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“The coldest blood runs through my veins
You know my name”

So sings Chris Cornell in the lackluster theme song to Casino Royale, the latest film in the James Bond franchise (now pay attention, because you have already heard one of my only complaints about the entire movie and there won’t be many more). After decades of the series creaking along using the same tired tricks, EON Productions has started over again, right where they should have - not with the first movie, but with the first book.

* SPOILERS *

Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953) was the slim introduction of Her Majesty’s Secret Agent 007, though it was far less of of an “origin” story than is being expoused elsewhere. When we first meet Bond, he is already a double-O agent. The two kills required for that status are mentioned, but not actually described until later in the series. In fact, most of Bond’s background is fleshed-out in other books. Instead, Fleming’s Casino Royale is a spare portrait of Bond at a turning point in his life. From the novel:

“But he was honest enough to admit that he had never been made to suffer by cards or by women. One day, and he accepted the fact, he would be brought to his knees by luck or by love. When that happened he knew that he too would be branded with the deadly question-mark he recognized so often in others, the promise to pay before you have lost: the acceptance of fallibility.”

And when Bond does fall in love with Vesper Lynd, he is brought to his knees…in spades. [Heh, sorry about that one.] It’s this story - the story of a fallible…broken Bond that the producers have brought to the screen this time.

It should be noted that there were two earlier Casino Royale films. The first was as a 1954 CBS Climax Mystery Theater teleplay (filmed before a live studio audience), starring Barry Nelson as CIA agent Jimmy Bond and Peter Lorre as the criminal LeChiffre. The second was a 1967 motion picture, starring Woody Allen, David Niven, and Peter Sellers (among others) as James Bond. Yes, you read that correctly. It was an unwatchable psychedelic mess. Neither production is accepted canon and the less said about them, the better.

Martin Cambell returns to the director’s chair and brings along the writers of the last two Bond films Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, now with some help from Academy Award winner Paul Haggis (Million Dollar Baby, Crash). Cambell directed Goldeneye, Pierce Brosnan’s entry into the series and one of the better modern Bond films.

The plot of Casino Royale follows it’s respective novel more closely than perhaps any other Bond film. LaChiffre, banker to Ugandan terrorists, has lost their money in a foiled stock market fraud and he plans to win it back in a high-stakes poker game at the Casino Royale in Montenegro, before he can be killed by his disgruntled investors. Bond’s mission is to defeat him in the poker game. Sound thin? It is, but Bond stories aren’t about the plot, they are about…Bond.

Let’s get this out of the way. Daniel Craig IS James Bond. There was a firestorm of early criticism and doubt about Craig’s looks. He doesn’t fit the classic tall, dark, and handsome Bond. He is short, pale, and…um, not conventionally handsome. And of course, he has blond hair. I admit that I was also taken aback at this. How could they make James Bond blond? In over 40 years of making Bond films, they couldn’t even be bothered to make Felix Leiter (Bond’s friend and CIA counterpart) blond. At least eight actors have played the part and not one “straw-haired Texan” (as Ian Fleming describes Leiter). Twice he has been black! How hard can it be people?

Craig appeared on screen and I never once thought about the color of his hair. His ownership of the role (along with the pre-credit sequence being filmed entirely in black and white) rendered the silly concern for his hair color moot. And though he is the shortest Bond (though not really all that short and certainly not Tom Cruise short), Craig is built like a boxer and is the first Bond since the 60’s who looks like he has the physicality to do the superhuman things that we expect from 007. It’s fitting and just a bit cheeky that for this reboot of the series, they took one of the most iconic scenes in all of the Bond films, that of original Bond-girl Ursula Andress wading out of the ocean in Dr. No and stood it on it’s head by instead having Craig wade out of the ocean in a skimpy swimsuit.

Craig plays Bond as a blunt instrument. He grunts, he vomits, he sweats, he bleeds. He kills with his bare hands. Bond is still sophisticated, but one gets the feeling that unlike earlier Bonds, this 007 can’t sniff-out an “overdose of Bons Bois” in an indifferently blended brandy (Goldfinger). In a harsh send-up of those who have come before, Bond orders a martini and when asked by the bartender “Shaken or stirred?”, Bond spits back, “Do I look like I give a damn?” Bond behaves like a man who knows he is living on borrowed time and when he is finally brought to the edge of death in a raw, humiliating torture scene that strips Bond of any possible arrogance, pride, even manhood, our new Bond does not sit back and coolly activate a Q-Branch gadget on his wristwatch, a deus ex machina to save the day. Instead, Bond cries out like an animal in blood-curdling anguish and then says what he has to say to bring his death quickly. Bond is beaten. This is new ground, indeed.

Also new is a Bond-girl that finally works. Eva Green is absolutely radiant as Vesper Lynd, a government accountant sent to oversee the funding of Bond in the high-stakes poker game at Casino Royale. When she first meets Bond, she goes toe-to-toe with him, showing-off her quick wit, intelligence, confidence, and lest we think her just a nerdy bean-counter, her sexual assertiveness, with a comment about keeping her eye on the government’s money and off of Bond’s “perfectly formed ass.” As a nit-picky aside, when she meets Bond for the first time, he is seated and remains seated until she leaves their dinner. So just how did she know he had a perfectly formed ass? Is it in his dossier? Hair: blond, Eyes: blue, Ass: perfectly-formed. Yeah, that’s what my dossier says, too.

Vesper talks tough, but when the game goes from poker to hardball, we see her outer layers start to peel away. In one of the most brilliant moments in the film, we see what almost looks like a domestic scene as Bond and Vesper are dressing for the first evening at the casino. Bond walks into Vesper’s bathroom and tells her to wear a dress that will draw attention to herself. Vesper counters by telling Bond that she has bought him a new dinner jacket, because his wasn’t suitabe for such a high-class affair. Ouch. But then we see her face reflected in the mirror. She isn’t wearing any makeup and she looks softer and younger than before. She is looking back at Bond, a tuxedo covered razor blade, and there seems to be a hint of doubt around her eyes, perhaps a realization that she is about to be in over her head. By the end of the evening, for the first time ever, we see a Bond-girl that is utterly disturbed about being in such close proximity to the cold violence of Bond’s world. It’s this vulnerability that warms us to Vesper, just as it does Bond.

Still, despite the added depth of character and other more superficial changes (mostly for the good), the Bond formula is alive and well. The Bond franchise is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and the old guard would never allow it to begin again from a blank sheet of paper. Let’s run down some of the elements of the Bond formula and see how they fared:

The Pre-Credit Sequence

Say, where is the gunbarrel shot? You can’t tell me anything was wrong with that! More serious and less thrilling than most, we see Bond earning his license to kill, first in a brutal fight and then quietly, in cold blood, all rendered in beautiful black and white photography. This is a stark announcement that things will be different. The gunbarrel shot comes at the end and the more traditional action-packed pre-credit sequence is queued after the title sequence.

Title Sequence and Theme

The title sequence also gets a new animated look, but misses the mark. The playing card theme gets tired quickly and when Daniel Craig finally appears in sillhouette, it looks too much like they are riffing on the iPod ads (which by the way, look to me like riffs on the 30 years of classic 007 title sequences done by Maurice Binder.) While I don’t think we need to go back to the Freudian-heavy title sequences such as the one for Thunderball (with it’s scuba divers pursuing naked sea-nymphs and shooting at them with their…um, spears), they were at least fun in their outrageousness. The new title sequence contains no female figures and worse, no humor. It doesn’t help that over this sequence is played the aforementioned theme song which apparently is so bad, that it isn’t even included on the soundtrack album. For a change of pace, I would have liked to have seen a title sequence like that done by Kyle Cooper for the recent film Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang (the title which, for those who don’t know, is a reference to James Bond.)

Bond Girls

There are just two. Vesper Lynd and another woman with whom Bond has a brief, unconsumated fling, strictly for queen and country. There are still the female hotel clerks whose eyes make open invitations to Bond and it is with this convention that I take issue. I don’t think our new man is up to this. For example, in one scene, Bond drives up to the front of a resort in the Bahamas, gets out of his car, and two women walk past him, look him up and down, and share a lascivious giggle. Admittedly, this is classic Bond. But this isn’t the penultimate Bond, Sean Connery stepping out of his 1964 Aston Martin DB5, nor even the handsome Pierce Brosnan stepping out of his Vanquish in a beautiful Brioni suit. No, it was a somewhat jug-eared man who looked like his face had been beaten repeatedly with a potato masher, wearing ordinary clothes, stepping out of (I kid you not) - a Ford Mondeo rental car! In fact, less than 30 seconds later, Bond is mistaken for a valet. Now that I believe.

The Villians

Never were there a bunch of more ordinary thugs. Criminal and cruel, yes, but as LeChiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) explains to a business partner about his eye that weeps blood, “…it is a (damaged) tear duct…there is nothing sinister about it.” And so there isn’t. Le Chiffre is not a megalomaniac with a bonkers plan to destroy the world, but rather an investment banker just trying to get back some money that he lost short-selling some stocks. Nothing more. In fact, until Bond involves himself in LeChiffre’s affairs, the only person in danger of being killed is LeChiffre himself. There are terrorists, henchmen, and a bomb-maker that can run and jump over stuff, but they are otherwise rather ordinary. No scary names or superhuman abilities. This is good.

Q-Branch

There is no Q and there are no Q-Branch gadgets in Casino Royale. None. For now, this is also a good thing. It lets us see Bond have to use perhaps his single best attribute - his resourcefulness. In one scene, we see Bond break into a security office using nothing more than a simple distraction. In another, Bond is caught without a weapon and instead of reaching for an infallible Q-Branch gadget, he snatches-up a table knife and strides towards his quarry. This kind of simplicity serves Bond’s character well.

Other classic Bond elements like Exotic Locations, egregious Product Placement, Fast Cars, and Drinking (lots of drinking in this film) are all present. There is less humor than in most other Bond films, but we still get to see Bond enjoying himself once in awhile and there are still a few quips and double-entendres, though thankfully no real groaners.

Casino Royale might be the best introduction of a new James Bond ever. Yes James, we know your name, but now, we’ve got your number. Welcome back.

jimmy (a straw-haired Texan willing to play Felix Leiter at any time for SAG minimums) 

It was down to 44 degrees this morning, but I was not to be deterred. I kept the top down. Clear and cold, the air whipped around me tugging at the new scarf around my neck. The scarf fluttered above the car looking like a gold striped ribbon on a gift wrapped in black paper. The Killers played to me, guitars building along with the revs…

 
“We’re burning down the highway skyline
on the back of a hurricane that started turning
when you were young
when you were young” 

The roaring wind, the cold air stinging my face and numbing my fingers, driving fast on the best road in Austin, and listening to new music formed a perfect storm of joy for me this morning. I couldn’t stop smiling. I don’t know if it was therapy or a drug, but it was a welcome break from the melancholia that I have been feeling, as I do every year when Summer changes to Autumn.

The Killers’ first CD Hot Fuss never left heavy rotation around me. Literally, it never left the CD changer in my car. As a complete work, it satisfied and thrilled like no other album I had heard in years. Every song was a hidden treasure of sonic tracings and echoes from the 80’s in a way that was like authentic genetic influence rather than a band playing dress-up. Rising above the rest was a song that has become one of my favorites - Brandon Flowers’ discussion with God on “All These Things I’ve Done” - a song I have quoted on this blog before.

On their new CD Sam’s Town, The Killers continue to dazzle, if perhaps to a slightly lesser degree. The DNA strands from my youth are still there. I hear the Styx opening to Paradise Theater on Enterlude. I hear Springsteen’s Born to Run (or Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s superior(!) remake) in When You Were Young and a Book of Love synth thread in perhaps the best song of the album Read My Mind. OCD keeps me from absorbing the whole album at once, so I am rotating through my first favorites, the aforementioned three plus Sam’s Town and Reasons Unknown. In my opinion, these alone substantiate this sophomore effort as near-brilliant in its own right. If I warm to the second half of the CD, I will consider it great indeed.

“Slipping in my faith
until I fall
you never returned that call
woman, open the door
don’t let it sting
I wanna breathe that fire again

She said
I don’t mind
if you don’t mind
’cause I don’t shine
if you don’t shine”

- The Killers “Read My Mind”

jimmy
 

With my house cracking apart, I was even more eager to get away this past weekend for some fresh air and the open road. So, Friday afternoon, I loaded-up the Miata and pointed her towards Rising Star, Texas, where I would meet my friend David Sylvester for some dove hunting. I’m not much of a hunter. I have been out with Dave half a dozen times and haven’t bagged a single anything, most of the time because I never saw anything. But that has always been a secondary consideration for me. Hunting has always been about getting outside, drinking beer, shooting firearms, and basically doing things that would make Ted Nugent proud. Not bathing for a few days is just a bonus. Anyway, this would be my first dove hunt; maybe I would have better luck this time.

I stopped to have lunch in Lampasas and review the burger at Storm’s:

Storm’s is legendary around Central Texas. I swear, any time that I hear anyone mention Lampasas, the very next words I hear are, “Did you go to Storm’s?” It could be a conversation between two people, or you can just walk outside and mutter “Lampasas” under your breath and a passerby in a car will call out, “Hey, be sure to go to Storm’s!” I’m not kidding. Go try it. So, inspired by the Texas Burger Guy (TBG) blog that I stumbled upon recently, I decided to stop and see what all the fuss is about.

A quick note about my review style. I hope to submit my review to TBG as a guest reviewer, so I will try to follow TBG review rules.

Storm’s has been serving burgers at their original Lampasas location for over 50 years. Originally called Dairy Cue, it sounds suspiciously like Storm’s started life as one of the many Dairy Queen knockoff restaurants that are strewn around small towns in Texas (Dairy King, Dixie Queen, Daisy Queen, et al). Dairy Cue, or Dairy Q? No matter, Jim Storm and his family were setting themselves apart serving quality burgers and attracting legions of loyal fans, including perhaps the most famous gourmand in history - Elvis Presley, who is said to have frequented the establishment while stationed at Fort Hood.

Old School Drive-In

New School Patio

The original Storm’s is a drive-in and still has the look of a bona fide burger joint. But they also have a new patio across the parking lot for those wanting to “dine-in.” The patio is contemporary and clean, with a fountain made from Llanite and landscaping that uses native Texas plants. To be honest, the patio didn’t look very “burger joint” at all, but the fact that they chose to keep the original drive-in alongside the new structure, shows their solid values and commitment to their own heritage. Okay, I can feel TBG getting impatient; let’s get to the food.

The menu is simple and features the Storm’s Special - a 1/2 pound, triple-meat cheeseburger and fries. If they say it’s special, then that’s what I want. I placed my order from the patio, using the same intercom and menu system found in the drive-in stalls. In just a few minutes, I was served. My initial observation was that the burger came wrapped in paper rendered clear from the grease. I wondered if I could get an angioplasty in Lampasas.

Click here for 1600 x 1200.

Undeterred, I unwrapped the burger. I had ordered the special without pickles or onion, which is my custom, and this is what was left: three beef patties, one slice of American cheese, shredded lettuce, tomato, and mustard, on a lightly toasted white bun that looked like it had been run over by a truck. This was a good burger, maybe even a very good burger, but I would stop short of saying that it was a great burger. Maybe it just goes against too many of my preferences. For instance, the fact that it is a triple-burger might sound impressive at first, but the individual patties are thinner than the ones found in an Elementary School cafeteria. They are so thin that it would be impossible not to overcook them, which is the real problem here. If anything, one of the valid reasons for having multiple patties, is to increase the cheese to beef ratio, but Storm’s only has one slice of cheese to hold together three patties (obviously, extra cheese is available). I also prefer to have my vegetables on top of the burger, rather than beneath it. It’s a small thing, but it does matter. Let’s run down the TBG categories:

Ooze Factor
Let’s talk about ooze for a second. There is good ooze and there is bad ooze. The best ooze is the cow juice from a nice medium-rare to medium burger. To a degree, grease can be good ooze. Bad ooze is a wet burger from watery vegetables. This was a medium-wet burger, but there was very little cow juice. The ooze was mostly from grease and wet vegetables. If you like grease, this is another advantage to a triple-burger, especially if it’s fried - there are six sides of burger holding grease for you. I’m going to go straight down the middle on this.
Ooze Factor Rating: 5

Herd Killer
No mystery here; this burger is a 1/2 pounder. With more patties to cook-down, I bet it comes out less than a single 1/2 pound burger when it’s served.
Herd Killer Rating: 4

Handling
This burger was very easy to handle. By design or by accident, this burger was squished-down flat, which made for good maneuverability and easy ingress. It had good ergonomics, but was not very impressive looking.
Handling Rating: 4

Bling Bling
My total bill was just over $5, an incredible bargain. Also, to aid in digestion and to keep my blood thin enough to hopefully stave off an aneurysm, I ordered water with my meal and they gave me a huge, Super Big Gulp sized cup, which I thought was unusually generous. However, I noticed that there was a $.50 charge for any substitution, no matter the item. I can admire that concept from the standpoint of this being a burger joint (”You get what you get,” according to Alan Richman), but I have to dock them under this category. It would be silly to charge me $.50 for tater tots instead of fries.
Bling Bling Rating: 8

Gravedigger
Half a pound of meat and a little grease isn’t enough to get me too worried. If you think food is going to kill me, you haven’t seen me drive. This was less than an hour later with the top down and the little tin can getting blown all over the road:

Storm’s Gravedigger Rating: 4 shovels
Jimmy’s Driving Gravedigger Rating: 9 shovels

Overall Storm’s Special Burger Rating: 5

This is a case where an overall rating might make a burger look poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. As I said before, this is a good burger, especially when considering other factors of the dining experience. First and foremost are the fries. The fries are outstanding. They are fresh cut and fried in the skin to a perfect level of crispiness and saltiness. The only thing I found unusual was the fact that I found a packet of ketchup at the bottom of my pile of fries, like the prize at the bottom of a cereal box, when it was too late to use it. I couldn’t tell if that was a Storm’s custom, or just a fluke. I don’t usually put ketchup on my fries, so it really didn’t matter.

Finally, on my way back home a couple of days later, I stopped at the Storm’s in Burnet to check the consistency between the two locations. I ordered the exact same thing, except that I also ordered a vanilla malt. The burger and fries were exactly as I had found them in Lampasas (except no ketchup packet prize). The malt was thick and delicious. In fact, it was so thick that I couldn’t figure out why they bothered having an “extra thick” option, which I didn’t try. I suppose it comes as a solid, rather than a liquid.

There are Storm’s locations in Lampasas, Burnet, Hamilton, Kingsland, and Marble Falls. For more information, check their website at www.stormsrestaurants.com.

Overall Rating for Storm’s: 7 

After lunch, I turned up 183 and continued heading north. The weather was stunning and the roads were clear. I found that with the top down, but the side windows up, I could cruise comfortably at fairly high speeds. I still had On The Road in my CD player, but there was no hope of hearing anything but subliminal whispers from it.

This might sound a bit strange, but I love the Southern Gothic dilapidation found in small Texas towns and the adjoining countryside. I love the abandoned shops and the broken barns. I love the fallen stables and the (not really so) ancient stone walls. I love the faded signs of times past. I stopped in Zephyr, Texas and snapped some photographs of the Miata in front of such a building.

Click here for bigger. 

I also snapped some fashion shots of the car at our final destination - the hunting camp, which is a boxcar located in the middle of the lease property as if set down by the same mischievous UFO that dropped a boat in the middle of a desert in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Now with Super Shock Control!

I arrived before anyone else, so I had a chance to just sit back, crack open a beer and dig into a book. Despite the mild weather and a gentle breeze, the afternoon sun eventually made me tired, so I dug around in the boxcar until I found a hammock. I tied it between a couple of trees and lay in the shade until Steven Sylvester and his stepson Riley drove up. We unpacked their truck and visited for awhile until the sun started to drop and then we geared-up for an evening hunt. Just as we were driving off, Steven’s best friend, Sam Roach, drove into camp. Within a half hour, the four of us were setup near a tank under a tree line where the doves were known to roost for the night. We waited for them to fly in. When they finally came, Sam and Riley each got a bird, but Steven and I were shooting blanks. We each mumbled something about the beer.

It seems migratory birds are completely safe from me as they appear to be small enough to evade my target locking computer. The same cannot be said for the cute, fuzzy bunny rabbit that Riley flushed out of the brush for me, though. The rabbit ran straight at me and fearing death at the end of sharp, pointed teeth, I was forced to defend myself.

We got back to camp and Sam showed me how to clean the rabbit. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Riley and I built a fire and Steven grilled steaks for everyone. He also grilled the two birds they had got that day. He put the meat into jalepeños and wrapped them with bacon. Delicious. David eventually arrived late in the evening. We told him what had happened and then we turned-in so we could get up early for the morning hunt.

The morning hunt didn’t go as well. I think Sam got another bird, but they were scarce. We spent the rest of the day walking David’s new property. He and his wife just closed on a property about half an hour from the lease. Dave plans to just hunt the property, but eventually they will build and probably retire there. It was a very nice plot. Unfortunately, walking around in the woods was starting to take its toll on me and I developed a fairly righteous allergy attack and I had left all of my meds back at the camp. When we drove into town for lunch, I stopped in a grocery store and bought some Benadryl. When I walked up to the checkout to pay, the cashier and the bag boy acted like I was some kind of alien. The cashier had no qualms at all about checking me out, looking hard up and down as if to say, “What is your story.” Sure, I was in my hunting drag, which is really just my Air Force BDU, except that I can’t button the top button on my trousers anymore. And I was wearing a hat, so my hair couldn’t have been too bad. I just couldn’t figure out what she was looking at. The bag boy (who was really on the verge of being a bag man) kept grinning at me like an idiot. When he asked me if I wanted paper or plastic, I said I didn’t need either and that I would just walk out with it. Then he laughed and pointed at me as if I had said the funniest thing he had ever heard.

Later, we went back to camp and shot skeet to practice for the evening hunt. As usual, I did very well shooting skeet, but I still couldn’t bring down a bird. One time, after another wave of birds had flown safely past us, I turned to Dave and expressed some frustration.

“No dude, you clipped that last one. I saw it.”

Just about then soft, downy feathers began falling gently all around us like snowflakes. I had indeed clipped a bird and the wind had blown his feathers back over us. It was surreal and funny. I never did get a dove, but the other guys each got at least one.

The next day, after another lame morning hunt, we got out our frustration by going redneck and shooting inanimate objects at the camp. Dave shot an old pair of his boots. The best though was an old TV that somebody had brought. We set it up on a chair and I went after it with my 9mm. I didn’t think it would do much…but it did. Then we stepped it up by shooting it with Sam’s AR-15. Finally, we went absolutely medieval by shooting 00 magnum loads at it with a 12 ga. shotgun. We obliterated that TV. I suppose one could argue that we were making a social statement about being outdoors vs. staying indoors, but more realistically we were probably just making a statement about us wanting to shoot up stuff.

It was a great trip.

After I got home, I checked the Internet for rabbit stew recipes, read about six of them, took the elements I liked, and then struck-out on my own. I cook by feel, so don’t expect any measurements. Here is what I did:

1 rabbit
vegetable oil
flour
red wine
potatos
carrots
red (purple) onion
bella mushrooms
2 cans beef stock
salt
pepper

Salt, pepper, and brown both sides of the rabbit in a large frying pan. Then put the rabbit in a crock pot with diced potatos, carrots, bella mushrooms, and anything else you want in your stew. I like to keep it simple. In the frying pan, make a roux out of the remaining vegetable oil, flour, salt, and pepper. Add sliced purple onion and red wine. Reduce. Add beef stock and reduce until you have the consistency you want. Pour the reduction into the crock pot and cook everything on low for a couple of hours. I was going to cook it for two, but it ended-up being three because I went into my office to work on this entry, drank the rest of the bottle of red wine that I had used to cook, and lost track of time.

I took the rabbit out of the crock pot and pulled the meat off of the bone. The stew would probably be best served with/on biscuits, but I’m too lazy, so I had mine with toast points. Okay, they weren’t really points, I just tore up a couple of slices of toast and threw them in the bowl. I thought the stew was quite good. In fact, I wouldn’t change anything except that I would start earlier and cook it longer. It wasn’t undercooked by any means, but if left in the crock pot longer (say, eight hours), the meat would be even more tender. The stew was even better a day later. And the day after that.

jimmy      

My 2000 Audi A6 2.7t quattro turned 100,000 miles a couple of weeks ago. I have owned it about three and a half years and still have another year and a half to pay for it. Unfortunately, the warranty has run out, there have been some expensive services, and the car guzzles premium gas, now at around $3 a gallon. Is this car worth every cent, or is it an albatross around my neck? Let’s see.

I bought the car in December of 2002 from Roger Beasley Audi in Austin, with 46,368 miles already on it. That left over 3600 miles of full factory warranty and free maintenance available. The car was also Certified Pre-Owned (CPO), so it had a two year extension of the factory warranty, though the extended warranty carried a $50 duductible for each dealer visit. Without hesitation, I can tell you that the CPO extended warranty saved my skin. For a mere $200 in duductibles, I had thousands upon thousands of dollars in repairs done to the A6. Most notably, the A6 had a turbo replacement (which actually involves the replacement of both turbos) which would have cost $3500-$4500. During that same service, my instrument cluster was replaced. That would have cost another $1000 or so. Instead, the total bill came to $50. Whew. However, it served as the first serious warning about the potential cost of this vehicle.

By the numbers:

Service & Maint is just that. Included are the repair or replacement of normal wear-and-tear items. The repair category is for items not considered normal wear-and-tear items. Warranty is for anything replaced under warranty. Other parts is for parts that I have purchased and installed on the car myself.

The first thing to notice is that the biggest ticket item was the regular 90,000 mile service, which includes an important timing belt replacement. In fact, almost all of the TCO (not counting fuel) is associated with regular maintenance and repair of normal wear-and-tear items. That makes the car seem reasonable, if not dependable. Now might be a good time to mention that this car has never stranded me. It has suffered vaccum leaks, suspension problems, electrical problems, and even blown turbos, but it has always started and made it to the dealer under its own power.

The cautionary tale is to be found under the warranty category. Without an extended warranty, just the turbo replacement would have been more than all of my service & maint costs put together, easily doubling or perhaps tripling my TCO. That’s important because that’s the position I find myself in now. Many of those expensive problems fixed under warranty are known issues with this model and therefore are potentially recurring issues. In other words, I can expect that my turbos and my instrument cluster (among other things) will fail in the future. If I weren’t still paying for the car or if I had extensive cash reserves, this might not be a problem, but I am and I don’t, so it is. My driver side window has been giving me problems, so I am on the verge of another repair.

Maintenance and repair (not counting tires) is costing over $1100 annually for this vehicle with some benefit from a warranty. I don’t see how that number will decrease, now that the warranty has expired.

Also, in mixed driving (admittedly with a lead foot), I am only getting 20.2 mpg. My car requires premium grade gasoline, so at today’s prices (temporarily down from $3+ to about $2.85/gallon) I’m paying around $50 for a fill-up. That is SUV territory. 

But is it worth it? Don’t I love this car? Yes and no. The A6 has been a very good car to me. As I mentioned, it has been very dependable. It is very, very fast and has excellent brakes. The A6 looks nice. It is elegant and graceful from some angles, though plain and dumpy from others. It’s homeliness (especially with the stock 16″ wheels) has probably saved me from undue attention and scrutiny from the local gendarmes, even though I bomb down the roads daily at menacing speeds. There is no other explanation for how many times I have blasted past the police and they couldn’t be bothered with me. I think my plain car must look amusing to them at speed, like a fat man rolling down a hill. Only once have I been cited in this car and it was an unusually flagrant violation, even for me.

The interior of the A6 is beautiful, comfortable, and practical. My passengers have plenty of space, even in the back seat. I have massive amounts of trunk space and with the rear seats folded down, I have even slept in my car, while comfortably stretched-out to my full length. I love the automatic, dual-zone HVAC that I never have to touch and the Audi/BOSE stereo sounds good. The cabin is very quiet, there are no squeaks or rattles from interior bits, and it feels dead solid, even at 100,000 miles. And though I have never had to test it, I feel very safe in the A6. It has the performance to get me out of most trouble and if that weren’t enough, I am surrounded by a solid, well-engineered structure with lots and lots of airbags, as well.

The problem is that many of these benefits are almost never actually realized. I talk about my passengers having plenty of room, but I almost never carry any passengers. Even my wife and I never take the A6, because her 4Runner is either better for the task at hand (i.e, grocery shopping), or simply because it’s cheaper to operate. So, the size and weight of the car, which contributes to the car’s problems (fuel economy, poor handling), isn’t even being utilized.

At 100,000 miles I must say that I’m inclined to move on. This isn’t news; according to the posts below, I have been inclined to move on since eight months after buying the car. It’s a good car, but it’s not hitting the sweet spot in my performance/dependability/utility/value/happiness matrix™. So, I’ll be looking for a car that is closer to that sweet spot soon. Stay tuned.

Here are some links to posts that I have previously published about this car in other forums:

• ‘95 S6 vs. A6 2.7t (long) (05.06.03)
• Life with the 2.7t… (08.01.03) - “What do I need instead?”
• TWS Clockwise Track Report (11.18.03)
• …and a data point about the value… (12.19.03)
• Top o’ the mornin’ to ya… (03.17.04)
• Good morning (06.18.04) - You win some…
• A6 2.7t Question (06.23.04)
• Replacing both turbos (07.09.04) - “…getting rid of the A6.”
• Jimmy sure knows how to pick ‘em… (01.26.05) - …you lose some

 jimmy

On Saturday night, Mrs. Pribble and I walked into the Old San Francisco Steak House, her for the first time and both of us for the last. The Old San Francisco Steak House (OSF) had been bought and would close its doors forever on Sunday, after 25 years in business. Remarkably, except for some very small details, everything was as I had left it. The decor was exactly the same, down to the period artifacts and artwork, dominated by the huge portrait of Gussie Lee (the legendary inspiration for the restaurant), all designed to evoke the Gay Nineties. The creaking of the brass-handled front doors, first the outer and then the inner, reminded me of a time when those sounds would cue my service to new dinner guests.

Our own fellow dinner guest and OSF alumnus, Mat Farabee, hadn’t arrived yet, so we stood back and watched the manager at the helm of the slowly sinking ship. As happens so often in these sad situations, formality had broken-down and the employees joined the customers as bystanders to an event outside of their control. The manager, who wasn’t wearing any kind of uniform whatsoever (a far cry from the days when my boss and I would man the reservation desk in tuxedos), openly commiserated with the guests waiting in the lobby. She had moved from Dallas for the job just a year before and couldn’t help the frustration creep into her voice when talking about uprooting herself for what was probably then an already doomed business. The end came so quickly and without warning, that our waiter had been hired only three weeks before. I was also startled to hear the manager explain the fate of the other OSF locations. I had just been to the OSF website (while it lasts) and it still showed three locations and another coming soon. I figured the Austin location closing was a unique case, but I was wrong. The Houston location closed a year ago to make way for a Super Target, the Dallas location closed early this year to become a strip club, and the Austin and San Antonio locations would be closing on the same day. OSF really was over. If Mat didn’t hurry, our dinner plans would be over, too. Every few minutes, somebody would come from the kitchen and announce what food they had run out of and the manager would add it to the long list on a whiteboard they had set up in the lobby. Cuts of meat were starting to show up on the list - surely a bad sign.

While we were waiting, in swished Bernice, the only employee who had been at the Austin location since day one and only one of two remaining employees from my days back in the eighties. Bernice was in her hostess outfit, a long black satin dress and white feather boa, looking like an older Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke. She had let her red hair go pure white, but otherwise looked exactly the same. We greeted each other and promised to catch-up later in the evening. Mat finally arrived and we were seated.

The main dining room (or “red room” as we used to call it) and the green room also looked almost exactly as I remembered. The red room is two stories tall and the walls covered floor to ceiling with kitschy period advertisements, signs, and other memorabilia, with a bison head and two or three steer heads mounted for good measure. The room is otherwise dominated by a full-length bar across the front of the room, on which is a piano (there used to be two) and hanging above it all - the red velvet swing. Every hour or so, a “swinger” dressed in a burlesque-style little red dress, fishnet stockings, and garter belt, would entertain guests by swinging higher and higher to the piano accompanyment of ragtime music, until she reached the top of her two story arc, the music would crescendo, and she would kick a cowbell mounted to the ceiling to the delight of all. I scoffed at the red velvet swing now being equipped with a seatbelt, but both swingers of the evening performed well, even to the mostly empty room.

We had an 8 o’clock reservation and were sat around 8:30. Our waiter informed us that they were out of T-bones. I told him that he should consult the list in the lobby, because they were out of much more than that. He scurried off to catch-up on the latest bad news, while I wondered how long OSF had been using waiters. In my day, despite the illegality of it, the OSF only hired waitresses. That was why waiting tables at OSF was the one job that I hadn’t done. I had been a busboy, food expo guy, dishwasher, valet, line-cook, salad/dessert prep cook, flambé cook, bartender, and host. I even mowed the grass a few times and one time another busboy and I spent our day stealing huge chunks of limestone from a construction site to use for the OSF landscaping. But I never waited on a table. Speaking of waitresses, I also noticed that the uniforms had changed. The waitresses used to wear basically the same outfit as a swinger: low-cut little black dresses, fishnet stockings, black shoes and a garter belt. At some point (perhaps with the arrival of waiters), this had been replaced with black pants, white shirt and a vest. Sigh. I understand, I really do. But you must understand that to a 15 year old boy, watching waitresses (mostly college girls) in those uniforms made working at OSF one of the best jobs I…er, I mean he could ever have. Mat seconded this notion adding that standing at his station at the end of the bar, watching the pretty swingers twirl over his head and waiting for a flambé order so that he could go and set stuff on fire, really was the best.

A busboy delivered the traditional block of Swiss cheese and a small loaf of bread. The block of cheese was smallish, but that was sometimes the case even back in my day, and considering their diminishing food supply, I actually expected worse. What was more interesting was the fact that the block didn’t come on a cutting board, but sat directly on part of the thick red wax covering that hadn’t been cut away from the cheese. Swiss cheese doesn’t have a rind and therefore, isn’t generally packaged in a wax covering, but rather vacuum sealed in plastic. Specifically, the Swiss cheese that we served in the past came in huge blocks (100 lbs.?), vacuum sealed in plastic, that we then cut down to six blocks (almost a foot on each side) to serve to customers. So, it appeared that we were being served a different cheese, or at least a cheese from a different supplier. I piled paper-thin slices of the Swiss on my bread plate and was soon relieved to find that it tasted exactly the same as I remembered. It was delicious!

We told the waiter that we would like to place our dinner order quickly in the hopes that we would be able to get what we wanted. He said there shouldn’t be a problem, because they had just closed the restaurant and wouldn’t have any more customers that night. It wasn’t even 9 o’clock. They would normally be open until 11pm. In fact, by the time the 9 o’clock swing finished, there were maybe only four other tables in the restaurant, so there was really nobody left to deplete any more food. Sure enough, everything that we wanted to order was available.

Our house salads arrived. The chilled fork presentation was a nice new touch, but the salads were smaller than the hearty servings I used to prepare and the house dressing, a creamy Italian with grated Swiss cheese, was quite a disappointment. In the past, finely grated Swiss cheese was mixed into the dressing, properly infusing the dressing with the Swiss flavor. This appeared to be regular creamy Italian dressing poured over Swiss cheese that had been coarsely grated over the salad. Worse, the dressing itself was not very good and overall the salad was a watery, goopy mess.

The poor salad was immediately forgotten, as soon as our steaks arrived. Except for being plated with the fat side out towards the customer (a presentation no-no), my 16 oz. prime rib was perfect. It was big, bloody, and beautiful. In the 20+ years since I have worked at the OSF, I have found myself constantly disappointed when ordering prime rib (always rare to medium-rare) from other restaurants and having a grilled steak served to me. This is an excerpt from a wonderfully impassioned letter written by Mick Vann, contributor to the Food section of the Austin Chronicle. His description of how prime rib should be cooked is exactly how OSF did it. His disappointment in how “prime rib” is now cooked and served is exactly what I have found, as well:

Our prime rib was cooked low and slow in an Alto-Shaam oven cabinet, so that it was cooked overall to rare in the center of the roll. We used a 109A prime rib rack, bone-in. If we had an order for MW or Well, we gently braised it in a pan of au jus, or brought it up on the grill (called a “Douglas Cut”), using the end cuts of the roasted roll. There was a nice layer of browned goodness on the exterior. Now what steak places use is a rib eye roll that they just put in the oven … no bone, no browned exterior, and it’s NOT Prime! What they are serving is a rib eye roast, and calling it Prime rib. One we tasted was obviously removed from a Cryovac bag, and was precooked! Restaurateurs who do that should be ashamed of serving inferior cuts to their unsuspecting customers!

The steak was served with a baked potato, a ramekin each of au jus and horseradish sauce, and two sprigs of broccoli that were really more of a Texas-sized garnish than a side of veggies. I noted that the potato was no longer rosin baked, which was a method of cooking the potatos by dunking them in a boiling vat of rosin, a thick, syrupy substance made from pine sap. The potatos would be pulled from the vat, immediately wrapped in brown paper and served. The idea was that this method of cooking prevented the moisture loss from oven baking. I have also heard it said that the process imparts a unique flavor to the potato, though I have never thought so. While it was sad to see another unique aspect of the OSF gone, the truth is that I never preferred potatos cooked that way because the process rendered the potato skin inedible. My baked potato was good, but the waiter didn’t mix the butter and sour cream into it enough and it all melted out onto my plate in a buttery, goopy mess.

But I couldn’t be bothered with the state of my salad or baked potato. I was there for the memories and for the steak. My prime rib was all that I had dreamt it would be. It was tender, juicy, and delicious. Mrs. Pribble agreed that her prime rib was good as well and also gave high marks to the garlic mashed potatos. This is what Mat had to say about his meal:

I had the rib eye, “the most flavorable of all steaks!” according to the menu (“flavorable”? Perhaps they meant “flavorful”). It was a bit disappointing; the meat was a poor cut, somewhat gristle-y, but I can forgive that as they were probably having to dredge the dumpster for post-expiration date meat at that point. Less forgivable was the cooking; it was much more medium-well than medium (almost no pink at all). But it could certainly have had more flavor added to it, so I suppose it met the advertised promise of being “flavorable”. Oh, and the garlic mashed potatoes and broccoli were fine.

I’m sorry that Mat didn’t enjoy his meal as much as Mrs. Pribble or myself, but he didn’t make a fuss. This was probably because there wasn’t time to complain between the recounting of story after story of our time working at OSF. Some were well worn and often told stories, but some were new remberances helped along by just being there. Pam, the other employee who had been there since the beginning, also helped out by sharing with us her memories, starting with our drinks. Mat and I knew that we wanted a souvenir glass to take away with us. In our day, to get a souvenir glass, you had to order the house special, which was some flaming frou-frou drink. The menu now showed a dozen different drinks that qualified for the souvenir glass, but none of them sounded like the old special and none of them seemed to involve fire. I caught-up with Pam at the bar and she reminded me that the drink was called “The Swinger” (duh, Jimmy) and though it was no longer on the menu, they could whip up a couple, no problem. No longer on the menu? How could that be? When the waiter arrived with the drinks, he offered a clue while lighting the drinks, “Now I have been told that if you let these burn too long, the glass could shatter.” So that was it. Like the seatbelt on the swing, the end of rosin baked potatos (later confirmed to be at the hand of the fire marshal), and the removal of the house specialty drink from the menu, OSF had eroded the essence of their unique personality, of their very character, just to keep glasses of flaming alcohol from exploding in a few faces. That’s just sad.

Jimmy and Mat risk life and limb for their OSF souvenir glasses.

Speaking of sad, by the 10 o’clock swing, there were maybe three tables, including ours. I took photos of the last swing performance in Austin and we did our best to cheer her on. Part of me wished that the restaurant would have been packed to the rafters for its last Saturday night. I mean, I had seen Saturday nights with 800-900 covers! I had seen the lobby and bar packed for hours with people waiting for a table. I had seen the valets double-park the whole lot and then park cars down the street. But those days were long, long ago and instead, it all ended quietly. Bernice, Pam and a few of the other employees got up on the bar for group photos. One of the swingers asked me to photograph her on the swing.

We realized that the piano player was also the flambé cook, so we rushed to order our dessert before he was cut loose. Tableside flambé service had long ago been done away with (again, in the interest of safety) and a permanent flambé station had been built. I was told they didn’t have the Cherries Jubilee, so Mrs. Pribble and I shared an order of Strawberries Flambé and Mat ordered the Bananas Foster. One of the downsides of having these desserts prepared away from the table is that they can still only be prepared one at a time, yet the waiter is likely to want to serve the whole table at once. So, our Strawberries Flambé was cooked first and by the time it got to us, it had mostly melted into a creamy, goopy mess. Sigh. Still, it was tasty. Mat, who had chatted it up with the piano player while the flambés were being cooked, shared with me the recipe changes that had occurred since when we had learned to flambé. I can’t say that I agreed with any of them. Since when does orange liqueur take the place of fresh juice squeezed from an orange?

After dessert, I had a chance to visit and reminisce with Bernice and Pam. The names and memories poured out of us: Bob Van Hattum, Tim, Les, Clint (the Vans-wearing bartender who went off to stunt man school in Hollywood and was killed in an airplane accident), Larry the mumbler, Irene and her sister, Becky and her sister, big Becky (Ford EXP), Rebecca (Boo) and Quita, Lynn, Blue, Simon and Jeff (the stoner busboy), Jeff Rasmussen, Jeff Holden, Lori (Planet X), Laurie, Brenda and Tony, Cathi Ball, Judith, Misty, the expo guy on speed, Carlos, the white busboys, the breakdancing busboys, the Mexican busboys, Edwardo, Ed Mancuso, the Anderson twins, John Anderson, and my close friends - Mat Farabee, Charles Braden, Wes Mau, and Rob Booth. These names were still only scratching the surface. Besides, every name unpacks even more memories of not only things we did at the steak house, but things we did outside the steak house as well. Somehow, I feel like I packed a lifetime of memories into barely four years. I’ll have to talk more about those some other time.

Bernice and Pam also knew where a lot of people were and how they were doing. They said a lot of folks had come back when they heard the OSF was going to close. A lot of swingers came back to swing one last time. That was comforting to hear. Even better was hearing about all of the couples who met at the OSF and were still together: Jim and Cheri, Kevin and Sherri, Rob and Michelle, and several others. Somehow, between all the sex, drugs, and rock & roll (and there was a lot of that), there was true, lasting romance to be found there. Pam said the best thing to me, though. After we had talked for a long time, she said, “I have been here all along, so I can tell you that you’re not mistaken - those were the good old days. It has never been better.”

We had been the only table for a couple of hours. It was almost one o’clock in the morning. The piano player was gone and canned music played through the PA. Our waiter had long since gone home, but Pam kept our water glasses full and they left the lights down for us. Usually, they gave customers a brand new souvenir glass, but they had run out and so our actual glasses were boxed up, sugar still on the rims. Pam offered us a beautiful chocolate cake, but we were full. Then she gave us copies of a book, The Legend of Gussie Lee, which had been published in 2000. The few staff remaining were quietly closing out tickets and counting their cash. I felt myself unwilling to stand up from the table. I was looking for any way to stall. But finally, there was nothing else and with a deep sigh, I stood. My wife wanted me to blow out the candle on the table, but it was too Tennessee Williams for me and I would have none of it. I hugged Pam one last time and we walked out under the Hurry Slowly sign over the front door. The doors creaked, first the inner, then the outer.

jimmy