Café Manna is self-described as “one of the first 100% vegetarian restaurants in Southeastern Wisconsin”. Located on Brookfield Road just south of Capitol, this relatively new restaurant can easily go unnoticed from the street, but is worth the trip. In the interest of full disclosure, it should be known that I am not one to go crazy over vegetarian or vegan cuisine and prefer my dinners to involve some sort of meat. That said, it is something that I knew my wife would enjoy so I figured I’d give it a shot.

My first impression when we walked in was extremely positive. We were warmly greeted by the employees and immediately seated. Although Café Manna is in a very small space, they have it arranged very well and it in no way feels cramped as many small restaurants do. We were promptly brought out a small plate of pita chips and their homemade cashew coconut hummus, which was an incredibly tasty change of pace from the standard bread and frozen unspreadable butter that you get at most restaurants. Coming from someone who normally balks at the idea of a vegetarian entree, their menu had a plethora of choices that appealed to me, with many marked as gluten-free, raw, and/or vegan. I eventually settled on their Peace Bowl with Curried Cashew Crunch and Jessie chose the Falafel Platter. Our meals came out to us quickly and were presented beautifully on the plate. As good as it may have looked, it tasted even better. Many people are afraid of curry because of its spicy reputation, but they were very even-handed with it and it had the perfect amount of spice versus flavor. My only complain with the meal was that the pyramids of rice could have been a little larger, to soak up the extra sauce. To drink with dinner, I had a kettle of Coconut Chai hot tea from Zhena’s Gypsy Tea, which complimented the meal perfectly. Although neither of us felt like having desert after the meal, they had some very tempting options, including Banana Fig Pudding and Ginger Macadamia Nut Carrot Cake, which topped my list of what I’d like to try next time.

I will definitely be eating here again and, unless you are adamantly opposed to vegetarian cuisine, I’d highly suggest it to anyone who asks.

Here’s the info:

For quite some time now I’ve been looking to separate this blog from my personal domain name, Primakow.net. This isn’t something that I have taken lightly, however, and I have spent a considerable amount of time attempting to find the right domain name for this blog. I now present to you the newest refresh of my blog, now with it’s own domain:

If you came here looking for a website about a tasty type of spiced tea, you will be disappointed. The word “Chai” (pronounced from the throat, Ḥai), for those of you that are unfamiliar with it, is a prominent word in Judaism meaning “life” or “living”. The phrase “Chai Life” may a bit repetitive, but I chose it because it is also catchy, easy to remember, and is a nice Jewish twist on the idiom “the high life”.

Evan, you ask, will the site be changing? What differences will there be in store for your loyal readers in the future?

Fear not. Everything that has ever been posted here is still here and you will still be able to look forward to rants, news, political opinion, random instances of funny, and all of the other posts you may come here to read. It will just be on a new domain name. Above and beyond the random posts (both in topic and frequency) that I tend to make, I will also be slowly rolling out an online store via the excellent services provided by CafePress. More on that to come. In the mean time, please enjoy the Chai Life.

Apparently, Microsoft’s Bing search engine was holding some sort of contest to come up with a jingle for the site. For some unknowable reason, the winner (of a $500 prize) is a video named “Bing Goes The Internet” by a guy named Jonathan Mann. You can watch it in a below, but I warn you: It will get in your head, you will hate it, and you will probably never want to watch it again. Don’t worry, though, Microsoft has no plans to use it in a national ad campaign.

As you may already have been aware, 20th Century Fox was attempting to kill Futurama – again – by recasting the voice talent. Petitions were circulated, people were upset, the Internets were in an uproar, and for the second time in recent memory (the first being renewing the show) Fox made the wise decision. News sources all over the ‘net are reporting that Futurama has been saved – again. The network and the original voice cast have reached an agreement and they have signed a new contract. Now we just have to wait for new episodes to air in mid-2010 with their former voice acting goodness.

Public enemy number one of the financial crisis, Bernard Madoff, is locked up in a federal prison in Butner, N.C. Although his punishment may not bring relief (or money) to those he scammed, there is a little more icing on the cake. The New York Post is reporting that fellow inmates are looking to rough him up a bit to beef up their reputation. According to a source for Post who has a relative locked up with Madoff, “Some of the guys were talking about smacking him around a little, just to get the notoriety of it.” Sadly, the flip side to the story is that not everyone in lock-up with him feels this way. Apparently, many view him as a stand-up guy for pleading guilty and not implicating anyone else. “He got a lot of respect from other inmates because he didn’t tell on anybody, he didn’t take everybody down with him,” the aforementioned source said. Regardless, he’s got it coming. I hope he and his cohorts enjoyed their years of living off the trust and fortunes of others, because for as long as a written history will be kept of this recession, he will be remembered as the scum he is.

It has been brought to my attention that the powers that be are looking in to recasting Futurama. This is unacceptable. Very seldom in the history of television has this worked out to the benefit of a show (be it voice actors or live actors) and this would not be one of those times. The voice talents of Billy West, Katey Sagal, John Di Maggio, Tress MacNeille, Maurice LaMarche, Phil LaMarr, and Lauren Tom are vital to the series and it would not be Futurama without them.

If you agree with me, please take 30 seconds of your life to sign the following two petitions and share them with your friends:

http://www.petitiononline.com/futura13/petition.html
http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/futuramarecast/

Emoji Icons are a rather extensive set of icons (Emoji being the Japanese word for what we call emoticons or smilies) that are common in Japanese text messaging and web sites and are essentially have been standardized in Japan. They are available on the iPhone and are very fun to use, but it takes a bit of trickery to get them unlocked. Here’s a step-by-step on how to unlock them. Once unlocked, you can sent them in text messages, emails, or whatever else you can type on the phone and they will be viewable by anyone who has a phone or computer that supports them. Even other iPhone users, even if they haven’t done these unlocking steps themselves. So, without further ado, here’s how to unlock them:

1. Install the “Spell Number” app at the iTunes App Store. Don’t worry, it’s completely free.
2. Once installed, launch the app.
3. In the box, type this exactly: 91929394.59
4. As soon as you have that typed in, without doing anything else, press your ‘Home’ button.
5. From your home screen, go to Settings -> General -> Keyboards.
6. Choose International Keyboards, then scroll down to Japanese, click it, and turn on Emoji.
7. That’s it! You’re done! Thought it might be harder? Too bad. You can delete the app now, unless you feel you need it for other purposes. Whenever you’re typing, there will now be a little icon on the bottom left to switch back and forth between Emoji and English (or whatever other languages you use).

Here’s a small selection of the 461 emoji icons now available to you:

There’s been a ton of talk about the big new features that everyone loves in the latest version of the iPhone’s operating system. Copy & paste, landscape keyboard, MMS (Still waiting on you, AT&T!), and of course better speed come readily to mind. What hasn’t been discussed as much, however, is the small stuff that might not be headline worthy, but is still great to have. In case you’ve missed them, I’ve put together a list of my five favorite of the smaller features.

• Keyboard Updates
  No, I’m not talking about landscape keyboard. Click and “hold” (don’t remove your finger) on certain keys, and you now get new options. It’s much easier to show than it is to explain, so here are two of the new options:
  
  
• Undo Typing
  You typed something you didn’t mean to type. It happens. Instead of holding down that delete key, just give your phone a shake and it’ll pull up a nice little box asking if you want to undo the text.
  
  
• Linked Phone Numbers
  You’ve probably noticed that if you get a text message, email, or visit a website that has a phone number on it, it looks like a web link. Click on it, and it will automatically call that person. So how could Apple improve on this? Click and hold the phone number and you’ll see. Now you’ve got the option to call the number as before, but also to send a text message to that number, create a new contact card for the number, or add it to a previously existing contact.
  
  
• LAUGHING OUT LOUD
  However much I resist the urge, I still somehow let the letters “lol” be typed on my keyboard. No matter how many times I tried to get it to learn, the prior iPhone OS’s auto-correction demanded that the letters be in all caps. I don’t know about everyone else out there, but rarely if ever do I type the letters “lol” and simultaneously actually laugh out loud. As such, the appropriate way to type it would be lower case. There’s no need to shout it, when it really means something more along the lines of “hey, that’s kinda funny”. One of the first things I noticed when typing text messages is that Apple finally realized this and it now defaults to it’s lower case form.
  
  
• Closing Apps While They Open
  Previously if you clicked an app to open it, even if accidentally, you had to wait until it fully loaded until you could then quit it. Especially with some games, this took a bit. Now all you have to do is press the home button and it immediately closes it. There’s not really a way to post a screen shot of it, so just try it out and see for yourself.

I hope you learned a little something new about your phone with my list. Got something else you love that I missed? Feel free to share it in the comments.

For those of you who don’t teach at Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) or, as is the case with myself, aren’t married to someone who teaches there, then you are likely unaware of the crippling requirement that MPS imposes on its staff and the damage that it does to its students. If you are employed by MPS, you must live within the city of Milwaukee. Not Milwaukee County, mind you, but the city itself. There are, of course, a handful of nice areas to live in, but to restrict where someone is or is not allowed to live simply because you are their employer is unjust.

The reasons behind the requirement, when it was instituted in the late 70’s, seemed at the time to make sense. If teachers live in the communities that they teach in, they will send their kids to schools in the city and will therefore better relate to the schools, helping the community as a whole. After 30 years, however, one can easily see that teachers tend to live on the outskirts of the city in a few select neighborhoods, often not anywhere near the school at which they teach and many teachers send their kids to private schools, not community schools.

The socioeconomic failure of the residency requirement might not be enough to justify its repeal, but the drastic limiting of the job pool is. At any given time, there are 500+ vacant teaching positions throughout the district. Without opening up applications to teachers who already own homes outside the city and don’t want to sell or who are otherwise unwilling to move in to the city, there is simply no way to fill the open positions. There are certainly tons of excellent teachers throughout the district, but for the schools to tell themselves that they don’t frequently end up hiring bad-eggs simply because they need to fill positions that they have too few applicants for is a lie and, most important of all, is unfair to the students. For every low-quality teacher that the city is forced to hire out of desperation there are plenty of teachers currently working – or unemployed – in the surrounding areas who would jump at the chance to get the job if it didn’t mean selling their home and moving to the city. If the purpose of the residency requirement is to benefit the students to build a better future for the city, then which is more important: Hiring anyone who applies because there are too few applicants or having an abundance of applicants, even if they might have to commute, and being picky with who you choose to teach the city’s youth.

There are two ways in which Milwaukee’s teacher residency requirement can be repealed:

• Legislatively, the state senate and assembly can pass a bill which would make it illegal. This has been unsuccessful many times before, but is nonetheless being tried again this year with Assembly Bill 89 and Senate Bill 54. I encourage you to contact your representatives and tell them to support those bills.
• The teachers’ union also has the power to undo the requirement through collective bargaining. Both the MTEA and WEAC support a repeal of the requirement, but it falls below things like salary and benefits when it comes to contract negotiations and ends up being tossed in the pot as a bargaining chip.

Regardless of which how it is done away with, the residency requirement is antiquated and needs to be repealed.

There are some awesome videos floating around on the Internet, but few are as unique as getting to watch the last minute of a satellite’s life before it crashes in to the moon.