Serial Sunday:

1. Tonewood Brewing: I’ve written about some of Tonewood’s styles here on Uncorrected before, but have never selected it for a Sunday Serial. Rhonda and I snuck over to Tonewood, as we do, after dropping the boys off at House of Fun. While they shopped, we tried a few beers; I had a 16-oz Block Party, which is a “Modern American IPA.” I was drawn to the Deep End but the Block Party won out; I did try a 10-oz Deep End, which is a Mexican Dark Lager. I was thinking Negro Modelo, which is OK, but this was much, much better. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to taste much after having an IPA first, but even the Deep End was plenty hoppy. Rhonda got the Double-Dry Hopped Fuego, which we both tried on our last visit and loved, followed by a 10-oz Block Party. We got some to go, too; I dropped one of the cans in the driveway when we got home because I was trying to carry too much, and it sprung a leak, so there are only three cans.
2. Dominick’s Tavern:: We have taken the boys and some of their friends here on numerous visits; it is one of our most frequent Camden County stops. The wings here are coated, so caveat emptor. They’re big-ass wings and there are a handful of sauces to try; I usually go for the 911, which seems like a buffalo hot sauce with some hot pickled cherry peppers mixed in. Rhonda got the Fat Daddy sauce, which is a buffalo sauce with bleu cheese and maybe vinegar stirred into it. I tried it once and thought it was OK. They always have Tonewood’s Fuego on tap.
3. Pink pants: I got some.

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:

1. Blue Rascall Distillery: It’s a bit of a cheat for me to feature last night’s post about Blue Rascal in Serial Sunday, but it’s a charming and tasteful place. I got to thinking today that, like the breweries and wineries popping up all across the Garden State, and more appreciably in our remote spot here in South Jersey, that so many great options exist. We sat and sipped on locally made rye. Not just whisky, but rye. For all of the limitations of living in and around Cumberland County, we do have a number of treasures to appreciate. Rhonda and I were grousing a bit, though, that none of the categories we enjoy are currently here in Vineland. We did, for a time, enjoy an Amish market here in Vineland. But we have no distillery (nearby Millville does, though). We have no brewery (Millville does, though). And no winery in the land of the vines, birthplace of Welch’s. Caveat emptor: two cocktails isn’t the same as splitting a bottle of wine.

1. Hotel Starlino Maraschino Cherries; These cherries were featured at Blue Rascal, and the bartender declared them better than Luxardo. Rhonda and I both agree heartily. I ordered a big can today while walking the dogs.

1. Brave Browser: I’m not new to Brave, having used it in lieu of Chrome on the Mac due to Chrome’s resource hogging. It’s Chromium-based, so it was a good choice on the Mac as my “other” browser; I could keep myself logged into Vineland’s Google account, and turn to Brave for Google Suite work (Safari on the Mac is my preferred browser, though). So Brave was an easy choice for use on my Windows devices, once I realized how resource-hogging Microsoft’s Edge browser is. I even swapped Brave for Safari on my phone. It’s easy to set up syncing and there are granular sync controls. Brave’s search is pretty good (I think they use Bing), but you can switch to a number of other services, including Duck Duck Go. It also offers an AI assistant, Leo.¹

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¹ I had a moment of nostalgia, remembering my first beers at the Ship Inn in Milford, NJ. I turned 21 while being up in Milford with my family after my grandmother died. I believe it was the night before the funeral, and my Dad and I nipped out to celebrate my ill-timed birthday with a few pints. I don’t remember exactly what I had that night, but it was a transformative experience. Here were incredibly fresh, authentic British classic styles at a pub… in New Jersey. In sleep Milford. It was a revelation and emollient to such a sad time. It’s called Descendants Brewing now.

² I’m pretty excited to learn more about Arc and give it a go on both Mac and PC. I’m in the Windows beta, too.

This is pretty rad 

Kourosh Dini:

First, by writing, be that of your ideas or your tasks, you use time in a wonderful organic way. Not only is there a free beauty unique to ink meeting the page, perhaps heightened with a nice pen, but there is a gentle living path for an idea to develop. Tracing letters directly from mind through muscle and instrument engages a flowing feedback.

Even better, if you attempt to write nicely, to make your words appear as something you enjoy reading, you need to slow down. Like any path of mastery, one needs to both reduce scope and speed to the edge of ease, and then preferably gently, guide your growth from there.

Writing by hand invites you into that process.

https://www.kouroshdini.com/a-benefit-in-handwriting/

On our way back from Sharrot Winery, we stoppe₫ at Hammonton’s two local landmark grocery stores: Inferrera’s and Bagliani’s . Neither Rhonda nor I have ever been to the former; I learned of it from a coworker, who preferred it to the more famous Bagliani’s. Inferrera’s has fewer cheeses and salami (to name a few things), but we bought some very lovingly sliced chip steak, with which I made cheesesteaks. Aaron and I had AC-style rolls (from Bagliani’s), while Rhonda and Joe had softer, more pillowy rolls (Joe had a chicken cheesesteak). All good.

Rhonda, Aaron, and I hit Sharrot Winery for lunch today (ah, spring break). It’s a restaurant, too; unlike our usual haunt, Bellview, which offers cheese plates and the like, Sharrot has a small but tasty menu of dressed-up bar food and other goodies. We shared a bottle of rosé and two flatbreads (pepperoni and the bleu cheese/prosciutto), as well as the crab salsa and burrata. It was all very good.

Rhonda and I took Aaron for a tour of Drexel University today. It was a carbon copy of the trip I took with Joe two years ago. It was rainy and cold, so I didn’t get any good pics on campus, but lunch was a nice adventure after.

Chuan Kee Skewer

I found this joint on Eater Philly, and it sounded good. I had three places in mind, but this was the consensus due to hot pot… or so we thought. They didn’t have it on the menu, and the server seemed befuddle₫ when I showed him pics of the dish (on Chuan Kee’s Yelp page). So we got some grilled stuff, dumplings, and ramen.

Reading Terminal Market

I didn’t realize how close this was, so we walked from Chuan Kee. Cannoli from Termini Bros!

Rays Coffee and Tea House

They still make siphon coffee, but I ordered the house blend before I realized it. Next time.

I read somewhere that to find work you don’t mind doing, you have to figure out what problems you like to have. That’s an interesting angle to take on the problem of work, if it is a problem. It speaks to the fact that no job worth your time is going to be effortless; it’s worth expanding that notion to say that life isn’t particularly rewarding if you’re not in the active process of solving problems. I think it’s fair to say that even crossword puzzles and notionally fun things are often problems to solve; this keeps your brain healthy and active. AND: using cognitive energy burns calories.

Here are some things I don’t mind tangling with:

• Computer problems: I like troubleshooting tech issues. I don’t solve all of them, for sure, but I am able to figure out most things. People always ask me how I got “good” with computers, and it’s a simple answer: motivation and Google. (And by Google, I mean AI and YouTube and Stack Overflow and Reddit and you get it.) I like when people ask me how to do things at work and at home, I even liked troubleshooting my kids’ Windows issues when I was a die-hard Mac user.
• Certain mundane household tasks: I like folding towels (but nothing else). I like folding up foil for chickenbags. I like making pourover coffee, measuring everything, creasing the number 4 Melita filter paper, dampening it with hot water before adding the freshly ground beans. I like slicing chicken breasts into three thin cutlets with my razor-sharp Henckels 10″ knife. I like sharpening my chef’s knives and cleaver. I like crafting our nightly preprandial, currently Manhattans: I measure everything to the gram, thinly slice orange garnishes, and crack big ice cubes with due care.
• Writing this blog: I get a great kick out of writing here at Uncorrected. I need to do a couple of things before I settled in: I had to decide what it was about (it’s about nothing… it’s about whatever catches my eye… it’s about tech, cooking, exercise, ephemera). It is, in the classical sense of a blog, about a person with a penchant for writing doing just that. I like to think, and writing is thinking. It gives me great pleasure sometimes to just go back and read what I wrote. I like it so much more than social media. It’s the original social media, and maybe I’m just a crufty middle-aged guy, but that’s me. I write here; I think here. I like having a draft open before me, uploading media to WordPress. I like mulling over a post while I’m mucking about outside. I like dropping ideas into Todoist for later inspiration.

Sorry about missing Serial Sunday last night; it was Easter Sunday and while dinner was plenty early, I was vegging on the sofa and not feeling enumerative.

1. Momofuku Black Truffle Chili Crunch: This is one of David Chang’s excellent chili crunch varieties. It’s good on just about everything, but I always put it on my grilled chicken. It’s calorie dense, so keep an eye on your usage. It’s just delicious; we’ve had the regular, extra spicy, and hot honey, too.
2. Typora: Typora is a no-frills markdown editor in the style of iA Writer. I’ve been using it on Windows, as iA can be slow and looks out of place on Windows. It’s got a long free trial, and is only $15 for a license. Runs on Mac, too. Best of all, there are plenty of themes. I’ve been a sucker for “cobalt” themes since using TextMate many moons ago, and there are lots of nice cobalt flavors to choose from.¹
3. OLFA Blades: My dad always has the coolest, most bespoke tools, and he’s who I learned about OLFA blades from. I always have one or two around and spare blades at the ready. They are good for any precision cutting, or just zipping open a plastic bag.

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^{1It does not, like iA Writer for Mac and Android, publish to WordPress. This feature is omitted in iA Writer for Windows, too. Like RSS readers, the Mac is an embarrassment of riches for bloggers. No so on Windows.}

Hot on the heels of eggbag, I bring you: chickenbag. Arguably another portmanteau, chickenbag is a bag fashioned from aluminum foil that I use to store chicken, hot off the grill, for service (ie dinner). We have grilled chicken breasts about once a week, but sometimes it’s just something I make for Joe when the rest of us are having beef. I tear off a big sheet, crimp the fold and sides into a seam, and leave the top open for chicken to go into after it’s done. I can cook in batches and move it off to the side until dinner is served.

A typically dense read from The Marginalian:

…neuroscience affirms the body as the instrument of feeling that makes the symphony of consciousness possible: feelings, which arise from the dialogue between the body and the nervous system, are not a byproduct of consciousness but made consciousness emerge.

and

Consciousness… is a particular state of mind resulting from a biological process toward which multiple mental events make a contribution… These contributions converge, in a regimented way, to produce something quite complex and yet perfectly natural: the encompassing mental experience of a living organism caught, moment after moment, in the act of apprehending the world within itself and, wonder of wonders, the world around itself.

Organisms progress from “minding”: create images from sensory experience, to thoughts: rendering the internal world in the same way.

I Feel, Therefore I Am: Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on Consciousness as a Full-Body Phenomenon

One app on the Mac that I love and use all the time is Yoink, a digital shelf for files. Example use case: I grab a screenshot, grab the thumbnail in the lower right corner of the screen, and then drag it into Yoink’s shelf. From there, I can drag the file into an email, iMessage, or MarsEdit.

There’s a Yoink-like app for Windows, it turns out: DropShelf. There are some differences between DropShelf and Yoink, but it is functionally equivalent. I do not, for example, like how DropShelf is activated: You select a file or files in File Explorer, and shake your cursor. The gesture requires a lot of “shaking” to the point that I think the invocation doesn’t work. It should work just by dragging, as does Yoink.

Here’s this week’s things of check out:

1. Quick Accent in PowerToys: I’ve written about my love for PowerToys on Windows before, but necessity was the mother of discovery for me this week. While trying to type “café” a few times this week, I struggled to find the accented “e” character in Windows. A quick web search helped me discover that PowerToys has an affordance similar to that offered on the Mac: to find and enter an accented letter, hold down the letter key and tap the space bar. Presto: atop your screen appears a list of possible accented letters. You use the number key or the arrow keys to select your target. Pretty bueno.

2. Butter Steak: Rhonda and I had a neighbor who used to crow about this downmarket grocery store nearby and their “butter steaks.” I didn’t know what a butter steak was and suspected the name was an Orwellian trick to call the steak the opposite of what it was. Having seen them in our local butchers, I knew they were cheap and kinda homely. Turns out it’s a flat iron steak, which is a much sturdier sounding name. I’ve had exactly one flat iron steak before, at the now-defunct (pour one out) Winfield’s in Millville, NJ, site of many excellent meals shared with family and friends before it closed during the COVID pandemic. I purchased one butter steak alongside a more fanciful ribeye roast (two bones) for under four bucks, chucked it in the sous vide tanking along with the ribeye, and seared it off on the grill with the roast. I sliced it on the bias and served for everyone to try. I was excellent; more tender than a flank, more chew than a filet mignon. What a great, cheap, if ugly, cut of beef.

3. La Jolie Fleur Rosé: Rhonda and I nipped out Friday to the around-the-corner Greenview Inn. We have been sipping rosé regularly at local wineries, and taking a bottle along from said wineries to our favorite BYOBs in town. Greenview offering a full bar, we ordered off of the menu, and tried the only rosé on the list: la Jolie Fleur. It was more grapefruity than the Outer Coastal Plains varietals we’ve been enjoying, with some sediment at the bottom of the bottle. Very crisp. Would be nice to sip chilled by the pool this summer.