I said here yesterday that I wanted to go down to Brea and see Frank Ferrante play Groucho later this month, and that an added bonus was a dinner at Riley's, a restaurant down there that used to be a Love's Barbecue and carried on with the same cuisine. Alas, a reader of this site — Brent Walker — informs me that Riley's is outta business. This is sad because it was the last remnant of the Love's chain. The Love's website claims there's still one in Jakarta, Indonesia but I'm dubious. I'm also not likely to be in that neighborhood so that one might as well be non-existent, insofar as I'm concerned.
This might not be the end of Love's, however. That website still sells the Love's sauce. In fact, I just received a case that I ordered...and they've redesigned the bottles, which is probably a sign of something. The site also claims they will soon begin selling the famous Love's beans over the Internet, which would be a glorious thing if they're as good that way as they were in the old Love's restaurants.
A couple of you are probably wondering, "What's the big deal about Love's?" No big deal, really. Just something that interests me, which is all a topic has to be to get onto this page. I liked their food and I like their sauce. You might, too. It's a sweet barbecue sauce and I usually don't like sweet sauces. In fact, during a period when all the Love's around me had closed and the sauce was not yet available over the 'net, I went out and sampled about a dozen brands of sweet barbecue sauces searching for a taste-alike. I was pleased by a grand total of none, I'm afraid. Since there are 720,000 barbecue sauces one can buy (conservative guess), I'm sure there are many that are good and maybe even a couple that are indistinguishable from Love's. But I sure didn't find them.
Don't bother suggesting your fave, at least as long as I have that case of Love's in my garage. As I mentioned in my piece on Baskin-Robbins, I'm not big on trying new things. Also, I should mention that I almost never put barbecue sauce — Love's or any other kind — on barbecued ribs, barbecued chicken or barbecued anything. I put it on foods that aren't barbecued to make them taste barbecued.
Anyway, my thanks to Brent Walker. He saved me from a week of getting my tastebuds in an uproar for something they're not going to get.
The other night, Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama in the Indiana primary by a measly 2%, right? Nope. The final tally has Clinton at 637,814 and Obama at 626,642 — a difference of 11,152 votes. That's 50.4% to 49.6%. A difference of .8%.
This apparently doesn't change the delegate allocation but it may change the way the results are spun. And it makes you wonder if the networks didn't call the race a bit early, even if they were ultimately proven correct. They sure didn't predict "less than 1%."
I'm not sure Barack Obama has won the nomination so much as Hillary Clinton has lost it. Reportedly, prominent folks in her campaign are dickering to write books about it, which is being taken as a sign that they know it's over. I may even buy one of those books as I have a certain curiosity to know how such savvy politicos as the Clintons managed to take an inevitable win and turn it into a "bad loser" loss.
A lot of folks seem to think she's staying in because she wants to be offered the vice-president slot. I don't know if she does and I don't know if Obama would be nuts to offer it. It might be a "unity ticket" but it also might be two strong forces uniting to keep working against one another. My guess is we won't find out.
This morning when I awoke, I had two e-mails from the staff at Turner Classic Movies telling me that they read this posting and that the schedule will be changed and those Laurel and Hardy films will air in the proper sequence.
That's one of the reasons that's such a good channel. These folks really care about what they broadcast. A couple of times when I've criticized their programming or the choice of prints, I've heard from TCM staffers about how awful they felt about screw-ups and how they were scurrying to re-air the material in question soon and do it right. I won't mention their names because I'm not sure they'd want me to...but they're obviously film buffs who are trying hard to do right by a wonderful film library.
By the way: On June 11, TCM will be reairing one of the notable clunkers in that wonderful film library. It's Don't Worry, We'll Think of a Title starring Morey Amsterdam, Rose Marie, and as many of Morey's friends as he could dragoon into one of the worst movies ever made. We wrote about it here and will remind you when we get closer to that date in case you want to make sure your TiVo doesn't record it. Thanks to Daniel Sachs for sending me the alert/warning.
Here's a treat. You've probably heard about the famous/infamous time on the TV show, This is Your Life, when they attempted to surprise and profile Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. The series would surprise some celebrity each week and tell their life story...and it was all done on live TV. When they did Stan and Ollie, all did not go quite as planned. It took far too long for Laurel and Hardy to get to the stage, which forced host Ralph Edward to ad-lib for long, painful moments. Then when The Boys finally arrived, Laurel was so sore about the whole thing that he barely spoke. (I wrote about it at greater length over on this page.)
Well, if you've never seen it, here's the first eight or so minutes. It ends abruptly and goes out of sync before that...but the sight of Ralph Edwards trying to fill time is worth the click. If you'd like to see the whole thing (which runs 25 minutes), you can download a pretty good copy in AVI format from this link.
May 10, 2008
