Pod saves my daily stroll
On my daily walk I’ve sort of abandoned audiobooks because you just have to walk too far to pick up a few chapters so I’ve now taken to podcasts of about 40 minutes to an hour in length (fast-forwarding through sponsored ads), and I have a few favorites so far.
One is a fairly exhausting, and certainly exhaustive, “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs,” by Andrew Hickey. I checked out his piece on The Band’s “The Weight,” and it’s a Michnerian epic with Hickney going back nearly to the Stone Age with a long passage on Victorian-era art critic and philosopher John Ruskin and slowly working his way through Levon Helm’s early days with Ronnie Hawkins, where he eventually picked up the rest of the musicians who made up The Band. Ambling through the Basement Tapes with The Band working with Bob Dylan, he eventually gets around to the group’s classic song.
But even more, I’m enjoying “Pod Save America,” now that its hosts, particularly Jon Favreau, former director of speechwriting for Obama who, with co-hosts Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor, have emerged from their post-debate despondency and have become optimistic about candidate Kamala Harris, dragging me along on the emotional rollercoaster. The podcast also put a measurable spring in my step, according to my Apple watch’s Outdoor Walk metrics.
International Breakfast Tour 2024
Ostensibly, my daughter Hannah’s and my weekly restaurant search is to find the best breakfast in all the land, and we’ve got a couple of early leaders, but the real excitement is blundering into the worst places. It’s a darned exciting race for last place.
Posing a serious threat in the battle for the basement was Monday’s trek into that horrid stretch of malls along Seal Beach Boulevard, where we eventually found Hot Off the Grill, which we didn’t know was part of a chain of restaurants that includes locations in Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach and Laguna Hills.
Hannah went with a can’t-miss breakfast burrito, which she determined to be a C-minus. I was considering Huevos Á La Mexicana, but I had doubts they could pull off something so exotic, a doubt confirmed by the fact that when my order of a sausage omelet arrived, it was topped with two orange squares of individual slices of American cheese of, possibly, the Kraft variety.
All we can say is Hot Off the Grill is definitely a contender…
Hot house, cool pool
With this current brutal heat wave, there’s no better time to buy a pool, and here’s one currently on the market in Long Beach’s Park Estates neighborhood for $3 million.
If that seems pricey for a swimming pool, consider the fact that it comes with a four-bedroom, three-bath Mid Century Modern home at 1340 Los Altos Ave. designed by one of the local masters of the craft, Paul Tay, and built at the peak of the MCM movement in 1959.
The pool is large and gorgeous, as is the attending structure, which sprawls over nearly 3,500 square feet on a third-of-an-acre lot. The home has classic Mid Century lines and lush landscaping viewable from most rooms and their oversized windows and atria.
Tay’s works can be found throughout the city in Park Estates as well as the Virginia Country Club neighborhood, La Marina Estates, Alamitos Heights and Signal HIll.
At last, the return of ‘Homicide’
One reason to stay alive a while longer is the long-awaited release of all seven seasons of “Homicide: Life of the Street” streaming on Peacock beginning Aug. 19. The release had been stalled for years over issues involving the music rights.
If you enjoyed “The Wire,” which I’m assuming you did, you’ll enjoy “Homicide,” based, as “The Wire” was, on the works of author and onetime cop reporter David Simon. It features a tremendous cast that includes Andre Braugher, Ned Beatty, Yaphet Kotto, Vincent D’Onofrio and Richard Belzer as Det. Munch, before he joined the cast of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” as that character.
In addition to all seven seasons of the show, the Peacock release will include “Homicide: The Movie,” which served as the series finale.
The mammoth release ought to keep you busy at least through the summer.