Slowly
I feel the muse stirring like an arthritic dog. A seventeen-year-old arthritic dog, begging me with her eyes, Put me down already, will you? But I’m stubborn. She’s not getting off so easily.
Mind you, all of this is happening in idea space. Nothing on paper yet, electronic or otherwise, but notes. Notes on culture, slang, plot, etc. Notes.
I have a setting and a roughed-out plot. It’s a trite plot, which isn’t always a bad thing. I’m hoping it will develop some freshness the more it molders in my brain. But anyway, what I’ve been missing is character. So let’s say we have two policewomen, call them, oh, Cagney and Lacey, and Cagney’s my main character, and yet the only one who is talking to me is Lacey.
But Cagney has to be my main character. She’s the outsider, so she should be best able to see through this foreign culture’s paradoxes and hypocrisies. And yet it’s Lacey who is coming alive in my mind while Cagney remains a few notes on mental paper.
As I endure this process, I’m rereading another alt history SF, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. And I’m wondering if Chabon had a similar problem, since his main character is really pretty simple when you get down to it: he’s an alcoholic cop, a divorcee who pines for his ex. Not too many layers there. He’s stubborn and brave, two musts for a hard-boiled cop protag. Meanwhile, his partner is a hoot — a bear of a man, a Tlingit Jew (hey, you’ll just have to read the book!) who carries around a whopping huge hammer as a sort of enforcer, who has way too many kids, whose wife alone threatens to steal every scene she shares.
Maybe that’s all I need for my Cagney: stubborn, brave, and broken. Maybe I should just let Lacey be the one with all the color.
D.
Daeji Bulgogi
I live in a city where the only Korean restaurant has a big fat B sign in the window . . . and so I am continually torn between risking dysentery and getting my Korean fix. Mind you, I’ve been in this situation before. I’ve lived in the land of Mexican, Chinese, and Nothing Else Ethnic, and I’ve prevailed by dint of my own clever craft. And the internet.
Hence Daeji Bulgogi, marinated slices of pork grilled over coals or, if you’re lazy like me, seared under the broiler. The linked recipe is simple, delicious, all around wonderful. Here are the ingredients, to which I’ve made only one (arguably critical) substantive substitution:
1 pound pork tenderloin, trimmed
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce*
1 1/2 tablespoons sambal oelek or Thai chile paste**
1 teaspoon minced peeled fresh ginger
1 teaspoon dark sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
3 garlic cloves, minced***
*I used regular soy sauce. No, it wasn’t too salty. Daeji bulgogi is meant to be eaten with steamed rice, to tone down any excess saltiness or spiciness. But to my palate, this was neither too salty nor too peppery and didn’t really need the rice. But that’s be.
**This is the critical substitution. Instead of Thai chili paste or sambal oelek, I used a Korean red pepper paste (kochujang — I used “Hot Pepper Paste” imported by Rhee Bros. Inc.) We have a halfway decent Chinese market which also carries Korean, Japanese, Thai, Indonesian, and Filipino foodstuffs. Wasn’t hard finding kochujang.
***I used more garlic than that. I always use more.
OMG I was looking for a picture of kochujang and found this recipe for potatoes in kochujang and red miso. Sounds amazing.
First, I mixed up the marinade in a gallon bag. Next, I cut my pork chops into 1 inch square chunks and pounded the chunks flat. I then marinated the pork slices in the bag for about 45 minutes.
I spread the pork out on a rack and set the rack over a cookie sheet lined with heavy duty foil. I had some space left over, so I coarsely chopped one onion and shook it in the bag with the leftover marinade. I placed the chopped onion next to the pork and stuck it all under the broiler. After about five minutes, I flipped all of my pieces and put them back under the broiler until I saw some black bits — maybe another five minutes.
I served this with steamed white rice and a very simple asparagus dish (this recipe, using sesame seeds instead of pine nuts).
Yummy indeed.
D.
Politically incorrect, but oh well
They put the lovely and freakin’ hilarious Sara Benincasa at #4, so they deserve a shout.
Popcrunch’s 10 Blogger Chicks We Want to See Naked.
Go Sara! We can only love you more!
D.
Happy Holidays
Not a bad Mariah Carey. But is she kosher?
. . . Because I can rerun Sarah Silverman’s Give The Jew Girl Toys only so many times.
D.
What don’t these people understand about “casual encounters”?
Call it a hobby. I occasionally read Craigslist personals — the casual encounters section.
This is where the prostitutes have fled to, now that the law says they can’t advertise outright. (You can always tell the hookers — they think $ is the S key.) They seem to have flown the coop, even in the Casual Encounters section. I’m perplexed, though, by the number of people who don’t get that “casual encounters” means “hooking up.” Some people are looking for a long term relationship. Huh?
And then there’s the woman who has a “healthy attitude toward the Bible.”
He must love the Lord with all of his heart,then I know he will love me with all his heart.
I wonder: what does she think it means that all the guys are sending her photos of their junk? Bunch of bloody Onanists!
And then there are the ones who really don’t know quite what they want. Take the romantic,
These days I fantasize that a person slowly knocks the door of my bedroom, cuddles me and slowly takes me in his arms
which is all very well and good, but
eventually we turn out having sex. And so if you think that you can be the Mr. Right intended for me mail me right now. Now i’m all alone here in my room lingering to get busted thoroughly.
Or maybe I just don’t understand women. Or, rather, women who post on Craigslist.
In other news, my 15-year-old son just came in here wondering what 11-year-old girls want.
For Christmas. He’s doing some sort of charitable Secret Santa thing.
Jeez.
D.
Another reason to read Daily Kos
. . . is for the science.
Depending upon which way you lean, Daily Kos may be one of the few bastions of liberal thought on the internet, or a hotbed of Commie pinko activism. The reality is, it’s a battlefield wherein Obama cheerleaders, self-proclaimed “pragmatists,” and progressive purists regularly get into screaming fits. The only thing uniting this crowd is that we all despise the Republican agenda.
But, back to the science. Pop over to Daily Kos right this instant and you’ll find a book review of How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown, the astronomer whose work on the solar system’s outermost reaches led to Pluto-the-planet’s demise, and the author is participating in the discussion in the comments. How cool is that?
Right below that, author Mark Sumner reports on mega-meteorites striking the Earth in Death From Above, and leads with the provocative question,
Fill in the blank. The Earth suffers an impact from an asteroid or comet generating more energy than the explosion of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima every __ year(s).
You’ll have to pop over there to find out the answer. Sumner provides lots of great information about the science of impacts, the Tunguska event, the Teller Scale of Intolerably Large Disasters, and the Torino Impact Hazard Scale.
And there’s Darksyde’s regular feature, This week in science. The most recent column included a link to PZ Myers’s self-proclaimed “wet blanket” to the arsenic-based life form story . . .
It’s an extremophile bacterium that can be coaxed into substiting [sic] arsenic for phosphorus in some of its basic biochemistry. It’s perfectly reasonable and interesting work in its own right, but it’s not radical, it’s not particularly surprising, and it’s especially not extraterrestrial.
. . . and a link to a report regarding SpaceX’s efforts regarding the commercialization of space travel.
See? Not just politics!
But with regard to politics, I found the cute image below in one of the comment threads. One of my bumper stickers reads “Cthulhu 2008: Why Vote For the Lesser Evil?” This would be a good companion sticker.
Now that’s change you can die for!
D.
Topology timeout
I haven’t ranted political lately because it would all be “head butts wall, head butts wall, head butts desk (for variety).” Count me as one of the liberals so fed up with Obama that I’d like to see a successful primary challenge in 2010. But no ranting. NO. RANTING.
Instead, we’ll turn a sphere inside out.
Hey Obama! Ever read Langston Hughes’s poem Harlem?
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
My favorite comment from that sphere viddy: I WANNAH TRY THIS TA MAH LEFT TESTICLE
There’s a part two, you know.
D.
