One of the best Saturdays I’ve had in a long time: great Seattle weather, a whole lot of my friends, football, steaks, and ice cream.

Roger Ebert gets his voice back. Here’s a description of what the company is doing, from that Esquire profile:

Ebert spent all those years on TV, and he also recorded four or five DVD commentaries in crystal-clear digital audio. The average English-speaking person will use about two thousand different words over the course of a given day. CereProc is mining Ebert’s TV tapes and DVD commentaries for those words, and the words it cannot find, it will piece together syllable by syllable. When CereProc finishes its work, Roger Ebert won’t sound exactly like Roger Ebert again, but he will sound more like him than Alex does.

Technology at its best.

Olympic athletes to rally in Seattle on Thursday. Apolo Ohno won’t be there since he’s appearing on the Tonight Show. I fondly remember logging onto Battle.net in 2002 for a few leisurely games of Starcraft. It was the day after Ohno got his gold after the South Korean that finished ahead of him was disqualified. And the Battle.net channel was filled with a lot of “HATE USA” “DIE OHNO” messages and users spamming URLs pointing to images of Ohno falling in the other final and grabbing a South Korean to make sure he fell too.

I like Apolo Ohno, but has there ever been an athlete appearing happier and being celebrated by the media for bronze medals? On the other side there’s Michael Phelps, who I’m not fond of as a person, but a single bronze a couple years ago would have been a failure. Michelle Kwan, AKA me and Dan’s Olympic hero, is essentially Dan Marino on ice because of her bronze and silver medals. In Olympic finals, Apolo Ohno has been the first to cross the finish line only once. But I guess that goes with the laid back nature that people (including me) enjoy.

Filipino Food: Off the Menu. Filipino chefs working at upscale restaurants in the L.A. area give their takes on why Filipino food hasn’t gone mainstream at all. Los Angeles Times:

“It’s probably one of the least understood cuisines,” says Rodelio Aglibot, a Filipino chef who was the executive chef at Koi before opening the now-shuttered Yi Cuisine, perhaps the only upscale Filipino restaurant Los Angeles has had. “Are we Pacific Islanders? Are we Asians? There isn’t, like, a defined identity,” says Aglibot, who is now chef-partner of Sunda in Chicago.

I eat at restaurants typically to eat food that tastes better than I can get at home. It’d be kind of cool to have that option with Filipino food. Though I admit I don’t get cravings for Filipino dishes the way I get cravings for, say, teriyaki or tacos.

I started reading The Hunger Games today. First book in a trilogy. So far it’s good. I imagine it’s on the Teen Novels shelves, but and after finishing Green Mars I’m really really happy to have an easier read. I saw its sequel on some top 2009 ten fiction list in Time Magazine, and I was sold on the short blurb—post-apocalyptic, children, arena were key words. Here are a few lines straight from The Hunger Games that could act as an extended blurb:

Just as the town clock strikes two, the mayor steps up to the podium and begins to read. It’s the same story every year. He tells of the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens. Then came the Dark Days, the uprising of the districts against the Capitol. Twelve were defeated, the thirteenth obliterated. The Treaty of Treason gave us the new laws to guarantee peace and,as our yearly reminder that the Dark Days must never be repeated, it gave us the Hunger Games.

The rules of the Hunger Games are simple. In punishment for the uprising, each of the twelve districts must provide one girl and one boy, called tributes, to participate. The twenty-four tributes will be imprisoned in a vast outdoor arena that could hold anything from a burning desert to a frozen wasteland. Over a period of several weeks,the competitors must fight to the death. The last tribute standing wins.

IGN: 5 Ways to Improve Modern Warfare 2’s Multiplayer. Of the five complaints, the map frequency resonates with me the most. I’ve grown to hate a lot of maps. There needs to be a preference system or a way to search for a certain map. It might lead to a situation similar to Counter-Strike servers that were dedicated to Dust or Dust 2, but guess what, Terminal’s fun and I’d like to be able to play a public game on Terminal if I feel like it.

Quick notes on the other things. Team scoring experience can change but I couldn’t care less about experience points. Grenade launchers can get annoying but I’ve never felt it was to the point of unfairness. Bigotry, racism, and general anger don’t bother me. I don’t think most people actually believe the things they say—that’s just dumb people saying dumb things. If I’m wrong about that, we’ve got a lot of kids with true hate in their harts. But again, I don’ think I’m wrong. It’s really easy to mute people anyway. And dropping out of a game without a dedicated server is expected once in a while. Drops that aren’t related to the host leaving can be annoying, but that seems to happen only about once a week.

I’d like to be able to create a public lobby with friends so that we could be on opposing teams. Yes, teamwork is fun. But yes, going against your friends is also fun. It’s one of the reasons I loved Counter-Strike and Starcraft. And if we have, say, 7 people in a group, I’d much rather separate into a group of 4 and a group of 3 and have strangers fill in the other 5 spots in a 12-player match instead of playing ground war.

(Thanks for the link Junior.)

Deadspin’s been running a weekly post called Dead Wrestler of the Week, remembering wrestlers that have died. Most to overdoses or heart failures or a combination of both. This week: Miss Elizabeth.

There began not just one love story for the ages but two: Savage and Liz’s, of course, but also the love between Elizabeth and the WWF audience, as every male between the ages of 5 and 75 fell head over heels for this woman — or, at least, for the idea of her. We had been talked into it.

Me included! Bill Simmons, in a podcast I think, mentioned something I could completely relate to: as a dumb kid he thought Miss Elizabeth was the pinnacle of elegance with Princess Di and Jackie Kennedy tied for second. We owned the Summer Slam ‘91 tape which had the Match Made in Heaven—the Randy Savage & Miss Elizabeth wedding—and of course the Match Made in Hell—Hulk Hogan & Ultimate Warrior vs. Sgt. Slaughter and some Iranians. Two things stick out from that tape: Hogan in a Camel Clutch and the recap before the wedding of Randy Savage proposing. “Eliza-bett. Eliza-bett.” Crowd cheers. “Will youuu marry ME?”

And she replies, “Oooooooooh yyyyeaaaaah!”

P.S. You’d think that clip would be on YouTube with a label containing some form of the word “proposal” but it’s not. I found it though: Randy Savage Pops the Question . And my memory served me correctly for once. There are two other things I love, the first is Bobby Hennan yelling “Get down on your knee!” then Gorilla Monsoon screaming “YES!”. The second thing I love is that Macho Man and Miss Elizabeth look genuinely nervous during her reply.

Piroshky Piroshky showed up on Serious Eats. A lot of my friends are big fans. As with most great food spots in Seattle, I’ve still never tried the place. But I’ve heard very, very good things.

New Zealand’s rugby team does the Haka before international matches. (Here’s the Haka of the All Blacks Wikipedia entry.)

When Munster hosted the All Blacks at Thomond Park in November 2008, the four New Zealand players in the Munster team performed their own haka prior to the All Blacks.

Watch the video of the Munster Haka. Listen to how loud the stadium is. Remember that Munster is hosting, then pay attention to the silence as the All Blacks step forward and do theirs. And after all that, just search for “All Blacks Haka” and watch a bunch of them—the best are when the other teams challenge them and stand their ground a few feet away from the chanting All Blacks while the crowd goes nuts.

Female wolf spider with babies on board. Exactly what the title says. Instant top fiver for things I don’t want to see in a shower.