The decline of Mission Chinese Food

Michael Bauer has dropped Mission Chinese Food in SF down to a food rating of 1.5 stars.

Many favorites are a shadow of what they were when I initially reviewed the restaurant as well as when I updated it 18 months ago, about six months after Bowien started spending the bulk of his time in New York. On that visit, the food had lost a bit of luster but still showed his vision.

My all-time favorite dish - salt-cod fried rice ($12) with Chinese sausage and confit mackerel - shows how the cooking has devolved. On my recent visit it was as dry as sawdust, although there were glimmers of what I had loved in the interplay between land and sea.

Another favorite, ma po tofu ($12), which used to be thick with ground pork, seems to have been reformulated. It now has a greasy broth with too-large cubes of tofu and a one-dimensional heat that masked the earthy shiitake and aged chile sauce.
 

I agree. My recent few deliveries from MIssion Chinese have been so disappointing: the beef in the broccoli beef brisket was overcooked, as were the Chongqing chicken wings. Westlake rice porridge lacked the usual comforting flavor blend of salt and brine. It was just bland. The market greens, which have always been braised baby bok choy for as long as I've been ordering from them, have been successively less and less flavorful, lacking both salt and garlic.

Bauer theorizes the decline in the food quality at Mission Chinese Food may be due to the absence of Danny Bowien from the kitchen. Bowien is off in NYC working on Mission Cantina and searching for a new location for his NYC branch of Mission Chinese Food; the initial location was a hit but was closed by the Department of Health for pest-related issues last November (yikes).

With a much longer commute than I had in LA, a dearth of street parking throughout San Francisco, and the scarcity of good restaurants in SOMA near my apartment, I have come to depend on restaurant delivery for more meals than at any point in my life since my years in NYC.

The SF food delivery scene is, to be blunt, a desert. I'm not counting the possibility of using Postmates to expand the delivery options to include more restaurants that offer takeout; that's a fairly hefty price premium that I hesitate to resort to except when I'm desperate.

Obi Wan Bowien, come back and whip that kitchen into shape! You're our only hope.

The zeitgeist in verbal tics

Blame the English major in me, but at any given time some spoken or written tic causes me to cringe. For a while, it was really common for me to hear people say "I'm wanting to" instead of "I want to." To my relief, that seems to have faded.

The two phrases that I hear so often now, perhaps because they're so common in business settings, are “at the end of the day” and “the reality is.” I'll be in a meeting and hear both phrases used multiple times, everyone one-upping each other with each successive "at the end of the day" or "the reality is," each successive occurrence marching us closer to the true end of the day and some greater version of reality.

When someone drops an "at the end of the day" on you, the presumption, whether explicit or not, is that whatever you've said is not bottom line enough. You haven't been seeing the big picture, you've been in the weeds.

Something similar occurs when someone hurls "the reality is" at you, but it feels worse, doesn't it? What have you been doing, dealing in unreality?

At the end of the day it doesn't matter. But the reality is it does matter. At the end of the day. Not before then. At lunch, just after dinner, but before the day has ended, it doesn't matter. But later, closer to 10pm in your time zone, maybe after you've brushed your teeth and you're about to end your day, then, and just then, it matters a lot.

The rise of the knowledgeables

Over at the Typist, a missive on the future of journalism:

First, as the quoted tweet suggests, this isn’t about whether The Information itself will be successful — financially or journalistically — in the long haul. This is about the model by which it operates, and the major role I think that model will play in the future of journalism.

Secondly, let’s differentiate between journalism and reporting. The latter is only one part — integral as it may be — of the former. I think big organizations will dominate news breaking and reporting for a long time to come. They will still be responsible for the “what,” but less and less for “what does it mean?”. They’ll serve mainly as middlemen of information — an important and nontrivial task in itself — but not much more beyond that.

In the future, we’ll have ‘knowledgeables’.

Knowledgeables won’t “kill” today’s journalists. They will simply supplant them where anything substantially more complicated than a “what” is needed. Nobody is going to go out of business when this happens. In fact, as the separation between reporters and knowledgeables (both journalists) becomes more dichotomous, everyone wins. Everyone wins by doing what they do best. In this case: Journalists deliver, knowledgeables analyze. This is called specialization.

Forming small, self-owned, and single-focus groups, knowledgeables will play a different game than the one news companies are struggling to survive in. To be sustainable, these specialized cells won’t have to break any news, serve a meager diet of ads as content, or deal with every item out there just to feed the hungry ratings machine. They won’t cater to everyone, only to their everyone.
 

I agree with the general sentiment, and the increased returns to specialization in the internet era (maybe Nate Silver should have picked a hedgehog as a logo instead of a fox). Examples of knowledgeables include John Gruber, Bruce Schneier, and Patrick Smith.

The art of the password

Good overview of the state of password creation (and cracking) by William Poundstone.

Though I never bother with such websites, I hadn't realized the following:

Have you ever wasted a few moments with a sketchy website that promises to reveal your Klingon name (wizard name, ghetto name, porn star name, etc.)? Some of these sites are fronts for password-harvesting operations. They’ll ask you for some personal data—mixed in with Trekkie trivia —and prompt you to make up a password. Scammers know that the password you supply is likely to be similar or identical to ones you use elsewhere. They may sell collected passwords on the black market for about $20 each.

A password is like the key to your home. There are weak locks and strong locks, but neither does any good when a pickpocket swipes your key. Security is always about the weakest link.
 

Poundstone's advice on picking a secure password:

The best way to use the pass-phrase idea is to turn the conventional advice on its head. Instead of thinking of a phrase and converting it to a password (that won’t be all that random), get a truly random password and convert it to an easy‑to-remember phrase.

...

A password, a pass-phrase, a mnemonic—what’s the big deal? The difference is that a random-character password is the gold standard of security. It’s better than any human-chosen password could be. It will still be good even if everyone in the world adopts this scheme.

A random-character password of reasonable length is, for practical purposes, unguessable with today’s technology. It won’t appear in a list of popular passwords. A mass attacker could guess a random password only in a brute-force search. With upper- and lowercase letters and numbers, there are sixty-two possible characters. (I won’t count punctuation marks, as not all sites allow them.) That means it would take 62^8 guesses to be certain of hitting an eight-character password. That’s over 218 trillion guesses.

That effectively rules out an Internet mass attack and would slow down a targeted attack. Accepting the claim that some forensic software can spit out 2.8 billion guesses a second, it would take about twenty-two hours to make that many guesses. That’s secure enough for most people—should you disagree, you’re welcome to add a few more characters.

The politics of Game of Thrones

I tried to read the Song of Fire and Ice by George R.R. Martin and couldn't get through much more than one book. The prose is rough, functional at best. 

The TV series, though, I love. The first book ended up reading like an adaptation of the first season of the series, so closely did the two hew to each other back then. It made sense to me to find out Martin had worked as a Hollywood screenwriter for much of the 80's and part of the 90's.

What Martin does do well, and what makes Game of Thrones more fascinating than much of the fantasy series out there, is delve deeply into realpolitik. Characters win or lose not so much based on whether they are good or bad in character as whether they're the smartest player in the political arena, the so-called "game of thrones." Thus we see many characters killed off in defiance of audience expectations. That's the part of the series that I love the most, beyond the high and increasing production values (a noticeable increase in quality after season one), beautiful locations (refreshing in this day and age of cartoonish digital backdrops to see the real world serve as the backdrop for so much of the series), and fun performances (there are some weak links, like Danaerys, but most of the lead performances are strong).

Martin also manages to challenge the audience's desire for clean moral judgments (with the exception of characters like Joffrey who seem horrific through and through).

Much of this comes out in a really good interview of Martin in Rolling Stone.

A major concern in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones is power. Almost everybody – except maybe Daenerys, across the waters with her dragons – wields power badly. 

Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it's not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn't ask the question: What was Aragorn's tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren't gone – they're in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?

In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences. I've tried to get at some of these in my books. My people who are trying to rule don't have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn't make you a wise king.

...

Early on, one critic described the TV series as bleak and embodying a nihilistic worldview, another bemoaned its "lack of moral signposts." Have you ever worried that there's some validity to that criticism? 

No. That particular criticism is completely invalid. Actually, I think it's moronic. My worldview is anything but nihilistic.

Some of your most contemptible characters are also among the story's greatest truth-tellers. One of the most riveting moments in the TV series took place in the Battle of Blackwater episode, which you wrote the script for, when Sandor says to Sansa, "The world was built by killers, so you'd better get used to looking at them." 

Truth is sometimes hard to hear. Two of the central phrases are true, but they are not truths that most human beings like to contemplate. Winter is coming and Valar morghulis – all men must die. Mortality is the inescapable truth of all life . . . and of all stories, too.