Onderzeeboots by the Zee

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The typical tourist sights in the Netherlands include tulips, windmills, canals, and various and sundry museums, all quite exceptional. The slightly less typical sights include two submarines which might well have played cat and mouse with each other during the Cold War: B-80, a Soviet Zulu-class submarine, and Tonijn, a Dutch Potvis-class submarine.

The Zulu submarine sits in Amsterdam’s harbor, in NDSM-werf, where it served as a stationary “party boat” that could be rented for events. To facilitate such soirées in a submarine’s exceedingly cramped conditions required the gutting of the hull, so now it’s just a shell. Given the copious graffiti on its sail and the general lack of upkeep, it seems deserted at this point.

GVB, Amsterdam’s public transit company, runs a free ferry (.pdf) to NDSM-werf from behind the main train station, and while you can’t access the submarine, there are several good vantage points to shoot pictures from.

Zulu Class Submarine in Amsterdam Harbor

Perhaps an ignominious reincarnation for such a machine, but it’s likely the other fate would have been the scrapper’s yard, and it’s quite an interesting conversation piece in an already picturesque city.

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Dutch Treats: Broodje Pom in Amsterdam

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Travel engages all five senses, and my faithful traveling companion would probably suggest that I focus on taste more than any of the other four when we’re on the road. So, for our recent trip to Amsterdam, I was determined to find some unique dishes to complement the intense experience of a van Gogh seen in person and the delightful sound of the high plinks of bicycle bells in concert with the lower plonks of trams on their street tracks.

Indonesian places came highly recommended, and we did visit one (mentioned at the end of this post), but my main culinary goal for the trip was a broodje pom, a sandwich filled with a Surinamese chicken-and-tuber casserole called pom. And Tokoman, on Waterlooplein, holds grail status online as the place to visit for this sandwich. So we went!

Tokoman, Amsterdam

The first time we tried to eat there, this website-less shop was closed (no Sunday hours), but the second trip, on an incredibly breezy day (small glass vases went flying from vendors’ shelves when we roved around the nearby Waterlooplein Flea Market) proved more bountiful. For €3.30, we got a nice sized sandwich (say ten inches long) on a fresh baguette, filled with the orangish-red casserole and topped with a cabbage relish and peppers.

Broodje Pom from Tokoman, Amsterdam

Or, at least we asked for the peppers. Everything I had read suggested the peppers would impart some heat, but there was no heat at all in this sandwich. I wonder if the person behind the counter, detecting my foreignness, held back the good stuff for fear that I couldn’t handle it.

Still, the broodje pom had a nice sweet and sour balance, and the grated tubers blended well with the chunks of soft chicken. The tubers, while essentially the filler, played a nice textural role, a tender counterpoint to the chicken. Overall, the flavor was reminiscent of a barbecue sandwich that substituted any vinegar tang for a sweeter, more citric bite. A multi-napkin sandwich for sure.

The broodje pom wasn’t the knockout sandwich of my dreams, but I’m glad we tracked down Tokoman (Waterlooplein 327) to give it a try. It’s not every day you sample Surinamese cuisine, and the broodje pom we shared kept us going for another few hours of walking in one of Europe’s most walkable cities.

Oh, and we grabbed Indonesian take-out in Nieuwmarkt, near our hotel, at Toko Joyce. A small, take-out only operation, they offered a lunch box with 100 grams each of a meat dish and a vegetable dish over rice or noodles for about €6.00 or so. Perhaps it wasn’t a full-blown rijstaffel, but it hit the spot, gave us a sample of Indonesian fare, and got us on our way for more sightseeing and random canal crossings.

Doctor Who Project: The Dalek Invasion of Earth

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What’s worse? The alligators down here or the Daleks up there?

At last, they return! The Daleks appear once more after their resounding first season success in “The Mutants,” invading Earth in Terry Nation’s “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” (Story Production Code K). This time, the Daleks want nothing more than to, um, empty out the core of the planet and replace it with an engine of some sort.

But whatever! It’s the Daleks! And they’re in London!

This story, which Howe and Walker claim “surely ranks as one of the series’ all-time greats” in their Doctor Who: The Television Companion, starts in familiar enough style, which is to say that our travellers leave the TARDIS, become separated from it because of Susan—this time she brings an entire bridge down upon it—and then become separated from each other. Even Ian comments upon the party’s tendency to split up: upon realizing Barbara and Susan are missing from the landing site, he exclaims, “Why, why do they do it?”

Still, the separation works to good effect in this six-part story, as Susan and Barbara are spirited away by the human resistance to the Daleks and Ian and the Doctor are captured by the Robomen, the human semi-cyborgs enslaved as footsoldiers by the Daleks, who are few in number on Earth. The development of the resistance figures adds depth to the story, as thus far in the series, our sympathies have been almost entirely on our travellers finding their way back to the TARDIS. Very few secondary characters have been roundly developed in the series so far, and as will become obvious, the development of one resistance figure in particular takes on real significance.

The capture of the Doctor and Ian gives good reason to explore the Dalek saucers and to see lots of Daleks rolling around. There’s probably a good ten minutes of scenes showing nothing but Daleks moving back and forth in this story. The audience wants what the audience wants.

That said, Terry Nation wisely holds off on revealing the Daleks until the very end of the first episode, where one rises ominously from the murky Thames…

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My First Friday Night Magic

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I’m a wargamer from way back, a good twenty-five years at this point. Never dabbled much in minis, play a ton of Euros, and own a nice collection of role playing game materials. I consider myself broad-minded in my gaming interests. But collectible card games? No, thank you.

The perceived wisdom amongst the chit-and-paper-map crowd is that CCGs are money sinks with constantly changing rules and a mostly adolescent (or adolescent-acting) audience. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who got sucked into a CCG and abandoned the true faith, ranting instead about mana screws and the superiority of a red/black control deck.

Still, the grandfather of all CCGs, Magic: The Gathering, has been around for almost twenty years now, and my experiences with some of the computerized versions (notably Duels of the Planeswalkers on the 360) revealed a significant depth of play. The customizable (read: collectible) nature of the card decks, the millions of potential randomized interactions with another customized deck, and the elegant basic rules intrigued me. Luck plays a role, but it’s mitigated by strategy. There’s some good gaming to be had here.

Oh, yeah. A Mythic Rare!

So, having some free time on a recent Friday, I took the plunge and visited my new Fine Local Game Store on Capitol Hill here in Washington, DC, Labyrinth, and participated in their Sealed Deck Friday Night Magic tournament. The Sealed Deck aspect was key—you buy the booster packs you play with on the spot, a twenty dollar outlay, and use those and those alone the whole night. No need to spend hundreds on a competitive deck with the new flavor of the week card. The event, a “sanctioned” tournament in Wizards of the Coasts’ international tournament structure, was well run, and while there were quite a few seriously competitive players showing off their binders with thousands of cards, everyone seemed pleased to interact with the more casual attendees. I got in four hours of play, met some decent people, and thoroughly enjoyed myself for a minimal expenditure. And now I’ve got some cards to build a deck with if I want to keep playing.

I can easily see how the game becomes addictive. There’s a thrill in opening a sealed booster pack and hoping for a rare card, and every new card adds to the potentials for your deck. Even the constantly changing cards (many of which become ineligible for tournament-level play after a year or so) make sense from a play standpoint—the speed with which you can play matches (fifteen minutes each) can make the extant cards seem stale after months of gaming with them. Most of the people I met didn’t play other games, so keeping their gaming experience fresh is both profitable for Wizards and enjoyable for the consumer.

So, while I may not be a convert to the Church of Magic, I think I’ll attend Friday Night Magic at Labyrinth when I can if they’re running Sealed formats. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to inventory my cards and see about buying some sleeves…

Vinegar Victorious! Stamey’s Barbecue in Greensboro, NC

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There are certain life rules one should always follow: don’t get involved in a land war in Asia; don’t try to conquer Moscow in the winter; don’t argue with anyone with a bumper sticker on his or her car; don’t jaywalk in front of a cop; and don’t, under any circumstances, attempt to discuss North Carolina barbecue. So, consider this mini-review of Stamey’s Barbecue in Greensboro, North Carolina, a meditation rather than a definitive statement.

Because I’m not about to claim that Stamey’s Lexington-style barbecue is superior to Eastern Carolina-style barbecue (or the reverse), nor attempt to rank Stamey’s in the pantheon of North Carolina barbecue. Not going there. All I know is that on a recent trip to Greensboro, I had the opportunity to sample some of Stamey’s chopped pork barbecue from their original High Point Road location and came away impressed.

Chopped Pork Barbecue from Stamey's Barbecue

Vinegar stars here, suffused throughout the tender (oh, so tender) pork. There’s a touch of chili and a sweetish binding agent, but it’s a vinegar sauce without question. The vinegar flavor is strong but not overwhelming, allowing the pork to have its own flavor. No need to drench the meat in sauce such that you can’t tell what you’re eating. I ate it hot, I ate it warm, and I ate it cold the next morning, and I was happy each time.

The slaw was the true revelation for me, though. I’m very finicky about slaw, and Stamey’s vinegar-based slaw, hit with a touch of the barbecue sauce to cut the acidity, ranks amongst the finest I’ve had. The super finely chopped cabbage provides a nice texture, and as it’s just slightly more acidic than the barbecue, the slaw provides a nice counterbalance.

I’m probably not well equipped to discuss the hushpuppies, as the extent of my prior experience with these fried cornmeal delicacies comes from childhood trips to Long John Silver’s, but if an object can be both light and agreeably dense at the same time, Stamey’s puppies accomplish the task. The hushpuppies had a nice golden crust, holding a bit of oil that brought out the taste of the slightly moist cornmeal interior. I ate more than my share of them.

I also had a chance to sample Stamey’s Brunswick stew but came away underwhelmed. The ingredients were certainly fresh, but I failed to see the appeal of the thin, blandly seasoned dish, especially when more chopped pork awaited.

If only I had thought to buy a Cheerwine to go with my $6 meal. Next time…

Doctor Who Project: Planet of Giants

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Oh, please don’t keep talking on the twentieth century level. I’m talking about time travel!

Having escaped the French Revolution with his head (if not his fancy hat), the Doctor tries yet again to get Barbara and Ian back to the twentieth century. Given that they’re so close, just a few hundred years off, he attempts to “sidestep” into the 1960s with a simple frequency change on the TARDIS controls. And it works! They’re in England even. Of course, they’re about an inch high when they leave the ship, starting the second season of Doctor Who on the “Planet of Giants” (Story Production Code J), but hey, it’s a start.

Because the TARDIS door opens mysteriously upon materialization—a time Susan declares “the most dangerous moment” in the operation of the TARDIS—the “space pressure” exerted upon the TARDIS at this point shrinks the Doctor and his three companions, a fact they finally realize when they confront giant ants and earthworms and matchboxes.

Doctor Who 009 (1964) Hartnell-Planet Of Giants2 by Père Ubu via a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

The travellers split up upon arrival, with Barbara and the Doctor going one way and Ian and Susan the other. This particular grouping allows both Susan and the Doctor independently to come to the realization that they have landed on Earth in a shrunken form.

Indeed, this story presents Susan as a canny and calm time traveller, piecing together clues about their predicament, showing knowledge of TARDIS operations, clambering up corroded drain pipes, striking oversized matches, and even reminiscing with her grandfather about that time they suffered through a World War I zeppelin air raid together.

Until, of course, she screams and screams when she sees the dead giant ant and the not-dead giant cat. In her defense, it is a very giant cat.

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