Thing of the Day: Iron Fork/Vampire Weekend

Iron Fork Nashville

Good week!

My rebuttal to the CNN article on "hooking up" was published in the campus paper, which led to a huge amount of support from friends and strangers (thanks for the comments and the love, everyone!) as well as several moderately uncomfortable moments, such as a professor leading a class discussion concerning the matter as I sat blushing and awkward, my mother somehow finding the article (stop Googling me, Margarita) and BBMing me a series of messages praising my writing and scolding my opinions, and a stranger named Terri commenting on the Vanderbilt Hustler website that I will surely never get a reporting job because of my views on sexuality. Either way, the positive response was overwhelmingly larger than the negative, and I'm really glad I wrote the piece.

Eating adventures were plentiful as well. On Wednesday, my roommate and I had one of the most excellent Nashville culinary experiences of my college career. Several weeks ago, we had bought tickets to Iron Fork, an Iron Chef-esque event that takes place every year in the Country Music Hall of Fame. I had never actually been to the Country Music Hall of Fame, and to experience it for the first time in an open-bar-unlimited-sample environment while watching chefs from several of my favorite Music City eateries (Acorn, Eastland Cafe, Sunset Grill) battle it out in in a live show with an actual secret ingredient (purple sweet potato?!?) was nothing short of weekday perfection. The next day, in continuing my search for the perfect pad thai in Nashville, I had lunch in great company at East Nashville's Thai Phooket and was pleasantly impressed. Despite the hole in the wall location (trailer in parking lot), the food was both delicious and cheap--definitely the best Thai I've had in the South thus far.

The weekend brought Rites of Spring, a Vanderbilt concert with a scheduled lineup of Cold War Kids, Phoenix, Drake, Passion Pit, Ben Harper, and more. Although sake bombing caused us to miss Cold War Kids on Friday, Phoenix was amazing! Passion Pit unfortunately cancelled due to "illness" (or, "we're hungover and don't feel like playing in the rain), but the rest of the acts put on a great show.

And the perfect closing lazy Sunday: I just got back from Date Night. Tina Fey is possibly the only female I find funny ther than Chelsea Handler, and the movie was a high point on both her and Steve Carell's parts. Except for the fact that (spoiler alert, sort of) in a high-action scene, the day was saved by a Kindle. Details aside, this would clearly just never occur in real life. I wonder how much Amazon paid 20th Century Fox to have their silly gadget featured in such a heroic scene, because there's no way I buy it. An iPad, maybe, but a Kindle? Spare me, Amazon.

In other news: I can't stop listening to Vampire Weekend's Contra, although I don't really understand what a Contra is. Is it like Contra-band? Or Contra-dict? Wikipedia says it might be referring to a Japanese video game, or a Nicaraguan rebel army, so I'm really not sure what VW (Hipsters--is this an approp abbrev for Vampire Weekend?) is getting at, but I think the song and the CD are great. Also, why do hipster bands and popular rappers always think its okay to make up words and phrases? The only one other than Contra (because, apparently, Horchata is a thing) that I can think of right now is "Badonkadonkdonk" but I'm sure a quick review of this decade's hip hop songs would provide us with at least 50 more.