Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
About Walnut
View all posts by Walnut
Old Grandfather
After a productive (and certainly thought-provoking) interview in Bakersfield today, I drove to Ontario. This is a 2.5 hour drive, more or less: 99 to the 5, 5 to the 210, 210 to the 57, 57 to the 10. In Southern California we name our freeways, but most of these are unnamed. 210 is the Foothill Freeway, and 10 is the San Bernardino, unless you’re heading west, and then it’s the Santa Monica. 57 is the Orange. Makes for interesting directions.
210 through Pasadena and Arcadia qualifies as Old Stomping Grounds, methinks, but you wouldn’t expect a freeway to provoke memories. (Not unless you count the 110, AKA Pasadena Freeway, which every car-lover MUST drive at least once in his life. Wikipedia says it “is now known as a dangerous, narrow, outdated roadway” — primarily because the curves were engineered for a max speed of 45 MPH, and some of the on ramps are so short as to be merging death traps. But driving the 110 is an experience no one ever forgets. You’ll need to have this on tape, though, for background music.)
So what’s so evocative about the 210? This mountain range, the San Gabriels (here’s the big version):
Mt. Wilson is the old man of the mountain, who unfortunately has his head in the clouds in this photo. I had forgotten how much this range had reminded me of a sleeping giant. These are childhood memories, largely tossed aside even by age 10 or 11; but yeah, as a kid I could see shoulders, gangling arms and legs, a bald head bristling with antennae (there are lots of radio towers up there — also hidden by clouds). As I inched along the 210 in 6:15 PM rush hour traffic, I kept sneaking peaks to the north. Mountain ranges are not constellations, after all. They change appearance by the mile, and I wanted to catch the profile I knew so well from the 60s.
And suddenly, there he was, Old Grandfather, silent and slate-blue, just as I had remembered him.
You can go home again, but what waits for you exists only in geologic time.
D.
Ephemera
I followed Dean’s friend Graham back to Graham’s blog and discovered that I had missed International Talk Like William Shatner Day. The guy in the video, Maurice LaMarche, claims to be the third best Kirk impersonator. Naturally, I had to find out about the two “best” Kirk impersonators.
Kevin Pollak does an uncanny Kirk:
Sadly, I couldn’t find a clip of Kevin Michael Richards doing Kirk, but I did find one of Kevin Pollak doing an awfully good Christopher Walken.
D.
When did that happen?
We only use one TV, Karen’s big flat screen TV which we keep in the master bedroom; and the only time Jake ever watches TV is either (A) when Mythbusters is on, (B) there’s some educational program Karen wants him to watch, or (C) there’s something on MSNBC or Comedy Central appealing enough to pull him away from the internet.
Last night, Countdown had footage of four lion cubs, so we hollered out for Jake to come see (since he’s a feline fanatic). Karen was brushing her teeth or some such and when she came out, she and Jake were briefly standing side by side. And good lord, he’s almost as tall as she is!
You always hear people say, “Enjoy them when they’re young, it’s over faster than you think,” but it’s stuff like this which drives it home.
Off topic, but: I asked him if he would mind if we sold the downstairs TV. It weighs a ton and we rarely use it. Correction: I’m the only one who uses it, and I think I’ve watched it three times in the last six months. It’s ridiculous to keep shlepping it around with every move.
It used to be Jake’s playroom TV, but if I remember correctly he stopped watching videotapes about the time we bought it. He’d watch his old Battlebots tapes, and that’s about it. He doesn’t even do that anymore.
So I think I have a name for his generation: it should be called the post-TV generation. I guess you might call it the internet generation, but so many of us are internet-fixated, the label is too general. But my generation grew up with TV-as-babysitter, and TV as primary source of entertainment all through my childhood and teenage years. I suspect many of today’s kids are weaned from TV and hooked on the net by the time they reach their 7th or 8th birthdays. Maybe sooner.
I think this is a good thing. The net is far more interactive, and, I would argue, challenging. If you don’t believe me, check out Closure, an odd black-and-white game which requires a great deal of outside-the-box thinking. I bogged down on level four; Jake finished it. (Oh, and yesterday he played a net game in which the goal was to psychoanalyze and cure various neurotic animals. He cured the sheep straight away, but the turtle was very troubled indeed.)
D.
Eating jellyfish
Watching people eat jellyfish, you would think it wasn’t a delicacy. What is the matter with these folks? This stuff is good eats.
How do I describe it, though? That’s not easy, but I’ll try. First thing you have to realize is that jellyfish has little or no flavor of its own; it acquires flavor from its marinade. Typically, this is a mild sweet/sour liquid accented with sesame oil and green or red chili peppers. The jellyfish I had tonight at Tin’s Tea House Lounge (cuz I was too lazy to walk the extra block to P.F. Chang’s) was nicely salted, too, and they served it on a bed of sweet beans. Mung beans? Azuki? I have no idea. I liked them, though.
So yeah, the flavor isn’t difficult to imagine, but the texture is more of a challenge. Closest thing I can compare it to is fresh cucumber pickles — it has that same vegetable crispy-crunchiness (but NOT the crunchiness of a carrot, for example). Watching those YouTube videos, you might think jellyfish is slimy or chewy. It’s certainly not slimy, but chewy? Well, YEAH, you need to use your teeth on this one, but it’s not chewy the way geoduck, abalone, or calamari are sometimes chewy.
I don’t understand why folks have a problem with this. If people are able to stomach durian, they ought to have no problem at all with jellyfish.
I’ve only ever had to spit out one food in my life. My high school girlfriend’s mom said it was fish stomach and I believed her. It had the texture of phlegm. She called it jook, but I have since learned that jook is a rice porridge and does not have the texture of phlegm (or at least it shouldn’t). I think her “fish stomach” comment predetermined my response.
How about you — what did you have to spit out?
Keep it PG-13, please 🙂
D.
Eating Portland part deux
I think interviews went okay today, but I always feel like I’m either blathering or too quiet. For this interview, I tried to err on the side of too quiet. Perhaps it’s like the early stages of a romance, when mystery is a good thing, so that your date is free to imagine anything she likes about you. Blathering ruins the mystery.
On the other hand, I blathered like hell on my first date with Karen, and she still married me. It must have been especially entertaining blather.
We dined at an upscale joint tonight. I’m not sure my salad is on that menu. Spinach, check; roasted beets, check; Walla Walla onions? I don’t think so! And there was blue cheese, too. Tasty salad.
For dinner, I had the Petrale Sole, also not on that menu. It’s hard to pay attention to the food when you’re focused on staying engaged and looking like you have two neurons to rub together, but my sole was excellent. Tender flesh, thin crisp crust (perhaps from a thin layer of flour and finely ground bread crumbs, but dammit I really wasn’t paying attention, so I’ll never manage to replicate it!), side of sauteed root vegetables, a nice pilaf beneath, and a saffron beurre blanc. Yes, I would return.
Good food. Good company.
I’m catching the red eye tomorrow: 6:20 AM. Folks in the department tell me that TSA doesn’t even show up until 5, so there’s no point getting there two hours early. I’ll get up at 4:30 . . . that should give me plenty of time.
Waiting game follows.
D.
Eating Portland
As usual, the appetizers were the best part of dinner. That and the view.
I began my evening at a place recommended to me by the realtor who shlepped me around town today: the Portland City Grill, a surprisingly* tasty eatery on the 30th floor of the US Bank building, AKA “Big Pink”:
I made it in time for their Happy Hour, and ordered a margarita and an oyster salad. The latter consisted of two small fried oysters topped with a citrus/mango salsa, served on a bed of mixed greens tossed with a balsamic vinaigrette. I could have easily made a main course of it.
From there I walked a few blocks east to the original McCormick and Shmick’s, where I ordered fried calamari with three sauces, and the rainbow trout entree. I found it mildly amusing to imagine ingesting a fish bone and asking my interviewers tomorrow to please pleeeeease scope me and pull the damned thing out. Won’t that make a fine first impression! Especially when I whine and complain with every centimeter of the scope’s passage.
The calamari was top notch: tender, not chewy. Two of the dipping sauces were standard, a tartar variation and cocktail sauce, but the third was cilantro and green onion, sweet and tart. As for the entree, it wasn’t bad rainbow trout but it wasn’t anything spectacular, either. Some sort of beurre blanc, topped with bay scallops and teensy tomatoes. The vegies (mashed potatoes and green beans) were perfect, though.
Interview tomorrow!
D.
*A killer view and good food? Yup.
Ice cream with chunks of Toffler
After dinner, I loaded up my laptop and GPS into my backpack, along with my defunct Blackberry (which I use as an alarm clock, address book, and eBook reader), my cell phone, and the little gizmo that lets me log onto the hospital computer from a remote terminal, so that I can answer my patients’ emails. If I was into the iPod thing I’d have loaded that into the backpack, too. Tomorrow, when I leave my car in long term parking, I’ll take my Blue Ant Supertooth* and toss that into the backpack, too. Yes, I can fit all the electronics I need into one rather-heavy-now backpack.
I like to tell my son about our junior high school computer, the one that filled a room and looked like HAL’s memory from 2001. Most of that monster’s memory was dedicated to understanding Basic, and what little was left over could be taxed by a Blackjack program.
Earlier still, in our home growing up we had a built-in black-and-white TV with a built-in fish tank above it. (How’s that for intelligent design?) I can’t remember that TV ever working. TVs back then had radio tubes (pause a moment to explain radio tubes to my son) and a dial to change the channels. My parents still have one of those dial-type TVs, and gets decent reception on one channel. I showed it to Jake the last time we visited.
We still own a CRT-type TV, but we rarely watch it. It used to be our good TV. Nowadays, I turn it on if I’m working in the kitchen, peeling shrimp or what-not. I imagine we’ll replace it soon with a flat-screen TV. Considering how infrequently we watch it, we probably ought to sell it before we move. Sucker weighs a ton.
Not that the flat-screen TV is a lightweight, but considering the size of it, it’s amazing I can lift it. Meanwhile, our stereo from 20+ years ago languishes in boxes, and I’m beginning to wonder about the utility of hanging onto our VCR. VCRs. We have two. Not counting the one I used to have in the Crescent City office.
With any luck, my son should live well into his 80s, and maybe beyond. I wonder sometimes about what we’ll achieve with regard to life extension. But even ignoring that, Jake should see the late 2070s or even the 2080s. What will we see together? What will he see that Karen and I won’t live to see? Will all that gear I lug in my backpack fit into a wallet? Will it be built into a fancy set of eyeglasses, the ultimate heads-up display? And when will we start internalizing this gear?
As a sometimes science fiction writer, my mind wanders to stories where technology has allowed us to cheat death. If we could load the sum total of our knowledge, our personality quirks (mannerisms, diction), our logic and style and creativity into an AI, would anything be missing? We’ll probably see an AI beat the Turing test in our lifetimes; will we see one so sophisticated that we can’t tell a loved one apart from his AI doppleganger? I suspect so. At that point, have we cheated death?
. . . Which is what it’s all about, at least for me. It’s not my own death I fear (not MUCH, anyway!) but the death of loved ones. As I’ve said a hundred times, if I were a better Buddhist none of this would bug me. I’m simply too attached to this business of living.
D.
*cuz some of us don’t like looking like Borg, and besides, those other thingies hurt my ears.
Snopes, you gotta love ’em
Today, a patient told me I could make Mountain Dew glow in the dark by combining it with baking soda and hydrogen peroxide. He referenced this YouTube video.
I’m still enough of a chemist to realize that soft drinks don’t fluoresce, so I checked the last word in urban legends: Snopes.com. And, guess what: it’s bull.
I bet the Mountain Dew people love that viral video. Sells lots of Dew. But I bet they’re less enamored of the rumor that Mountain Dew shrinks your nads.
D.
Your musical interlude
Have I mentioned lately how much I dig the Dandy Warhols?
Love the song, but I also like the narrative of this video. Reminds me a bit of Atom Egoyan’s Exotica.
Good Dandy Warhols starter CD would be Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia, or perhaps the latest one, Earth to the Dandy Warhols. Dandy Warhols Come Down is excellent, too. The only one I’m a bit indifferent to (of the ones I’ve heard) is Welcome to the Monkey House.
That’s all I got tonight . . . and sorry I haven’t been around much but today is representative: up at 5, home by 8. Okay, this was a bad day, but I wanted to hear those violins 🙂
D.
Sausagy nonsense
My pal Lucie sent me a link to a recipe for Merguez sausage. I printed out a copy, but now the darn thing is locked behind a firewall! The only thing more nonsensical than locking things behind membership-only firewalls is putting it up for all to see and THEN locking it away.
I’ve made some minor changes. It’s my recipe now.
(Why pork? It seems to be one of the few meats I can still tolerate.)
Toast heaping half-teaspoonfuls of cumin seeds, coriander seeds, and fennel seeds until slightly smoky, then grind in a spice grinder.
Add this to 1 lb of ground pork, along with 2 tablespoons of finely chopped fresh cilantro, 1.5 teaspoons of salt, 1 teaspoon of paprika, and 1/2 teaspoon of Spanish smoked paprika (you can substitute red pepper flakes or cayenne). Mush it all together with your hands, and when it’s all nicely mushed, form it into sausages.
No, I haven’t tried them yet — I’m letting them air-dry in the fridge — but they smell lovely. I’ll keep you posted.
D.