One of the benefits of living near the Jersey Shore (and Delaware Bay and its tributaries) is easy access to blue claw crabs. I have been steaming them the same way for maybe 20 years: in a cup of white wine, a can of beer (12 oz if you’re counting), and some chopped garlic softened up in some olive oil. The crabs get a dusting of old bay before they steam. I drop a big nub of butter in when they’re done and spoon the remaining liquid over the crabs and some pasta.

We’re late to the crab party this year for some reason, but patience is its own reward.

It’s hard to believe we’ve burnt through almost half of July already. Rhonda and I have a quick getaway planned for later in the week–more then, with pics. I’ve been shopping online for a new four-thirds digital camera but I’m not sure I’m ready to take that plunge. Maybe in a Sunday Serial in the future.

Coppola Chardonnay

Rhonda and I nipped out to the Maplewood for a quiet dinner on Friday. I switched out the Kendall Jackson Chard we usually get for the Coppola, out of curiosity. It’s a less luscious, brighter take on the varietal. Affordable and good.

Superman

I’m cheating since I wrote about Superman earlier in the weekend, but it was a really good flick. I came up on Superman starting with the Super Friends TV show, which wasn’t good, and then the Christopher Reeve films, of which I have fond memories (the first two only) but Reeve’s Boy Scout portrayal cemented, in me, my preference more conflicted, vulnerable characters like Batman, Daredevil, and Punisher. Superman has always been a monolith where others are more human: fractious, duplicitous, obsessed, yes, but alternately selfless and committed. James Gunn’s Superman is no Ubermensch; we enjoy a Superman just as conflicted and unsure of himself as we humans are.

Superman is an ideal. He represents the best we can aspire to be. He’s not the hero you relate to, à la Peter Parker/Spider-Man’s ongoing struggle to pay his rent and buy Aunt May her damn medicine. He’s the hero who inspires you, who shows you the way.

James Gunn’s ‘Superman’ movie is corny. Which is why it gets Superman right

The sun gives Superman superhuman powers; I get a pool and spritzes. Being Supes was fun for a couple of hours, but I’ll take the pool.

Home

I got stuck a couple of miles from home due to a flash flood. It was maddening to be in walking distance of home and not be able to get there. When I finally pulled into the driveway and a broad grin spread over my face, I reflected that that might be how Aaron will feel when he first comes back from college in the midst of his first semester. Coming home is a simple pleasure that I experience every day, but is something you realize you take for granted when circumstances impinge upon custom.

We all want a soft place to fall.

Rhonda brought a dog home just before the COVID shutdown, in March 2020. Here’s a pic of her coming come with Rhonda and the boys from January of 2020:

She was probably a dog who was kept around for breeding. She wasn’t fixed when we got her. She always seemed to be in a kind of survival mode. She was sweet and gentle, and if a dog can like something, I’d say she liked living here. One of her most endearing behaviors was, during COVID, when I was working at my desk, often on Google Meet, coming up to me and putting her front paws on my thigh and looking at me.

The boys named her Chi Chi, but I quickly rechristened her “Tippy” because all we heard during the COVID shutdown was her tipping and tapping up and down the hall. She was always in motion.

We’ve taken in a number of dogs who were hard up for a place to land, and I’m always impressed by how they handle it: with grace and elan. Or like nothing really changed. Food? Check. A pack leader? Check. Let’s do this.

Would that we could all cultivate such equanimity.

I’ve been making these since forever. I put them on the Weber over indirect heat for at least an hour. They’re brushed with equal parts grocery store bbq sauce, Bachans, and honey, during the last 20 minutes on the grill.

Rhonda and I stopped by the local brewery (it feels good to type those words).They had a contraption that printed their logo on the beer. I had a kölsch and Rhonda and I split the stout. Rhonda tried the West Coast IPA, which was great.

Yesterday, late afternoon, we got hit with a flash flood in Vineland. Apparently it rained pretty hard for hours in the afternoon. I was in Williamstown, and didn’t notice extreme weather.

I tried a couple of routes to get home but decided to wait it out for a bit in the car, parked a couple of miles from home. Eventually, I decided to try again and devised a circuitous route, which worked out. Rhonda and Aaron walked down the street to see me drive through the flooded-out section of our road.

We were able to nip out for a pizza, so things worked out in the end.

All four of us took in James Gunn’s Superman this afternoon. Nothing like a matinee!

David Corenswet imbues the DC icon with a jocular, joyful sense of humor which threatens, at the outset, to silo the character in the kind of boy-scoutish wholesomeness that defined Christopher Reeves’ version of Superman, and the dour, all-too-seriousness of Henry Cavil’s portrayal. But Superman reveals an unexpected depth, considering the character’s legendary unassailability.

Gunn’s signature style comes through in Superman. There’s one combat sequence, where Mr. Terrific dispationately dispatches with a squad of lackeys, while Lois Lane, protected by a force field, observes the battle from safe harbor. A poppy song accompanies the scene. It’s like the opening scene of Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, where the team battles a space monster to the tune of Mr. Blue Sky by ELO.

The casting in Superman is: suberb. Again, Corenswet is decidedly not Cavil. Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner is spot on; Hal Jordan would have been competition for Superman, so choosing the US-Agent-like Guy Gardner is a great choice. The “Justice Gang” and Metamorpho make for an odd mix of allies; this felt very Suicide Squad-ish, but delightful. Mr Terrific steals the show: utterly rational and unemotional–only Superman can crack the façade. I was leary of Krypto the Superdog but found the portrayal clever: Krypto is annoying, difficult to heel, utterly oafish but lovable, and deus ex machina when required. In the end, it’s Superman’s drunk cousin’s dog. What a guy.

Corenswet plays Superman with a humorous weariness; it’s genuine, not saccharine. As I watched the film, I intuited Gunn’s intimation: Superman is more like you–like me–than he has ever been portrayed. To this end, Superman delivers a soliloquy to Lex Luthor at the end of the film. It wasn’t a subtle touch.

This is certainly the most enjoyable Superman yet.

Jason Snell, [waxing excited][1] about what Spotlight can do in Tahoe:

The new Spotlight also has integrated one of the most useful and unheralded features of macOS: the ability to search the menus of the app you’re currently using. You’ve been able to do this for ages from the Help menu or via the Command-Shift-slash keyboard shortcut, but if your muscle memory always takes you to Spotlight’s Command-space, you can now search all the menu commands in your current app from there, too.

Finbar and Paletro are two cool utilities that do this now.

I’m oddly fixated on how much less I like Safari’s tabs search mode compared to Chromium-based browsers. The keyboard shortcut for Safari is easy enough but I can’t seem to build the muscle memory. I wrote about Tab Switcher and Tabby, both of which I like in different ways. Here are a couple of ways to skin said cat, one of which is a paid app, and the others are AppleScript-based.

Witch

Which is a utility that modifies your Mac’s default command-tab switching feature. If you create an action thus…

…you can view a list of Safari’s open tabs in the resulting overlay. You can even search. As with Tabby and Tab Switcher, you can set a keyboard shortcut to activate the list. It works with other applications with multiple documents, too.

AppleScript

Here’s an easy AppleScript that will activate Safari and open tab search:

tell application "Safari"     
    activate    
    delay 0.2   
tell application "System Events"      
    keystroke "\\" using \{shift down, command down}  
end tell 
end tell

You can launch this from Launchbar or any fine Mac launching utility.

Shortcuts

At least on the Mac, this AppleScript will work just fine if run from Shortcuts.

Work is Monday-Thursday for the summer; I get up a little earlier, but I’ve been swimming and rowing for my am workout (and maybe some meditation… I might write about that later). We got some good pool time in this weekend and I swapped out today’s prosecco (usually Cupcake or Josh) for Coppola’s take on a favorite. I smoked ribs today and took zero pictures. Anyway, here are some things for you to check out. Nerd warning; software ahead.

BundleHunt

Bundlehunt is a discount-app site; they regularly feature software for discounted prices, albeit with limited licenses sometimes. I picked up Typinator, PopChar, and a duplicate finder utiliy. It’s a great way to try out an app you’ve been eyeing up.

Typinator, for me, has been interesting. I’ve been using TextExpander since it was freeware by a med student named Peter Maurer. It was a utility that ran in System Preferences, not a standalone app. I have the original pricing for the subscription, which was painful at the time but it’s only twenty bucks a year.

I have no complaints about TextExpander, save whatever it is that causes it to not work when 1Password’s Lock Screen is active. Aaaand that it doesn’t look like a Mac app anymore. But that’s a small detail; Iwas happy to be able to use it on Windows, as was the case with 1Password. And it’s not really an app you interact with save for adding a new expansion or changing one.

But still–I’m a sucker for a Mac-assed Mac app. I got a couple of Typinator seats and am adding my most used snippets to it so that I can try it out. I will say that it seems to use about half of the memory of TextExpander.

One more thing about Typinator: the PopChar integration is sick. I’ve made great use of PopChar in the past, but haven’t found much use for it recently (in fact, I bought PopChar X from BundleHunt back in 2022). In digging around the app, I found an integration that reminds me of using Launchbar to find emoji: you can invoke Typinator’s search menu, and then type “pop:” and the character you’re searching for. It’s fast and includes all of the unicode characters on the Mac. I’ve been using Launchbar’s emoji search liberally, but this extends things considerably.

SummerFest 2025

Just like Bundlehunt, SummerFest is a chance to get your paws on some higher-end Mac software at a discount. The always-interesting Tinderbox is there again, as is my old favorite, Nisus Writer Pro, which I used in place of Word for many years. I grabbed a HoudahSpot license this time; I’ve been interested in it since rejiggering my documents following the Johnny.Decimal system. I’m curious about Panorama X.

Laura Croft: Guardian of Light

I barely game at all, but occasionally want something casual for the iPad. I saw a review of this Tomb Raider game and decided to try it out. It’s a lot of fun, boasting great mechanics and a balance of styles: combat, platform, and puzzle-solving.

I row six or seven days a week, 20-30 minutes, zone 2 a lot and intervals twice or thrice a week. I’ve been able to maintain my weight loss (80+ pounds) between rowing and diet.

I learned on vacation a couple of years ago that just treading water in the pool at the hotel we stayed at in Ocean City, NJ, burns plenty of calories. It beats rowing, in fact, according to my Apple Watch. Summer 2023, I worried about gaining weight on vacation. Last summer? Not so much.

Having opened the pool, I wondered if I might supplement my morning row with a swim. And wondered too if swimming in our humble backyard tub would compare to the more spacious in-ground pool in OCNJ. So I tried it this morning: I swam in the pool, doing breaststrokes and backstrokes and making four-foot-deep dives to the bottom, swimming from side to side.

I checked Apple Health after and it reported a decent burn for a pretty chill dip in the pool. I compared this to a couple of different rowing sessions: an easy recovery piece and a hard 2K.

Activity	Duration	Intensity	Active Calories	Source
Rowing	30 minutes	Easy	167	Apple Health
Rowing	2k (8 mins)	Hard	127	ErgData
Swimming (backyard)	30 minutes	Easy	354	Apple Health

I added the fifth column, Active Energy, because different apps report different data. Apple Health differentiates between the energy you burn by exercising and what you’d burn just being. ErgData, on the other hand, combines them. I take this to mean that the calorie expenditure reported by ErgData is exaggerated. Concept2’s Calorie Calculator bears this out. In looking into this, I read that some swimming apps report the same way.

I’m circumspect about losing meters this season, having logged 2 million meters during each of the last two years. But: it’s nice to have a low-impact and efficient alternative, if just for a short season.

I mentioned last week that I have often meant to document smashburgers here on Uncorrected. I tried again tonight and was reminded why, despite my intentions, they don’t lend themselves to a photo procedural: things get fast near the end.

I did get some staged shots tho:

Weigh ‘Em Out

I make 2 oz patties, and each burger sammich gets two patties.

Prep the Garnish

I chop lettuce and make a copy of In and Out Burger’s Animal Sauce. I also slice up some onion and throw them on the grill while the burgers sear. Each sandwich gets a slice of Cooper Sharp.

I chopped some peppers-jalapeno, long hot, and cherry-up and let them sit in a pinch of salt and acv.

Bacon and Buns

I crisped up some bacon from the butcher and toasted the buns.

Hulk Smash!

I use a cast iron press and a piece of parchment paper to smash the burgers on the hot griddle.

Pre-assembly

Here are the two extras, unadorned, which ended up in the fridge. The pace kept from taking a pic of the finished product. Here’s one from March though.

Holy crap it’s hot out there. Here are some things for your consideration on this blistering Sunday.

feedle

Feedle is an RSS search service, billing itself as a search engine for blogs and podcasts. The obvious expectation would be that you could search for blogs and podcasts and add them to whatever RSS source you’re using (Feedbin over here). But each search generates its own RSS feed, so you can subscribe in your RSS reader to the search results. Very cool.

Swimming Pools!

I have always been a swimmer. Both of my parents could swim. We spent a lot of time at the beach and a local swim club when I was a kid. It’s something you take for granted but it’s a valuable survival skill for sure, and a tremendous source of pleasure. It’s good exercise, too. I had a couple of friends in the neighborhood growing up whose fathers installed in-ground pools, so I was lucky enough to always be able to find a cool place to swim in the summer.

I’m pretty sure Rhonda and I installed our pool back in 2012; it’s a memorable time not only because we opened it for the first time, but because a derecho hit this corner of southern New Jersey while we were filling it up, and it was a hell of a storm, with multiple days of power outages and considerable damage (not our property, fortunately). The pool, only partially full, served as a tank of water from which we could bail water to keep the toilet flushing. Not exactly the first week of ownership experience we were looking forward to, but it was helpful.

Anyway, we’ve replaced the liner once, but otherwise it’s pretty much still the same setup. I used to be neurotic about maintenance, but I’ve mellowed some over the years. Despite the apparent complexity, you can effectively manage your pool using bleach (which is chlorine), baking soda, and borax. These three ingredients, alongside a basic test kit, are all you need. And once you’ve dialed in the alkalinity and pH, they tend not to move around too much, so it’s really a matter of keeping the pool chlorinated. As with cars and lawn mowers and everything else that we rely upon for a more convenient and efficient life, the internet abounds with people who are happy to document and explain complicated things so you don’t have to figure them out for yourself. I used Trouble Free Pool and the Pool Calculator a lot when I was first getting started, and while many of the lessons have stuck and I operate from a place of experience now, I still rely on the calculator to get things up and running.

The kids, not being kids anymore, don’t spend a lot of time in the pool; we tend to sit in there on Sundays in the summer, draining spritzes and hanging out before dinner. It’s really nice and warms my heart to see the boys trundle out after Rhonda and I have been floating around in there.

Pool Calculator

I mentioned the Pool Calculator above; it’s worth the measly 10 bucks a year to subscribe. You can create a profile with your pool settings and come back to it all season for advice on how to dose your pool water to keep it safe and clean. There’s an app, but I tend not to use it. I don’t recall it being intuitive, and my pool isn’t so far from my Mac that I can’t just pop back inside to update my entries.