Frosting Delivery Devices: Baltimore’s Berger Cookies

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I’m something of a sucker for local foods—not sprouts grown on a farm just down the road or chickens raised in someone’s backyard a block from where I live, but local specialties that never quite migrate from their home regions, like D.C. half-smokes or Pittsburgh’s Primanti Bros. sandwiches: the type of food that locals dream about when they leave home, the taste they just can’t shake and just can’t find anywhere else.

So when the Washington Post ran a feature article on a type of cookie native to the Baltimore region, my taste sensors went on high alert. Andrew Reiner’s article (“Baltimore’s storied Berger cookies come to Washington,” April 19, 2012) looks at the famed (in Baltimore, anyway) Berger cookie, made by one and only one bakery, Bergers.

Thanks to a dear co-worker who lives in Baltimore, I was able to get a pound of Berger cookies straight from their Lexington Market outpost.

Berger Cookies

The samples I got from Lexington Market appear to be rather more refined than the cookies Berger sells through grocery stores, with delicate curls rather than heaping glops of fudge frosting, but the effect is the same: lots of sugary frosting atop a nondescript cookie.

The cookie itself is somewhat crumbly, akin to a shortbread but without much flavor at all. It plays the role of vanilla ice cream in an overloaded sundae—just there to hold it all together and cleanse the palate for the next sugar-sweet explosion. Without the slightly greasy cookie to cut through the frosting, the fudge flavor is overwhelming; with the cookie, the balance feels closer to right. Eating that much fudge is a bit decadent, but the cookie brings it back to the realm of dessert rather than pure abandon.

And as for the proper eating technique? Reiner suggests eating them the way natives do:

The most popular way to eat Berger cookies in Baltimore is from the freezer. There’s just something so deeply gratifying—empowering even—about experiencing the fudge creme frosting in this altered state. It’s enough to enjoy a Berger at room temperature, but to have the option of frozen? Well, that’s a degree of luxury that aristocrats understand.

While I can’t imagine eating these often—even a half-cookie sates the brain’s chocolate pleasure center—I’m delighted to have had a chance to try these big bites of charm from Baltimore. Now I just need to pop the remainder of my initial pound into the freezer…

Is There a Penalty Box in the TARDIS?: Doctor Who Hockey Jerseys

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I’m always so very pleased when my keenest interests collide, and never more so than when they happen to be Doctor Who and hockey. Behold, then, the mind-blowing awesomeness that is the Doctor Who Hockey Jersey:

TARDIS Hockey Jersey from davesgeekyhockey.com via a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License

I really don’t know what to say, other than to express my disappointment that the first run has already been spoken for. A second version is apparently on tap for May, so I’ll have to keep my eye on Dave’s Geeky Hockey for that announcement. But which Doctor? I’m certainly a Tom Baker partisan, but my recent experiences with William Hartnell have put me in a First Doctor frame of mind.

(Image courtesy of davesgeekyhockey.com via a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License)

(via Geekadelphia)

Doctor Who Project: The Crusade

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You arrived?

Yes, in a box.

From the utterly fantastical, web-filled world of Vortis, our intrepid travellers careen back to Earth’s middle ages, landing just outside of Jaffa, where they encounter Crusaders doing battle with Saracens. And you know what? They don’t find that strange one bit. It’s taken them some fourteen stories, but in “The Crusade” (Story Production Code P), our jaded time travellers no longer display amazement at what they discover outside the TARDIS doors. If it’s Tuesday, it must be the Levant, ho hum.

Even when they meet King Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, there’s no real sense of wonder. Ian only wants to persuade Richard, one of the most mythologized of British kings, to help him rescue Barbara (who was this story’s kidnap victim and court intrigue player, just as she was in our last historical, “The Romans“), expecting this favor as payment for the return of the king’s shiny gold belt.

Indeed, the parallels between “The Crusade” and “The Romans” are striking—Barbara is separated from the group and used as a pawn in various court intrigues (Saladin’s court, in this case); Ian spends the entire story trying to rescue her and engaging in sword fights; and the Doctor and Vicki pal around with historical personages, dress in period clothing, talk about changing history, and have a few laughs while narrowly escaping at the end.

Given these similarities, why, then does “The Crusade” rank as perhaps the finest historical story of all of Doctor Who‘s run? Simply put, the quality of the writing and the acting. David Whitaker’s script provides strong enough characterizations of the story’s historical figures that one does not balk at sequences without the Doctor or the companions. The writing itself flows gracefully—aside from some awkward sequences with Arab characters speaking broken English—resisting even William Hartnell’s legendary efforts at mangling lines.

But then, the story would also work without the Doctor and his companions. For all of Barbara’s escaping and running and being re-captured by the evil El Akir, the story centers on Richard’s attempts to end the war with Saladin; the strongest moments of the story revolve around Richard and his sister Joanna’s arguments over her proposed marriage to Saladin’s brother. It’s as though our time travellers were dropped into a BBC period drama and wander around at the margins of the story. Very little time is given to “sightseeing” and explanations of the strange world in which they’ve arrived. Too, the story remains essentially serious, with only a minor humorous aside featuring stolen court clothing, a tone that helps reinforce the laconic response of the travellers to meeting such significant historical figures.

So what makes “The Crusade” a Doctor Who story other than the presence of the TARDIS?

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Kickstarting the Apocalypse: Wasteland 2 in Development

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These days, computer games that perform even tolerably well in the marketplace are all but guaranteed a sequel. Indeed, my current pile of Xbox 360 games is all sequels: Mass Effect 3, Gears 3, NHL 12, Fallout: New Vegas, Forza 4, and so forth.

But in the heady days of actual floppy discs, when loading a game on your trusty Commodore 64 took five minutes and Electronic Arts was amazingly cool, sequels were few and far between. So it comes as a welcome surprise that one of the finest games of the late 1980s, Wasteland, stands poised to make a return. If you ever wondered where the Fallout series came from, look no further.

Combat in the Wasteland

Brian Fargo, one of the original creators of Wasteland, is spearheading development of Wasteland 2, to be funded as a Kickstarter campaign. I spent hours and hours with the original post-apocalyptic RPG, both on floppy and later via the magic of emulators (when I finally finished the damn thing), and I call upon all true fans of the genre to pony up some cash and fund this game!

Doctor Who Project: The Web Planet

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Whatever power has got hold of the TARDIS has taken your pen! Of course, ha ha! Now then, there’s something for us to solve!

No sooner do our temporal travellers extricate themselves from a web of Roman palace intrigues then they find themselves in a literal web, with the TARDIS trapped by an unknown force on the planet Vortis, better known as “The Web Planet” (Story Production Code N).

TARDIS on Vortis

From the start, this story attempts to break new ground by creating an entirely alien world, both physically and narratively, with uneven results. One can see obvious seam lines in the background flats, and in an effort to provide a sense of space, the camera occasionally pans a bit too high, revealing the two-dimensionality of the background. Plus a man in an ant costume (a Zarbi) runs into a camera.

Zarbi go bonk

There’s plenty of running through corridors, multiple scene changes in each episode (since, of course, Ian gets separated from the Doctor and Vicki, and the three of them are separated from Barbara, all by the third episode), and often the scenery is jostled by actors. But given the limitations of studio shooting—not just spatial but temporal and financial as well— one can only applaud their willingness to go for it. In particular, the sound work, with an ominous chirping whenever the Zarbi appeared, helped strongly to carry off the ambitions of the visual effects team.

Speaking of the second episode of the story, “The Zarbi,” producer Verity Lambert noted:

This was an extremely difficult episode to do technically, in that there had to be a tremendous amount of scenery in the studio, and apart from the breaks necessary because of scene changes, there was the added problem that we had not used the Zarbi, except briefly in episode one, and it was impossible to tell until we got into the studio the kind of difficulties we would run into with dressing them and moving them from one scene to another.

(Quoted in Howe-Stammers-Walker, Doctor Who: The Handbook: The First Doctor)

They were, essentially, making it up as they went along in terms of putting an ambitious science fiction show on air in a tight time frame and an even tighter budget. So we can rightly forgive them any wires we see pulling the butterfly-like Menoptra through the air or the odd extra limbs on the pillbug-like Optera.

But can we forgive them for the plot?

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