Not Feeling Funny

I've been the most slacker blogger ever. I may even have lost my readership (aka Jeff and Daisy). This whole work thing is really cutting into my computer time. The fact that I am going blind is also a factor. But here I present to you, as promised, a half-hearted review of Martinique Bistro.

We went for an early dinner on my birthday last Sunday. We thought we might finally knock Galatoire's off our list of major restaurants we must experience before we leave New Orleans but I changed my mind at the last minute. It was my birthday and all I really wanted to do was relax in a low key place with some champagne and mussels. I'm not as hard to please as some people (um, Jeff) would have you believe. But I did want to eat in a courtyard.

The mussels and champagne were heaven on earth. We really should have stopped there. As usual, the entrees didn't live up to the appetizers. I'm pretty sure I had some sort of duck. I am a woman, so the fact that I don't rememeber in vivid detail what I had tells you all you need to know. I could give you a colorful (and accurate) description of the corned beef and cabbage I had in the cafeteria last week. Or the homemade tomato sauce my adopted Italian grandmother made ten years ago. But all I can remember is that I think I had some sort of duck and I think it was reasonably tender.

I also ordered a wonderful dessert of molten chocolate cake with homemade cappuccino ice cream. Although the cake was less than molten (actually, it was closer to lukewarm) the dessert was simple and wonderful. My only real complaint is that the dessert was actually too small. I'm quite sure that is the first time I have ever felt that any restaurant dessert was too small, but Martinique Bistro's skimpy portion left me wanting more. Oh, and our waiter was boring and overly serious. Blah, blah, blah.

Please don't hold the above review against me. Really, my enthusiasm, dare I say passion, for food and dining is rivalled by few. Like I said, this whole working thing is taking a lot out of me. Also, I have been told that one of my job functions is to be "a kind of cheerleader." (I work in human resources). Maybe I'm trying to counterbalance the forced cheeriness I dispense all day with this drab writing. Or maybe that job is killing my soul. This week my boss told me I need to use more exclamation points in my writing. How could one exclamation point in a 100-word article ever not be more than enough? Either way, I should probably warn you that my creative powers are hiding somewhere dark, curled up in the fetal position. They took my proofreading and grammatical abilities with them. I'm not sure they're coming back after a week like this.

Local Newspaper Sucks

The New Orleans Times-Picayune has an interesting way of presenting the news. Check out the news headline from the New York Times (and pretty much every other actual newspapaper):

Supreme Court Bars Death Penalty for Juvenile Killers

and then the one from the Times-Pic:

Four young Louisiana murderers spared the death penalty

Actually, the one from the Times-Pic isn't really even the headline - it's half the story. Literally - there is only one other sentence in the article. This is certainly a different way of framing the same information.