To some people, this may be a fairly minor achievement, but I am very happy to announce that Beyond the Rhetoric is officially one of the 10,000 most popular blogs on the Internet, according to my Technorati ranking.

It’s been a long (and fun) journey, but things have really picked up these past couple of months. It wasn’t that long ago that I cracked the top 20K. I can only imagine going into the top 5K, top 1K, and top 100 will be ridiculously more difficult.

I’d like to thank everyone who has been sending backlinks my way, especially people who are participating in geeky link trains and blogging tips memes. Very much appreciated!

Maybe with this growing popularity, an upcoming contest will get a heck of a lot more exposure than the three entries I got in the T-shirt contest. Having two huge prizes valued at over $180 each… well, I guess that doesn’t hurt either. Stay tuned and be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed so you’ll know exactly what’s going on.

You might be the next big winner! (And get some link love from a PR5, Technorati top 10k blog too.)

After surviving the Grouse Grind, I felt that I deserved a culinary reward. Thankfully, I live in a city that has no shortage of good food, so I went on over to CityTV’s 5th Annual Taste of the City. I went to the same food festival last year, but I found the venue to be much more inviting this time around. The food, on the other hand, was nowhere near as classy, nor was there as much variety as I had seen in the year before.

The way that Taste of the City works is that you go to a ticket booth and buy a sheet of food tickets (not to be confused with food stamps). They were available in sheets of 10 for $5 or sheets of 20 for $10. In both cases, it works out to 50 cents a ticket. I would have liked if there was some sort of incentive to buying the larger sheet, because otherwise you have no real motivation to pony up the extra five bucks up front. In the end, Susanne and I split 30 tickets between the two of us.

One of the first stops that we made was at the Nando’s Chicken booth. Nando’s is well-known for making some truly fantastic barbecue chicken and our experience at Taste of the City was no exception. The outdoor BBQ could be detected from blocks away. The chicken itself was cooked on an open flame, and then you had the choice between three sauces that they would then slather onto the crispy skin. There was lemon herb, medium hot, and extra hot.

Joey’s Restaurants was in attendance, and we decided to give their Ahi tuna taco a go. The girls manning the booth, so to speak, were nice to look at, just like the servers in the restaurants themselves. Unfortunately, the food at this outdoor venue wasn’t nearly as attractive. I’ve had the Ahi tuna at Joeys before and it was definitely better than what they were offering at Taste of the City.

We went later in the evening (around 6pm), so there weren’t as many people around as there would have been earlier in the day when Taste of the City opened its doors at noon. The festival ran until 8pm.

Keeping with the barbecue theme, I walked on over to Sate Satu, a place that specializes in modern Indonesian food with a distinct Dutch influence. Their barbecue skewers looked a lot like the food at Richmond Night Market, so I wasn’t all that interested. I believe it was 6 tickets for 2 skewers (which works out to $1.50 per skewer). They had beef balls and chicken chunks.

I know that there is more to Indian food than just butter chicken, but it’s a staple and I couldn’t help myself. Here is the plate from Maurya Indian Cuisine. For four tickets ($2), you get some rice and a few chunks of succulent butter chicken.

One of the newer eateries in town is Cassis Bistro, located near Homer and Pender in Downtown Vancouver. They were offering Coq au Vin (free range chicken braised in red wine, mushrooms and pancetta) and the pot that you see below, Daube de Boeuf, which is basically a boneless beef shortrib stew with Porcini mushrooms and red wine. The meat was tender and very tasty.

Last, but definitely not least, the BC Chef’s Association was in attendance, but they weren’t doing anything fancy at their booth. Instead, they were serving up bratwurst with sauerkraut on a hot dog bun. I topped it off with a little ketchup and dijon mustard. Yum.

Yes, I stuffed my face and it was great. It wasn’t quite a Japadog and I’m not quite Kobayashi, but that bratwurst was satisfying nonetheless.

Remember when the kids were cute? Remember when they were young? Turns out they weren’t that innocent after all…

 

The last time that I went to do the Grouse Grind was a solid two years ago, and regrettably, I haven’t exactly kept myself in the best of shape in the meantime. With a little bit of convincing from some friends, I went to tackle the famous hiking trail — sometimes referred to as nature’s stairmaster — bright and early on Saturday morning at 8am.

Given that it was the weekend, the trail was very busy with tourists and locals alike, so part of the challenge was a) getting past slower people and b) getting out of the way for faster people. In any case, I managed to survive the grueling climb in about the same amount of time it took me to do it two years ago, you know, when I was still a young man.

My friend Angela brought her camera along for the ride, so she took a few pictures along the way. Here I am as I struggle up the trail.

After you get to the top, you can choose to either hike your way back down — which can be a little dangerous and a little torturous on the knees — or you can pony up five bucks and ride the gondola back to the bottom. Obviously, we opted for the latter. Here I am with some of my friends. I’m the goof holding the “downloading ticket.” On a side note, being the geek that I am, you can imagine what was the first thing I thought of when I was handed a ticket for downloading.

At the peak of Vancouver that day, it was very foggy, as if we were in the middle of a cloud. Go there on a clearer day, and there are a number of activities and performances to enjoy. They have random stunt shows and a couple of other things to see, but the vicious hike is probably Grouse Mountain’s biggest attraction during these summer months. Go in the winter and you can enjoy some decent snowboarding and skiing.

If you’re ever in Vancouver, I recommend that you set aside a bright sunny morning to tackle nature’s stairmaster. Times will vary considerably, with the fastest of the fastest being capable of finishing in under 35 minutes (there’s a 70+ year old man that completes the Grouse Grind in about 45-50 minutes and he sometimes does it up to three times in one day). The average, relatively fit person should be able to complete the hike in about an hour and a half.

Wow. Just wow.

A little while back, my mom and I went to T&T Supermarket — a Taiwanese-style supermarket with all sorts of Asian specialties — and we happened to find ourselves in the produce section. There, they were selling what the sign called “Taiwan mango”, but what I saw were mangoes that looked like they went through the dryer in reverse. Like, seriously, these mangoes looks like they were on steroids. When I picked up the plump mango, it definitely had some weight and girth to it. They were priced at $0.99 a pound, so we decided to buy one just to try.

We got to the cash register and the clerk put the fruity behemoth on the scale, telling us that this single piece of fruit was a whopping two pounds. One mango, two dollars. It’s not quite as expensive as Korea — if The Daily Kimchi is to be believed — but that’s pretty damn pricey by Vancouver standards. In any case, the mango was still a little raw, so we waited a couple of days as it ripened. Eventually, it looked like it was ready to be consumed, so we cut it up. (Sorry, I didn’t take any innard pics, but the inside looked pretty much like a normal mango.)

Well, the net experience was that this mango was tasteless, had a strange (almost grainy) texture to it, and all in all, was a big waste of two bucks. Word to the wise: Buy small or normal-sized fruit. Buy organic fruit. ‘Cause it seems that the uglier it looks, the sweeter it is.

Yeah, don’t buy this… even if it’s twice as big as a can of Coke.