While turnout might not be terribly inspiring for today's CD 8 Special Election primary, the candidates will still have their events, spin their win or loss, and probably tip poorly. If you're interested in possibly seeing a Republican cry, take your chances at one of their election night festivities this evening. Of course, you could just leave your browser on The Range and just keep hitting refresh as we cover the results. Your choice.

Frank Antenori, El Parador (2744 East Broadway).

Jesse Kelly, Viscount Suites (4855 E. Broadway Blvd).

Martha McSally, Radisson Suites (6555 East Speedway Blvd).

Dave Sitton, Jonathan's Cork (6320 East Tanque Verde Rd.).

Ron Barber will not have a public event tonight, partially because it would be weird to have a victory party when he doesn't actually have an opponent.

• The unbeatable game

Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only person who spends absurd amounts of time thinking about subjects like whether all the games on Freecell can be solved, but then, every once and awhile, there's a brilliant moment of validation, like "Unbeatable," a feature on The Gameological Society (a new spinoff of the AV Club, which was a spinoff from The Onion). It turns out, only one game is unbeatable, #11,982:

Members reported other troublesome hands across the participating newsgroups. Hand No. 285; No. 1,941; No. 21,320. These took time, but eventually they were cracked. Hand 11,982 remained. With 31,999 hands completed, Ring called an all-hands on the final hand. A week later, No. 11,982 still stood unbeaten. It was over. They had lost.

Or not. Ring never regarded winning every hand of FreeCell to be the project’s goal. To him, Turpin’s post, along with Horne’s vague help file, was more a question than a challenge.

So when that final push on No. 11,982—an effort aided by humans and even a handful of game-solving programs—met with failure, Ring celebrated. Is every hand in FreeCell winnable? No. Thirty-one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine hands are winnable. And one isn’t. He proved that. He had solved one mystery of the universe.

Oh, Uncle Ted. We'd love to see you perform at the Pima County Fair on April 28th, but you might end up in some secret detention facility if you don't tone down the rhetoric (bold added for emphasis):

”We’ve got four Supreme Court justices who don’t believe in the Constitution. Does everybody here know that four of the Supreme Court justices not only determined you don’t have the right to keep and bear arms, four Supreme Court justices signed their name to a declaration that Americans have no fundamental right to self-defense? That sounds like a stoned hippie. That doesn’t sound like a Supreme Court anything.” The musician went on to say: ”If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will be either be dead or in jail by this time next year."

[WSJ]

A small caravan of food trucks will convene at Brookline College at 5441 E. 22nd Street this Thursday, April 19. There's more on the event over here.

My favorite truck these days has to be Ni Hao Amigos, which serves both Mexican and Asian fare out of a cool, weathered old truck. They're next on the list for a Food Truck Diaries piece, which have been woefully scant due to my intensely hectic schedule but will be returning with gusto - with special guests! - in the coming weeks.

Thank goodness. I was really concerned that a alt-rock musician that I hadn't thought about in a decade or so was jumping into a relationship with someone I've never heard of.

Very exciting concert news today, at least as far as I'm concerned, as Stateside announced that Of Monsters and Men are coming to the Rialto on May 31st. Tied possibly with Tanlines and Fred Hammond, I've probably listened to the debut from Of Monsters and Men as much as any album this year, so much that I wrote a very excitable blurb about the band in the March/April issue of Relevant Magazine.

You're going to love Iceland's Of Monsters and Men. Remember how you felt about the first Bon Iver record? Remember how you flipped out when you first heard Mumford and Sons? Maybe you’ve sung along loudly to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros' “Home”? That’s how you’re going to feel about Of Monsters and Men’s debut album My Head is an Animal.

It’s not that they sound specifically like any of those groups, but they exist in a similar emotional indie folk space as those bands. What makes their music memorable is that there’s an undercurrent of joy in their male/female vocal leads, a sweetness mixed in with a wistfulness that exists in the simplicity of their melodies and instrumentation. There’s something about hearing their music like it’s a handwritten note attached to a descending balloon. It might not matter where they came from, since there’s enough to unpack in the emotions of the album on its own. Since they're from Iceland, you might have some trouble remembering the band member's names, but their music is so memorable, emotionally resonant and likable, you'll feel like the group invited you to a campfire...assuming they do that sort of thing where they're from.

Tickets go on sale Friday at 10 am and range from $22 to $29.

Yesterday I was at the Tucson Taste of Chocolate event at the Doubletree Hotel where I was a judge along with Karyn Zoldan, Edie Jarolim, Mary Paganelli and three other celebrity judges. It was a fund raiser for the Rincon Rotary.

You would not believe all the ways people presented chocolate. There were all the usual suspects: cakes, cupcakes, cookies, fudge and a chocolate fountain. But then there was salted chocolate nut bark, a chocolate empanada, chocolate nut praline, turtle cookies, chocolate pizza, something called chocolate Charlotte, chocolate balsamic vinegar, a chocolate enchilada, chicken mole and much, much more. Some places had just one item; others had three, four, five or more.

It was lots of fun and utter heaven.

There were four categories: Restaurant, Caterer, Bakery and Just Chocolate – I judged the last two.

I don’t have the People’s Choices winners but the Judges’ Winners are below the cut:

In order to rapidly lose weight ahead of their weddings (theoretically to men that love them just the way they are), some brides are taking to replacing the "eating" process with the insertion of a feeding tube into their nose which provides "a constant slow drip of protein and fat, mixed with water, which contains zero carbohydrates and totals 800 calories a day." This is actually something people are doing and not an elaborate joke from The Onion.

Yesterday I took another cooking class at the Foundation for Inter-Cultural Dialogue. This time it was Japanese food.
I have to hand it to the instructor – sadly I didn’t get her name – but she had to step in at the last minute because the original instructor’s kids were sick. She did a fine job. First she made an earthy mushroom soup. Then she did a shrimp curry and finally a noodle dish with vegetables and chicken. All were prepared in propane burners which was an amazing feat. There was a cadre of helpers, including a videographer who made sure we could see all the stirring and bubbling and brewing.

We got to eat the results of course. Everything was great, especially the soup.

Then the women of the Foundation served up a wonderful meal of Turkish food. There was a fantastic mixed bean salad and another salad with carrots and yogurt (yogurti havoc slatasi) and yet another salad with tender bites of potato and greens. The couscous was absolutely delicious. There were breads – one was a buttery roll wrapped around potatoes mashed with red pepper. Another was called – I believe ramazan pidesi - that was filled with a mild cheese and topped with nigella and sesame seeds. Desserts were wonderful as well. One was a take on baklava but rolled in small cigar shapes. The other was what I thought was lemon squares but turned out to be a moist, moist light spongy cake.

There were others as well including a creamy pudding.

I did research on the names with no luck. Is there anyone out there that can help?

But the best part was the camaraderie and sense of community afterwards. The crowd was a mixed bag of mostly women. All ages, all backgrounds. It was pretty neat. Everyone hung out afterward and ate and chatted about food and family and life.

These classes are pretty simple events, nothing like you’d see out of a professional kitchen, but they are a great time. You learn something, you get to eat great food, and you meet wonderful people. I recommend them highly. The next class is rumored to be Filipino food and a date hasn’t been set but if you contact the Foundation they’ll put you on the list and will let you know when the date. They like to take a head count, of course.

Pitchfork has the entire Dr. Dre/Snoop Dogg set from Coachella, and it's absolutely worth watching, if only for the parade of guest stars, including Kendrick Lamar, Wiz Khalifa, 50 Cent and Eminem, but let's face it, all anyone really wants to see is the clip of a holographic 2Pac seemingly returning from the grave to do a few tracks at an indie rock concert in the middle of the desert. It's an interesting use of technology, albeit more than a little creepy.

Related: