Balls and Walnuts
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My son’s ongoing education
Last week we feted him with The Man With Two Brains; tonight, Young Frankenstein.
What’s next? He’s seen all the Python movies. And Dr. Strangelove. Blazing Saddles, perhaps, or a Pink Panther movie?
D.
Currently reading . . .
Let Me In by John Ajvide Lindqvist (NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE!) Interesting vampire foo. Eli is 12. She’s been 12 for two hundred years, but she’s not one of those old-and-jaded child vamps, adults in a bag of kid-bones. She’s really just a kid. Who needs blood to live. And she’s a he.
Hmm, is that a spoiler? I doubt they kept that little detail for the American version of the movie. The Swedish version, Let The Right One In, was quite good, and can be streamed on NetFlix.
Lamentation by Ken Scholes. Far flung future where the one library storing what’s left of human knowledge has just gone up in smoke, along with the city around it. The characters are more archetypes than flesh-and-blood creations, but well drawn nevertheless. Scholes relies heavily on the device of one character somehow intuiting another’s inner thoughts via a facial expression or careless (or careful) gesture. And yet I’m still captivated by it all.
Dexter is Delicious by Jeff LIndsay. Oh, how very different Dexter is in the books than in the TV show! Rita’s alive, Dexter’s brother is alive, Deb knows of Dex’s dark desires, and Rita’s kids are budding Dexters. The one thing in common with the show: there’s a baby! Fun so far but it hasn’t hooked me yet. Like Let Me In, Dexter is Delicious pads a bit too much for my taste. Leave out what your readers skip, dontcha know.
SO what are you reading?
D.
And the winner of the music contest is . . .
DEAN!
And no, he didn’t get fifty million entries, even though he posted fifty million times. Just the max, two.
Wish you could all win but hey, rulez is rulez.
Dean, email me your new address and I will arrange for your teh awesome prize to be sent to you. malmerkin at gmail dot com.
HEY! I just had a great idea for a new drink: absinthe and a slug of espresso, a nice big fat octopus tentacle added in as a stirrer. I’ll call it the Cthulhu Cthooler*.
D.
*Who says I can’t still write.
Salt water chicken
I can’t believe I haven’t blogged this. I MUST have blogged it. But I just did a search, and came up empty-handed.
This is so simple: it’s a simplified version of Julia Child’s roast chicken recipe.
1. Make some brine. I use one heaping tablespoonful of kosher salt and four cups of water.
2. Rinse your chicken and put it in a garbage bag. Set the garbage bag in a big glass bowl. Fill the bag with the four cups of brine. If you like, you can add other things to the brine, such as peppercorns, rosemary, bay leaves. But I really don’t think it makes much difference. Tie off the bag and put the whole thing in the fridge.
3. I usually remove the giblets from the cavity and add those to the bag, too.
4. Leave the chicken in the fridge overnight. This is a very mild brine, so don’t expect 1-2 hours to do it for you.
5. Preheat oven to 425 to 450 F.
6. Coat a casserole dish with olive oil and then add vegies to the dish. Usually, I peel one potato and cut it into big (3/4 inch high) disks, and then I chop one yellow onion and add it to the dish, too. Portabella mushrooms are nice. Today, for the first time, I used a combination of chunks of butternut squash and chopped red bell pepper. It’s all good. Whatever you use will take on the loveliest flavor from the chicken.
Anyway, what you’re doing is building up a platform upon which your chicken will sit. Stir the vegies in the oil, flip the potatoes, add salt and pepper to taste. Place the chicken, back-side-up, on this platform.
7. Brush the chicken with a combination of olive oil and melted butter. Salt and pepper to taste. Pop it in the oven.
8. At 15 minute intervals, brush the chicken with more butter and olive oil. When you have sufficient drippings from the roasted chicken, you can brush with this instead.
9. When the chicken is nicely browned, usually after 30-45 minutes, flip it. The breast side will then brown fairly quickly, usually in no more than thirty minutes.
10. Remove from oven, rest, carve, voila!
Gizzards cooked in this manner (in the bottom, along with the vegetables) will be gloriously tender, not the chewy horrors you’re imagining right now. Livers tend to overcook. Necks are delicious.
The vegies are always great. The drippings are useful, too: you’ll have a combination of highly concentrated chicken stock with a top layer of fat (which is butter + olive oil + chicken fat). I usually save both for use in other dishes.
Julia Child is insistent about the baste-every-fifteen-minutes thing. I’ve left this in the oven for a half hour at a time, no basting, and it does very well. Brining is your insurance against a dry bird.
By the way, I’ve done this with Thanksgiving turkey, too. Takes a special kind of refrigerator to accommodate a turkey in brine, but it’s worth it. Best bird you’ll ever eat, and I don’t even like turkey.
Bon appetit!
D.
Pegged to a tee, and don’t forget the contest
My music contest is still running. Where are all my gentle readers? Or do you all hate Jonathon Coulton?
From today’s Daily Kos, front-pager Laurence Lewis has me pegged to a tee on the question of why I’ll be voting in November:
Recent polls show more and more Democrats coming home, but it is not because they are suddenly much happier with the way Democratic leaders have handled the issues, it’s because they recognize the danger of an increasingly extremist Republican Party. It’s because they won’t be dissuaded from fighting for their own values and principles, even when they believe their own party’s leaders aren’t always joining them in the fight. In some cases, they will vote for more Democrats not because of the Democratic leadership, they will vote for more Democrats despite the Democratic leadership. In short, this is a moment for the Democratic base to prove that it is above the pettiness and the political games, a moment for the Democratic base to make its collective voice heard by saving the Democratic leadership from the political fallout of its own shortcomings.
Read the whole thing, it’s worth your time.
D.
So I finished the trilogy today
I don’t often go for the top 100 stuff, but Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy intrigued me. I don’t think I’ve ever read such a dark story from the YA genre. On the one hand, it’s surprisingly chaste (enough soulful kissing and hand-holding to make a Twilight fan happy, but not even a hint of anything warm and slippery). On the other, the trilogy often wallows in depression and despair.
Premise: post-apocalyptic Earth, not much left in the world except for a relatively tiny group of Americans. SF readers won’t like this bit because Collins doesn’t bother with set-up or detailed explanations. Who knows what trashed 99% of the world’s population or why only Americans have survived. Anyway, here they are, the fascistic, oppressive Capital and its 12 liege states, the Districts. And since the Districts are heir to a failed rebellion nearly 75 years earlier, they must forever be punished in the annual Hunger Games, in which a male and female teen (12 to 18 years old, to be precise) from each District are obliged to hunt one another to the death until only one of the 24 remain.
Classic crucible-type novel, heavy inspiration from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” a certain old Star Trek episode (if he has the time . . . if he has the time), and Roman gladiatorial bloodsports. Collins may not get points for originality, but she does run with the premise and squeeze quite a lot of good drama (some would say melodrama) with a minimum of deus ex machina saves. Think Survivor Man with kids, many of them ill-equipped for the challenge. Kids with nasty sharp weapons.
And it’s all televised. The humiliation of the Districts requires that the citizenry including family and friends of the players are obliged to watch the Games play out to their bloody end. The Capital’s rich, privileged class eat up the Games, of course. It’s great entertainment for them.
The trilogy follows its protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, through her first Games, and of course it would be telling to give you much insight into books two and three. I will say that with regard to who lives and who dies, the conclusion of book three didn’t surprise me, but the way Collins arrived at that conclusion was a bit startling. But do I recommend it? I’m not sure. The first two books were a hoot, and I was impressed that book two didn’t fall prey to the usual middle-book sophomoritis. But the third book was tedious. Look, I understand that the protagonist is being stage-managed, but should the novel feel stage-managed too? Does the author’s heavy hand need to appear on the page again and again?
But it’s YA, I tell myself, and the author’s craft needn’t be at its peak for the book to be successful. Otherwise J. K. Rowling would still be living out of her car.
D.
One fine moment of many
We’ve neglected Jake’s education, deprived him of so many Great Movies. True, we’ve made him watch Godfather I and II and Sunset Boulevard, but he hasn’t seen Lawrence of Arabia, or The Sting, or Little Big Man.
Or The Man With Two Brains . . . until tonight.
We have to make up for his knowledge deficit, and soon. Less than three years before he goes away to college. Hopefully we have the time. Next up on our Netflix queue: Young Frankenstein. He’s seen clips, but he’s never seen the whole thing.
What’s your Must See movie? And oh, don’t forget the contest.
D.
A music contest!
Driving home from the gym today, it struck me, I love this CD so much I wish everyone could listen to it. That CD? Jonathan Coulton’s Best. Concert. Ever.
No, really. It is.
And then it occurred to me that I bet you all have stuff you wish the rest of us could listen to.
Hence the contest.
Here’s the idea: think of a performer or band you dearly love, preferably someone a little bit off the beaten track. Post a link in the comments*. If I haven’t heard of the performer or the band or that particular song, then you have just submitted a valid contest entry. How about we limit two entries per person. At the end of some as-yet-to-be-specified time period, I’ll have a drawing of names (entered twice if you gave me two valid entries), and to the winner I’ll send a copy of Best. Concert. Ever. Because I know you’re going to love it.
If you already own Best. Concert. Ever, I’ll send you something else that’s off the beaten track that I think is awesome.
If you put in an entry I’ve heard before, say, something off Pink Floyd’s The Wall or Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, then I’ll let you know in the comments that it’s not a valid entry, probably by sneering at you with a nasty, “What part of off the beaten track didn’t you understand?” But you’ll still be able to submit more entries until you reach your two.
And in the process of holding this contest, we’ll all (hopefully) get to hear a bunch of stuff we haven’t heard before — and maybe we’ll find something new and different and wonderful to listen to.
Questions? If not, let the contest begin.
D.
*The link must be to something with audio content — a YouTube video, or something with an audio sample from the song, for example; one particular song, please, not just a general link to the whole CD. Ideally, post a link to the song you really love by that performer, from that album, etc.
Funny how it all comes back to you
I guess the stereotypical situation is, Junior brings his Algebra homework home from school, and his parents groan about how much they hated their Algebra class, then die a little inside as they struggle to help him with his homework. But that’s not THIS family. Karen more or less minored in Mathematics at Berkeley, and I was no slouch myself (though nowhere near as proficient as she was).
Still, neither one of us has done much Calculus in the last thirty years, and hey, you forget stuff. You forget the chain rule and the product rule. I even forgot some simple things about taking derivatives. But you know what? It doesn’t take long to recover all those old skills.
I can even recapture some of the joy I derived from Calculus homework . . . the way each problem was a little puzzle, and how great it was to get the right answer in the most efficient manner possible. There’s a saying in science that a lazy scientist is a good scientist, and the same is true for math. If you’re working too hard at something, chances are you’re doing it wrong. Long division excepted: that’s always a bitch.
Is it like that in all disciplines, I wonder? Certainly must be true for programming. And writing, I suspect, since some of the best crafted novels seem so simple at their core. Although messy novels have their place, too.
I can’t wait until Jake gets to Integral Calculus. Now that’s entertainment.
D.
Jury duty
There must have been at least two hundred of us in the room. We were instructed to report to the courthouse at 8:15 AM, but they didn’t even get to the opening spiel until 9:30. The bailiff who gave the spiel fancied himself a stand-up, and really, he wasn’t half bad. But what are you going to do with 200+ people who aren’t really happy to be there?
At 10:00, he read off the randomly selected names in alphabetical order. Now, I think he should have read them in random order, just to heighten the torture. But the way he did it, those of us with 3rd grade or better education knew precisely when we were off the hook. The rest remained anxious to the end.
Interesting how some folks took it in stride while others cursed. Mostly I just waited, anxiously, until the bailiff had passed by us HOs. (And you know how much a HO likes being in a courthouse. Just sayin’.) Roughly forty of the two hundred of us marched off to face voir dire, while the rest were instructed to sit. And sit. And watch the news, or Rachael Rae, or (after lunch) Criminal Intent, or Family Feud.
I had a book. I brought Markos Moulitsas’s American Taliban, which is good, but I can’t get as absorbed in nonfiction as I do in fiction. So during our two-hour lunch break I drove home to pick up my eBook reader. I finished the second Hunger Games book today, and I must say, Collins managed to surprise me a few times. And it wasn’t as big a letdown as middle books in a trilogy generally are. And she only had one minor plot fuck-up toward the end. All in all, good work.
The funny bailiff read off another list of names at 2:30 PM, this one somewhat shorter, maybe 30 names. And he was back again at 3:20. We all cursed. We were so close — we knew we would be discharged, free as birds, at 4:00! But he only came back to tell us we were discharged a little earlier than planned. Free to go for another year.
So all in all not as much fun as I had the LAST time I was stuck in the juror pool. Followup to that old post: I found out that I was tossed because of my views on child endangerment. My patient, who was a friend of this judge, told me that by stating my views so forcefully, I had come close to disqualifying the entire juror pool!
That’ll teach ’em to bother a doctor.
Anyway, thank heavens they didn’t pick me today. Now I can go back to work and do what I do best: eat pork rinds for lunch while I speed-surf the ‘net.
D.