Dude - I love to eat. My current obsession is Thai Orchid on Jefferson Street in Roanoke. I've been eating there at least three times a week lately. Today I went by and grabbed an order of sweet basil fried rice with tofu. The flavors contained therein nearly drove me to insanity. Fresh basil, sauteed tofu, rice and some kind of sauce that I couldn't even describe. Crazy delicious. My previous favorite was yellow curry with tofu, but I kind of wore that one out with repeated devourings.

Anyway, I say all this because I found a couple of food-related websites that intrigued the hell out of me. The first one is Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality. This one made me laugh uncontrollably and barf at the same time. This is a remarkable feat for one website alone to accomplish, and so - I salute it. As a sample of what to expect, take a gander at the following:


McDonald's Sausage Breakfast Burrito as advertised, and


the same breakfast burrito as delivered at your local McD's. Absolutely disgusting.

Another website that was pointed out to me by fellow frankblack.net Forum members was The Great Taco Hunt. The blog features a man known only as Bandini, who is an obsessed taco lover committed to finding taquerias nationwide that cater to connoisseurs such as himself. I identify with this man because I, too, am a taco lover (albeit a vegetarian one), and I appreciate his obsession with a particular food. I am contemplating starting my own bean burrito search. The Taco Bell version is starting to lose its hold on me.

I have to go now. I'm kinda hungry.

Books have taken center stage recently, so I've moved my current reading list up to the top in my ever-present right hand column. I just finished Haruki Murakami's After Dark. Didn't like it as much as Kafka on the Shore or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but it was enough to give me my Murakami fix.

And would you believe that until last week I had never read Orwell's 1984? And I taught high school English. Whatever. 1984 now goes down in history as one of my all time favorites right next to Catcher in the Rye, Money, and High Fidelity.

I'm also on an insane comic book kick. I'm at the comic store twice a week now. Currently enthralled with Irredeemable Ant-Man, but I'm also reading DMZ, The Walking Dead and Y: The Last Man. Y? Because I am el supremo nerdo.

I think I've also set a record for most links in one post.