Haunches & tummerz

Coming soon, 5 November 2026: Oh no, there goes Matsumoto

Seen at a screening of Godzilla Minus Zero.

What a hoot!

The movie opens with the city of Matsumoto under attack from a giant creature that looks quite a bit like a dragon - think a more working class Smaug. Armed with a 16mm camera, a scientist named Kanji Murakami (who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima) and his assistant document the creature's rampage through the city. They are able to bring their film back to Kenji Noda and his crack team at the Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau.

We learn that this new leviathan came from outer space as a kind of tentacled, clear goo that ate or absorbed the local fauna and grew into the monster that wreaked havoc on the poor Matsumotoans.

Teaming with the U.S. military, a plan is made to deal with the creature, named Ghidorah, who's taking a nice nap after having wrought destruction across the land. A fuel-air bomb proves ineffective so Noda's team attempts to electrocute it. While they're successful in zapping Ghidorah, the electricity does not kill the beast. Not only does Ghidorah shake off the zap, it grows 2 more heads. Oof!

Felicitously, Godzilla, thought to have met his demise in Davy Jones Locker, reappears and Noda's group decides the only option left is to have Godzilla fight Ghidorah. One monster would surely not survive the encounter but leave the victor in a bad way, vulnerable to mankind's arsenal of destruction. To do this, Murakami devises a way to use someone who was left with some Godzilla DNA in her body to act as a lure, essentially, and lead the newly-reconstituted lizard to Ghidorah for a death match.

The woman who got that DNA in the previous movie, Godzilla Minus One, is the lovely Noriko Ōishi who has married the pilot from that same movie, Kōichi Shikishima. Shikishima flies the plane with Noriko connected to Murakami's vacuum tube-laden gizmo which broadcasts her Godzilla essence and lures the creature to Ginza, Tokyo which got destroyed in the last movie. There Ghidorah is hanging out he having been lured to the site by some Van der Graaf generator thingies and the promise of their tasty megavolts. Or was is the amps?

Monsters fight, humanity is in grave peril, and people sacrifice themselves to save mankind. And the monsters fight even more!

Watching the spikes on Godzilla's tail and back start glowing blue got me all excited. My heartbeat quickened in anticipation of stuff blowing up and a grievous blow being dealt to Ghidorah. Fun!

My friend and I caught it on a Marcus Ultrascreen and not an IMAX so we saw a widescreen version of the movie projected onto a really big screen that had the same aspect ratio as your normal, average screen. Or that's how I make it out. I'd love to see this on IMAX as the monsters are framed to emphasize their height and make them all the more imposing.

Godzilla Minus Zero was an absolute blast and must be seen on a big screen - IMAX, preferably - at all costs.

OK, onto the trailers! Marcus shows many fewer than AMC but they also crank the volume way up for them.

Song of the day, 6 November 2026

I was listening to the original on headphones the other night and caught some backing vocal parts that I'd never really noticed the past 41 or so years. Ha!

I rather like this cover.

Put the Wisconsin in the Death Drip

Last weekend my ladyfriend and I made a stop at Viet Hoa and we noticed a new coffeehouse opening across the street. I was reminded of this by a new Capital Times article/listicle about new restaurants in the area as the coffee joint gets a mention.

Upon seeing the sign, my ladyfriend lamented that the owners didn't go that one step further and name the place Wisconsin Death Drip. Now that would have been Very Metal.

BLACK River Falls dark roast.

A lost opportunity.

Red red wine vinegar powder, you make my tongue feel so fine

I first encountered these a couple weeks ago at Whole Paycheck and then again at another store that I cannot recall. Apparently the brand is trying to make inroads into the Wisconsin snack market. When I see a new brand of chips on a store shelf I wonder why then. Have Graza's chips always been available to Wisconsin retailers but none have taken the plunge until recently? Or did some distributor somewhere decide to bring them into the state? (Graza appears to be a Brooklyn, NY company, though I dunno where the chips are made.)

Graza appears, at its core, to be a purveyor of olive oil and so the bag proudly proclaims that these chips were fried in 100% extra virgin olive oil. The bag also says that its contents was "inspired by the chips we first fell in love with in Spain!" Is it mere coincidence that I ran into Spanish-made chips at roughly the same time? Graza's website notes that the chips are made with potatoes that have yellow skin and yellow flesh and also a high starch to water ratio. Their competitors, Graza claims, use bog "standard white chipping potatoes" with less starch. The site also notes that they source their spuds from farms in North Dakota and northern Illinois which gives them a fairly local provenance as far as we in Madison are concerned.

These chips had one of the more complex aromas of any salt & vinegar chips that I've sampled.

Ooh! I remember now. I ran into them at Meat People after seeing them on the shelves of Whole Paycheck.

Sticking my face into the bag and huffing, I got a big oil aroma followed by sweetly scented spuds and then a fair dose of vinegar. But I also smelled roastiness - browned sugary bits along with a very mild bitterness.

There were a lot of large diameter chips in the bag and brown centers were common. Overall bubbles were on the less frequent side. They were sliced thicker than normal which runs contrary to the ad copy on the Graza website which claims the spuds were cut 20% thinner than average. Obviously Graza and I have different definitions of what is normal chip thickness. Without busting out calipers, I will say that I use Lay's chips as a benchmark. They're the gigantic chip maker here, after all, and their non-kettle chips are rather thin. They are very thin and usually very pale - the opposite of these Graza chips.

The added thickness meant that these were nice and crunchy. I don't think I'd ever seen potato chips with such brown centers and assume the sugary starchy stuff is concentrated there. It wasn't surprising then to taste a very well-done type of roastiness that complemented the sweetness of the spuds. I didn't taste any extra salt and the vinegar was on the mild side, though stuffing multiple chips into my mouth at once yielded a decent tang.

I found these Graza chips to be quite tasty, especially the extra roasty-toasty flavor. That they were made with red wine vinegar powder is something that sets them apart but I have to admit I didn't really taste it until I read the ingredients list.

Man? Hoo-man?

Crunch, crunch, crunch on the Superbon

A recent visit to Steve's Liquor did not yield the desired Schlenkerla Rauchbier but I went home with a bag of salt & vinegar chips that were new to my tongue.

Superbon's packaging is by far the most colorful of any salt & vinegar snack I have encountered with an anthropomorphized cow relaxing on the right and a friendly sheep's face breaking the fourth wall by looking directly at us on the left as its ear comes out of the frame. This is also the first salt & vinegar chip bag that is not dominated by light blue which is standard for the flavor for reasons unknown.

In addition to the wonderful packaging, these chips stood out as being the first brand from Spain to grace my table - Chips de Madrid. What are Spanish potatoes like? Would they use a light touch with the vinegar? Do they make 'em differently in Catalonia?

Although the chips' aroma lacked much in the way of vinegar tanginess. it did have a really nice earthy potato smell to it in addition to oil. The chips were of a light gold hue with an occasional brown spot. They were noticeably thicker than your average American spudly slice.

Tossing a couple into my maw, I found that they had a nice crunch to them. They didn't seem to have any extra salt but did have a decent sour zip to them. While I don't know anything about the varieties of potatoes they have over there in Spain, I can testify that the ones used here had a great earthy spud flavor to them and that they were distinctly unsweet.

Not being a food expert/chemist, I am unsure why certain chips have a sweeter taste than others even when the label shows no added sugars. Is it the variety of the potato? Or does handling have anything to do with it? It says here that potato-chipsmiths let potatoes that have been in cold storage sit at room temp for a couple months so that their glucose and fructose levels are lowered. I presume that the sweetness I taste in potato chips comes from these sugars but it's unclear to me if these levels are due to handling, the variety of potato, or both or none.

The chips also had a slight roasty flavor to them which I suppose should be expected considering their slightly darker color. That's another thing: is the color here more due to the cooking time that the chips underwent or more a product of the potatoes having extra sugars?

As expected, the chips at the bottom of the bag were covered in salt and vinaigrette flavouring which made for a nice treat.

The conclusion I come to with most salt & vinegar chips is that they need more vinegar. My tongue should not have to wait to get to chips sitting at the bottom of the bag in order to start going numb. That was the case here but it's OK. If you put enough into your mouth, your tongue will eventually start to feel it. And the potato flavor was quite delicious. To top things off, the illustration on the bag was really neat.

Just a fine eating experience overall.

¡Prepárate para una noche llena de música y energía!

When I go to a Mexican restaurant I am usually reminded that there is a whole other world right here in Madison that exists below the mainstream radar. It's like that China Miéville novel The City & the City with Madison's Hispanic population sometimes seeming to exist in a parallel city where English is not the primary language and culture happens out of the spotlight, away from downtown and the gaze of a well to-do middle class.

I exaggerate a bit as Latinos here are not confined to a certain area of town and take part in the life of the city in all ways but a lot of Spanish language cultural events take place more towards the perimeter of the city and out of the spotlight. Last month I ate at El Pastor on the southside and grabbed a handbill for a concert that happens later this week.

Three bands are playing at the Alliant Energy Center this Friday. I've, not surprisingly, never heard of any of them and likely would never have known about this concert had I not stopped to look at the handbill on the counter by the register.

Los Dos de Tamaulipas are the headliners. Led by brothers Rolando and Orlando Zapata, they are reputed to blend traditional norteño with modern corridos. According to Wikipedia, norteño is defined by accordion and bajo sexto, a 12-string guitar. Of course, there are infinite variations. Corrido seems to be less a musical genre than a way to tell a tale set to music in a particular meter.

Kanales is one of the openers and is the stage name of Mexican singer and songwriter Pedro Haros. He seems to be most closely associated with corridos.

The other opener is a band called Los de la Marka who seems to be purveyors of norteño. Their videos tend to feature a lot of pretty señoritas which makes for some fine viewing.

Song of the day, 5 November 2026

There's a new Godzilla movie out!

Willow in her tube, part a gillion

Feeling bookish

A few recent reads.

It's been a couple months since I finished The Light Ages so it's not fresh in my mind. We start with the discovery of a manuscript that describes the construction of an astrolabe. Geoffrey Chaucer is attributed authorship but it turns out it was written by a monk, one John of Westwyk.

I thought this was going to be a broad survey of medieval science demonstrating the many innovations during the period derided as the Dark Ages. Instead we let John of Westwyk's life guide us as his wanderings and the people he encounters serve as the launching pads for investigations into medieval learning. The book's emphasis is on the rather amazing mathematics and astronomy of the medieval period. Astrolabes were like the Swiss Army knife/smartphones of their day. Sailors needed to know where to sail, Christians needed to know when Easter was to be celebrated, healers wanted to know where a given planet was at a given time, and so on and so forth.

Mankind has looked to the skies for thousands of years and men created precision instruments like astrolabes and clocks long before the Industrial Revolution. They conceived mathematics that explained what they saw in the heavens long before Newton and Leibnitz.

A fascinating book. While it doesn't cover many areas of medieval knowledge, it does go in-depth into astronomy and mathematics and does good on its subtitle. This was indeed a surprising story and showed that there was much more than superstition capturing the minds of people during the Middle Ages.

I watched Arrival on my flight back from England back in September and resolved to read the short story that it's based on, "Stories of Your Life" by Ted Chiang.

The tale is only about 50-60 pages, if I recall correctly, and it was easy to see how the film's script was forged from the source material. The stories are mostly the same in the broad sense and in much detail. But it's the differences that really count.

Minor ones include the thingies that actually come to Earth. In the movie they're big spaceships that our heroes must ascend into to meet the aliens behind large windows while in the book, these screens come down to the surface and are activated a bit like televisions. Another difference is that the short story has no scene where disgruntled young men who consume the rantings of the likes of Alex Jones try to kill the aliens.

The biggest difference is that Chiang's tale is littered with flashforwards that strongly hint at the linguist's ability to see into the future whereas that was more of a big revelation in the film. (Right?) Not only does the question of being able to change the future if you know it come into play but also what would it do to a person if they could not only mold stories about their lives from their past but also their future?

I saw mention of The Tainted Cup months back but I do not recall where. It wasn't until after I had bought it that I learned that it had won a Hugo award. What attracted me was the murder mystery aspect of the plot, that it fit into the fantasy category didn't sway me one way or the other, though I admit that I am not a big fantasy reader.

The setting is the Great and Holy Empire of Khanum. We get a map of it and can see that it is a coastal domain. Every wet season gigantic creatures called leviathans emerge from the seas and attempt to make landfall which is quite bad for the Khanumians. And so they've erected massive walls to keep out the unwanted visitors and fortified them with various range weapons. If the term "fantasy" gives you Silmarillionphobia  and you tremor at the thought of epic creation stories and lengthy family trees, fret not. This is the majority of the fantasy world building that the novel gives us. We get a bit more about the various cantons that the empire is divided into and the various social groups that make up hierarchies but that's about it. We get enough to drive the plot and deepen the mysteries that unfold.

Oh, I suppose it bears mention that magic is alive and well in Khanum. Most important is the use of magic to alter people. Dinios Kol, a.k.a. - Din, has been altered so that he has extraordinary memory and recall abilities. A young man, he has been assigned to Ana Dolabra, a detective with a reputation as an eccentric. Ana doesn't like to leave her residence, much preferring to don a blindfold to sharpen her senses and her mental acuity as she speaks with those who come to her home.

And so she dispatches Din to examine the scene of a particularly gruesome botanical death. An imperial officer, Taqtasa Blas, was found dead in a mansion belonging to one of the most powerful aristocratic families in all the land. Din is surprised to find that the cause of death was a tree that grew from inside his body and sundered it apart.

Blas led the engineers whose work protects the empire from the leviathans and soon after his death, there is a breach in the sea walls that allows a giant inland to wreak havoc. Soon Ana and Din learn that several engineers whose duty it was to keep that section of the walls in good stead have died - in the same manner as Blas.

Since Ana doesn't like to leave her home, Din goes out and does the majority of the legwork. He commits the scenes and interviews to his supercharged memory and returns to Ana where he spills the beans. In turn, Ana uses her experience and nimble mind to make all sorts of deductions and postulations.

Bennett does a very nice job of broadening the mystery, of introducing us to new characters, new regions of the empire at a very deliberate pace. We don't just get a heap of stuff dumped on us, we get everything at a speed that allows us to digest what we've been given before moving to something new.

Din is young and attempts to conceal a secret of his from Ana. He is also from a poor background so we come to understand the decadence and corruption of much of Khanumian aristocracy through his eyes. We get to know a group of others that assist with the investigation with Tazi Miljin standing out for me. He's a war hero, a grizzled veteran who proudly sticks out for his incorruptibility. This is your typical working class guy who shakes his head a lot at the behavior of his superiors but ultimately isn't interested all that much in rocking the boat. Ana too has a past that she must contend with.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Tainted Cup. It was a fine mix of procedural, character study, and world building. The initial death had me hooked and then Bennett drops the bomb that many others died the same way and it was buy the ticket, take the ride. No going back. He masterfully introduced and then deepened & widened a mystery, built a new world, and let us get to know a selection of characters at just the right speed for me. The book is a rich stew that simmers most of the way through until it reaches the boiling point at the end. 

The opening scene when Blas' death revealed has some serious Annihilation vibes for me and so remains quite memorable. But the scene that hit me on a gut, emotional level came towards the end of the novel. Our gang of investigators is out seeking a soldier named Ditelus whom they suspect is a collaborator with the brains behind all of the deaths. Ditelus is what they call a crackler, someone whose body and strength has been enhanced via magic. They find him hobbling along far from any town mumbling about going home, though his homeland had been destroyed several years ago. In my head he was this Lennie Small type led by the novel's villain and he just had a ton of pathos for me. He knew he was going to die and just wanted to go home. He wasn't this big, bad guy - more of a big child. The scene just had this dark fatalistic feeling to it that really had me in its grip.

The Tainted Cup is the first entry in what is currently a trilogy and I am looking forward to the digging into the second book. It will be interesting to find out if we learn anything more about the leviathans as they are not simply big, threatening creatures. Their corpses literally become part of the landscape in addition to being the source of some magics. They are more than a simple menace and I wonder if the leviathans as a type of ritual sacrifice will be further explored in the series. Plus characters note multiple times that they have increased in size over the years. Why is that?

Ana's past surely has more to it than we know. Perhaps an explanation for her peculiarities? Plus Din is young so he will surely mature as the series progresses.

An emergency and a new Weihnachtsbock

First the good news. Lakefront has a new winter seasonal - a Weihnachtsbock - called Krampus Bock.

I look forward to giving this new brew a taste. While I have no recollection what the brewery's previous winter seasonal was, I see that Snake Chaser, their Irish-style stout, has returned for St. Patrick's Day celebrations once again and that the emphasis on IPAs/fruity hops in their overall lineup has been toned down a bit.

And now onto the bad news. Schlenkerla is seemingly nowhere to be found. OK, OK, I've only looked at 2 stores but there wasn't any. The woman behind the counter at Steve's Liquor on University said that she is unable to find it any longer or that it's really hard to get or some such thing. D'oh!

At least Working Draft has a smoked beer of some ilk on tap much of the time. I missed their smoked Märzen, sadly, and also their smoked Dortmunder Export. However, their smoked wild rice lager is on tap now.

Also note that they brewed a Swedish lager in collaboration with Dovetail and the release party is Saturday.

Upside down

Willow in her tunnel

Never get out of the hovercraft

I went into Icebreaker (Jään vangit) thinking that I had another fine Nordic noir murder mystery, this time from Finland, on my hands. As it turned out, I had stumbled upon something very different. And not just because there are no saunas.

It is a rule of Nordic noir that the protagonist has as lousy family life. Here were meet Sanna who is divorced and whose son wants to spend Christmas with his father rather than with her. Cut to the Finnish Coast Guard HQ and we find Sanna and her partner Joonas being tasked with making contact with an icebreaker, the Aura, which has gone radio silent. I immediately took to this idea as it was eerily similar to the Call of Cthulhu scenario" Terror on the S.S. Champagne" which I ran at Gamehole Con this year. And so our heroes head out to the ship in their hovercraft. They find that it is locked in the Arctic ice a la Endurance and seemingly abandoned.

Sanna finds one crewmember tied to a control box thingy on deck. Joonas looks after the guy while our heroine continues her search. She eventually finds most of the rest of the crew, including the captain, trapped in a room below deck with the door having been welded shut. One final sailor is found on the bridge unconscious and bleeding. The remaining crew member, Eemil, has apparently gone mad and his whereabouts are unknown.

A woman, Jaana, is consoling her son Peter in his quarters and speaks in hushed tones about a darkness and how Peter has to fight it. Another couple of crew members, Toni and Martti, do not seem to be on good terms. And so we get an entire cast of sailors whose true motives are shrouded in mystery.

As everyone is recombobulating and plans to get the ship fully operational again are being formulated, it is discovered that one of the crew has taken off in the Coast Guard hovercraft. Oh, and Sanna goes outside and sees Eemil standing over a hole in the ice in which Joonas is struggling to stay afloat and crawl out of. Eemil flees but poor Joonas meets an ugly fate in the icy waters. Sanna is devastated as she and Joonas were romantically involved.

Early on we get introduced to the characters and are tantalized with lots of mysteries and unknowns. Why has Email gone mad? What happened last summer? What is wrong with Peter? When a massive snowstorm rolls in, the ship becomes a suitably cramped backdrop for the action. After enough talk about a darkness and countless scenes of the radio simply not working - they're only 40km from the mainland - it dawned on me that there's something supernatural at play and that this wasn't a more mundane entry in the Nordic noir murder mystery canon.

Suddenly the radio finally comes alive and its the guy who stole the hovercraft. He is calling for help saying that he is lost and can no longer feel his legs. The assembled folks on the bridge see a flare in the distance. Sanna, Toni, and Martti head out on a rescue mission. A fog descends unnaturally quickly and they find the hovercraft covered in frost, the engineer who stole it is found frozen solid, something impossible given the conditions and the short amount of time involved.

Ah, so we now had a strange fog that seems to mess with time and make people hallucinate/have visions.

Icebreaker proved to be perfect Halloween viewing because, in that area of the Arctic, it is the winter solstice during which the veil between this world and the next is opened. And so the show is part ghost story.

We learn that the events that caused Eemil to go mad are related to the disappearance of Sanna's father whom we see in many a flashback.

I appreciated the descent into madness of a couple of the characters as this added some Lovecraftian flavor. Eemil encountered something, a blackness, that disposed of his sanity and I liked how this darkness is never explained away. There are some genuinely spooky scenes such as when Sanna and the crew (minus the captain) attempt to hoof it over the ice to the mainland. At one point they are traversing perilously thin ice and then the fog descends and they find that they are essentially back where they started, not far from the Aura. They are forced to seek shelter at an abandoned home on a nearby island. You know something bad is going to happen when the fire goes out suddenly, a simple but effective way to show that the characters are in deep doo-doo and to take a symbol of hope away.

The show did a fine job of slowly letting me know that it wasn't just a mundane mystery, that things are not as they seem and that there are supernatural forces at work. The isolation, the mysterious fog, and the nebulous supernatural entity here gave the show some LOST vibes. But instead of being trapped in a tropical paradise, these characters are trapped on the Arctic pack ice. The scene in the derelict house brought back the scene in LOST where Ben brings Locke to that spooky cabin to meet Jacob.

One gripe I do have it is that the storytellers went to the Sanna-goes-off-alone well too many times. Once is tense and thrilling but it got silly after 3 or 4 times and just became an ineffective trope. Oh, my other big gripe is that people seemed to recover from what I took to be severe hypothermia in an hour or two. That and recovering from being bashed on the head with a pipe in a matter of seconds.

Nearly forgot. Something else that kind of took me out of the story was that, for the first half or so of it, Eemil, the guy who locked the crew in that room and welded it shut, was loose after the crew had been freed but no one seemed to care that he was below decks doing, well, stuff. No one seemed ill at ease that a madman with an axe was on the loose. It was business as usual. "I'll just head to the engine room, where Eemil worked, by myself to look at the fuses."

I must admit that Eemil reminded me of that water mouth guy from that Doctor Who story "The Waters of Mars".

Not the best screenshots to illustrate my reaction but you get the idea.

These freshly laundered clothes don't have any fur on them!

Halloween cookin'

I made ghoulash...spooky!

It turned out well. Mostly hot Hungarian paprika but with a dash of the Spanish stuff. Next batch will include some serranoes or jalapenos as I have a freezer full of them.

My pumpkin pie experimentation continues apace.

I feel I've gotten the sugar level down to where I want it. No granulated sugar and most of a can of condensed milk. It keeps the sweetness at a nice, mellow level and allows the pumpkin flavor to come through. Next I need to get the clove/allspice flavor at the right spot. I want a little less of those tastes and for a hint of the cardamom to come through. I just have to keep trying.

For Halloween I made quince marmelade. It has been years and years since I've done so.

Now I have to invite people over to eat it with me. A toast party? Maybe slather some on a round of brie and bake it to perfection?

A chip that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a Chicago dog

On the plus side, there was absolutely no ketchup flavor.

Aw, jeez. I'm tryin' to take a bath here!