Nothing says “family-style Italian restaurant” like food additives. My partner and I headed up to Pittsburgh yesterday and stopped by a Buca de Beppo for lunch. The subsequent hours of digestive upset and low-grade migraine had all the hallmarks of a heavy hand with the monosodium glutamate. Yum!
The experience apparently gave us good leftover karma, because we were able to spend most of the morning turning scraps from the refrigerator into some really good meals. Excess broccoli became soup. Chicken breasts and a variety of cheese remnants got stuffed into crepes. And aged bananas? Cake. (Not to sound too much like Sandra Lee, but even the cheapest cake mix can be doctored into tastiness. On the flip side, I once meticulously followed Ina Garten’s chocolate cake recipe to have it end up tasting just like Duncan Heinz. The chocolate buttercream was killer, though.)
Now I’m kind of half-watching The Odyssey on Sci-Fi, and I can’t quite get past Bernadette Peters as Circe. I love Peters, and Circe is one of my favorite figures from mythology, but something’s not quite working here. It’s almost like Peters is purposely flattening her kewpie-doll quality to give Circe a different kind of wronged bitterness. There’s something unsettling about it, and it leeches both the performer and the character of their power.
And now, some manga:
Case Closed Vol. 9 (Viz): The most noteworthy thing about this installment of the fun mystery series is that it came shrink-wrapped. What in the world could Detective Conan have done to merit a sheath? While the structure of the stories is comfortingly familiar, the scenarios are a little more extreme than usual (an apparent gun-to-the-temple suicide, a little girl trapped in the trunk of a car with a severed head, a perilous car chase, and Rachel at the hot springs). In spite of this, the tone is much the same as usual, and the detection is as diverting.
Death Note Vol. 3 (Viz – Shonen Jump Advanced): This has to be one of the most densely written manga I’ve ever read. There’s a metric ton of dialogue and interior monologue, but almost all of it feels essential to keep the twists coming. There’s a metric ton of those, too, and some of them are genuinely shocking. Tsugumi Ohba’s story keeps ticking along, deftly rendered by Takeshi Obata. Death Note has the kind of page-turning urgency I haven’t seen in a comic since Kurt Busiek’s run on Thunderbolts (Marvel). Sure, it’s pulp, but it’s pretty terrific pulp.
Ultra Maniac Vol. 3 (Viz – Shojo Beat): The first volume of this title was all screwball daffiness. The second was more of a sincere exploration of friendship. This time around, it’s a nice balance of both, with teen witch Nina and average girl Ayu navigating teen romance and magical chaos, knowing they can lean on each other during the rough patches. It’s standard stuff, but the light touch keeps me chuckling, and the characters are really endearing. The extras are unusually illuminating, as Wataru Yoshizumi talks about the changes in the story from manga to anime, which were fairly substantial.