Tag: cocaine

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SFGate.com: Going down quickly.

[ad]Today’s rant is brought to you courtesy of sfgate.com, the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle. I being the techno nerd that I am like to get up in the morning and read my news online. Because of this I don’t need to buy the paper. We do get the Sunday paper, but really it’s more for the ads than the news in it.

Now I have to admit that the paper version of the Chronicle is put together right. They put the best written articles on the front page which amounts to about 4 stories. On the other hand the online version at sfgate.com can put somewhere around 30 articles on the front page and when you start to read them you have to scratch your head a bit. Yesterday I saw an article titled, “My Rush hating wife” with a picture of Rush Limbaugh. What? Republican’s in San Francisco writing for the Chronicle?!?!? It turned out to be an article on the band Rush, not Rush Limbaugh and how he loved the band, but his wife didn’t get them and didn’t like them. This is news?

Today I read an article on a Republican Senator that wants to ban the sale of “Drug-Like Bath Salts” that are sold with a wink and a nudge, but you’re supposed to snort them for a hallucingenic high, not take a bath in them. That’s pretty much the story. I’m curious what drug-like compounds are in these salts. What’s more is a quick google search shows that the article was pretty much lifted word for word from the Huffington Post without giving them any credit. This story didn’t give me any information on these so called bath salts that “pack as much punch as cocaine or methamphetamines.”

What has really gotten to me though is that in doing more research on an article on sfgate.com I came to a page which had what looked like a bunch of sfgate.com stories on the right. One was about the “make $5000 a month from home.” We’ve seen this all before, but it looked like they were going to take a look inside the offer and tell you what they expected you to do or how people had their entire income sucked out of their bank accounts by some Romanian hacker kid. No, it was an article telling you to go ahead and buy in. It’s a great idea! Then I looked at the top and realized I wasn’t on sfgate.com anymore. I checked out who owned the web address of that site and one for the page that was linked there where you could earn $5000 a month at home. They were both registered in the Grand Cayman Islands. Interestingly enough, this is were many US moles of the Romanian cyber-criminals open bank accounts.

SFGate.com, where is your due diligence? You put an ad on your website that looks like a link to an sfgate.com story, yet it sends you to a site that looks like sfgate.com, but is most likely a scam by cyber-criminals. Where are your journalists? I’ve got more meaningful content in this story than most of your articles do. Some of your writers I went to college with, did they learn nothing during that time in college? I earned my degree in Broadcast Communication Arts and we took classes on ethics and responsibility and how we were supposed to report the facts free of opinion. What the hell happened to that? Now it’s made up mostly of bloggers and I won’t say, “bloggers like me” because I think I’m doing more. I don’t even like to call myself a blogger anymore because I don’t tweet that I’m “ordering a tall half-caf latte @ starbucks…mmmm”. I write about things in San Francisco that I think other people care about or want to know about. Not articles about how I don’t understand why my wife doesn’t like Rush [which my wife does like FYI] or that people are snorting some powder that packs as much punch as cocaine, but should be banned even if what’s in it is legal, but we don’t know so we can’t tell you and while you’re at it click on one of our ads to make a Romanian kid rich.

I am about one step away from pronouncing real journalism to be dead, nope, I’m not. It’s dead.

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Cambozola: The heroin of cheeses

It was one of those days. We had some friends coming over and we wanted to have some food available because we always like to eat. I ran out to Andronico’s which is like the food porn of supermarkets to get some cheese and there sitting in front of me was a huge collection of wedges of cambozola cheese. It had been awhile since I had it and I remembered how much I liked it so I grabbed a wedge and went on my way to get some prosciutto di parma and get back home.

Well when our friends came over they decided that they wanted to go out to eat. I’m thinking we’ve got cambozola AND prosciutto di parma in the house [along with a lot of other foods, but still] why go out? Well it turns out we did venture out to the Tennessee Grill and had huge meals that left us feeling like a light dinner sounded best.

As I sat down at the table that night my wife cobbled together some of the food we were going to eat for lunch. She handed me a some toasted bread and I automatically grabbed the cambozola and spread it on to the nice warm toast and noticed it start to slowly melt into the bread as I took a bit.

Oh God. I forgot just how good this tasted, but like the title says, it’s the “heroin of cheeses”. You just can’t stop and you keep going back for more and more. I was cutting up little pieces and dropping them on my salads, crackers, bread. I think I brushed my teeth with it one morning. It is just that good a cheese. I had become obsessed so I went to look up some information on my renewed addiction via Wikipedia:

It was patented and industrially produced for the world market by large German company Champignon in the 1970s. The cheese was invented circa 1900 and is still produced by Champignon. In English-speaking countries, cambozola is often marketed as blue brie.

It is made from the same blue Penicillium roqueforti mold used to make Gorgonzola, Roquefort, and Stilton. Cream is added to the milk, giving Cambozola a rich consistency. Therind of the cheese is similar to the Camembert rind. Cambozola is considerably milder than Gorgonzola. It features a smooth, creamy texture with a subdued blue flavor.

The cheese’s name appears to be a portmanteau of Camembert and Gorgonzola, given that its flavor profile combines the moist, rich creaminess of Camembert with the sharpness of blue Gorgonzola. It also refers to the Roman name Cambodunum of the city Kempten, where Champignon is located.

OK, I knew it wasn’t make in the Bay Area, but this German cheese with an Italian sounding name made by a company with a French name deserves at least some shrine in whatever town Champignon is in. I started searching for more info on my new love and found that people are putting this on everything now. Hamburgers with cambozola, pizza with cambozola, cambozola cheese pastries. It’s everywhere. It’s got a somewhat strong, but smooth taste, but none of that stinky cheese smell. It’s also a semi-soft cheese so spreading it isn’t too difficult. I just finished a snack of cambozola on toast with some barnier olives from Andronico’s and the tastes went well together. It didn’t even clash with the dark chocolate I had to finish my meal. Then I found out that Michael Chiarello of NapaStyle and Food Network fame has made a sauce with cambozola that he sells through NapaStyle and he even gives a recipe for asparagus with cambozola sauce on the Food Network website. OK, I know what I’m making for dinner tonight.

There is a downside to this wonderful cheese though…it’s not cheap. A pound will run you between $15-$20 depending where you get it. We used to find the cheapest at costco, but we don’t go there as often as we rarely need a palette full of anything anymore. If you can keep the addiction in check though it is a great cheese to try. It’s pretty easy to find in San Francisco as most grocery stores have it and it seems to be made only by Champignon so you don’t have to wonder whether you’re getting the best brand or not.