On the weekend of Rhonda’s 52nd birthday, which we did indeed celebrate, here’s this week’s list of things to check out:

1. Rosé: I always associated rosé with sweet wine, which maybe it was in the bad-old days. It was, in my mind, on a par with white zinfandel. It’s very popular as a dry white, and after having it myself a number of times, I convinced Rhonda to try the rosé at Bellview after I had it at a celebration of life for a former coworker. Ever since, it’s been our favorite there, and we like to keep a couple of bottles around for jaunts to our local sushi haunt. Speaking of…
2. Ikura Sushi: Kura is a Thai and Japanese restaurant in downtown Vineland. They do a brisk takeout business, but you can almost always walk in and get a table. Which is what we do… often. Me being me, I note what I’m going to order on my phone each night, and then pull up that note so I can vary (or repeat) my order. With most things culinary, I’m adventurous and inclined to try items across the menu, but at Kura, I’m uncharacteristically consistent: gyoza, one small and simple roll, and three orders of sashimi.¹
3. BMX: I was a child of the 80s, and a big part of what boys did in the 80s involved BMX cycling. We all had a cheap dirtbike, and then increasingly expensive freestyle bikes with rotors and pegs and other affordances I wasn’t agile enough to take advantage of. But my last BMX bike was a dead simple Haro BMX race bike: no rotor, back brake only, knobbies. I just rode it and hopped curbs. It was great. Aaron has a very cool SE wheelie bike, with 24″ tires, and some time after he got it, I purchased a 29″ Haro BMX bike for Joe. He’s ridden it like twice, so I take it for a spin from time to time. In a time-honored tradition, Aaron and I rode down to the St. Padre Pio Festival at the same-named church down the street, and brought lunch back (Aaron had an eggplant parm, and Rhonda and I split a porchetta, which is a roast pork sandwich with a long hot pepper and some provolone cheese). I skipped the beer garden, and we scooped up the food and rolled back to the house in style.

¹ There is another placed where I’m boringly repetitive in my dinner order: The Knife and Fork in Atlantic City. I always–always–order the lobster Thermidor. There are a few reasons, including the fact that it’s an uncommon dish, and we don’t go there often.

I almost included watermelon in my Serial Sunday Pro Max post last night. Watermelon is ubiquitous and cheap in southern New Jersey all summer long. I’ve always loved watermelon, but not more so than these last two summers. Last summer, my rowing schedule kept me plenty thirsty, and there is nothing more refreshing when you’re thirsty than watermelon. It’s also low calorie relative to the bulk you can serve yourself, even being careful with your calories: a decent bowl of watermelon won’t even net you 100 calories. I eat watermelon first thing in the morning when I get up, just before rowing and coffee, and eat it throughout the day. I can eat a quarter of a melon in a day when I’m really in the mood.

Sadly, like all great seasonal things, it seems like the supply is drying up locally. Rhonda and I tucked in to Shop Rite and came up empty, and subsequently rolled out to a local farm stand in the hopes of securing one there. Nothing.

I did, however, score a nice small cantaloupe, which I cut up this afternoon. It’s delicious.

It’s iPhone Preorder week! Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:

1. iPhone 16 Pro Max: As the title of this week’s Serial Sunday suggests, I preordered an iPhone 16 Pro Max. I was pretty sure I was gonna skip this version, as there’s nothing earth-shaking with this iPhone rev. My last two iPhones have been the pro model, but the smaller of the two offerrings. I have in fact owned two Max-size phones, and before that, the iPhone 6 Plus. I think I go through a phase where I start to covet the smaller size of other people’s phones, back down to the smaller model, and then miss the battery life of the big phone. It used to be that the Max would get you an additional camera feature, but that’s not true this time, either. I got Desert Titanium.
2. Drawboard PDF Loves Lefties: I wrote about Drawboard here on Uncorrected a couple of months ago. It’s a cross-platform PDF reader that runs great on Windows (notably on ARM Snapdragon chips) and Mac, and I subscribed to it due to its feature set, price, and cross-platform availability. I discovered recently, though, that in addition to renaming the Radial Menu, you can set the new toolbar meant to replace the Radial Menu to the left, bottom, or top of your screen, mimicking the behavior of the drawing palette in OneNote. (Apple Notes does a good job with this handedness-response design, too.)
3. Blistered Shisito Peppers: I’ve had these a few times at different restaurants, and they are always described tantalizingly as some being hot, some being mild. Like one in ten is hot. Rhonda saw this recipe on The Kitchen one day and they came out really good with the additional ingredients.

Simon J. Levien, writing for The New York Times:

Former President Donald J. Trump has gone to great lengths to distance himself from Project 2025, a set of conservative policy proposals for a future Republican administration that has outraged Democrats. He has claimed he knows nothing about it or the people involved in creating it.

“I’m not going to read it,” Mr. Trump said at his first presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. “Everybody knows what I am going to do.”

I don’t think anyone thought he was literally going to read it.

What is Project 2025, and Why is Trump Disavowing It?

I wrote about making this a while back, but we make this dish pretty often. Last night’s effort was a success. I kept the bath at 122 and then charred the steaks up over the charcoal.

1. PasteBar: PasteBar is a cool clipboard manager and snippet utilty for Windows and Mac. You use PasteBar to collect snippets of text and other digital errata and keep in its database. You can organize your snippets using Boards, and create tabs of Boards (say, a coding board, and then a board with vehicle information and part numbers). It’s incredibly flexible. It doesn’t appear to support any kind of keyboard launch for snippets, a la TextExpander or AutoHotKey, which would be a natural fit for an app like this. I don’t see where you can sync across devices, either, but I haven’t dug very deep.

2. PowerToys Workspaces: One of the surprising things about Windows is that, while there are a lot truly bespoke Mac apps in that ecosystem, Windows suffers from a lack of choices. That said, Microsoft adds a lot of features themselves to the OS, obviating the need for some analogous must-have Mac utilities. PowerToys is a perfect example of this; it’s an optional installation of utilities made by the Windows maker, but not installed by default. I’ve sung the praises of PowerToys Run before, but this update adds a workspaces utility handy for multiple display users. I will definitely check this out at the office.

3. Fall: I suppose this should be its own post, but I was outside walking the dogs, pondering a third topic for this weekly listicle I am fond of writing, and it was unmistakable: fall is upon us. It’s been cool all day, but as the sun bows in the west, the air is downright crisp. Fall is paradoxically inviting and foreboding. It signals the end of summer, culturally a time we consider fun and light. But it’s a slow ramp up to the holidays, when its cooler but not cold, and there’s lots of merriment. The colors, the dishes, the waning daylight: these are all things I like about fall. It is, of course, foreboding in that it signals the denouement of another year, another spin on the globe, and the slow roll of winter.¹ The grim steeliness of winter lies just over the crest of the holiday season. Memento Mori, as the Stoics advise.

If you are given to reflecting, fall is hard to resist.

¹We have, in some sense, licked the problem of winter; we live in hospitable indoor climes and temper the limits of the shorter days with interior delights, be they cooking, watching, reading, or something else. But the memory remains.

I am pedantic enough to insist on the use of “BBQ” or “barbecue” in one cooking situation, and grilling in another. Barbecue connotes low heat, judicious application of smoke, extended cooking times. Grilling, on the other hand, means higher heat and shorter cook times. Here, the smoke flavor comes from the charcoal only. But the lines do blur.

Sunday was baby back ribs, once again, on the Weber Bullet smoker. I used Kingsford briquettes, a bit of rub, and cherry and apple woods. They took about five hours and came out great. I always use the Minion Method for ribs; it’s yielded reliable and delicious results.

Monday found the smoker fired up again, this time sans the water pan. This method, which I’ve also used to great success in making beer can chicken, uses a lot of charcoal to fashion a kind of pit barrel grill. The drums I cooked today took about an hour, and that’s about the same for a whole bird. The smoker only gets up around 325 degrees on a good day, so it still takes some time. Again: very good.

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

1. Ulysses: I’ve been trying trying demos of the Mac/iOS/iPadOS since the app debuted on the Mac, but I never pulled the trigger and subscribed. It’s a great example of a Markdown-based text editor, although Ulysses has some notable differences from the likes of iA Writer, what might be considered its closest analog. I don’t need or want Ulysses for much of its feature set, though; I prefer individual text files to a database exclusive to the app for this kind of writing. It does, however, have great WordPress support, even allowing you to include images in a post. I’m writing this installment of Sunday Serial in Ulysses in fact, and will likely publish it from here as well. I prefer iA Writer or even BBEdit to it on the Mac, but even there, I have to move everything over to MarsEdit (a great application in its own right, but not one I like to write in). Ulysses nicely unifies posting to WordPress when I’m using my iPad.
2. American Philosophy: A Love Letter: I mentioned this book mid-last-week in talking about John Kaag’s _Hiking with Nietzsche._I’m really ignorant about American philosophy.
3. AppyHour: Rhonda signed up for this app-delivery service a while ago. We both agree that we’ve enjoyed trying things we wouldn’t have otherwise chosen at a store. The Prosecco jam in this last box is gooooood.

Rhonda and I found ourselves temporarily in an empty nest last night, so after Brie and rosé at Bellview, we ducked into around-the-corner Greenview Inn. I hadn’t really ever looked at the “from the grill” section of the menu, but you can order a number of meat and fish selections, choose a sauce, and add an a la carte veg to go along with it. And I figured with sauces being hard to calorie track, why not try something chock full of protein? So I ordered the veal chop with some salt and pepper, and a wedge of lemon to add some zing. Twas good.