Category Archives: Words
Your blog today, come on man. You can’t lump VA drivers based on Fairfax County. That’s Northern VA… that’s DC-light. It’s transplants from other places. They may have VA tags but their histories and lineage are not Old Dominion. And they may not even be a majority of the drivers on the roads but it’s enough of them that THEY are what you notice.
- Ben from Lynchburg, via email.
This is a fair point. When I said “Virginia drivers,” I should have said “Northern Virginia drivers.” But I promise, it was actually the majority of them that were looking at other things besides the road. I’m only going by empirical evidence and about a 50-car sample, but this is hardly the first time I’ve noticed the area vehicular obliviousness.
As if I needed an excuse to eat Chick-Fil-A.
The candidate: The Chicken Biscuit from Chick-Fil-A, which counts as breakfast at Chick-Fil-A.
The construction: A fried white-meat chicken cutlet on a biscuit. That’s all.
Arguments for sandwich-hood: It’s a piece of meat sandwiched between two pieces of a form of bread. You can pick it up with your hands. It is at least as much about the chicken (the inside) as it is about the biscuit (the outside), so it doesn’t violate the bagel/cream-cheese rule.
Counter-arguments: I’m not even sure. I guess that it’s on a biscuit, and a biscuit isn’t regular bread? Also, it’s not called a sandwich
How it tastes: Pretty good, though not quite up to the standards of the regular Chick-Fil-A chicken sandwich, if you ask me. The biscuit, while amazing, is so buttery and rich that it actually sogs the chicken cutlet a little, so the fried part of the cutlet doesn’t really maintain any of its chicken-fried crispiness.
The breading instead just sort of attaches to the biscuit and thickens the outer layer of soft, greasy breadstuff, which doesn’t do much for diversity of texture. There’s a salty, mushy, buttery outside and a piping hot, moist, chickeny inside. It’s great, don’t get me wrong, and it’s fantastic that someone has decided I can eat this for breakfast. But the straight-up chicken sandwich provides so much more. Like pickles.
What it’s worth: $4.85 including tax with a large coffee and hash browns.
The verdict: This is definitely a sandwich. I’d love to indulge the people who believe otherwise by paying some mind to the counter-argument, but I’m not sure I even understand what it is. Because it’s on a biscuit?
“Biscuit” itself can be a pretty vague term, and are we really going to distinguish between the way the bread product for a sandwich is prepared when the ultimate effect is clearly sandwich? And if we’re excluding sandwiches on biscuits, how many other obvious sandwich-meat delivery vehicles would we have to exclude?
No, it’s a sandwich. Meat between two pieces of bread, regardless of what the bread is called. Don’t overthink this.
I’ve discussed this before: There’s no shortage of bad drivers anywhere there are drivers. But after years of research, I believe there are clear regional tendencies in bad driving styles.
I have no idea why this might be. Maybe it has something to do with intricacies in state-by-state traffic laws, the ways in which various local police departments enforce those laws and the long-term effects. Or perhaps certain bad habits just become socially acceptable in some places due to years of lousy role models and impotent driver’s-ed instructors.
It was a gorgeous day for a drive yesterday and for some odd reason, traffic along the northeast corridor mostly obliged. But I was coasting along about 12 miles per hour above the speed limit in the middle lane of a three-lane highway with very few cars on the road when a silver compact car pulled up right behind me and started driving maybe 10-15 yards from my tailpipe. I maintained a consistent speed and he could have easily passed me (on either side, no less), but he stayed there for minutes, making me nervous: What’s he up to? Why’s he chasing me? Is this some sort of unmarked cop car about to pull me over? Does he even see me or is asleep at the wheel and just plowing forward?
Finally, he lost patience and whizzed past me on the left, only to speed forward to the next small crop of traffic down the road and do the exact same thing to some other car in the middle lane. As he passed me, I took a look: Kid in his early 20s with a baseball hat slightly askew, a decal for his college occupying the bottom half of his rear window, a factory spoiler and New Jersey license plates. Classic Jersey driver.
Later on the drive, the Mazda Tribute in front of me in the left lane slowed from about 78 to 60 despite no traffic ahead of it and no obvious obstructions in the road. The car’s break lights never lit; it looked like the driver simply, suddenly took his foot off the accelerator in the left lane on I-95. As I craned to see what could be going on, the car veered toward the shoulder then jerked back into the lane. The driver, a salt-and-pepper haired man with glasses, turned his attention back to whatever it was he had splayed out across his steering wheel.
I looked at his plates: Virginia, of course.
No state I know of breeds more oblivious drivers. I’m staying with some friends in Fairfax County and I walked to a 7-11 on Lee Highway this morning. At an intersection, I tried to judge how many of the passing motorists were occupied by something other than the massive two-ton, fuel-filled steel machines hurtling around them in every direction and the ones they were themselves charged with piloting responsibly.
I would guess — and this is no exaggeration — that 75 percent of the people on the road were paying attention to something besides the road. Mostly their smartphones, but also their clipboards and knitting projects and novels and rosary beads. It was kind of beautiful to see, actually: People of all ages, shapes, races, and creeds unified by a cavalier disregard for all the dangers beyond their dashboards.
It rained today, and maybe 50 percent of the cars did not have their headlights on. People still don’t know about that! Does it not often rain here? Don’t many new cars do this by default now?
This is the chicken biscuit from Chick-Fil-A. It is the simple showpiece of their breakfast menu: A fried chicken cutlet on a biscuit.
But is it a sandwich?
Loading ...I’m on my way to DC for some Georgetown basketball and Super Bowl festivities. I planned to cue up some posts to roll out today, but I blew it. I’ll have some more stuff tomorrow and Friday, and I’ll be back in business (and quite tired) on Monday. For now, here’s some Super Bowl talk with Tom Curran from CSNNE.com:
This seems like a good idea. You pay randwich.es $7 and they bring you a random sandwich. I haven’t tried them yet so I can’t vouch for them myself, but they seem to thrive on social-media word-of-mouth so maybe this is good for some extra bacon or something when I do make an order after they return from vacation on Feb. 3.
This cajun turkey, bacon, arugula, blue cheese, tomato and alfredo sauce sandwich looks promising:
Via reader Greg.
Also — since we’re on the topic of sandwiches (as we frequently are), I’m kicking around an idea in my head and I’m looking for some feedback: I bring a pretty humble sandwich for lunch almost every day. It’s healthier and less expensive than eating out in midtown.
Obviously no one wants to read a diary of every boring sandwich I eat, but what if I worked across the week to maximize the potential of the cold cuts I buy, then make posts about the best reasonably simple and inexpensive sandwiches I can conjure up with those meats and cheeses and the condiments and vegetables in my fridge? Does that have any appeal beyond making my lunches more interesting?
If you’ve ever wondered why Quad-A reliever Dirk Hayhurst is something of a baseball-nerd darling on the Internet, it’s because his book The Bullpen Gospels is really good. Not just good-for-something-a-ballplayer wrote, legit good.
Anyway, now it appears he’s bound for Italy to play baseball there and write about it. I’ve long fantasized about writing a book about baseball around the world — going to games every place baseball is played and detailing each place’s baseball culture. But it looks like Dirk Hayhurst is going to trump the hell out of that idea, and good for him.
Wendy Thurm passes along this entertaining link. One issue, though: I wouldn’t call most of these sandwiches. Predictably, the Duchamp is my favorite, for a variety of reasons. The Christo is playful and captures the imagination, and the Rothko just seems uninteresting to me.
← Older posts
