a lesser extent) attacking our freedom to travel and to engage in geographically dispersed commerce.

Having jets that could allow most passengers survive an in-flight catastrophic incident would not solve terrorism, but what it would do is remove one of the primary civilian targets of terrorists.  Those who traffic in fear would probably redirect their efforts to other vectors, but none would be as psychologically effective as bringing down a passenger jet in a fiery ball of death. 

We have the technology, so this is simply an engineering and economics task – how many people have to die for this to become viable?

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Bound by Logic

We walked into Sherlock Holmes with the baseline hope of being entertained, and we were not disappointed.  Director Guy Ritchie has created a period/action/mystery film, starring Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson.  We could not recall a single other Guy Ritchie film that we’ve actually watched all the way through, as we typically find ourselves overwhelmed by the style but underwhelmed by the story, however in this case the film delivers on both counts.

The story revolves around a plot to return England to her glory days as the Empire, including re-absorbing the United States, weakened by the Civil War.  A secret society uses advanced (for the times) technologies in an attempt to give the appearance of supernatural powers, and to then rule by fear.  In a parallel thread, Watson is engaged to be married and is in the process of moving out of 221B Baker Street, much to the dismay of Holmes, who conspires to delay the passing of their close partnership.

Holmes and Watson, of course, work together to uncover the plot and foil the plotters, and the film ends with an obvious setup of the sequel, which will, of course, include matching wits with the infamous Professor Moriarty.

The style is a mash-up of authentic-looking old London combined with modern slow-mo, blow-up, near-super-hero-ish sensibilities.  This could have been a horrific combination, but Guy Ritchie keeps it all just enough in check so that things don’t spin into forehead-slapping territory.

Put it together and it was a solidly entertaining film, and I am looking forward to the sequel.  It wasn’t great or classic cinema by any stretch of the imagination, but you’ll feel like you got your money’s worth, unlike with many (many, many) other big-budget, action-oriented movies.

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Zombieland Rule #1: Cardio

To survive in Zombieland, you have to follow the rules:

Rule #1: Cardio.  These are fast, famished zombies and they will run you down…unless you have speed and stamina.

Rule #2: Beware of bathrooms.  You’re exposed and encumbered, and there’s usually only one exit.

Rule #3: Seatbelts.  When you’re whipping around trying to run over and/or shake off zombies, you want to be sure that *you* stay put.

Rule #4: Doubletap.  Shoot ’em once to stop ’em, shoot ’em again to make sure they stay stopped.

And so on.  These are the first few of an ever-expanding set of rules that Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) has derived for survival in Zombieland.  It seems that mad cow disease mutated into a more immediate and vile infection, one which causes the infected to become black-goo-spewing, human-flesh-eating, fast-running, not-very-smart zombies, who roam America looking for their next man-wich. 

Columbus is a nice young man who is trying to wend his way back from his dorm in Austin, Texas to his parent’s home in Columbus, Ohio (hence his nickname).  He meets up with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), who is a hard-bitten, hard-driving, hard-hitting, zombie-killing machine (with a cool hat, more on that below).  The unlikely duo decide to join forces for as long as they can stand each other, and along the way manage to get conned by a couple of grifting sisters, Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), who take the boys’ Escalade and leave them stranded.

The tale unfolds from there, and I won’t say much more about the plot.  Zombieland is both a zombie film and a comedy, and it does both genres very, very well.  It compares vaguely to Shaun of the Dead, but it has a much different vibe, and is better as both a zombie film and a comedy. 

And the laughs are big…BIG.  After the film, my throat hurt from the laughing and hooting I’d been doing throughout almost the entire film, which is amazingly short at 83 minutes.  There was even an eye-misting interlude shuffled in between the carnage and mayhem, which was suprisingly effective and well-done.

The film also earns its R rating, as the violence and gore are excrutiatingly high-def and are often presented in super-ultra-mega-slo-motion, so that you can practically count the droplets in the spray of zombie-ejecta, and count the shreds of flesh between their teeth.

However, if you can handle over-the-top-gore and convulsive laughter, then Zombieland just might be the picture for you.

Oh, and stay all the way through the credits.

The Real Deal

Okay, now, about the hat.  Woody Harrelson’s character is wearing his hat (seen to the left) in virtually every single scene.  And I can tell you from direct experience that that is one cool hat.  It’s made by a company called Real Deal Brazil, and they make them from reclaimed/recycled tarps used on trucks that ship goods across the Brazilian rain forest.  Marie and I each have had one of these hats since long before we had heard about Zombieland, and they are perfect for working out in the scorching Central Texas summer heat.  The hats are tough and so far are indestructible – in fact, their motto is that you don’t take care of the hat, the hat takes care of you.

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Sympathy for the Bossman

When we heard that Mike Judge had a new movie coming out, we knew it was a must see for us on opening weekend.  His previous films Office Space and Idiocracy are considered to be works of genius in our house, even though it took us a while to discover and appreciate the masterpiece-i-ness of them both.  But we now know and love them, and regularly quote both on a daily basis.

For those unfamiliar, Office Space told the story of downtrodden workplace drones who rise up to throw off the shackles of their e-dentured servitude  and stick it to the man, while Idiocracy tells the story of the evolutionary decline of mankind into mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, mono-syllabic morons.

In counterpoint to those films (particularly Office Space), Extract tells the story from the perspective of “the man”.  Jason Bateman plays Joel, who is the owner of a successful food flavoring extract company.  While he was in college he developed a unique way of creating extracts that retain their flavor when heated, leading to tastier results.  Through years of hard work he has parlayed his breakthrough into a moderately large factory, which he runs from his office overlooking the shop floor.  He’s so successful that General Foods is sniffing around and thinking about buying him out lock, stock, and barrel, which would allow Joel to retire a relatively wealthy man.

However, even with his professional success, Joel is not happy.  He and his wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig) have drifted apart, and Joel finds himself lusting after the flirty new company employee Cindy (Mila Kunis) who seems to be fascinated by the world of flavoring extracts.  But, Joel is honorable and can’t bring himself to be unfaithful, so his spacy bartender friend Dean (Ben Affleck) suggests that he secretly hire a gigolo to seduce his own wife.  If she goes for it, then Joel is then morally free to also cheat, and if she doesn’t go for it then he’s learned a valuable lesson about his wife’s fidelity.  So, in a fit of chemically-enhanced miscalculation, Joel hires the himbo gigolo to “clean his pool”.

And then – everything goes wrong for Joel.  His wife Suzie jumps at the chance to jump the new pool guy’s bones, Joel’s Idiocracy-like workers perform a ballet of OSHA violations that result in a sprung bolt performing a half-masculation on his floor supervisor Step (Clifton Collins, Jr.), who decides to sue big, which scares General Foods into delaying their buyout until the lawsuit is settled.  Add to that the fact that Cindy, the cute new employee, is also a sociopathic grifter who is pilfering the purses of her workmates while she dates Step and pushes him to sue for bigger money (which she presumably plans to get her hands on).

Jim Adler, the Texas Hammer!

To help Step score the big civil case win, Cindy hires bombastic lawyer Joe Adler (Gene Simmons – yes, *that* Gene Simmons) after seeing his number painted on the back of a bus stop.  As an aside for those of you not from Texas, “Joe Adler” appears to be loosely based on real-life, bombastic lawyer Jim Adler, self-described as “The Texas Hammer”.  The picture of him to the right is from his web site.

And to top it all off, Joel’s ungrateful and woefully ignorant employees think that they’re entitled to some of the money they assume he’s about to make by selling to General Foods, and decide to stage a walkout if they don’t get stock options prior to the deal.

So, here’s a man who had it all, built a company using his own brains and hard work, beautiful wife, nice house, and a lottery-sized buyout coming, and early retirement while he’s still young enough to enjoy it.  But then it all starts falling apart.

Suffice it to say that, by the end, things get wrapped up pretty satisfactorily.  The acting and directing are solid, and the script is pretty funny.  There isn’t a huge message being delivered in this film, unlike Idiocracy, but it’s a good message – don’t sacrifice the truly important things in life in the pursuit of “success”.  Success is happiness, not wealth or material things. 

The other message is that, while blue-collar types might not realize it, in many (if not most) cases the bosses that they like to insult and ridicule are their bosses because of hard work and smarts, not because of who they know or because they got lucky.  Hollywood has a tendency to demonize bosses, and it’s refreshing to see a film where a business owner is shown as a sympathetic character instead of a money-grubbing soul-sucker.  In the film you can see that Joel cares about his employees, he strives to run a safe plant, he encourages his employees to improve their positions, and he really does want to make the best darn extracts that he can.

So, while I’d put this as Mike Judge’s third best film, that’s still a big compliment.

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Asian Cajun Bar and Grill

18088 State Highway 105
Washington, TX 77880
(936) 878-2224

Between Navasota and Brenham, on Highway 105, on the south side of the highway, nestled in the trees stands a unique dining and drinking experience for the intrepid – the Asian Cajun Bar and Grill.  As you can see to the right, it looks like a typical Texas ice house, but it’s not.

First, a little back-story.  We live in Brenham, and circumstances often dictate that we have to head up to College Station.  Marie made that journey a couple of times in the last few weeks, and took a different (and more efficient) route than we usually took, and upon her return one day she mentioned seeing an establishment out in the middle of nowhere that claimed to serve both Asian and Cajun food.  We made a half-hearted mental dog-ear to remember to try the place out, but we figured that given the combination of factors it was probably a long shot that we’d end up liking it.

Tonight we headed to College Station to see a movie (Extract), and on our way up there we passed the joint again, and agreed that if it was still open on our way back we’d stop and check it out.  It was, and we did, and we’re glad we did.

It turns out that it is exactly what it seems, which is a combination of an ice house (which for non-Texans is a particular type of open-air, laid-back neighborhood bar), a sports bar, a Cajun restaurant, and an Asian restaurant.  The place appears to be run by a Cajun man and an Asian woman.  Our assumption is that they are a couple-type couple, but that’s just an assumption.  The place had a nice feel, and the proprieters were friendly.

I had the fried shrimp and Marie had the fried crawfish, and we also ordered some fried dumplings, and had a couple of Shiner Bocks to round out the meal.  The piece de resistance was that the Dallas Cowboys game was on in the dining room.  The food was excellent, the beer was cold, the service was good, and the Cowboys won (beating the Vikings in preseason!).  All in all, an excellent evening.

We’ve already made plans to go back, and foresee the Asian Cajun Bar and Grill becoming part of our regular dining rotation.

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