Benito's and a stroll along Magnolia Avenue

We hadn't been to Benito's Mexican Restaurant on Magnolia in a while, so last night after doing a little shopping we decided to go there for dinner. Benito's is a family owned restaurant with good food -- it's not  nouveau anything -- it's dependable and consistently good Tex-Mex. The portions are large and it is inexpensive. I always order the same thing, the pork taco plate, because they use whole pieces of pork (not shredded), and I like their green chili sauce. The pork tacos are excellent.

We almost went to Cat City Grill which I need to do, but they were very busy, and the Saturday night attire looked a little nicer than the shorts and flip-flops we were wearing. It was busy, which is good, as was Yucatan (I may not like it, but I am glad they are busy) and Lili's. Ellerbe's parking lot was about half full.

Which brings me close to the point. But one other thought first.

Magnolia Avenue is a good place to dine. It has locally owned restaurants which have on-site, local chefs. But also the city, along with organizations like Near Southside, has worked to make Magnolia more pedestrian and bicycle friendly. Last night after dinner we strolled east from Benito's almost to Jennings and back, and even though it had been 100 that day, it was pretty comfortable and a very enjoyable walk.

The point (I try to have one).

Magnolia Avenue is almost at that critical mass point in development that comes when there are enough businesses to provide dining, entertainment and shopping options -- which in turn draws more people and more business. It's not there yet. But it's better than it has ever been. It still needs some Saturday night shopping spots, a dessert/ice cream/coffee shop or two, and more live entertainment.  Unlike the South 7th development which was built to hit critical mass immediately, Magnolia is developing more slowly, more organically, and in my view, in a more aesthetically pleasing way. The building reconstruction alone is worth seeing. Magnolia has always been my favorite street in Fort Worth and with just a little more activity it could be a major Fort Worth destination on its own.

Last night, there weren't people out walking, or bicycling, or sitting on the benches. But before long, maybe in the next few years, I think we will see that change.

FortWorthology: Southside Bicycle Improvments

Fort Worth South

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Post Script -- As a member of St Mary of the Assumption on Magnolia, I am happy to say that our facility is improving and we are not far away from restoring all of the 100 year old stained glass windows.

The Movies I 'll re-Watch almost Anytime.

There are a few movies I can watch again and again. Not all of them are great movies, some of them I like for being not great movies. Here they are in no particular order. I would be interested in any of your favorite "rewatchs."

Henry V / Kenneth Branagh
Branagh made Shakespeare popular, at least movie-popular, and his most popular production was his version of Henry V. I love it and have watched it dozens of times. The musical score is as good as the movie.

The Godfather / Francis F. Coppola
It is still the best of the three Godfather movies in every way. The development of the plot and characters leaves me spellbound. I don't know why more directors don't imitate the method of suspense-building.

The Blues Brothers / John Landis
Jake and Elwood. Belushi and Akroyd, plus, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, and a weapon-toting Carrie Fisher. "We're on a mission from Godt." Great music, too, obviously. 

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou / Coen Brothers
I have talked about this movie before. The music is as good as the movie. 

Goldfinger / Thunderball / Guy Hamilton
Sean Connery in all his double-entendre finest. I rarely watch them from start to finish but when some TV station has a Bond weekend I'll always look for these two.

Lawrence of Arabia / David Lean
I just can't get enough of this movie. Is there a better actor than Peter O'Toole?

Marshall Grain Co.

Even now, when shopping in one, big American city is the same as shopping in another, there are still locally owned retail stores. Not as many as there used to be, but there a few -- fortunately.

Fort Worth's, Marshall Grain Co. is one such store.

About this time each year my wife and I pay a visit to Marshall Grain and pick up a variety of organic fertilizers, and bug and weed killers. This year we bought diatomaceous earth as a bug killer. It works, I think, the bugs are gone, anyway. In the past we have purchased everything from chickens to gardening tools at Marshall.

If you haven't been to a Marshall Grain, it is worth a visit. Stop by and check out their assortment of farm and garden products.The staff is friendly and helpful.  And you might even leave with a couple of chickens.

Marshall Grain is on Lancaster Blvd., just east of downtown, and now in Grapevine.

How many people are moving in and out of the Fort Worth area?

For those of us who can't get enough of Almanac-type statistics, Forbes Magazine ran a fascinating visual data report. I came across it reading D Magazine online.

The report maps IRS migration data to and from counties in the USA with a line drawn to indicate the movement.

Does your home county have any lines to Tarrant County? It could be you.

Note: it requires 10 or more IRS-filed movements for the lines to draw. The data is for 2008.

Other observations:

-- Check out Detroit, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
-- Most of Tarrant County's red lines (movement away) are into Texas.
-- Austin is interesting.
-- Californians are moving out.

Here's the link: Forbes data for Tarrant County
D Magazine's link.

I'd like to hear any thoughts on the report. Please comment.

Netbook Time?

I like the Mac laptop.

But it is expensive compared to a netbook made by HP, Asus, Dell, Toshiba, or Acer.  I like the portability factor and long battery life of the new netbooks. I can live with the 10.1" screen. I have no idea what "Windows 7 Starter" means. I think it means, "we're not charging full price for the operating system so we're starting you on something inadequate that will require an upgrade later." For a fee, of course.

I'm not ready for the iPad leap. I am just not hip enough to tote one of those around a Starbucks. Besides I'm not sure it isn't the Apple product-phallus.

Should I upgrade from 1 gig of ram to 2 gigs? 1 gig of ram. How 90's of them. Should I get the DVD external drive? And is the little sleeve they sell with them too much of a man-purse? I think it is.

Any thoughts?

On the Virtue of Wasting Time.

I have long held the belief that the average American does not have enough respect for the fine art of wasting time.

Before you indict me for being un-American, I do not mean being lazy. On the contrary, enjoyable time-wasting is the result of a life employed with normal work. Nothing makes leisure as enjoyable as work, if you know what I mean.

Wasting time is doing nothing in particular, enjoyably. It may include gardening, cooking, knitting, day dreaming, fishing, reading, sitting by the window, or any host of other things.

Wasting time is not usually television-watching, or browsing the web, or playing video games. Healthy wasted time is contemplative with no primary purpose attached to the action except its enjoyment. It is a nap. A walk. A crossword puzzle. It is fishing when catching a fish is a surprise not an expectation. Sometimes it is just getting bored. (The modern mind needs a little boredom, or a time when all the "alerts" in one's body and mind are put into sleep-mode, and sorry for the computer metaphor).

The high watermark of time wasting has a serendipitous quality to it, like a walk that ends in an enjoyable but unplanned conversation, or a detour into a used bookstore that leads to a book you have long wanted.

Leisure, the word once used for the contemplative times of one's life, is considered by classical philosophers to be a hallmark of an advanced civilization, and is only possible when the necessities of life have been supplied.

But unlike leisure years ago, modern leisure is organized, codifed, and usually has a mission attached to it. Something to give meaning to the action. It is the difference between the pick-up baseball games at the park when I was a kid and the uber-organized Select League baseball today. It is the difference between the average simple wedding of 1950 and the average stage performance we call a wedding today. And socially, it is "networking," (a damnable word) instead of meeting friends at the pub for a pint and a smoke. Even dying can not escape our desire to infuse more meaning into our lives, or so suggests the movie, The Bucket List.

I am not sure all the reasons we are the way we are, but certainly one reason is that our modern ethos equates "success" on earth with success in heaven, as seen in the countless "God wants you to be healthy and rich" religious television broadcasts, and in the non-religious but identical, "Success in Life" programs.  Somewhere in the last few hundred years we have replaced self-sacrifice with enlightened self-interest, the Fiat of the Virgin Mary with the empowerment Ayn Rand. . . but I digress. . .

I know that planning and organization are all good things, as is the accumulation of enough wealth to live a happy life, but the end is the good life not the planning of a good life. One of the joys of living in America is that it just works. I love that about our country and I am continually amazed at how efficient we are. But efficiency is not a god by which all is judged. It is a servant of happiness not its master. Life is not a performance to be captured on video, there is no audience applause at the end of it.  If one can take anything from our Buddhist friends, it is that the moment, the now, is to get our attention.

Our way of living is to video now, experience later. It is odd and I am as guilty as anyone.

But I am getting old and old people have thoughts like this.

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Written with my apologies to the following authors and their books:

Josef Pieper / Leisure: The Basis of Culture

Walker Percy / Love in the Ruins

Max Weber / The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

El Pollo Regio. Riverside Drive.

Yesterday around lunch time I was in the Riverside Drive and Belknap area so I thought I'd try one of the restaurants near there. Mamma Mia is there, Sammys Bar B Que, and a few others. I was alone so I was looking more for fast food and I noticed a place called El Pollo Regio. Man did I get lucky.

I ordered the half-chicken special. For $5.99 you get a half chicken, baked with Mexican seasonings, beans, rice, tortillas and a drink. It was delicious.  The pico de gallo looked and tasted homemade. I would go back just for that.

There is nothing fancy about the place. I thought it was just a single owner restaurant. But I was wrong, there are twenty or so Regio's in DFW area. I had never noticed them before.

There are only about six small tables indoors and a few outdoors, so they must do a big take out business. The chickens are all pre-cooked and held in a warmer. 

If you try it, tell me what you think. For six bucks I don't know of a better deal in town.

The Annual Ice Cream Issue. 2010.

I love ice cream.

Every year, when the temperature nears one-hundred, my thoughts turn toward a scoop of Rocky Road. I treat myself to a cone at Braum's every once in a while. 

How anyone can not love ice cream is incomprehensible to me. It is akin to not loving chocolate, or strawberries, or sunsets, or Gina Lollobrigida. Indeed, Americans have a long history of ice cream love, going back to the first Gelateria (ice cream shop) established in New York in 1770 by an Italian emigrant.

Locally, Blue Bell ice cream is a favorite. I also like Braum's. Both Braum's and Blue Bell do their own manufacturing, which I like. A good and inexpensive grocery store ice cream is the Archer Farms Brand, sold by Target. It scored high in a recent Consumer Reports on ice cream, as did Haagan Daz and Ben & Jerry's, but the latter are expensive and I don't care for the high fat content ice creams.

My wife makes our ice cream at home these days. It is easy and quick, and tastes great. We leave the ice cream mixer-bowl in the freezer until ready for use. It takes about thirty minutes to get good fresh ice cream. My first ice cream maker was a hand churn. I used it twice, I think.

Ice cream by the scoop in Fort Worth:
The new ice cream shops are Sweet Sammies and Paciugo, both off 7th Street. Sweet Sammies sells Blue Bell and Paciugo the homemade Italian gelato. I love them both.

The old stand-bys are:  Braum's, drive through and get one scoop of for about $2. My usual choice. And Marble Slab. Not my favorite and it is expensive. And Baskin Robbins.

And just in case you are on the East Coast this summer, my favorite ice cream shop in the world is the Royal Treat, in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Something about ice cream, a cool summer evening, boardwalk sounds, and salt air that works well together.

Frozen Yogurt: Ice cream has the advantage of taste-memory in most of our minds, but frozen yogurt is a refreshing summer treat, especially when it is served with fresh fruit. There are almost too many frozen yogurt vendors to mention this summer, but we have to include in our favorites, Yogolait, Menchies, and Pinkberry.

Finally, I like ice cream so much I worked as a ice cream salesman one summer. I drove an ice cream truck not unlike the one in this picture. The biggest seller was the Bomb-Pop. My favorite was the orange creamsicle.

Qdoba or not Qdoba.

(My apologies to Will Shakespeare.) 

I can thank Qdoba for at least one thing.

If it weren't for their restaurant on Walnut Street in Philadelphia, my son's college diet would consist of beer and tortilla chips. Thanks to them it is tacos, queso, beer and tortilla chips. He might even add a little lettuce to the tacos, so that's one vegetable serving a day. Like I say, for that I am grateful.

He's back for a while this summer so we visited the Qdoba restaurant in the Tower Building downtown. I like Qdoba it for the most part. The best menu item is the queso, it's as good as you can get in a fast food restaurant.

I was pretty excited the first time I visited the Qdoba-concept restaurant a few years ago. Now, and dozens of visits later, I have one main complaint and one minor complaint.

The biggest problem I have is with the food temperature, especially their signature burrito. Hot food should be served hot and cold food should be served cold. Simple. Qdoba's food, by the time I sit down, is luke-warm, and that keeps me from giving them high marks.

The taste is good, the service is good, but the food-warming basins are not kept hot enough, probably for insurance purposes, the rice is often cool, and then, by the time your food sits in the prep line and you wait to check out, the burrito's way too cooled off for me.

The other thing, and this is a minor point, but it seems expensive for what you get.

Now, I am happy to go to any restaurant of my children's choosing because a good meal is more than the food. We all know that. But if I could get that burrito served piping hot I'd go back, on my own, a lot more often.

Free Donuts. June 4.

National Donut Day?

Yep. According to their websites,  a free donut can be had today at Dunkin Donuts, Shipley's, and Krispy Kreme.

https://www.dunkindonuts.com/Donut/

http://www.krispykreme.com/

http://www.shipleydonuts.ws/

Let's have a vote. Krispy's, Shipley's, or Dunkin's?

I am Dunkin Donut guy, myself. And you?

(I believe Krispy is a no-purchase-required promotion, whereas Dunkin and Shipley require a purchase.)

Talking Jack. In the Box.

I have never been a big fan of the food at Jack in the Box except for the deep-fried, guilty pleasure they call a taco, which tastes fantastic -- especially at 1:00 in the morning.

And I have liked their commercials.

Sidenote: I will frequent a restaurant because of a good commercial. J/Box has them. And stay away from a restaurant with annoying commercials. Burger-King has them (that Burger King character is annoying and creepy).

My problem with J/Box has been the continual change of food and focus. One day the jack-in-the-box character was in, the next day they were blowing him up. Now's he's back. One day they were selling cheeseburgers, the next day, strawberry shakes and pita bread sandwiches. It's all too confusing for me. Jack in the Box has tried every conceivable food fad in the hopes of gaining some separation from the other hamburger places, but at times they appear to have given up on the hamburger altogether. The deep-fried taco is the long-standing menu exception and surpasses anything in fast-food-dom. (Have I said they are great at one o'clock in the morning?)

All of the above is a long introduction to a small point, which is, my son is a Jack in the Box lover and suggested I try the latest iteration. So I did, this morning. I ordered a steak and egg burrito and I loved it. It looked and tasted like real egg and steak on a slightly too-thin and too-crispy flour tortilla, but it was mmm-mmm good, for about $2.75.

Jack. I'll be back. Just keep this breakfast burrito a while. Please.