Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: December 2008
It has to be said
Happy Freakin’ New Year
I resolve to feed my brains to fewer zombies. How about you?
D.
This will consume your every waking moment
. . . if you let it.
The Spoony Experiment.
Imagine the arcane principles of Mystery Science Theater 3000 applied to the crappiest video games ever made, yet freed of the censoring influence of television. That’s Spoony. An example:
The X-Files review (sorry, didn’t embed well)
Noah Antwiler, the creative genius behind The Spoony Experiment, rips movies in addition to video games . . . but Jake and I don’t bother with that end of the site.
D.
‘Tis the Season
For latkes! Below, my recipe for potato pancakes (from a 2005 post). But first: anyone up for live blogging tonight, or are y’all still Christmasing?
Latkes (potato pancakes) For my wife and son, both small eaters, I use one good-sized russet potato, one small onion, and two eggs.
Peel and coarsely grate the potato. Add about 1/2 teaspoon of salt and toss to mix. Over the next few minutes, the potato will give up some of its water. You can pour this off, but in my experience the ultimate pancake is only subtly different.
Beat two eggs in with the potatos. Add a heaping tablespoon of matzo meal (NO, flour or bread crumbs will NOT substitute) and mix well. Coarsely grate one small onion and add this to the mix. The onion is optional, but I think it adds considerable character. Freshly ground black pepper is a must.
The matzo meal will absorb some of the liquid over the next five minutes. That’s about as long as I have patience to wait. In a nonstick pan, heat vegetable oil (a thin layer — don’t skimp, but your pancake shouldn’t swim, either) until a bit of potato sizzles.
I make my latkes about three inches across. I flatten them slightly with a fork. If your cooktop doesn’t heat evenly, turn the pancakes before flipping. Before flipping, you want ‘em GBD, as Alton Brown says (golden brown and delicious). The second side will brown more unevenly than the first, but don’t worry about that.
Drain. Serve with sour cream.
Or just eat ’em hot.
D.
Chicken Thingie!
I finally got around to trying to replicate that chicken thingie at Nora’s in Las Vegas. (Sis, you really have to check that place out.) Not an exact replica, since I didn’t know how much my son would appreciate an orange sauce on his chicken. He doesn’t do “sweet” with dinner, not at all, and he’s sometimes resistant to “sour,” too. What kind of kid doesn’t like sweet and sour pork? My kid. But I digress.
So the challenge was to create perfectly cooked chicken thighs — tender meat, crispy and savory skin — with some sort of rich, flavorful sauce. Don’t get hung up on details here. Follow the general principles, and you can make a delicious Chicken Thingie, too.
Lantsman
This made my day:
I recognized the accent of my nonagenarian patient, so I asked her where she and her husband were from originally.
“Poland,” she said.
“Hey! Half my people are from Poland,” I told her. “My mother’s half of the family. They came from Lodz.”
She brightened even more . . . a thing of beauty. “We are from Lodz!” And of course she pronounced it better than I had (“wooj”).
When she and her husband left, they wished me a happy Hanukkah. They may be in their 90s, but their jewdar works very, very well.
I couldn’t stand it anymore. So what if I’m the only one who cares; I broke out the menorah tonight and lit up the candles. I don’t have enough candles to last eight nights. Hanukkah miracle, anyone?
At Lodz Shetlinks, you can take a Virtual Tour of Jewish Lodz. This sounded like a lot of fun until I took the tour, which looks a lot like this.
Graves. Lots and lots of graves. Thanks for bringing me down, guys! But at least they have some photos of the sole surviving synagogue,
So how strange was it for me to run into a couple of Lodz natives? Not that bizarre, I guess; Lodz is Poland’s third largest city. That’s right — Poland’s Chicago. No big deal, right?
But it felt good, just the same.
My grandparents, if they were alive today, would be (as best I can figure . . . they lied about their ages and didn’t know their true birthdays) about 105. I miss them, even though they drove me crazy.
D.
Just because
Why leave adolescence behind when the humor is so awesome?
(From Cracked.com. And on a different note, some people really take their American Idol seriously.)
D.
Frogger
Long-timers here (and folks in Crescent City and Brookings) know I’m a frogger. I keep poison dart frogs. Hmm, I haven’t really talked about that since 2006, so if you didn’t know about the frogs, or you forgot, you’re forgiven.
As I write this, I have Stickam up and running so y’all are welcome to sign on and say hi. Over in another window, I’m perusing Black Jungle for plants and other terrarium gear. You see, I’m revamping the frog tank*. I do minor maintenance (water changes, plant-trimming, furniture-rearranging) every few months, a bigger cleanout about once a year, and a major revamp every few years. We’re overdue for the big revamp.
This time, I want The Perfect Waterfall. I always manage to screw up my water feature, but this time . . .
I started with floral foam bricks. Today, I glued them together (using aquarium silicone) in an irregularly staggered stair-step, and now I’m letting them “cure.” I also went to a retail quarry and begged a few scraps of slate. The idea is to mush everything together with the aid of aquarium silicone and Great Stuff. My tank is already plumbed for the pump. Basically, it’s a huge false bottom setup, but there’s a drainage grommet in the big tank that drains down to a small tank in the aquarium stand. There’s a pump in the small tank which pumps the drained water back up to the big tank through a separate grommet. That’s going to be the source of my waterfall, my No Longer Lameass Waterfall.
I want better plants this time, too — I’m tired of that philodendron (or whatever it is) with the enormous leaves. It took over EVERYTHING. I want my tank to look like this. Wish me luck!
Yes, I’ll take pictures.
D.
*No, I don’t have time for this, but the sight of my beloved frog tank in such disrepair has been weighing on me. And my poor frogs are stuck in little Sta-in-Pets, waiting for me to do my thing. Of course, it’s a good question whether I should transfer them back. The frog tank is in our garage, which during the summer months was an OVEN.
Duggars name #18 for Iraqi academic
I was intrigued by Michelle and Jim-Bob Duggar’s choice of name for #18: Jordyn-Grace Makiya Duggar. Makiya? At first I thought Jim-Bob had hit a random fantasy name generator, and I regretted that the world had not welcomed Jotil-Snebanina Warsulo Duggar (that was MY choice for the betting pool), but then it occurred to me: perhaps this fella has more on his mind than how to find the inspiration necessary for the procreation of #19 without resorting to ungodly pastimes. Perhaps he has a political agenda.
Meet Kanan Makiya, Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. This is an interesting guy:
Makiya has collaborated on many films for television, the most recent of which exposed for the first time the 1988 campaign of mass murder in northern Iraq known as the Anfal. The film was broadcast in the U.S. on the PBS program Frontline under the title Saddam’s Killing Fields and received the Overseas Press Club’s Edward Murrow Award in 1992.
From the Frontline interview, “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero”:
What is your own image of evil? Have you ever had an intimate personal encounter with it? Does it have its own taste and smell and configuration? …
Evil is something that, when you see it, when you know it, it’s intimate. It’s almost sensual. That is why people who have been tortured know it by instinct. They don’t need to be told what it is, and they may have a very hard time putting it into words. … That’s the nature of the phenomenon. It’s hard to put into words. But you have to have that intimacy with it, that kind of shoulder-to-shoulder rubbing. …
In order for me to understand evil, to see something as evil, I have to be able to see myself in it somehow, and yet not be there. If I’m not able to do that, then it’s just a phenomenon. It’s just a thing — terrible, bad, whatever — [but] it’s not got that intimacy.
[Snip]
When I handled the paperwork of the Iraqi bureaucracy, as it has killed tens of thousands of its own citizens, I see evil. I look at the paperwork. I look at the squiggles of the line and I wonder about the person who wrote in his handwriting style. …
I have a register which lists 397 eliminated villages, Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. … The work is called “The Register of Eliminated Villages.” You flip the pages, beautifully scripted and done with a pencil. Then the writer of this book has covered it, folded it very neatly with a nice, great big book cover made of paper, with great big white flowers against a red background. It’s a very decorative, pretty thing. … You look at this person who has taken such immaculate care of this book, which records the destruction of 397 Kurdish villages. … You look at the book and you know you’re touching evil somehow.
So the Duggars have named #18 for a guy who quotes Hannah Arendt. I’m impressed. On the other hand, Makiya does say things that would make him very popular with those Christian Fundamentalists who think that the only thing worse than Teh Islam is Teh Gay . . .
At this point in time, in this place, at this conjuncture in our history, religion did drive those planes into those towers. In that sense, in some deep sense, some deep way, religion is responsible. … Not any religion, but Islam in particular. But you just have to change the time and the circumstance, the moment. Move back 50 years, a hundred years, whatever, and you can have an entirely different circumstance. …
I have always thought there were dark … corners in religion. I took that for granted. That’s not the surprising thing for me. … The frightening thing is rather that, in the Arab world, we have let the darkness of religion flourish. The forces that are dampening it at this moment in our history are weak, and that is frightening. …
I call bullshit. 9/11 wasn’t about religion. It was intensely political and economic — and considering the developments of the last seven years, it was horribly successful.
Any guesses for the name of #19? Considering #18, I’m betting on Jillian-Kristol Wolfowitz Duggar.
D.
wiped
I finished early today, mostly because this was my last day of IT training and the instructor covered the afternoon’s material in record time. I figured I would get home correspondingly early, but the traffic was not cooperative. Highway 101 in particular was a bitch, a parking lot from Petaluma to Rohnert Park. You wouldn’t think sitting on your ass would be tiring, but there’s something about traffic that really takes it out of me. When will the Japanese invent cars that do all the driving for you? At least then I could put the time to good use.
I’ve decided I want too much out of life. While I’m thankful I have a great job at a time when having ANY job is a blessing, I want more time for my family, too. The little pleasures . . . like making a good dinner for them. Tonight, since I still managed to get home 20 minutes earlier than usual, I was able to make a pasta puttanesca. That’s a dish a guy can be proud of! Not like last night, when I fixed ’em some sausage. Might as well make Hamburger Helper.
And I want to write, and I want to read my books, and I want to study for the Sleep Medicine boards exam, which is only an option in 2009 and 2011. (After 2011, I would need to do a one year sleep fellowship AND take the test to get board certification.) I want to work on my blogs and my medical website and I want the muse to wake up and I want, I want, I want. I’m telling you, I want too much. And I need to start thinking about the job search, since the current gig is temporary, and if they don’t find me a permanent spot in the system I could find myself in dire straits next August.
This weekend, I’m going to see if I can find some audiotapes on sleep medicine. If so, at least I can put my three hours or road time per day to good use.
How do people do it?
D.