Took this picture back in April, forgot I had it till today.

Before my nap (!), want to share this NY Times article with you about the perfect burger. Because this caught my eye and it makes so much sense and I can’t wait to try it at home:

There’s a lot you can learn from a man who’s griddled thousands of burgers. Michael David, executive chef at Comme Ça brasserie in Los Angeles, had already earned his burger stripes on the team that developed Mr. Boulud’s French-American DB Burger.

At Comme Ça, Mr. David finally nailed the consummate burger on the 11th try.

The genius of his Comme Ça burger is that it is consistently juicy, perfectly seasoned and precisely medium-rare. The patty is charred on the outside and rosy pink from edge to edge.

It is a radical improvement on what most people already do, but it’s not much more complicated. His trick is to treat the burger the way many chefs do a steak.

He puts a good hard sear on both sides using his plancha, the freight train of flat tops, then transfers it to a 375-degree oven to finish cooking. After it comes out, there’s a built-in resting period while he toasts the buns and makes a last-minute lettuce salad.

His method translates to an amazing amount of flexibility. Home cooks who don’t have a plancha can sear the meat either on a grill or on the stovetop in a cast-iron skillet. It works equally well for one or two people, or for a crowd, because you can sear in batches.

The final cooking works beautifully in a toaster oven as well as a regular oven. Or, if you have an outdoor grill that is as large as some people’s kitchens, you can simply move the burgers to a cooler spot once they’ve been charred.

Oh, and after that, take a peek at these movie trailers -

The Road – based on the Cormac McCarthy book, starring Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron and Robert Duvall.

Pressure Cooker – audience fave at film festivals, a documentary about inner city kids vying for college scholarships in cooking.

Shutter Island – Looks like Martin Scorsese has made a horror film, of course with Leonardo DiCaprio … and Max Von Sydow!!!!!

Okay, so it’s 12 years since Hong Kong “returned” to the “Motherland.” The newspapers report that China is “nervous” about the expected size of the annual democracy march planned for today. And yeah, I confess, I’m a bit nervous about China being nervous. No, I don’t expect to see PLA tanks cruising down Nathan Road any time soon. I expect that after Donald Tsang, whose sole accomplishment was making Tung Chee Hwah look good, China will give us someone even more hopelessly incompetent to make us long for the days of Sir Bow Tie.

I’ll say this – normally it rains in HK on June 30 and July 1. This year we have the bluest skies I’ve seen in Hong Kong in recent memory. It’s gorgeous out there. And I think it will result in an even larger turnout for the march than usual.

As for me, I’m spending the day off at home. And it’s a day of peace for me, because my gf’s friends are visiting her. There’s a troop down in the kitchen cooking, eating and chattering non-stop in Tagalog. It’s not quiet but I am being left alone to do whatever crap it is I usually do when left to my own devices.

I’m still quite broken up over the death of my friend and former boss on Monday. Yeah, it wasn’t always peaches and cream between us, but in the balance, he was a very good person indeed and someone I’m better off for having known. I posted some photos of him on my Facebook page and people reacted strongly to those, including a suggestion that I get them to the family so that they can be displayed during the memorial service on Thursday. Which I’ve done. I’m not as good a photographer as I’d like to be, but it’s easy to take great pictures when the subject is great.

I guess in my life, I haven’t been personally touched by death that often. Oh sure, older family members drop off as their time comes. My father’s been dead for 17 years. (My mother, on the other hand, just keeps on going and going and going and going.) But very, very few friends are gone. So when it does happen, it’s still a major shock to me.

Anyway, what else is on my mind today to distract me?

Please make sure to pick up the latest issue of BC Magazine when it hits the stands – I think tomorrow? Aside from the normal crap in my column, I’ve got a feature article that I’m quite proud of: a look back at the Beatles’ concerts in Hong Kong in 1964 and an interview with Uncle Ray.

A report that Paramount studios has dumped a fistful of their executives and a further report that they are looking at out-sourcing most of their home video operations to another studio. This from the studio that’s currently riding high on Transformers. This is of course coming on the heels of my own employer deciding to out-source 99% of their MIS functions. Hollywood in crisis? I’m past the point of caring.

As you might have read elsewhere, Rackspace, a major services provider to the web, had some major outages yesterday. Michele Malkin’s blog went down, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

Simon Cowell’s contract with American Idol ends after the next season. He’s been making noises about not returning, presumably a negotiating tactic and one that’s working because reportedly Fox has offered him somewhere in the range of US$100-144 million PER YEAR. Just for American Idol.

And it’s like, last night, we were watching the movie Knowing. And I wouldn’t ordinarily waste my time watching a Nicolas Cage movie. I mean, outside of Adaptation, he hasn’t done anything worthwhile in at least 10 years. I watched it because it was directed by Alex Proyas, whom I kind of like because Dark City was amazing, and some have said that Knowing is at least a partial return to form for him. And yes, it was recognizably a Proyas film, but also recognizably a Cage film, with his overwrought acting. But most of all, he’s supposed to be this big brain, a professor at MIT teaching astro-physics, and here he is running around with a gun into places that no intelligent person would ever run, simply because it gives him a chance to look concerned and makes room for some spooky effects. You just can’t take it seriously, even though you’re meant to.

(Yeah, okay, the other day we watched Some Like It Hot. And those people do A LOT of stupid shit in that movie. But they’re SUPPOSED to be stupid people! And all of the lunacy is at least logical! And, yes, as I expected, my gf fell off the bed laughing at Joe E. Brown’s final line of the film. Where is another Billy Wilder when we really fucking need one?)

But it got me thinking. I mean, Cage started out doing great work in interesting films. Rumble Fish. Raising Arizona. Racing With the Moon. Wild At Heart. Birdy. And then he hooked up with Michael Bay on The Rock and hasn’t been the same since. What has he done in the past few years? Two National Treasures movies? A remake of Bangkok Dangerous? A remake of Wicker Man? (And soon a remake of Bad Lieutenant.) Ghost Rider, FFS? But all these movies make tons of money, don’t they? He’s probably clearing around $25 mil plus percentages for each of these films. And that means he’s probably got several hundred million lying around. For being bad in bad movies that people inexplicably love. Well, whoever said life was supposed to be fair?

Speaking of movies, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, opens in the US today. I’m a huge Mann fan and the reviews I’ve seen have all been strongly positive. The NY Times says it’s “a grave and beautiful work of art.” They also say it ” doesn’t look like the usual gangster picture, not only because it’s been shot in digital, but also because Mr. Mann is searching for a new kind of gangster story to fit the times, one that makes room for greater ambivalence, and lawmen and outlaws who are closer to one another in temperament and deed.” As usual, I have no idea when it’s opening here.

30s gangster films have been out of vogue in Hollywood since Untouchables. But with the current economic depression, it makes sense to think that people might want to look back at that era.

We are getting Ice Age 3-D quickly, and Roger Ebert said it was the best in the series; though the Times called it “idiotic.”

Well, that’s about all for now. Time for a break. More later, as usual.

Back in the real world, a world where people actually give a shit about something called music, the massive Glastonbury Festival took place in Old Blighty again this past weekend. And to show you how times have changed from when I was just a lil tyke, BBC TV broadcast a highlights show each night with gobs of live performance footage. And thanks to the internet and various illicit technologies associated therewith, said highlights shows can be downloaded via the usual sources. (As if it would show up on TVB? As if!)

For some reason, the math part of my brain ain’t working tonight, but what I got came in 7 separate files totalling somewhere around 8 or 9 hours of music – well perhaps two hours after one subtracts all the between song chatter from the various BBC hosts. Nah it’s not quite that bad.

What’s there to watch and listen to?

• Over an hour and a quarter of Springsteen’s set (so you know I’m happy just from that)
• Probably close to an hour of Blur’s reunion set.
• A healthy chunk of Neil Young including him covering A Day in the Life and shredding his guitar!

And on top of that, how’s about ….

• Spinal Tap with special guest Jarvis Cocker!
• The Specials – who sounded freaking marvelous
• The Doves
• Kasabian
• Crosby Stills Nash but no Young
• Franz Ferdinand
• The Prodigy
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• Madness
• Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
• Bon Iver

I believe they passed a law in England stating that Tom Jones and Status Quo need to appear at every festival, so they’re also here.

And, oh, Ting Tings, Lady Gaga, Paolo Nutini, Bloc Party, Fleet Foxes, Dizzee Rascal, Maximo Park, Black Eyed Peas, Bat for Lashes, Roots Manuva, Amadou & Mariam, Glasvegas and more.

Put very simply, if this is the kind of thing you like, you’ll like this!

Oh, almost forgot, the next day or the day before or something, Bruce played at something called Hard Rock Calling in London’s Hyde Park. He opened with London Calling. And here’s an amateur shot vid of it from the back of the crowd:

If you wanna see/hear Bruce do London Calling, much much better video and audio, here ya go, April 29, 2009 in Philadelphia: