Balls and Walnuts
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I am writing
Just very, very slowly.
Here, watch this:
Now, I really really like the way Bjork mispronounces English. It wouldn’t be Bjork if she spoke American (or even British) English. But that does lead to certain misunderstandings of the lyrics. For example, in Army of Me, I was sure she was saying,
and if you complain once more
you’ll meet her, Annie Oakley
Which is a pretty creepy way of saying, I’ll kill you dead. Except she’s saying,
and if you complain once more
you’ll meet an army of me
Which I suppose I should have figured out from the title. Oh, well.
D.
They don’t make Republicans like that anymore.
Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed . . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
And there are precious few Democrats who would be caught dead echoing this idea.
D.
For the Challah days
There’s two loaves there. Karen braided 1.5 loaves. I am a braiding dyslexic.
D.
Zeitgeist
This is not a funny story. I think it says something about human nature, but it doesn’t say anything particularly nice about human nature.
Once when Jake was young and we were still into traveling a lot by car, we were driving down the 101 to visit Karen’s parents, and we stopped for dinner at a hotel restaurant. It was someplace between Garberville and Santa Rosa . . . Ukiah perhaps. We were one of about six families there. The place had a window-wall overlooking the pool, and it was early enough and warm enough for there to be people at the pool.
The odd thing is, we — all of us, all six tables at the restaurant — noticed at the same time a woman wearing a bikini who really should not have worn a bikini. You know those tiny rubber bands we use to put jaw fracture patients into elastics? Well, maybe you don’t know. So imagine a rubber band, the loop of which has perhaps a 1 centimeter diameter. Now imagine a few of those rubber bands stretched around a marshmallow. Not an ordinary marshmallow, either, but one of those new and improved humongous marshmallows that comes eight to a package.
Every time she got up out of her lounge chair, there would be a collective over-dramatic gasp followed by laughter. We couldn’t have coordinated it better if there had been one of those live studio audience prompters telling us to LAUGH or GASP. It was really uncanny and really mean but many people there were near tears and it just kept going on and on, maybe for twenty minutes or longer before she finally went back to her hotel room.
We weren’t the only young family in that restaurant. We weren’t the only ones who had apparently forgotten our responsibility as example-setters. I’m quite sure that if you cornered any one of us and asked him if it was okay to laugh at a fat person, he would disagree strenuously. And yet there we were, laughing.
I think about this scene every now and then, and I still don’t quite understand it. I’m guessing that if we had seen this in a movie, very few of us would have laughed. If we had been out there past the window-wall, sitting pool-side with her, no closer nor farther than we were in that restaurant, we definitely would not have laughed. Something about the fact that it was real and we had that wall of glass between us. Something.
I’d compare it to the sleazy feeling you might get laughing along with an audience for a racist or misogynistic comedian, except I know (from experience) that I don’t laugh in such circumstances. Do we have a less well developed sense of political correctness regarding obesity? Or is obesity not the issue here — were we merely laughing at someone with poor taste in swimwear?
I like that last possibility, of course. But it seems overly generous.
D.
yeah, I’m still here
just have nothing to say.
Here’s a link to all the Bulwer-Lytton contest winners starting in 1983.
And here’s the 2010 winner:
For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.
–Molly Ringle, Seattle, Washington (2010 Winner)
D.
A passing resemblance?
Yesterday, one of my older patients said to his wife, “You know who he looks like? That guy. You know. The one who played John Adams.”
Having missed that one, I flashed on some actor in a powdered white wig . . . but a little trip to IMDB later that day revealed he was referring to Paul Giamatti.
I dunno . . . I don’t see it.
Mee krob
Mee krob is one of those pain in the ass Thai dishes that even the Thai restaurants rarely make. Back in Crescent City, we had a lovely restaurateur/chef who would make it for us if we begged prettily. Aside from her* mee krob, most others have been overly greasy, or have used too much sauce such that the rice stick becomes soggy.
Every so often I get it into my head to try to make this stuff, and oh boy does it make a mess. Conceptually, it’s similar to Pad Thai, but the additional step of deep frying seems to raise the difficulty by an order of magnitude. Oh, well. Consider it part of the Thanksgiving feast, a few days late.
Here is, roughly, what Mee krob ought to look like:
The basic idea is that you have fried rice stick (Chinese is mai fun) dressed with a sticky, peppery sweet/sour sauce, then tossed with sauteed green onions and red peppers, scrambled eggs, and a variety of other things, including garlic, tofu, fresh cilantro, freshly chopped green onions, and meat if you like. I used some leftover chicken breast and a few shrimp. You dress the thing with the cilantro, chopped green onions, some un-sauteed red pepper slices, and bean sprouts.
Here’s the basic recipe I used, but I had to adapt it. I knew the sauce would be all wrong — way too salty for starters.
If you can find whole tamarind, you can probably find tamarind paste. It’s at most Asian markets. I used two tablespoons of paste with two of water. But here’s my sauce — you can compare to the original if you like, but trust me, this is the real deal:
4 tablespoons tamarind juice (see above)
4 tablespoons fresh lime juice
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon Vietnamese fish sauce
1 teaspoons lime zest
1 heaping tablespoon tomato paste
1 tablespoon Chinese red pepper sauce
Combine the ingredients and simmer until it begins to thicken. Set aside. Ideal consistency is a bit thicker than room temperature pancake syrup. Too thick and it won’t incorporate into your fried rice stick easily, and too thin and it might soften your rice stick.
The sauce can be made ahead. The next step is to prepare your various vegies: separate the white and green parts of the green onion; chop your cilantro and your red pepper — I used red jalapenos; wash your bean sprouts. Dice your tofu and dry it on paper towels. Dice four cloves of garlic.
Lightly fry the tofu, then place in the oven to keep warm (I used a 300 F oven).
Saute the white part of the green onion with some of the red pepper, and once the onion is nearly done, add the garlic. VERY lightly saute the garlic (you don’t want to make it bitter!) Keep the sauteed vegies warm in the oven.
Saute your shrimp if you’re using it. I added a tablespoon of the sauce while sauteing to add flavor. Put the shrimp in the oven to keep warm.
Fry up your rice stick. Here are some tips: unless you have a huge deep fryer and want to use a ton of oil, pre-cut the rice stick using kitchen shears. Rice stick will fly everywhere, so put the “bale” of rice stick into a gallon bag, then cut it with shears. You are trying to create flatter “bales” so that they will submerge in less oil.
Set your rice stick aside on paper towels.
Once you’ve made the rice stick, the clock really starts ticking, since this stuff goes stale FAST. The only thing left is the egg. The linked recipe recommends dripping egg into the hot oil. I did this in batches, and the way I did it was to put two scrambled eggs into a sandwich baggie, seal it, then snip a little hole at one corner. Swirl the egg into the hot oil.
Everyone should do this at least once just because it’s fun. BUT. This is easily the greasiest part of the dish, so in the future I will forgo the scrambled eggs in oil bit and do it the Pad Thai way (make an omelet and cut it into strips).
Toss together your sauteed vegies, sauce, and rice stick. Use a big bowl or else this will be damn near impossible. You can put your other warm ingredients on top or on the side. Finish with garnishes of bean sprouts, cilantro, green onion, and red pepper.
It’s beautiful and the flavor is decadent. It’s the closest thing that a main course ever comes to being dessert — probably because of all the greasy stuff and the sweetness of the sauce. You may note that I cut down on the brown sugar by 1 tablespoon, but it’s still fairly sweet . . . as it should be.
This isn’t something you’ll do once a week, or even once a month. But for an occasional treat, and probably for company (provided EVERYTHING else can be made in advance and kept warm), it would be a show-stopper.
D.
*Her name is Koon and her restaurant is Sea West, a true gem. Indeed, the two best restaurants in that town are Asian. Thai House (a Vietnamese restaurant — don’t ask) is the other gem.
music is subjective, but . . .
I recently added three albums* to my iPod: Rasputina’s Oh Perilous World, Vox Vermillion’s Standing Still You Move Forward, and Portishead’s Third. I picked up Oh Perilous World because it sounded interesting:
The storyline of Oh Perilous World, essentially, is an audit of six years of post-9/11 America and its domestic and foreign policies under President George W. Bush’s administration, but told through a fictional steampunk parallel universe. In this world, America is ruled by the tyrannical Queen of Florida, Mary Todd Lincoln, threatening war and occupation of the small, third-world sovereign of Pitcairn Islands (a metaphor for the Middle East) using her blimps and airships. Her opposite number in Pitcairn is an Osama bin Laden-like resistance leader, Thursday October Christian (in real life the offspring of Fletcher Christian, leader of the Bounty mutineers who settled on island).
and because, well, I really like Rasputina — at least based upon their live album A Radical Recital and their debut album Thanks for the Ether. The Vox Vermillion album I bought because I liked their stuff on Pandora, and Portishead . . . well, I’m a dope. It’s taken me this long to realize they had a third album. You know — Third.
I’ve listened to the Vox Vermillion album once. I haven’t even finished Oh Perilous World. Neither of them can compete with Third. I lack the vocabulary and knowledge to write a decent album review, so here’s a link to a review that does the job quite well.
And here’s an amazing song, and a mesmerizing video to boot.
D.
*Albums? Disks? Collections? People still speak of a discography, but isn’t “disk” only a little less archaic than “album”?
Noise, and the nearly nonexistent lefty survivalist
About a week ago, I finished Darin Bradley’s Noise, a novel about college students responding to — and some would say helping to precipitate — TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it, an acronym common on survivalist web sites, along with WTSHTF: when the shit hits the fan). In some ways, Noise is an infuriating novel. Bradley wrote it following the completion of his PhD in English literature and theory, and it shows. He writes in the postscript, “So I had a head full of cognitive theory and nineteenth-century American utopianism, and I had loads of free time.” The novel often reads as though Bradley had just finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and said, “Hmm, you know what? Not lyrical enough.”
That said, I loved Noise and recommend it without any other reservation. Alternating chapters relate the first person narrative of “Hiram” (who, with his college roommate “Levi” have adopted new names to fit their new identities in the post-WTSHTF world) and The Book, a cobbled-together guide to surviving TEOTWAWKI. The details of TEOTWAWKI — referred to in Noise as “the Collapse” — are sparse, but Bradley suggests an economic bust so profound that governments and law enforcement fragment, its individual subunits going rogue in a last-ditch effort to survive. Hiram’s chapters detail his and Levi’s efforts to “get the jump” (predict the Collapse so as to get a head start on last minute preparations), put together a Group, bug out of their college town of Slade, Texas, and make it to their Place, which they have called Amaranth. The Book chapters would make a fascinating read all by themselves, as they provide a manual for how to survive and ultimately thrive in the most ruthless of new (post-apocalyptic) worlds.
Hiram is little more than a boy. The memories he draws upon to ground himself in this new world are of his days in the Scouts and his all-nighters playing Dungeons and Dragons. Bradley masterfully orchestrates the interplay between Hiram’s memories, the dictates of the Book (theory), and the things he must now do (practice). To commit sometimes horrific acts of violence, he and the rest of his Group have adopted new names, wear face paint or masks, carry out their actions in a somewhat ritualistic manner, and afterwards reassure one another with, “What you did was right.” That last essential closer is what in my opinion makes this a truly haunting work, for it is the acceptance of the perpetrator’s new society, his Group, which makes maiming and murder not just socially acceptable but laudable to them.
This book has stayed with me. I won’t spoil the ending here, but I will say that the closing image was predictable yet still remarkably powerful.
And this book has played into some of my own fears and anxieties about the world and the shit we’re getting ourselves into. I’ve been beefing up our somewhat meager emergency kits, trying to think both of the relatively trivial emergencies like breaking down on a drive over the Grapevine in the middle of winter, and the big ones, TEOTWAWKIs. In the course of doing my internet searches, it soon became apparent that survivalist types are largely right-wing and, well, religious. And that led to what I had thought at first was an innocent question, but has turned more interesting than I’d first thought:
Are there any liberal, lefty, left-wing survivalists, or are they all rifle-toting God-loving Obama-hating rednecks?
Drawing inspiration from just about anywhere
Yeah, not often I find a new recipe playing Facebook Scrabble (oh, they don’t call it Scrabble, but are there really any differences?) But when it occurred to me to check whether I could add a E to BARD to create BARDE, thinking perhaps it would be an alternate spelling, the game said yeah, go crazy guy. So then I wondered, is BARDE just an alternate spelling for BARD, or is it something else?
Yes, it’s an alternate spelling. But it’s also:
bard or barde 2 (bÉ‘Ëd)
— n
1. a piece of larding bacon or pork fat placed on game or lean meat during roasting to prevent drying out
And it so happened I was roasting a chicken at the time. So I quickly cut a few bacon strips in half and decorated the top of my chicken with them. This was about 3/4 through the roasting process; I always start with the bird breast-down, do her ’til she’s toasty, then flip her over and finish her breast up. And then I make dinner, yuk yuk yuk.
Karen and Jake both liked the end result, and they finished all the bacon, too. Which just goes to show, (as we all knew) everything is better with bacon.
D.