The interregnum between Christmas and New Year’s is a slow one for most daily and weekly news outlets. So’s the case on Serious Eats. We planned an onslaught of year-in-review posts, but readers grew tired of it before I could post about my favorite new (or new-to-me) food blogs of 2008. So I’ll just do it on Kublog.

Grocery Eats: Serious Eats New York editor Zach Brooks discovered DJ Grocery’s General Tso’s Philly cheesesteak on a message board, posted about it, and not long after, the good DJ was inspired to start a blog documenting his (and, later, his contributors’) insane experiments with extreme food mashups. His first post was titled “Fuck, Yes,” and pretty much set the tone for the site. With plenty of cursing and craziness, it’s a great antidote to all the too-precious food blogs out there.

So Good: Though D.C.-based Jon Eick started his blog in August 2007, it really seemed to blow up in 2008, with his coverage of the Papa John’s/LeBron James/”Crybaby” T-shirt controversy. He was totally one top of crazy food-related current events. Thank you, Jon, for highlighting the Shawn Johnson “Makes My Taco Pop” commercial.

Fast Food Critic: Timothy appeared out of nowhere in March with a concept that seemed easily dismissable—reviews of fast food meals. Who is not familiar with the stuff the major chains put out? I thought. But FFC manages to take a seeingly common subject and find great nuggets of wisdom and humor in it. He’s tempermental and has threatened to quit blogging at least once, but we’re glad he’s back. I’m looking forward to more in 2009, Timothy.

Eat Me Daily: This blog popped on the scene in in October, with a smart, funny, wry take on food culture. Lots of great posts about cookbooks, food-related art, food media, and video snippets from popular TV shows. Too often food sites tend to all go echo-chamber on you, covering the same stories in the same way, but the anonymous staff of Eat Me Daily often finds a great new angle on the stories everyone is talking about.

I heard this guy before I saw him last night as I boarded the R train at Pacific Street. He marched down the car, stiffly, robotically, with an old-school boombox, which he put on the floor near the front of the train. He then started to do warm-up exercises before doing a weird dance.

He was wearing a T-shirt that said “Lazer 1″ on the back (yes, misspelled, if memory serves), along with animal-print tights and, I think, sweatbands.

At one point, the music segued into Kenny Loggins’s “Highway to the Danger Zone” just as the train made a stop, and then he did a funny move—running comically out of the train and then back in before the doors closed. A dangerous move, as he ran the risk of getting shut out and losing his boombox.

Passenger reaction went from perplexed to amused pretty quickly, and the girl who got up went down there to take some cameraphone pictures of him, which you’ll see her doing at the end of the video just before the doors close on the show.

Yum. I liked my burrito.

There were some burritos on the menu: Regular (rice, bean, meat), Especial (rice, bean, meat, cheese), and Super (rice, bean, meat, cheese, sour cream, guac).

The GF gets the regular saying that’s how real San Franciscans get theirs, but I wanted cheese, so I went for the Especial.

Of course, I wanted to be down with the people, so I asked for “an ess-pess-cee-ahl burrito.”

The woman was like, “WHA?”

Me, sheepishly: “Um, ess-special burrito?”

That worked, and the lady and the customers behind me laughed.

Whatever. That’s how you pronounce it in Spanish.

The video is about as insane as the album art. Completely over the top and ridiculous. I saw one MP3 blog describe them as “what music will look and sound like in 2012.”

Best album art of the year? I’ve become strangely hooked on this song.

Empire of the Sun, “Walking on a Dream”

[Utsuru]

County by county on the New York Times map, Kansas was almost entirely red, with three exceptions in the eastern part of the state.

I grew up in Johnson County (above). Knowing the people I grew up with and among, there’s no surprise it went McCain. I wish my good friends who still live there could have helped flip it blue, but that’ll happen when moose fly.

The three counties that went for Obama and why:

Douglas: Home to the University of Kansas. Liberal college students.

Wyandotte: Kansas City, Kansas, lies in this county. Black people.

Crawford: Pittsburg, Kansas, is here. I have no idea why this county swung blue. My only guess is that there’s a teachers college here and that folks in education tend to vote Dem.

C: JoCo went red
C: The times has got a great map where you can see county by county
C: only two kansas counties went blue
AK: Douglas
AK: and WyCo
C: Wyandotte
AK: i’m guessing
C: yep
C: how did you know?
AK: Douglas = Lawrence; WyCo = Black people
C: even JoCo went 54 to 47.4, though
C so almost half of JoCo went for Obama
C: 84.7 to 13.2 for Obama in SF. unsurprisingly!
C: 55.6 to 43.5 for McCain in Lancaster PA
C: But actually I think those numbers show the lack of support for McCain
C: because they should have won those counties
C: with the lopsided-ness of SF
AK: Crawford County in KS also went for Obama

Alien Lanes is, of course, one of Guided by Voices’ best albums:

I never thought to research the title of this GBV album before, but a quick Google search seems to reveal that there’s no L.A. bowling alley by that name.

The site PopMatters, however, has a possible explanation for the title. From an interview with Eric Johnson of the Fruit Bats:

I’ve heard that Bob Pollock of Guided By Voices gets a lot of his song titles by misreading signs while he’s driving around. Like Bee Thousand, came from driving by this movie theater where they were playing this Charles Grodin dog movie Beethoven, and [he] misread Beethoven as Bee Thousand. And I think Alien Lanes came from a bowling alley called Allen Lanes.

And there you have it. From Allen Lanes to Alien Lanes to a sly reference in The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Jake Dobkin finds an unusual piece of street art.

I SO WANT THIS.

At Katsuhama.

More about Katsuhama on Serious Eats.

To quote Charlie Todd, who sums it up pretty well: “Holy shit. This new MTV Music site is UNREAL. If you have, like, a few days to kill, go check it out. They basically put every video by every band ever on the site…. I’m in heaven! I used to hit record on my VCR before going to bed each Sunday night to tape 120 Minutes in hopes I would catch some of this stuff.”

That’s exactly what I used to do back in ‘88, ‘89. And Malkmus and the gang started making videos during my non-cable-havin’ college years, so I’ve never really seen any of these Pavement videos—except for maybe “Cut Your Hair.” Once, at a friend’s house.

[MTV Music]

[YouTube]

[YouTube]

[YouTube]

[YouTube]

Poster Boy has gone missing from the 23rd Street C/E Station so I have to look online for his work these days. Looks like he’s been collaborating with Aakash Nihalani on some amazing pieces that seem to jump from walls onto benches, platform floors, and all over the interior of subway cars. Nihalani’s signature seems to be the colorful boxes, while Poster Boy brings the surreallist collage element to the collaboration.

I’ve got a loaner camera from Nikon after having done a podcast with the folks there on food photography. It’s been a good camera so far, though I think I still need to get used to its features before I can get some really amazing photos out of it. I’m using the standard kit lens with it (18-55mm/f3.5), but Nick may let me borrow his Sigma zoom macro for it for a spell. Then we’ll really take this thing out on the road and open her up.

[YouTube, via Dan]

Slapped together the seed of a website for a friend yesterday. He wants a portfolio site for his artwork. I was suprised how little time it took—only two hours of futzing. I found a workable photoblog template for Wordpress, hacked it a bit to change it from black and gray to white and gray, and uploaded some of his work to it to see how it would look. Not bad, I might say. I actually like this design more than Kublog here.

The boxes on the main page are created by using the Wordpress built-in custom fields option and are pulling in the thumbnail version of the artwork. Additionally, I hacked the template to pull in only images from category “featured art,” so that my friend can control which work appears there—an option he mentioned wanting on this site.

What he did want was a way to minimize scrolling if not eliminate it at all, but that ain’t gonna happen. The only way I can fit a grid of images on the main page—and keep individual artwork pages from scrolling—would be to make thumbnails and main images small enough to fit entirely onscreen for a laptop user (the smallest anticipated screen).

I think this, with a few more tweaks, is a fairly stylish solution, if I do say so myself.

Earlier this month I went with my friend Justin to see the Silver Jews play. I didn’t realize until we got there that this was a pretty big deal, since this is like maybe the second time Jew-in-chief David Berman had ever toured. They started the night off right, playing one of my favorites, “Smith & Jones,” and then kept it up, playing a nice mix of new and old.

Berman looks like what I’d imagine the guys from Steely Dan looked like in their heyday. It was a great show, and the Music Hall of Williamsburg is a fine venue. Good sightlines. It’s rare that I like shows these days, but I really did enjoy this one.

Anyway, I thought the story could have benefited from a few good photos of the machines it described, which sounded amazing. I dug around and found some.