Miscellaneous

If you haven't put the HBO series John Adams in your queue on Netflix, go do it now! It's a remarkable mini series based on the book by David McCullough featuring Paul Giamatti as John Adams. As is usually the case with Giamatti, it doesn't take long for you to see that he has truly transformed himself into the character he is portraying. He's not himself--he's John Adams and it's a pleasure to watch. All of the other actors are equally up to the task of portraying some of our most important figures. Laura Linney is excellent as Abigail Adams and the story is as much about her as it is about John Adams. I find most films about the Revolutionary War to be trite and boring. They tend to feel like a Saturday morning special on ABC when I was a kid, but this is filled with brilliant writing and even more brilliant acting and directing. Amazing, and for the most part is suitable for kids 12 and over. There are some scenes of bloody violence, but they are few and in the first episode there is a graphic scene in which a British port officer is fully stripped of his clothes and tarred and feathered. The nudity makes it more believable, but for those with kids, you should know it's there.

On another note, I pulled out my Guinness Irish Cream Cake again this morning. Unfortunately, part of it stuck to the pan. One of the unforeseen results of all of that baking madness last year turns out to be a lot of enjoyment in pulling out a recipe that I created back then, smelling the smells of the ingredients again, sampling the batter and smelling the cake as it bakes. It brings back memories of insane dogged obsessiveness last year and I enjoyed making this today quite a bit.

I'm going to reenter my same recipes for the bundt competition again, as well as adding two more this summer that have been floating through my head. I'll probably try to tweak the old recipes slightly, but I'm not going to obsess over them. And the new recipes I think will come together quite quickly since I did all of that mad scientist stuff last year.