Anniversary Dinner

To go along with Jess's post about our anniversary, I've decided to share my review of Pizzeria 712 from Yelp. One of my upcoming posts will be about Yelp, a site where you can review restaurants and read reviews from other people.

This is probably our favorite place to eat. The ambiance is incredible--this place feels like something that you'd find tucked away in some little corner of a big city. The restaurant feels cozy, and it's fun to see the brick oven blazing away in the corner. On our most recent visit, we saw that they had opened up some outdoor seating. It was nice outside, but I missed being able to hear the music as well as I could indoors. They ask for music recommendations from their patrons, and we've heard things from classic jazz music to Feist to the soundtrack of the Darjeeling Limited. It fits the atmosphere.

The staff is attentive and very helpful. Trent has provided us with fabulous recommendations on both of our visits. The folks who work there have tried all of the dishes they serve and can let you know what's the best. This is handy because the menu changes every few months (they incorporate foods that are in season).

The food is amazing. Seriously--wow. I'm not a big fan of vegetables, but I loved the roasted asparagus and the heirloom tomatoes were to die for. My wife got bruschetta with the heirloom tomatoes on arugula, and I had braised beef shortrib on crisped polenta with a horseradish cream. Mmmm. Our pizza was interesting, but tasty. It had sauteed mushrooms, carmelized onions, potato and some arugula. I'd never had lettuce on a pizza, but it was pretty good.

This is one of our favorite places to eat. It's one of our "special occasion" places because we're poor college students, and we've spent an average of $40 on our two visits. Give 'em a try, you won't regret it!

Political News

Guess what everyone--Dell Schanze is running for governor. Dell who? Yes, that's right. Mr. Totally Awesome Computers guy. Superdell. Yup. That one.

We found out the good news last night when Jess received an automated phone call from Superdell himself. He's the Libertarian candidate on the ballot for governor this year, running against current governor Jon Huntsman, Jr. (the Republican candidate) and Bob Springmeyer (the Democratic candidate). He informed us in this phone call that he's the only true American running for office. I forget what he told us about Bob, but he sure did say a lot about "socialist Jon Huntsman" and how taxes have been raised exorbitantly during Huntsman's term in office, how he's in the wallets of the big corporations, etc. If Superdell were governor, he'd be different and fix everything. He told us that our cars would soon run on water instead of gasoline if he is governor. How could life get any better?

So after this fine message, we decided to check out his website. [To be fair, he has put up a new website since we were looking at his stuff last night. It's more professional than his blog.] It wasn't anything more than a link to his blog. So I read his most recent post and the comments on it. Wow. I don't know that I could even do it justice. You really oughta just go and read it for yourself. He seems really defensive and easily excited. So I've continued to study up on him, and it's been entertaining.

He's got some fairly strong feelings about the media. In fact, after he closed his company (Totally Awesome Computers) he blamed the media and said the following according to Deseret News: "It's too bad that all of the media in Utah are liars and murderers. You just destroyed the greatest computer company of all time. We were the best in the world, the world champion. All this hatred was created by you. You're basically angels of Satan. All I can say to the people in Utah is, please pray for all the news people." I guess he's not one to mince words. [Angels of Satan?? Whoa...]


I was looking on Youtube to see if I could find any of his old commercials to link to here in the post, but didn't have any luck. However, I did find some videos about paragliding when I searched him. Here's one. I read the information about the video (on the right hand side), and one thing caught my attention. "We would like to publicly thank Dell Schanze, a phenom[e]nal innovator for all the efforts put forth to create a safe and wonderful sport for generations to come." Cool, I thought. Who is giving him these glowing accolades? I clicked the username (imasuper0308... could it be?, I wondered) and discovered that the user's name is Dell. So who's we? Did he really just congratulate himself? That's Totally Awesome.

Spiders

A couple weeks ago, Jess and I were discussing a difficult question. A difficult question that put to you seven readers of my blog in the form of a poll. Are spiders bugs?

A few days back, I got the results. The vote was close, but the "yes" folks had it 4-3. So my new question is "how do you figure?" Go ahead and explain your reasoning in the comments. Also, feel free to share any good spider stories that you have.

My argument: to me, "bug" is synonymous with "insect". Being a biology nerd, I was taught that an insect has six legs. A spider has eight, and is classified as an arachnid, not an insect. If I were to describe an area with many creepy-crawlies (think the small hole with the release lever in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where the lady has to stick her hand in and pull the lever to keep Indy and Short Round from being squished and stabbed in the room with the lowering spiky ceiling) I would likely say that there were lots of bugs AND spiders. I wouldn't just say it was full of bugs. Besides, "bugs" doesn't sound very scary. I'm not really afraid of bugs. But I can be afraid of spiders.