John & Belle Have A Blog

He is special! He is ready!

I just delivered a short paper on Zizek at the MLA. You can read the text of the talk at the Valve. It's a nice little piece. Tragically, the panel didn't turn into a full-scale brawl with Zizekheads the way I would have liked. Speaking of which, I just found a scan of one of my favorite comic covers evar.

Crime and Punishment

For some reason there's a single issue of "The Punisher" in the room Belle and I are sleeping in at her mom's house. I sort of feel there are probably enough Punisher stories in the world. I think there need to be heroes who advocate alternative conceptions of justice. Have a hero of rehabilitation: the Penitentiary - sort of a Centurion-type straight arrow-type. Or possibly, The High Penitentiary. He fights The Punisher; they engage in impassioned soliliquizing on behalf of their respective philosophical conceptions. Howsabout: The Distributive Justice League of America. Who should be in it?

Fudge

This is really the best fudge I've ever had. The orange is better than the mint, but only just. My brother and I brainstormed the orange one up on Christmas day. Don't scoff at the fluff; it works every time, takes about 1/8 as long as the standard way, and yields perfect texture. Definitely get the Guittard chips, too. They have an unctuous melty smoothness. They beat all other brands in the Cook's Illustrated white chocolate test! I made one whole batch of each (mint and orange), but if you worked quickly I think you could spread half the plain chocolate fudge in one pan, add walnuts to the remaining half, and spread that in a pan. Then you could just divide the white chips and make the two toppings separately (using half the cream, liqueur, etc. in each). One recipe gives you about 3 lbs of fudge.

Chocolate Fudge Base

1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter

3 c sugar

2/3 c evaporated milk

12 oz best-quality unsweetened chocolate (such as Callebaut), chopped finely (or whiz it up in a food processor for a sec)

1 jar marshmallow fluff

2 t vanilla

(1 1/2 cups chopped walnuts, toasted and cooled, if making orange fudge)

1. Bring butter, sugar and milk to rolling boil in a saucepan over medium heat, stirring frequently. Boil for 4 minutes, stirring constantly. You can wash sugar crystals down from the sides of the pan with a wet pastry brush, or just avoid scraping the crystallized fudge off when you pour it out (i.e., leave the crusty bit at the edge in the pan).

2. Remove from heat and stir in chocolate till melted. Add vanilla. Fold in fluff gently but thoroughly till well combined. (Add walnuts if making orange fudge.) Pour fudge into 9 x 13 pan lined with foil, and smooth with offset spatula. Let cool.

Mint Topping:

1 bag Guittard white baking chips

3 T heavy cream

2 T creme de menthe

1 T peppermint extract

1. Put chips, cream and creme de menthe in a bowl. Microwave on medium power 2-3 minutes (microwaves vary...) When chips are soft but still retain their shape, remove from microwave, add peppermint extract, and stir with a wooden skewer or chopstick till smooth. Pour over cooled fudge base and smooth evenly.

Orange Topping

1 bag Guittard white baking chips

3 T heavy cream

2 T Grand Marnier

2 T finely grated orange zest

1/4 t Boyajian orange oil

1. Put chips in bowl with cream and liqueur, melt as for mint topping. Add zest and oil and stir till smooth. Pour over chocolate walnut base.

Merry X-Mas!

Image via Invincible Super-Blog.

Moldy Mice

Mmm, these are the greatest. They're South Carolina-Mexican wedding cakes, basically. Make sure to get butter from a store with high turnover. My brother and I bought some European-style butter from Whole Foods, but it was slightly oxidized; the Safeway butter was sweet and delicious because it was flying off the shelves.

2 c unsalted butter

2 cups flour

1 T vanilla

2 T sugar

1 c chopped pecans

confectioner's sugar

1. Cream butter and sugar. Add flour, pecans and vanilla. Put 1-2 c confectioner's sugar in a pan or plate.

2. Roll into small bars the size of your thumb. Bake at 425 for 13-15 minutes (do not allow them to brown). Roll in confectioner's sugar while very hot.

Mendooozzaaaa!

K-Lo just quoted the Clash song "White Man in Hammersmith Palais". That's so wrong. SO. WRONG. Seriously, this weird pain just started behind my eye. Make her stop. Was there no apposite Wham! lyric?

Alcoholics Eponymous

A support group for alcoholics whose parents for some reason decided to name them 'alcoholics'.

Long Time No Blog

You know, I'm sorry. Where's the blogging? Where? Sad to say, when I am at home I keep thinking of other things to do, like hang out with my family and friends. As my brother Ben says, "sometimes I just don't care about what someone said on the internet." But that's wrong, very wrong. I care. A lot.

I went to a party at Matt Yglesias' house the other day, which was fun, even though they wanted it to be a real grown-up party and I lowered the tone. I got to meet his roomate Kriston, and Ezra Klein, and Kevin Drum and stuff. It was cool, but the coolest part was that I met hilzoy!!! Yes, THE hilzoy. It was totally airwolf. No, it was Swayze. That's how cool it was. I realized that because hilzoy is so smart and funny and reasonable, I had a subconscious assumption that she looked like Linda Evangelista with glasses on and a bun, like they put on hot actresses who are pretending to be marine biologists or nuclear physicists. That's not what she looks like at all! But that doesn't affect her basic hotness, because inside she's sparkling with hilzoy goodness! Of all the bloggers I read, she and Katharine are the two about whom I think "she's really making a difference." So, three cheers for hilzoy!

Now, on to the holiday goodness.

Stuffed Dates:

pitted Medjool dates
whole almonds
confectioner's sugar

1. Stick the almonds in the dates (you can fit two in a fat Medjool date and it is worth it to pay extra). Roll them in confectioner's sugar. All done!

Minestrone:

1 1/2 c white beans
2 bay leaves
hard rind of parmesan cheese (you should always save these since they last forever)
two medium onions, chopped
3 leeks, washed well and chopped
5 cloves garlic, minced
3 bulbs fennel, sliced thin
1 carrot, minced
1 c white wine
6 Italian sausages
1 t fennel seeds
olive oil
1 large can plum tomatoes in sauce (Muir Glen is best)
water or broth
1 c macaroni
salt and freshly-ground pepper

1. Soak beans either in cold water overnight or in just-turned-off boiling water for 1 hour. Drain, add new water and bay leaf and parmesan rind, and start cooking.

2. Brown sausages in a little olive oil in a dutch oven or other heavy pot. Remove and slice into thin rounds. Pour off most of fat from pan. Fry onions, leeks, fennel and and carrot for 5 mins or so. Add garlic and fennel seeds and cook 1 minute more. Add wine and boil, scraping up bits, for a minute.

3. How are those beans doing? Cook them till they're getting soft, then add to pot along with bay leaf, can of tomatoes (chopped, or rather, I just poke around with a knife in the pan after pouring the can in) water or broth to make a soupy mixture, and sausage. Cook till everything is done. Add macaroni and cook till done. You could make it look fancy by making little parmesan toasts to put on top and sprinkling them with some choppped fennel top (just the dill-looking part).

OK, I promise to be back tomorrow with more bloggy goodness. Really baby. I didn't mean to hurt you. It's just that you make me so mad sometimes...Aw, come on over here and get some sugar.

Metrosexual Shopping

Amazon has a gift guide for the for the metrosexual in your life. This opens up hilarious possibilities but frankly I can't be bothered.

Burninating the Peasants

Does the president know English? From Tuesday's NYT:

Mr. Bush, who does not often take questions after his prepared speeches, was asked by one member of the audience why he invoked the attacks of Sept. 11 as a justification for the invasion of Iraq when "no respected journalist or other Middle Eastern experts confirm that such a link existed."

The president responded that "there was a serious international effort to say to Saddam Hussein, 'You're a threat,' and the Sept. 11 attacks extenuated that threat." Mr. Bush added that "knowing what I know today, I'd make the decision again."

"Extenuated"? What was he even trying to say? Not accentuated. Exacerbated, maybe?  Seriously, the prez has been listening to too much Megadeth.

Got one chance, infiltrate them
Get it right, terminate them
The Panzers will, permeate them
Break their pride, denigrate them
And their people, retrograde them
Typhus, detriate them
Epidemic, devastate them
Take no prisoners, cremate them

That should really say "Typhus, deteriate them", as though "deteriorate" were a transitive verb that inexplicably dropped a syllable. Um, and, the President is fucking retarded. Wait, maybe he meant to say "burninate"?

On the road

On a plane home to Ameriky tomorrow. No blog for you, probably, for a few days. X-Mas is coming, though, so maybe Santa brings you something nice, eh? Something to think about.

Stocking Stuffers For Aging Hipsters

Alright, we gotcher stocking stuffer choice for the aging hipster in your life. I've been enjoying this one for three nights now. It's ... Classic Heist Movies. For only $5.98. Released on DVD in 1959, it features - Steve McQueen in "The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery", starring several actual members of the St. Louis police department, showing us why they are police, not actors. "High Risk". Scroll down. That's the one with James Coburn in it ... as Serrano! And, pick of the litter ...

Starring a Russian hat  ... with Lee Van Cleef in it!

And the strange beauty of Karen Black!

This was the best snarking out I've done since I rented that Korean movie. This movie has everything. It's got that freaky sleazy, 70's Brooklyn thing. It's got Max, from "Hart to Hart". It's got a guy I saw in a Bolo Yeung movie. There's a car that runs into a thing and everything explodes much too much. There's a fat effeminate diamond fencer. There's a karate scene with a black dude with sideburns; there's a meathook baling hook. The music is fantastic. And, best of all, the story is actually OK. Really.

Internal organ poncho and brain hat

You know, I shouldn't even complain (see below.) Here are a few of the pics that survived the crashes. At Zoë's school they made internal organ ponchos and brain hats. Very educational. No kidding. Doesn't really keep the rain out, though.

Failure, failure, failure, success, failure, failure, failure, success

Man, I don't have luck with computers. First, the two macs fail (fixed). iPod sort of working again (natural healing processes). iPod shuffle (dead, but they say they'll pick it up in a couple weeks.) Oh yea, and vid cam (memo to self: take to Canon repair center.) So I'm super safely backing up my school iMac (which has been behaving a leetle funny) to the iomega 250 GB drive (which has been making a whining noise), and the drive just won't read a good number of the files (keeps giving me dozens of -36 error messages.) So I can either copy all that stuff to a number of CD's or risk copying it to the 10GB iPod and hope it doesn't fail again (whew, worked. I actually managed to transfer an entire 3.6 GB of files from one computer to another.) And thankfully Belle made a CD of 500+ iPhoto library files for X-Mas pics and I can just input them into iPhoto (oh wait, something corrupt about the files. OK, so iPhoto never, ever will be able to read them again. I'll  copy them over to a different folder, use Photoshop to view them til the end of time.) Speaking of which, I lost my Photoshop and GoLIve update discs in the office move 16 months ago, so I didn't know what I was going to do about restoring them. And then I just opened this drawer and ... there they are. Right next to the Expression2 disc I lost 16 months ago. (OK, install those.) Then I looked behind a shelf and found this library book I lost last year, and had to pay the library to replace. And now I've lost this other library book. It's not like the place is a mess. Don't know how I do it. Found my Essential Dr. Strange. Okey. I'm just going to watch some quality cinema and drink a tall Tiger. Wokah-chika-woka-chika-wokah-chika-Waaaa!

Oh, and hey. I just noticed that you can download a free version of Creature House Microsoft Expression. It says it's for 'loyal users' but doesn't ask you to prove it with a serial number. It also says it's a beta even though version 3 has been out a couple years. But who argues with free? (But you do have to sign up to Microsoft's password thingy.) You can read reviews here and here. Here are some instructions. The 'help' function doesn't seem to work on the beta. I've used Expression 2 a lot. I draw my illustrations for teaching purposes with it. I find it works better than other tools just for making eye-catchy scribbles, which are more or less my 'never took drawing' signature style. (I'd send you to the website but it's down. Don't ask. But I've got a copy of the 'writings' site up on my .Mac site. You can see my Plato stuff, for example.) The department had me make a big banner, 1 meter by 2, for this open house thing. It was sort of fun and I made it in Expression, mostly. I've put an image under the fold. The guy who looks like he's wearing a pineapple is supposed to be Confucius.

Failure begins at home

Phrase of the day: "... will try to remove enough of his tattoo - which depicts a Cadillac emblem fashioned into a family crest - with a cream his mother ordered off the Internet."

UPDATE: On the other hand, it doesn't have to be that way: "Last night, Grandma did it. Final time on Growlanser III: 64hrs 45 min. Final time on Growlanser II: 31hrs 10 min. Total combined time on Growlanser Generations: just under 96 hours. Solid. Total bags of popcorn consumed: 37. Total cans, 12oz Diet Coke consumed: 54."

Putting the 'contact' back in contact hours

My Valve colleague Scott has a tale to tell. No, really. You've got to click.