UngsungBlog: A (Fantasy) Sports Blog

Ugh, I ate some really horrible Mexican food for dinner tonight, and now I feel really sick.

(Tangent: Tums Sugar Free is NAS-TY! I’d almost rather have the aches than have to chew and swallow these things. Maybe if I chased them down with some juice or milk next time…)

- After reading Krunk’s blog last week on Spanakopita, I decided to try to make the dish myself, using the recipe found on Wikipedia.

I actually never got around to cooking it until Thursday night :P.

I mixed together all of the ingredients, save the eggs, and sampled the spinach mix. O M F G. I could have eaten the filling by itself! I had to restrain myself from snacking on the filling as I layered two glass baking dishes with the phyllo dough.

(Tip: If you’re using phyllo dough, either get someone to help you, to speed up the process, or lay a wet cheesecloth on top of the unused portion of your dough. Otherwise, you’ll end up with hardened, tough-to-peel pieces of phyllo at the end of the preparation. Fortunately for me, only the last couple of pieces got stuck together.)

An hour of baking later, and my spanakopita dish was done! One bite into the dish, and I could have died happy on the spot :P. I think I overdid it on the fresh dill and the parsley, and I might have used too much salt, but I didn’t care. The phyllo dough was perfectly flaky, and the Mediterranean-seasoned feta cheese–Trader Joe’s didn’t have any regular feta cheese, so I went with what they had–was awesome.

I have pics (just for you, Hank), but I’m too lazy/sick to grab them off my camera at the moment. Trust me when I say that the pics I had won’t do the dish justice. I’ve got so much left over, in fact, that I could probably freeze a whole baking dish’s worth.

EDIT: Here’s a side pic of one of the slices (never mind the hideousness of the way the crust looks; this batch was from the latter sheets of phyllo dough, where they became impossibly difficult to work with. Besides, taste matters to me far more than presentation!)

Next time, I’m going to have to try wrapping them individually, like the way Krunk bought them.

- Presenting UBMe #4, aka “A CompUSA Dilemma.” Readers may want to read about my history with CompUSA before offering an opinion on today’s UBMe topic.

A week ago, you ordered a refurbished Targus Universal laptop charger from CompUSA (it was quite cheap). At about 8:30pm Thursday night, you were surprised by a knock on your door; it was Fedex with the charger!

(I don’t recall ever getting a delivery THAT late!)

You open up the box, plug in the charger, and was dismayed when you realized that the charger wasn’t compatible with your Dell laptop, despite the item description saying that it was compatible with “most” Dell laptops. You found the part you needed to get the charger to work with your laptop directly from Targus, making your cheap laptop charger a slightly more expensive, but still cheaper-than-OEM charger.

Fast forward to today…you opened your front door this morning, to find a package left in front of it. Puzzled, you picked it up, and noticed that it was from CompUSA. Certain that you didn’t order anything else from CompUSA, you noticed a sticker on the side of the box: it was another laptop charger!

You knew immediately that the right thing to do was to call CompUSA and let them know that you received a second item, even though you only ordered one. That’s when you recalled all the crap you’ve gone through with CompUSA; they’re not called “CrapUSA,” “CompUSSR,” “CrapUSSR,” et al., for nothing, right?

UBMe! Do you do the right thing and get in touch with CompUSA, telling them of their mistake? Hey, maybe they’ll tell you to keep the item anyway! Or, do you say “screw CompUSA” and keep the item, justifying your decision by the fact that the item was only ~$20?

I haven’t yet decided what my decision is going to be.

- Apologies for not having a thorough review of last week’s Office episode. I loved Michael’s version of the Dunder-Mifflin commercial, though, much more than the one Dunder Mifflin went ahead and used! Easily the best line of the episode was this insight into Michael’s creativity (quote borrowed from TV.com):

Michael: (To camera) Alright, let me ask you this: how many of you think this is creative? When I was five, I imagined there was such a thing as a unicorn. And this is before I had even heard of one, or seen one. I just drew a picture of a horse that could fly over rainbows, and a huge spike on his head. I was five… FIVE years old. Couldn’t even talk yet.

LOL!

As for last Thursday’s episode, I’m still not 100% sure what I think about this episode. Sure, there were tons of funny moments (the scene where Jim and Dwight wheel the copier down the hallway, causing hilarity to ensue, was so over-the-top ridiculous that it was funny), but I thought the episode was quite disjointed; it was literally all over the place. It appeared like the episode was going out of its way to crack as many jokes as possible, without giving us viewers any actual substance.

Mike’s “kidnapping” of Jim, for instance, was clearly a case of the writers trying to get laughs (and it only served to piss me off). The same goes with Dwight tossing Jim’s phone out of the window. At that point, any normal person would have quit his job on the spot, right? I was also not amused to hear of Michael and Dwight’s plans for the Utica office. Was it just me, or were those Molotov cocktails? Seriously, Michael and Dwight could be idiotically funny without committing near-crimes, right (see my review on “Launch Party”)? We need more of the pathetic, idiotic Michael that we could sympathize with, and less of the over the top, outrageous, and–dare I say–criminal Michael that we saw in this episode. I was again ready to change the channel at this point, and I don’t remember ever saying that TWICE in the same season of The Office, much less twice in six episodes.

As far as Jim and Pam are concerned, it’s pretty clear that their relationship is going to hit a rocky patch, and I’m interested to see how the writers are going to proceed. The seeds of doubt were firmly planted in last week’s episode; did you notice how uncomfortable Jim was when he showed Pam “Philly Jim?” Also, was it just me, or was Pam not thrilled with Jim interrupting her work on the commercial? Are we closing in on an imminent meltdown? Furthermore, I thought it was very interesting that the end-of-episode skit, which generally offers nothing of substance to the episode, showed Jim clearly unable to fit in with “The Finer Things Club.” And how much Pam find out about what happened in Utica? Maybe she was told about Jim and Karen’s conversation? As for Karen, I thought she played her role perfectly in this episode. I really hated the “if you wanted to see me, you could have just called” line, but you would have expected Karen to be pissed about seeing Jim again.

All in all, the second-half of the episode was great for the quick laughs, but I wasn’t too impressed with the episode as a whole.

My favorite moments:

• Karen: (on becoming Utica’s Regional Manager) “Turns out it’s a pretty easy gig when your boss isn’t an idiot and your boyfriend’s not in love with somebody else.”
• Oscar: “Besides the having sex with men, I would say ‘The Finer Things Club’ is the gayest thing about me.”
• Utica’s best salesman (to Michael): “Aren’t you the guy that hit the woman with your car?” (Did anyone catch Pam’s laugh, Michael’s whispering of “Get out!,” and the fact that Meredith was walking past them in the background?)
• Michael (to Toby): “Oh. My. God. That’s why people are leaving! I have no words…” (poor Toby!)
• Dwight: “I think I cut my penis on the lid.” (Ewwwww…)
• Kevin and Phyllis’ interrupting of “The Finer Things Club” (that was LMFAOPMP funny, I must admit). I wonder how many takes it took to complete that scene.
• Dwight: “I have to do something to his eyes,” followed by “The eyes are the groin of the head.”
• Michael: “Jim…if this is it for me, promise me something. Host the Dundees,” followed by “Do not tell Karen about the industrial copier.”

And I LOLed when Stanley revealed that Michael had “called his bluff.”

Until next time!

by Peter
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