menu

• thai chili garlic fried noodle with carrot, broccoli rabe, and lemon basil
• stir fried bekara, miso-honey sauce & bok choy with oyster sauce
• bacon and mustard greens quiche
• lamb kofta or something meatballish with yogurt, and some type of naan or roti
• kale and butternut squash risotto
• salad with strip steak, hard-cooked egg, and sugar snap peas; roasted purple potatoes

CSA Week 3

• sugar snap peas
• bok choy
• 5 carrots
• bekara (a japanese choy)
• kale
• curly mustard
• green leaf lettuce
• lemon basil
• broccoli rabe/raab/rapini
• mesclun

From Chris Dodd's people, this is just hilarious. Wolf Blitzer is such a tool!

ubuntu myth feisty wlan wireless break

check /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist for wireless card (scott's is rtl8185; 818x are blacklisted) and for that card, add an extra character to end of essid (dumb!)

I am lazy. I found a binary.

iTunesFS.

and a menu

• stir fried kohlrabi, leaves, and yu choy – vegetarian sauce (grrrrr friends)
• radish masala parathas! and beef sukka
• mesclun salad with teriyaki tofu and timbale of coconut rice
• southern-style bacony mustard and radish greens; cornbread
• peanut-crusted trout over sautéed swiss chard from Jacques Pépin

CSA week 2

Clockwise from berries:

• ‘Early glow’ strawberries
• Curly mustard greens
• Baby lettuce (red romaine, oak leaf, green leaf, etc.)
• Baby mesclun (spinach, mizuna, bok choy, arugula, purple mustard, etc.)
• Two more cabbageturnips!
• Cilantro
• Swiss chard
• Tomatoes (bought separately, different farm)
• White radishes
• Orange and purple carrots

tamales de acelgas

This dish tamales de acelgas, wrapped in swiss chard, called out to me from the chapter on tamales in my primary mexican cookbook, Diana Kennedy’s Art of Mexican Cooking. The pork filling combines sweet, sour, salty, spicy, and umami in a marvelous balance that is definitely Mexican, but as she notes, hints of the middle east (raisins! almonds!) but I would say also of southeast asia (one can imagine adding lemongrass, some ginger and lime; switching the pasillas for bird chiles, and passing it off as Malaysian).

I had made the filling before, but we were impatient, and ended up filling masa balls and deep frying them (yum). This time, however, I blanched the swiss chard, spread it with the mixed dough (fresh masa, btw, from a Pilsen tortilla factory), and carefully rolled up the leaves around it and set them in the steamer for a very long time. I am certain that I spread it too thick and made them too large, but I only had 10 large leaves. Nevertheless, the tamales are marvelous – especially for lunch the next day(s) – but the filling is so good on its own, and so easy, in the future I will probably just make a pile of tortillas and serve it as tacos.

aha

Thanks to an astute reader, the mystery vegetable has been identified as a purple kohlrabi. I wasn't off in thinking it was turnip-like – its german name means “cabbageturnip.” I'm gonna call it that. We were not alone in being perplexed.

Now, what to do with it—

• Radish greens soup
• Either pad thai or chinese pork and garlic chives stir fry
• Lamb’s quarter pesto
• Stir-fried yu choy with black bean sauce or oyster sauce
• Arugula and roasted beet salad
• Mustard or beet greens au gratin
• Tamales de acelgas (swiss chard wrapped tamales)
• Mustard greens with spicy ginger - honey - miso sauce

It’s here! First CSA box

Clockwise from the back at about 11 o’clock:

• red romaine
• beets (with their greens)
• a mystery root vegetable cabbageturnip! (purple kohlrabi)
• radishes (with greens)
• a rainbow of chard – orange, white, red, yellow
• yu choy
• arugula
• cilantro
• purple mustard greens
• lamb’s quarter

lol

You cannot resist lolcats.

Our CSA starts Wednesday!

yay! Others have alleged that we won't be able to figure out what to do with an abundance of, say, beets. I'm up to the challenge (I also happen to really love beets).

MacFuse has changed my life

Spotlight, and metadata search in general (cf. WinFS, the iTunes library, iTunes for PDFs, the iPhoto library; even bibdesk) is still supposed to (read: hasn’t yet but just around the corner!) change the way we store, organize, and interact with our data. And certainly there is a place for metadata search. But files still have to be stored on disks, and regardless of how complicated you make your symlink structure, distinct servers remain distinct. File systems are not going away. They remain “familiar” according to MacFuse developer Amit Singh. His port of FUSE (Filesystems in USEr space) takes the familiarity of a folders-and-files to its extreme.

It has a sheerly practical side too though. It's really nice to mount ssh volumes of remote servers as if they are local. And, for people who have to deal with Windows hardware like external drives, it offers what Tiger left out, NTFS-3g read/write support. Here is Singh’s tech demo video, showing some other cool stuff, like a Picasa file system. (There is one for flickr as well.) The "albums and photos" is a direct analog of "folders and files" and there’s no reason we shouldn't be able to access it like any other volume. I have not yet tested the iPod file system – all filesystems are just plugins for the underlying kernel plugin – but it should be the easiest way to copy stuff from an iPod. Right now I'm mainly using it to work on various remote servers. As nice as cyberduck is, sshfs is the way things should be – and now, at last, are.

the only appropriate remembrance

of Falwell is on Slate, where Timothy Noah writes, “He was a bigot, a reactionary, a liar, and a fool. Herewith, a Falwell sampler.” …

On global warming: “I can tell you, our grandchildren will laugh at those who predicted global warming. We’ll be in global cooling by then, if the Lord hasn’t returned. I don't believe a moment of it. The whole thing is created to destroy America’s free enterprise system and our economic stability.”

Classy?

“These phones are aimed at classy users we haven’t been addressing,” said Motorola’s chief executive, Edward J. Zander, who has been guiding the company through a turbulent yearlong downturn….

The phones were introduced at a dance studio in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, and recorded video demonstrations included the singer Fergie, the soccer star David Beckham and the race car driver Danica Patrick.

São Paulo sans ads

IMG_6091 Originally uploaded by Tony de Marco.

I read about this a while ago, and finally found some cool pictures of it… the entire city has banned advertising in public space. From onthecommons:

As Brazilian journalist Robert Pompeu de Toledo wrote, the ad ban is “a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash. For once in life, all that is accustomed to coming out on top in Brazil has lost.”

The article also refers to a project called Delete! in Vienna, which covered ads and signage all in the same color wrapping.

foodlist

• baked blue potatoes with gruyère, (frozen) butternut squash soup
• pechuga de pollo al ajillo, mashed blue potato
• thai curry (soup) of some variety, with eggplant, carrots, basil, sticky rice, bean sprouts
• pasta with zucchini, red lentil, tomato sauce
• tacos of guacamole, chicken “andouille”, mushrooms, and new favorite salsa
• swiss chard & red lentil curry soup, with bread

meat for at least a month!

I bought meat at the Tower Grove market (Norris pork, Seven Thunder Bison, and Prairie Grass lamb) because it's really expensive at Green City here in chicago. So for my own memory, here is what's in the freezer (including what Scott had):

• 2lb ground lamb
• 1lb ground bison
• 4 jalapeño-cheese bison sausages
• 8 lamb-apple bratwurst
• 1lb bacon
• 1¼lb bison london broil
• ½ lb × 2 bison skirt steak
• 1lb beef stew meat
• ½ lb ground beef
• 3 chicken breasts
• 1 chicken “andouille”

next

Frozen Yogurt!

Image from 101cookbooks.

*drool*

The company’s whole way of being was on display. Five workers were slicing spring strawberries for sorbet, made only with San Bernardo mineral water from Piedmont. Mr. Martinetti was surrounded by boxes of high-grade Ecuadorean and Venezuelan chocolate, hazelnut paste from Piedmont and Madagascar vanilla.

Into a huge steel vat, workers had just poured several cases of $30-a-bottle Spanish sherry for one flavor, Málaga, otherwise made of milk, organic eggs and sugar. (Raisins would be added later.) Mr. Martinetti dunked a lowly plastic cup into the vat and poked his nose in as if it were a glass of his family’s Barolo.

New gelateria to open in Manhattan. (And why I make my own gelato… ain't none of that shit in St Louis, though of course a couple blocks away from us in Chicago is Canady le Chocolatier, who is an artisan in every way.)

It's been two days! WUSTL is still great!

That's the tone of nearly every article in the official mouthpiece of Washington University, the Record, which they dump in our email boxes twice a week. It's over-the-top self-congratulation. And whenever there is a new ranking of any kind published, I am surprised they don't have a special issue.

if/when i visit mariana

Most important, they run two of the best and most distinctive restaurants in Mexico City. Which is another way of saying they run two of the best and most distinctive Mexican restaurants in the world.

some british guy for slate on france and turkey

“Sarkozy is the first leading politician in any large European country to say loudly and clearly that Turkey will not join the European Union.” But I don't think Sarko is nearly the showman that de Gaulle was. (full transcript tr/en and orig fr in very cool site – check out cartoons!)

Email: “Silent corporate cancer”

”It eats away at people's time, a minute at a time. I call it bleeding to death from a thousand pinpricks.“ Not unlike, say, blog reading or writing ;)

technomagic!

I just set up Proximity on my Powerbook using this handy guide, and I love it. It's one of those nerdy things that ought to “just work” and sure enough it does! Unsure of the drain on battery for keeping bluetooth on (phone or computer). I just walk away, and within my polling interval, the screen saver activates and requires a password. And here I thought bluetooth was just for lesbian fashion accessories! (They really seem to love the handsfree devices – no other group have I seen wear them out to bars, clubs etc.)

Save Chocolate from becoming a food product

Do this now.

food system thoughts

A friend and I were email-discussing this Sunday’s NYT magazine piece by Michael Pollan, whose recent work on food and the American food system is really superb. But he stops short of real policy recommendations to create the “right” incentives instead of the perverse ones currently on offer. Here's an excerpt of what I was saying (at the beginning, I qualify to his suggestion that we need to retrain many farmers in order to reduce the massive surplus of commodity corn, wheat, and soy).

I don't know – I actually disagree some about "retraining" because don't we actually need more farmers of smaller size, producing more diverse crops in more places?

If anything the human cogs in the monsanto / cargill / adm machine should be retrained in managing sustainable farm ecosystems (on their own). So we should create systematic incentives for consumers to want high quality local, sustainable, seasonal food; for distributors to make it available to consumers; and for producers themselves to disperse so as to reduce, if not strictly minimize, distance from field to table for most of what we eat.

For me as a consumer, the only incentive I need is sublime fresh food. Fresh green zebra, black cherokee, and brandywine tomatoes in august keep me from buying tomatoes the rest of the year. Two caveats: I know I am an anomaly in that level of zealotry (or devotion to tomatoes), and I do feel somewhat hypocritical with respect to geographic-heritage foods like Parmigiano-Reggiano.

But I think Pollan shares my problem: not eveyone is, shall we say, enraptured by food as I am (and I would venture he is). I hope you read his last article in the nytm. It feels like he, though much more knowledgable and eloquent than I, still quickly reaches the point of, "Doesn't the food just speak to you??" — if it doesn't, then where do we start to change the food system? It's very frustrating.

There's still a market, senseless to some of us, for out-of season shit from far away; for factory farmed meats (truly don't get how anyone could shop at a grocery store after having anything fresh – the time from slaughter is at least several more days, not to mention the other problems); for any and all the products of preservatives and new!improved! marketing.

compression algorithms

compared!

upcoming treats, egg article

exploring baked eggs: with leek in my pretty glasses, and with chorizo and pimentón (to serve with delectable primitivo! – A Mano has long been a go-to pizza wine, but I'll have to try to find this other one.)

Vanilla chocolate bread

Vanilla chocolate bread Originally uploaded by gay.goy.gourmet.

things to make

• long bean and ground pork prik khing curry with sticky rice
• Kao Pad Gkai Gkaprow (also with shrimp)
• pasta with anchovies and tomatoes
• lamb vindaloo
• jeweled rice
• creamy polenta, topped with sautéed morels (yes, glorious fresh morels, $9/4oz!)
• leang thai soup with random vegetables, beansprouts, and sticky rice
• paneer makhanwala
• blue cornmeal pancakes, bacon, eggs, etc

absurd^2

No, that is no more apt a description of wine than type. Seriously. (otherwise lovely article via Jessica).

In his photo-heavy book Helvetica, designer Lars Müller praises the titular typeface for its “understated self-assurance” – describing it as if it were an especially pleasing glass of shiraz.

lawsee!

Uncle Ben is a rare survivor in the once-crowded world of racist spokescharacters. Most of his contemporaries were fired a long time ago. … Today, no company would be dumb enough to build a brand around a black servant, but the ones now in supermarkets have been grandfathered in, rendered innocuous by the passage of time, image overhauls, and judicious wardrobe adjustments. But it's worth remembering what these spokescharacters truly are: a final, living vestige of Jim Crow America.

useless

slate on skymall:

The issue also features the "upside-down tomato garden," the "remote controlled robotic hammerhead shark," the "pop-up hot dog cooker," the "million-germ-eliminating travel toothbrush sanitizer," the "window-mounted cat porch," the "world's smallest indoor remote control helicopter," the "Turbo-Groomer® COBALT" nose-hair trimmer, the "Sudoku glass tabletop set," the "Solar-powered mole repeller," (what, no handcrank in case of nuclear winter?), the "versatile mock rock in five sizes." (For those unaware of the purpose of a "mock rock"—since real ones are not in short supply—they are designed to "hide problem areas in your yard or garden.")

nyt discovers underwear

“There’s been an explosion in printed underwear, low-rise underwear and different kinds of boxer briefs,” said John Sievers, an owner of International Jock, who said that his business has doubled in three years. Underwear by C-IN2 and Andrew Christian, artfully constructed with seams or straps to make the most of a man’s, um, profile, has done extremely well, he added.

open formats for open government

A legislative staff employee who would lose his job if he were quoted here by name said, "By the time those lobbyists were done talking, it sounded like ODF (Open Document Format, the free and open format used by OpenOffice.org and other free software) was proprietary and the Microsoft format was the open and free one."

Findings from a group of 12 study patients showed that vitespen vaccination (trademarked as Oncophage) was effective in stimulating the patient's immune system to attack the tumor cells, a function that is known medically as tumor-specific immune response. All the patients had recurrent, high-grade glioma, and all showed the immune response. The vaccine is made from the patient's own tumor.

grad school is absurd

We have a make-up class to schedule for Bayesian, meaning coordinating among the class and with the professor, whose schedule can be tricky:

Sorry, but the time we chose (4/30 at 4:30) won't work for me. I've got out-of-town company, and I'm taking my first Pilates class at that time.

vodka

The Eurocrats in Brussels are paid princely salaries to decide whether feta has to come from Greece (yes) or how curved cucumbers can be (Class I cukes are allowed a bend of 10 millimeters per 10 centimeters of length, according to Commission Regulation No. 1677/88). My beef is with the whole brouhaha over a liquor whose greatest, and only, virtue is that it is colorless and tasteless.

i love wine

NYT wine columnist:

“What I’m about to propose is a do-it-yourself method that has a lot to offer to just about anybody who loves wine, or wants to learn about it. In fact, if you’ll join in with me, we will take this home wine class together and be the better for it. Let me explain.”

to this I would add, go to good free tastings at the same wine shop. People ask how I know lots of interesting wine, or how I can manage to pair pretty well (or at least thoughtfully, rather than randomly) with food— and for me a good deal of the experience has been at free or inexpensive tastings of some truly great wines that I certainly can't afford. It's also taught me a lot about those overpriced (though sometimes not) bottles.

stereotypes r fun

A few years ago, Meghan Daum, an op-ed contributor to The Los Angeles Times, wrote about a promising first date with a man that never led to a second one because, she later learned, the guy saw that she drove a Subaru Outback station wagon and concluded she must be a lesbian… “It’s not a choice. It’s the way we’re built.” (subaru ad with martina!).

You better believe I will celebrate this mf

And while there are several eggs Benedict creation myths, some of which may be the subject of discussion among aficionados on National Eggs Benedict Day, a little-known observance celebrated on April 16, they share decidedly genteel roots: rich and distinguished New Yorkers, fabulous New York restaurants and an adventurous 19th-century dining culture unfettered by contemporary concerns about trans fats and cholesterol.

trivia!

Some of the mysteries of easter explained: As it turns out, chicks have little to do with Jesus and a lot to do with spring.

New! Peep surgery!

mobilization and technology

Protests Move From the Streets To YouTube

I hate america

Religion is dumb. Americans believe in religion. Americans are dumb.

hmmm

NeoOffice/J is really slow and cumbersome, and buggy in a few important ways. Openoffice itself is also slow... and now we're at OOo 2.2. I may try to build the Aqua alpha and see how that goes.

Powerpoint is evil

and hinders learning. (Also: previous Wired piece by Tufte, my hero).

cool bayesian image labeling

Supervised Learning of Semantic Classes for Image Annotation and Retrieval (see also here)

more e voting

Finally, it requires that the source code for e-voting machines be made publicly available. (we can hope!)

haha

So I was just stopping by iusethis.com (mainly to see if anyone else had picked up on the beauty of catdoc/xls2csv) and the top like new item is this. I laughed. Especially at the icon!

good design

It's good that people notice it, and think a little bit about it: NYC Condoms mentioned again in nyt.

rabbit ravioli

rabbit ravioli
Originally uploaded by gay.goy.gourmet.

i meant to post this over here. ravioli stuffed with: rabbit braised in white wine and chicken stock, with fennel, shallots, goat cheese, and herbs, served with toasted pine nuts and browned butter.

nyt gay boys

[more on why i don't get people who came out later]. Now, as a 17-year-old 11th grader, Zach has passed through phases that many gay men of previous generations didn’t get to until their 20s, 30s, even 40s. “Eighth grade was kind of his militant time,” Mr. O’Connor says.

I'm better off for being a mess

I knew it!

nerdy roundup

I found more cool/nerdy tshirts. I made myself an Iusethis account. I've discovered a lot of cool apps there. And, exciting progress from mydreamapp (cookbook!). Last, documentation of the subetha 'see' tool.

slovak election law

this post is to hold a bunch of stuff i find that i'll need to refer to later

• http://www.legislationline.org/legislation.php?tid=57&lid=301&less=false
• awk 'BEGIN { FS=","; } {if ($1 != "\"\"" ) print $0;} ' partyvote-by-obce.csv > partyvote-no-pct.csv

surprises to no one

Whole Foods would pay $565 million, or $18.50 a share, for Wild Oats, a 23 percent premium over the average share price the last month. The company would also assume $106 million of debt. Shares of Whole Foods jumped as much as $2.24 in after-hours trading to as high as $47.94

Also:

Wednesday night, in a short, ambiguously worded statement, the companies said they would dismiss all legal action against each other regarding the trademark and that Apple could use the name [iPhone] for its device, which it plans to start selling in June.

Jobs wouldn't have walked out there and called it the iPhone if he weren't damn sure he could get away with it. Expect AirPort hardware to be made by cisco (or its consumer brand Linksys) if it isn't already.

food(*2)

Next week is mardi gras, meaning no market – soulard will be full of drunk stupid people instead, so I had to think about two weeks of food. I also have stuff in the freezer I sorta forgot about so it helps to list them here and thoughts on what to do with them.

• macaroni and cheese with whole wheat penne, cheddar, and bacon; salad
• fettuccine all’alfredo
• ma po tofu (need ground pork)
• chicken with scallions, black bean sauce
• risotto with zucchini (end of last batch of chicken stock; also time to make more of that)
• polish “hunter” sausage and sauerkraut with apple
• more pizza (left over cheese! yay!)
• tofu pad thai
• paneer makhanwala
• chicken vindaloo
• orechiette with spinach, peas, mushrooms; goat cheese pink sauce
• seared tuna

bizarre.

The house next to my apartment – a single-family structure on a street of 6-unit buildings mostly – has been as far as I know empty for the entire time I've been here. There was, however, a mean foreign (german or eastern european of some variety) woman who I learned owned this place. She has a daughter, but I only saw them rarely. She thought it was appropriate to yell at me about something involving trash and the dumpster one time; I kind of went off on her.

So, sometime last year or the year before, she and her man-folk, working on the weekends, built a detached, unheated garage out back (in addition to a strange cement-slab back yard with a cesspool, or birdbath the size of a kiddie pool).

Today, I see a crew of men (not hers) knocking the thing down. WTF?!

pollan nyt mag piece

Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

…
Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health. Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. What would happen, for example, if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?

Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There’s no escaping the fact that better food — measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) — costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good soils — whether certified organic or not — will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is grown.

food

• thai red curry with chicken and okra
• bacon and spinach quiche, salad, and bread
• roasted-vegetable and goat cheese crêpes, and salad
• dirty rice with lamb andouille, maybe some ground buffalo
• pork tenderloin (courtesy of Alex)
• leang (fishy) curry with tofu, mushrooms, babycorn, and sticky rice

on bathrooms

"Flushed with Pride" from Slate

new soup to try

"more different than better"

Better Than XP
I could keep bringing up examples, but I think you get the idea. At the UI level, the human level, Vista is different far more often than it is better. Even so, I think it must be said that Vista is indeed an improvement on Windows XP. Honestly, I think that's the only metric that really counts when you think about it: Is Vista better enough than XP to be worth the upgrade? I'll say yes. This may be more of a comment on how bad XP really is more than how good Vista is.

food

• asian salad with rice timbale, orange, crisp noodles, and baked tofu with hoisin
• polenta with some sort of lamb stew
• apple-lamb bratwurst and sauerkraut
• salmon with gingery mashed sweet potatoes and blood orange beurre blanc
• pasta with ricotta and cinnamon (sorry, Atlantic subscription req.)
• matzo ball soup (mostly for scott to freeze)
• chicken paprikás
• ricotta pancakes (NYT)

yay for paint!

paintedapt5
Originally uploaded by gay.goy.gourmet.

we have color on the wall in our apartment now! orange hallway, blue wall, purple under the bar… go see!

oat muffin recipe

Once when searching for a quick breakfast (out of yogurt, only one egg, not-so-fresh milk) I found the easiest oatmeal muffins – I've made them plain, with apples, and with fresh cranberries (for any of those, add ½–1 cup or so chopped). Now Scott has a muffin pan (a nifty silicone one, at that) so this note is mostly for him.

My scarf is done!

Scott is the best!

merry christmas from the drycleaner

So when I picked up some stuff friday the korean drycleaner lady reached under the desk, beamed, "happyyy horiday!" and produced a bag… I was intrigued, then joyed to find some tasty berry wine!

is there video of this??

The researchers blindfolded college students who crawled through grass to sniff out a chocolate-scented trail.

attrition rocks

Ha!

a sick twisted story

“Bottle service is prestigious,” said Quinn Bradley, 25, another customer at Y Bar. “I am not a vodka connoisseur, but a higher price usually means it’s better, right?” Marketers have spent millions trying to convince consumers of just that.

Also, Patrón tequila was created by one of the co-execs of john paul mitchell hair goop. What a mess! (NYT)

crazy hungarian jews

(yum!)

Negativity Friendships

NYT: “It’s not that we enjoy disliking people,” Bosson, a social psychologist at the University of South Florida, says. “It’s that we enjoy meeting people who dislike the same people.”

Salon on Mary Cheney:

As a price for their tolerance, however, they may expect you to reexamine certain issues – e.g., your implicit countenancing of same-sex-marriage amendments, your silence in the face of outrageous discrimination against gay parents, your collusion with some of the most virulent homophobes in America's history, etc.

neato nerdiness

damn.

Well, my 5-year-old Troika keychain (in a model they seem no longer to make) finally broke. Troika keychains are by far the best designed and therefore the only acceptable key-holding devices for me. Moreover, several models allow easy removal of groups of keys from the ring, a necessity so I don't have to carry my car key with me all the time, or anything more than a house key and bike key when I exercise. The one pictured is my top choice, but now I run into the problem of trying to find someone who has them and will sell me one.

food this week

• sweet potato crusted wild caught alaskan salmon with curry spinach, OR
• broiled salmon with mexican-caribbean rub, avocado, and tequila cream sauce
• thai prik king (fragrant no coconut milk) curry with green beans and chicken
• lentil soup with polish sausage, blackbear pumpernickel
• fajitas with avocado, chicken, and refried black beans
• pad kee mao (tofu and broccoli, chili basil sauce)

the first of several

Scott's dad asks about Margaret Cho. Well, not about her – but what her name is. She is described as "that musician you used to like. The Chinese girl. She played the violin. Or the piano."

Scott's parents

The whole visit will be co-blogged over at Scott's MD-PhD Adventure. Just finished the first day.

voting machines

slashdot interview

best response is… max ε?

It may sound like chaos, but it's only the lesson drawn from one of the insights of traffic psychology: Drivers will force the accelerator down ruthlessly only in situations where everything has been fully regulated. Where the situation is unclear, they're forced to drive more carefully and cautiously.

slashdot 'fortune' quote

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. -- Aldous Huxley

seared tuna, ginger mashed sweet potatoes, salad

seared tuna, ginger mashed sweet potatoes, salad
Originally uploaded by gay.goy.gourmet.

from the other day :)

food for this week

• afghan chicken biryani [pdf]
• crêpes with mushrooms and parsnips (inspired by this lovely NYT piece)
• curry fried rice (nasi goreng)
• seared tuna with garam masala
• ma po tofu

too good in too many ways

Holy Rollers: The city's bicycle zealots, by Ben McGrath. This article contains quote after quote that made me grin knowingly. Some examples:

Critical Mass, according to its participants, is not a group but a recurring event. “An organized coincidence,” one regular rider told me. “No, a disorganized coincidence—a ‘happening,’ a temporary reorganization of public space.” … Others passed out buttons that read, “Please Don’t Arrest Me—This is my permit.” On closer examination, they were recycled pins made by the antiwar group United for Peace and Justice, with customized paper labels glued over “No Blood for Oil.”

I introduced myself to the masked man and asked his name. “NYMAAN,” he said, pointing to his cape, which was adorned with the words “New York Metro Anarchist Alliance.” He added, “I am an idea, not a person.” (His outfit advertised a Web site that features the heading “Notes from the global intifada.”)

The hierarchy of urban piety is ever delicate. Still another Villager, a biking enthusiast, railed against the unctuousness of the anti-bike pedestrians. “I’m tired of joggers using the bike path, getting in the way,” he said. “They tell us to get off our bikes and jog because it’s more environmentally sensitive. To them bikes are manufactured things. The metals that go into them are mined. And there’s the plastic, too . . . made from oil.”

neato

the new mobile gmail is supercool.

yay for winter bike!

so I found a bike on craigslist a while ago – a beat up fixed gear for $150. I didn't feel like driving up to north county a month ago, but then I saw it posted again for $110. That was too good to pass up, especially because I've been riding around on my good bike the past couple days in the fucking rain and it's all yucky and needs to be cleaned again… pictures soon.

“Hacking Democracy” (Salon.com)

on Salon:

It’s a nice thought, one you want to believe: If only Americans could be made to understand the true, gut-sinking atrociousness of just about everything involved in U.S. elections – from the gerrymandered districts to the undemocratic distribution of electoral power to the enormous influence wielded by partisan officials to the underfunded, overwhelmed local offices to, finally, the insanely dangerous technology we use to run the whole thing – well, then, maybe folks would actually do something about the problem.

myth commercial detection

Applies a series of score for the scene based on looking at all three factors in relation to one another, especially taking timing and patterns into account. Based on the final score of a scene, it's either (essentially) dropped into the show bucket or the commercial bucket. It's not a black/white type thing. Because of the scoring, there are a whole range of grays in the middle. You end up with scenes that looks "more" like commercials or "more" like show content, and they are then flagged as such.

in other words, it's a Bayesian update! I'll look into this more…

i love the market

• stir fried tatsoi with teriyaki
• sautéed beet greens with roasted beets, salad
• prik khing with tasty long beans, sticky rice
• risotto with zucchini (on chicken stock day)

complete darwin online!

darwin-online.org.uk

me too!

Pollan in the NYTMag sunday:

The week of the E. coli outbreak, washed spinach was on sale at my local farmers’ market, and at the Blue Heron Farms stand, where I usually buy my greens, the spinach appeared to be moving briskly. I tasted a leaf and wondered why I didn’t think twice about it. I guess it’s because I’ve just always trusted these guys; I buy from them every week. The spinach was probably cut and washed that morning or the night before — it hasn’t been sitting around in a bag on a truck for a week. And if there ever is any sort of problem, I know exactly who is responsible. Whatever the risk, and I’m sure there is some, it seems manageable.

Yogurt is not a big truck

Yogurt is not a big truck
Originally uploaded by mathowie.

• friend rice (nasi goreng)
• fennel soup with saffron and tomato, pumpernickel
• chicken filet al ajillo, baked purple potato
• pad kee mao chicken and broccoli
• bacon and spinach quiche

keyboard consistency fix

…how to move from word to word. This is ⌥← and ⌥→ in all the Mac applications I use, except Terminal. Until now.

movie to see

Salon review of Shortbus: “Group sex may be a beautiful thing, man, but it's also a jumble of wobbly lines and arms and legs heading the wrong way.”

GMBO: giggling my butt off

Check out the handy list of everyday acronyms so you can decode your kids’ IMs with congressmen.

if only we could make expensive, synthetic fish oil…

NYT: The fact that heart patients receive such different treatments in sophisticated hospitals around the world highlights the central role that drug companies play in disseminating medical information, experts said.