This year’s Restaurant Week in Boston helped us uncover another hidden gem right in the heart of Brookline itself. Among the places we tried including 209 Boston and Cafe Fleuri, one place clearly stood out above the others. Opened just 2 years ago along Route 9 and serving traditional Northern Italian cuisine, La Morra not only offers a rustic and comfortable dining atmosphere, but features their own homemade pasta cooked to a perfect consistency. Their clambake-themed Restaurant Week menu included a hearty Tuscan fish chowder, a richly-flavored lobster risotto, semolina-dusted haddock, wood-grilled skirt steak, and some good old traditional tiramisu. Perhaps most memorable for me was a linguine dish with fresh herbs and tomatoes which sounded simple at first, but offered subtly tantalizing flavors and textures that words can barely describe. This week also happened to include Sammy and Howie’s one-year old birthdays. For those of you who have been wondering, both of our rats are doing extremely well. In celebration, I’ve created a new page with their pictures to share our moments together over the past 12 months.

It’s finally happened. Someone ACTUALLY died from playing too many computer games. Of course, this kind of news will not deter me from my gaming… just as another exploding Fung Wah bus will not stop me from riding it next weekend. Speaking of games, I really miss the old days in college sometimes, when my friends and I would stay up ’til 4 in the morning fragging HPB’s in CTF Quake or slaying acid beasts in the dungeons of Diablo. There’s nothing more satisfying than ganging up on some unwary newbies and blasting them back to the Stone Age (literally, in the case of AOE). So last week, I downloaded several new releases including a demo of F.E.A.R., as well as the best-selling GTA: San Andreas, which packs a healthy serving of drive-by’s and car-jacks. Despite the hilariously stereotypic dialogue, the constant swearing does get a bit overbearing after a while. Combined with the dreaded realization that I’M now the newbie, I’m afraid I’ll have to quit the online gaming arena soon and go back to playing Leisure Suit Larry or 7th Guest with Melody. =P

After a bit of optimization, connecting both an amplified antenna and a pair of old-fashioned bunny ears to an HD receiver, I’ve finally gotten all the free digital HDTV channels I want piped into my little idiot box at home. Sweeeet. Last night, I came across a special on video games from the most-unlikely of networks to air it: PBS. The show brought on a bit of nostalgia as it documented the evolution of gaming from the early days of Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt on the original NES, to the birth of FPS games like Doom and Quake, and to the emergence of MMORPG worlds more recently. Did you know that Pac-Man was originally named Puck-Man in Japan, but was changed when it got here to avoid people altering it to something more offensive? Btw, I’ve taken down my guestbook ’cause it was getting spammed too much.

It’s past midnight and I’ve just helped submit a manuscript to the highly-esteemed Science journal. This would’ve been a real exciting time except that it’s NOT my paper! Unfortunately, the first author of this particular paper is out sick, leaving it up to the 4th author (out of 11), me, to do the dirty work of putting the figures, statistics, and final text together. In fact, I’ve pretty much been working full time on this guy’s project for the past 3 weeks, which is hilarious given that I’ve got lab meeting to present tomorrow. Too bad I can’t present HIS data.

The plan was simple. On the eve of our friend’s final days as a bachelor, we would give him one last opportunity to savor the taste of good food, the scent of money, and the company of a few fine gentlemen. So it was our plan to meet Saturday morning to drive down to Mohegan Sun, devouring anything we could feast our eyes upon, rake in the dough, and perhaps indulge in a drunken revelry until the wee hours of the night. Of course, things never quite turn out the way we expected. After stopping for some Memphis dry-rub for lunch, another stop to put some air into my tires, and yet another hour to locate the last guy after his call night at the hospital, we didn’t end up leaving the city until almost 3pm. Even worse, when we finally got there, we realized that none of us actually knew how to gamble. We tried putting our six brains together, watched the Craps table for about 10 minutes, and left as clueless as before. We then spent much of the time walking around, nervously clutching our measly stipend savings as we tried to find a game we could actually understand. It didn’t help that the lowest minimum bet at most tables turned out to be $10, which made for a very stressful 10 minutes at the Blackjack table. We finally took what little money we had left to satisfy our stomachs buffet style, before driving back to Boston feeling somewhat defeated. Fortunately, refusing to succumb to our poor fortune, we took a detour to the last resort of single-men: the nudy bar. Centerfolds of Boston is deemed the classiest strip joint in the city, which isn’t saying much considering there’re only two in total. While the place was small and somewhat run-down, the performers were surprisingly attractive. As a final treat, we put our wallets together to buy our guest of honor one final lap dance before the place closed. Despite everything, the weekend in retrospect felt well-executed, accomplishing what we had set out to do… except maybe replacing “money” with “ladies”.

Dark has been the cloud that hung over the month of July. Between the constant problems at work and at home, I’d hate to imagine what would’ve become of me if not for the occasional bits that managed to bring a smile back to my face. It was good seeing some old faces earlier in the month, when I took a quick trip back home to Brooklyn to attend an old friend’s wedding. It was my first experience at a Russian-Jewish wedding, complete with caviar and other exotic foods, speeches from relatives in broken English, and festive live Latin music and dancing. We also revisited Shakespeare on the Commons the following weekend with my new roommate from Germany to see the highly-anticipated performance of Hamlet. But with the stark, modern production design and some grossly-exaggerated overacting, we found the whole thing rather difficult to swallow. Fortunately, Melody’s week-long vacation last week took me on a most delicious culinary journey at home to carry me through the brutal month. Though we wished we could’ve taken a trip somewhere, we ultimately settled for a short getaway on Saturday at Walden Pond. Our quiet afternoon there helped me recenter my thoughts, amidst the fresh scent of pine trees, sounds of falling leaves, and memories of Trascendentalist legends.