Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Mishpucha (mi familia)
Red Rock Canyon, Las Vegas
Not one minute ago . . .
Jake: What are you doing?
Me: Just scanning a couple —
Jake: It looks like you’re photoshopping.
Me: Huh? No, I’m cropping.
Jake: Well, you’d better not be photoshopping those pictures to make yourself look better than me.
Me: You’re so vain / You probably think this blog is about you / You’re so vain / I’ll bet you think this blog is about you, don’t you, don’t you?
Jake: Huh?
Pix below the cut.
Walnut & Son will be in Las Vegas
. . . from the 12th (today) to the 17th. No telling when or how often I will post, and I will undoubtedly be even more remiss than usual visiting your blogs.
We’ll be staying with my folks, which is always an adventure. My goal on this vacation is to find some GOOD places to eat, and spend as little time in buffets as possible. I would also like to expose my son to some stand-up comedy and/or live theater, if I can find it.
One neat thing: WordPress lets me set the posting date and time in advance, so I have a few goodies planned for y’all. And with any luck, I may even have some Las Vegan snark to share.
D.
Kos biography
The San Francisco Chronicle has a fine article on Daily Kos’ creator Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. It includes the most complete biography on Markos I’ve ever seen. If you admire this guy as much as I do, check it out.
This bit reminded me of Jurassic Pork’s post last week, Walk the Line. JP, does this sound familiar?
As Daily Kos has taken off, life has changed for the family. Elisa said her husband has gotten death threats. A couple of her friends who have Republican spouses no longer want to socialize with them because of what’s on the blog.
“Me, I never talk about politics or religion with somebody unless I know we agree,” Elisa said, who doesn’t visit Daily Kos every day. “But Markos, he likes to debate everything. He’ll say, ‘I can’t believe you feel that way. That’s so stupid.’ ”
Anyway . . . I have a committee meeting tonight, so I may or may not have the energy to blog. Stay tuned.
Have I mentioned our upcoming trip to Las Vegas? Jake and I will be in Vegas from the 12th to the 16th, something like that. Karen’s still recovering from her fractures, so she gets to take a pass on this. As for Jake and I, our main goal is to make it to Red Rock Canyon for some rockclimbing. That, and go to a REAL bookstore.
D.
Put another candle on the birthday cake
Karen had a birthday last week, but who has time to make cake during the work week?
It seems appropriate for people our age to sing things that none of you thirty-and-under-somethings would understand. Who recognizes this number?
Put another candle on my birthday cake
We’re gonna bake, a birthday cake
Put another candle on my birthday cake
I’m another year old today!
That’s from Sheriff John, and you can hear him sing it, too. Unfortunately, Karen didn’t grow up in L.A., so she doesn’t know what the f*ck I’m talking about. Or singing about. But she understands chocolate cake, all right.
The inscription is not Not Dead Yeti, which makes no sense at all, but Not Dead Yet!, which any Python fan should recognize. The recipe is from this month’s Cook’s Illustrated (March/April ’06), and while labor intensive, produces damned fine results. I cut the recipe in half since, as it is, we’re going to have leftovers.
Note to people with kids: the frosting calls for 100% semisweet chocolate. Knowing my son, I used half semisweet chocolate and half sweet German chocolate, and he still considered the result too bitter.
By the way, in case any of you have forgotten, this is what I want on my next birthday cake:
(not work safe)
My mishpucha
Last night, I discovered that I have a very low gag reflex.
Dumbass move of the day
Karen wanted a blueberry clafouti for breakfast today, so, loving husband that I am, I obliged.
In case you’re saying, “Huh? Wha?” a clafouti is a fruit pancake you bake in the oven. Or a giant muffin, something like that. You mix the batter in a blender, and then you pour some of the batter into a deep pie dish and let it set up a bit in the oven. Next, you add fruit, sugar, and the rest of the batter. Bake for one hour. Dust with powdered sugar.
I became inpatient with the “let it set up a bit in the oven” step. After waiting three or four minutes, the batter still had not firmed up, so I placed the dish (a heavy glass pie dish, oven safe, but not Pyrex) over a low heat. I moved it frequently so that it would heat in an even fashion.
The future is now
Jules White, Typewriter, Photo-Collage
Jake finished reading Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger yesterday, so today we had him begin reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night (upbeat stuff, eh?) He got stuck on this passage:
It is a curious typewriter Mr. Friedmann has given me — and an appropriate typewriter, too. It is a typewriter that was obviously made in Germany during the Second World War. How can I tell? Quite simply, for it puts at finger tips a symbol that was never used on a typewriter before the Third German Reich, a symbol that will never be used on a typewriter again.
The symbol is the twin lightning strokes used for the dreaded S.S., the Schutzstaffel, the most fanatic wing of Nazism.
Jake’s problem with this? He’d never seen a typewriter, and couldn’t imagine how such a thing could work.
Even with ample visual aids, he still didn’t quite get it. I showed him the high magnification image, pointed out all the parts, described how they worked. Next, I took a #2 pencil and scribbled out a dense rectangular box of graphite. I flipped this paper onto another paper, and by marking firmly on the back of the first paper, I left a mark on the second.
“Like that,” I said. “The key strikes the ribbon, which contains ink. That’s like the graphite on this piece of paper. It transfers the ink to the typing paper.”
He got it eventually, but the whole thing proved surprisingly difficult. Now, I’m wondering what’s next. Will I have to buy him a sliderule on eBay to prove to him that, yes, you can work trig functions with a clever bit of plastic?
Go on — I know some of you must have similar stories.
***
In other news: suddenly, I’m the WordPress God. I figured out how to put a frog on my header all by myself! You’re looking at a Dendrobates leucomelas, also known as the yellow-banded poison dart frogs. They are native to northern Brazil, parts of Guyana and Venezuela, and they’re a hearty species, easily kept and bred in captivity.
We don’t keep leucs. We keep blue poison dart frogs (Dendrobates azureus), a frog so beautiful folks never believe they are real until they hop.
Honestly, though, I haven’t yet achieved WordPress godhood. I have yet to solve my Blogger importation problems, and I can’t figure out why other computers besides this one refuse to recognize my password. That’s why I haven’t been able to post in the morning. No, it’s not a cookie problem; I’ve made the cookie settings as permissive as possible and it does not seem to help.
Time for The Daily Show.
D.
Wheel of Fortune
Before it became a showcase for the talent of Vanna White, the Wheel of Fortune was a tarot card symbolizing change, luck, the whimsy of fate. Great card if it’s dealt in the standard position (as shown), the pits if reversed (upside down). That’s Fate for you — a strict 50-50, like the coin flip of Batman’s nemesis, Harvey Dent. Heads, you win the lottery. Tails, you’re blindsided by a trucker asleep at the wheel of his semi.
I bought my first tarot deck, one of the classic Rider-Waite decks, my first quarter at Berkeley. Old-timers here at Balls and Walnuts will remember that I had a spooky period — read lots of Castaneda, futzed with my dreams, wandered the Berkeley streets at night like I was on some kind of vision quest. Tarot was part of it.
How does a chemistry major reconcile something as obviously bogus as fortune telling? My theory of tarot, circa 1984, posited that folks reveal far more in their body language than they do with their words. I might not understand what their body language had to say, but my subconscious did. Using the tarot as a sort of Universal Translator, I could free-associate my way through a reading, blathering on and on, wandering from one card to the next and then back again, generating hypotheses, testing for internal consistency, and ultimately arriving at a coherent story.
I’ll bet you’re thinking, “Yah, that’s how all the charlatans work. They throw out a million darts, hoping one or two will be bullseyes.” The trouble with that theory is, I never asked the recipient of the reading for verbal feedback. If he even spoke, I’d interrupt: “Don’t feed the reader. I don’t want you to say a word.” I was reading their body language, you see, and the cards merely catalyzed the process. (more…)
Oyreka!
Know what I remember from the Ancient European Civ class I took in college?
- Historians like Thucydides better than Herodotus
- Writers (like yours truly) like Herodotus better than Thucydides. Herodotus knew how to entertain.
- The ‘y’ in those old Greek names, like the Persian King Cyrus, is pronounced ‘oo’. Thus, Cyrus = Soorus.
- Similarly, the ‘eu’ combo is pronounced ‘oy’.
Eureka = Oyreka!
The boy and I had a good day together in Eureka. True, the neat-o store on 2nd Street which sold carnivorous plants, glass eyes, and faded sepia-toned photographs has closed. It’s a Persian rug store now. Aside from that, however, we had a great day.
The boy and I did lunch at Hurricane Kate’s, where, on the way to the bathroom, I overheard the dishwasher belting out Rod Stewart‘s If You Want My Body and You Think I’m Sexy at the top of his lungs. Yet another food service employee with aspirations towards American Idol.
After lunch, we went shopping for birthday presents —
KAREN, IF YOU’RE READING THIS, STOP NOW!
for Karen, and Valentine’s Day candies too, for good measure. We made a trip to Borders and bought:
For me, Tamara Siler Jones’s Ghosts in the Snow (hey, if I can read PBW’s StarDoc series backwards, I can read Tambo’s Dubric novels out of sequence, too!)
For Jake (think homeschooling), Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Vonnegut’s Mother Night, and The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain.
For Karen (and me, I admit it): a collection of John Varley’s short stories, and Maureen Dowd’s Are Men Necessary? That one’s a birthday present — she doesn’t know about it yet.
Jake wanted to get something for Mom that was HIS idea, so we went back to Old Town Eureka, found another gift shop, and Jake picked out a cool tee-shirt with a crane on it, while I lingered over a pack of Rider-Waite tarot cards. I’ll save my tarot stories for another day. For now, since I’m playing with WordPress for the first time, I’d like to try uploading an image:
The Fool, one of my favorite cards.
D.