News You Can Bruise for 2004 September 24

Man. Writer's block! What should I write about?

Nobody told me what to write about, though some people emailed in to gloat, so I'll write about the Radio Habana Social Club, where I just ate dinner with Sumana and friends. I went to get away from my writer's block and companion algorithm designer's block (I need to read some papers or something). Its selling points are that it's incredibly small, and the walls are crammed full of stuff, including a set of "Heroes of the Blues" trading cards (four or five different bluesmen took the "blind" praenomen, according to the cards, and for all I know they were really blind). These selling points are better than they sound.

However, I think the food is pretty bad. I had a tamale which in retrospect felt like just a big chunk of lard, and I was not happy because I ate lard. The menu said you could get the tamale with chile, which I misread as saying you could get it with chili, and I was very excited until my tamale came with a line of red sauce down the middle, dashing my hopes of a Doe's-esque tamale. It also came with black beans, which were pretty lackluster despite having intermingled onion slices; spanish-rice-tasting basmati rice, which was very good, and the generic California Random Greens Salad that makes you think you're having a fancy dinner.

I had cocoa which, as happens in some restaurants, wasn't sweet at all; it's like they make the traditional Aztec cocoa and you have to dump in a bunch of sugar from the sugar container to make it taste like cocoa, and you feel un-hip. But hey, that's me to a T.

The signature dessert was rice pudding; I didn't have any because I'm trying to get rid of this peach cobbler in my fridge, but it's probably good. My verdict: come for the atmosphere, leave for the atmosphere.

Oh yeah, I've been meaning for a while to publicly apologize to Taina Prusti, Jarno's girlfriend wife, for consistently calling her "Prusti" the whole time we were all together in Europe, and then afterwards on this very website. When Jarno introduced me to her, all I heard was her surname. She probably thought I operated under some weird American notion of chivalry. In my defense, I thought and still think "Prusti" is a great first name for a woman.