John & Belle Have A Blog

Chance Flavors The Prepared Mind

Definite sign I've adapted to tropical living: I was peering in the fridge just now, checking behind the capers and so on, muttering, "how the $#% can I be out of tamarind paste? I bought a huge block of it last week!" Actually, this speaks to something that my mom regards as madness (mild madness) but which I think is a great step forward in my life: the massive storehouse of food system. Fresh things I buy every week, herbs, veggies, fish. And some I buy even if they do not fit into the plan of meals I have mapped out for that week (really). But when you look into my cupboards you see serried ranks of duplicates, arranged in rows. Are you about to use that can of Italian plum tomatoes in sauce? Go on, there are three more! Putting a new jar of fruit-only apricot jam into the fridge? Just move that one behind it up, and put it on the list! My mom mocks me, but the end result of this is that I (almost) never run out of things. Pus it gives me a strange feeling of security to look into the cupboards and see cans of sardines and kilos of rice and flour and gram flour and beans and coconut milk and... If some gun enthusiasts in the states have unhealthy fantasies about how, precisely, they will kill some burgalar, I have fantasies in which I am suddenly called upon to feed 50 people! But I can totally do it! For a brief time when I was young my family really was hungry; we would eat generic box macaroni and cheese 4 night a week, and my mom would steal Lance crackers and stuff from the snack room of the place where she worked and Ben and I would take them to lunch at school. I doubt it affected me at all, though. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm, just going to rotate my sealed containers of various types of lentils so that the next time I make dhal I will use the type with the closest expiration date. [Later: looks like it's urud dhal's lucky day! It expires in November. Also, remind me to put fish sauce on the list.]

UPDATE: OMG, this is so great. The new, unopened fish sauce was just in the wrong row. Problem solved (but I'll still order a new one. See how it works?)

It's Actually Saturday Friday Random Ten

round and round and round she goes...where she stops, nobody (except Ben Wolfson) knows!
1. Ecstasy/The Raspberries
2. The Man Who Couldn't Cry/Johnny Cash (bonus Wainwright connection points)
3. Captain/Ween
4. Beware of Darkness/George Harrison
5. Thor Is Like Immortal/The Fucking Champs
6. News of The World/The Jam
7. Moon Shadow/Pattie LaBelle (kick ass!)
8. Survival/Nightmares on Wax
9. Video Killed The Radio Star/The Buggles (?)
10. Freaks In The Pond/Thumb of The Maid

Crisp and Bracing!

Not really a bonus bonus track: The Ballad of El Duce/The Mentors

Suffled how it gush/From the source of the woods

From our Italian/Albanian foreign correspondent, Woof - we get, as he puts it, somewhere between Chaucer and Tennyson:

I'm beating my brains for a poetic assonance or other such precedent for 'sufflegush'. The closest I can come is 'Stacheldraht', off of Nina Hagen's Freud Euch. I've never been able to understand the lyrics, nor do they appear to be available online. The chorus goes:

Stacheldraht
Stacheldraht in deine Unterhosen
Stacheldraht in deine Totenhosen

That is:

Barbed wire
Barbed wire
Barbed wire in your long johns
Barbed wire in your dead pants

(Totenhosen are a band, of course.) It doesn't seem relevant to the Albanian water issue, but you can sing it to the tune while you root for the national team.

Good Example

The other night Zoë got bored and started cutting her hair (she has done this once before, resulting in a radical pixie chop which looked so good I have replicated it later). I learned this when I got up in the morning and saw some light-brown curls on the floor of her shower. When I remonstrated with her, she said, "but mommy, you got bored and cut your hair!" "Right", I said, "But I've had lots of practice!" Her response: "I'm getting practice right now!" Damn. She had me there. Results under the fold.

UPDATE: the photo of Zoë reflects the newest chop; she just didn't take all that much off the left side.

Long Lankin

Hey, what's with some hating on Steeleye Span? Steeleye Span is the greatest, and it makes especially great kids' music. I was raised on a steady diet myself. Kids like things that are creepy and inexplicable, hence my childhood love of Slovenly Peter, the unexpurgated Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen's Girl Who Trod On A Loaf. Long Lankin is especially good in this regard:
...
"Where's the master of the house?" says Long Lankin.
"He's 'way to London," says the nurse to him.
"Where's the lady of the house?" says Long Lankin.
"She's up in her chamber," says the nurse to him.
"Where's the baby of the house?" says Long Lankin.
"He's asleep in the cradle," says the nurse to him.
"We will pinch him, we will prick him,
we will stab him with a pin,
And the nurse shall hold the basin
for the blood all to run in."
So they pinched him and they pricked him,
then they stabbed him with a pin,
And the false nurse held the basin
for the blood all to run in.
"Lady, come down the stairs," says Long Lankin.
"How can I see in the dark?" she says unto him.
"You have silver mantles," says Long Lankin.
"Lady, come down the stairs by the light of them."
Down the stairs the lady came, thinking no harm
Lankin he stood ready to catch her in his arms.
There was blood all in the kitchen
There was blood all in the hall
There was blood all in the parlour
Where my lady she did fall
Now Long Lankin shall be hanged
from the gallows oh so high,
And the false nurse shall be burned
in the fire close by....

Wholesome fun for the whole family! I often sing the songs to my girls. And also, Maddy Prior's style of singing, clear as a silver bell and utterly lacking in the tremolo so perniciously favored by most sopranos, is teh shizznit.

Why does google think I'm a robot?

For the past few days, when I do a google search using my school computer - a mac - I get a 'prove you aren't a spider or a robot or a virus-infected computer' error/test page. I have to read the wubbly letters in the little box, then I get my search results. This rejection is only intermittent, and it's not really all that inconvenient, but it's never happened before. Anyone know what's going on?

Demon Lover

Zoë and I have been discussing dinosaurs and feathers and the likelihoods of different possibilities.

I think T-Rex is red. Because red is the color of DANGER!

Zoë's favorite song, these days, is "Demon Lover", off of Steeleye Span's Commoner's Crown. She can sing the chorus, winningly, with intermittent accuracy, as 4-years of age goes:

I'll show you where the white lilies grow
On the banks of Italy
I'll show you where the white fishes swim
At the bottom of the sea
Seven ships all on the sea
The eighth brought me to land
With four and twenty mariners
And music on every hand

She set her foot upon the ship
No mariners could behold
The sails were of the shining silk
The masts of beaten gold

That's the spirit!

Euclidean Literary Criticism

My earworm du jour is "Farewell Ride", off Beck's Guero. I've been listening to it for months, but somehow this one took months to burrow in. Nice Tom Waits-y chunkiness, plus pedal steel and signature soaring Beckish chorus. But the lyrics have induced in me - not a negative, but a distinctly Euclidean reaction:

Two white horses in a line
Two white horses in a line
Two white horses in a line
Carrying me to my burying ground

Some need diamonds, some need love
Some need cards, some need luck
Some need dollar bills lining their clothes
All I need is
All I need is

Two white horses in a line
Two white horses in a line
Two white horses in a line
Taking me for my farewell ride ...

But Euclid's first postulate teaches that any given two white horses define a line. A perhaps related lyrical conundrum from Fountains of Wayne, "Know You Well", off of Out of State Plates:

Out of the cold November
Still as a passport picture
Still as a passport picture
Still as a passport picture
Still as a passport picture

Is there a technical term for this device? Exemplifying a concept by citing an instance that no one would naturally hit on as exemplary, although it technically qualifies? So that the mind is provoked to consider what it would be to find this thing to be not just an example of that but a paradigm of that. Another example. Robert Musil: "As real as houses in the morning".

And a very disorderly post it is

My iPod is still broken. I thought - per comments to a previous post - it might be a defective firewire cable. Science marches on. I have established that is not the case. I unfold this private sorrow because Amazon is having a serious sale on iPods - and nanos. If, like, twenty of you go and buy right now, I'll earn enough to, well, buy an iPod. Sale ends tomorrow or something. 60 GB w/video - $379.99; 30 GB w/video - $269.99; 2 GB nano - $179. Pretty good prices.

And the new twist on our home mac situation is that the power cable on our iBook broke in two, so now we can't, like, power it. So the fact that the iPod mysteriously works with the iBook (not the iMac) is no less mysterious, but even less suggestive of viable musical tactics. But I sort of think this old electrician we hire to do odd jobs might just be able to reattach the frayed wires. Is that wise?

Oh, hey. That's one fine Johnny Cash CD for sale cheap.

This post needs substance. Here's a question for you. I honestly don't know how to formulate it, so reformulations would be welcome. Who has done a good job of plotting the course of 20th Century disillusionment with the possibility of social engineering? Just for starters, consider fiction like Brave New World, or - my personal favorite (and always available in a bargain DVD 3-pak!) H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things To Come. The concern in this fiction is not that social engineering will fail but that it is terrifyingly likely to succeed too well! We'll regiment and order our lives so rationally that the romance and individuality will be squashed out. You get lots of anxiety about this in writings on society in the 50's and 60's - Organization Man-type Grey Flannel Suit stuff. Trilling's The Liberal Imagination  contains undertones of concern that the liberal consensus shall be too overwhelming. Even parables like Forbidden Planet, which posit that the id will necessarily erupt in awkward ways, are palpably concerned that the rational superego might manage to put an impressively hermetic seal on the id, at least for a while. These days, I should say, the fantasy of reason pure and ascendant, applied to social engineering, has less of a tug on our intuitions - or at least our literary tastes. Something like Brave New World reads like a thought-experiment, hardly like a terrifying, all-too-possible future.

Think about how Forbidden Planet tales get told these days. Belle and I just watched Serenity. PLOT-SPOILERS!

Go Tell the Spartans

Tonight I watched Go Tell the Spartans, as part of our family's collect 'em all Burt Lancaster series. I was under the impression it was some sort of classic war movie. But it didn't seem all that, like, good. Do you have an opinion? The tag line is evocative: "Skirmishes, Ambushes And Boobytraps Explode Into The Most Savage War That Ever Scorched A Land." Eh.

Friiiiiday Random Ten

1. Moonchild Including The Dream and The Illusion/King Crimson
2. There Goes The Fear/Doves
3. Tripping Out/Curtis Mayfield
4. What In The World/David Bowie
5. Don't Take Everybody To Be Your Friend/Joseph Spence (from Real Bahamas, which I cannot possibly recommend enough. The little hairs on your arm will stand up when you hear "I Bid You Goodnight, by Edith Pinder et al. (there's a Windows Media sample at the link.) Especially if you only know it from the Incredible String Band version, called A Very Cellular Song. There's a sample available from this too, and it's great, in a hippie way. I can hear my mom's teeth grinding all the way from America, because she loathes and abominates the Incredible String Band, for various reasons.))
6. Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts VI-IX)/Pink Floyd
7. The Pointer Sisters/ Going Down Slowly
8. Kokomo/The Beach Boys (?!!!?????!)
9. Lucky Lisp/Morrissey
10. Girl Inform Me/The Shins

Wow, that really was random. Bonus Track 11: Feelin' Satisfied/Boston. Yeah, baby. Feel the power of RAWK! "You know it's now or never, take a chance on rock-n-roll!!" [cue handclaps made with wooden blocks, quadruple tracked vocals, and some blazing guitars!] I'm not just "pretending" to "like" Boston in an "ironic" way people. I actually fucking love Boston.

But why is Kokomo, one of the worst songs ever, lurking like a deadly serpent in my iTunes, ready to strike at any time? Yet I feel a strange reluctance to trash it. What if I wish to use it to illustrate a point sometime? In that spirit, I link to a great pandagon thread nominating Oasis' Wonderwalls as the worst song of all time. (But they're just doing that to piss jedmunds off.) Controversy rages in the comments, but this guy nails it:

Well, Officer, I Did Drink One Beer, But That Was a While Ago

I've asked my highly placed sources in AA to report back on how the rank and file of recovering alcoholics view the "I might have had one beer" excuse. I'm thinking...guffaws ensue. I myself have jokingly hit somone over the head with an empty wine bottle, causing it to shatter and tiny shards of glass to get in his face, after having "a beer."*

*NB: in this case, "a beer" is understood to be shorthand for "an entire bottle of Jagermeister". A common, though inexact, use of language. Chomsky would chalk this up to performance error.

UPDATE: I don't have any reason to think Cheney is an alcoholic; I am merely noting that a roomful of alcoholics is likely to regard the phrase "I had a beer", when said beer precedes an unfortunate accident, with well-founded, personally-motivated skepticism.

Pickled Fish

Poison...poison...poison...tasty fish!

800 g fresh sardines or ikan kuning
salt and ground chilli pepper
oil for frying
1 T mustard seeds
1 t fenugreek seeds
1 sprig curry leaves
3 small red onions, sliced thinly
3 T garlic and ginger paste (50-50)
4 small red chillies, sliced thinly, with seeds
1 t tumeric powder
1/2 c rice vinegar
2 T caster (ultra-fine) sugar

1. Clean fish; slice along belly and remove guts but otherwise leave whole. Rub fish with salt and cayenne pepper and leave in fridge for at least one hour.

2. Heat 3 inches peanut or vegetable oil in a cast-iron pan or heavy wok. I always heat the oil with two torn pieces of bread inside, and when the bread begins to bubble strongly and is dark brown I start to fry. My dad says that oil which is heated over high heat with nothing inside will create a huge bubble, well up, overflow, and start a fire. Whether this is true or not, I have never been willing to find out.

3. Fry fish, 4-5 pieces at a time, turning after 2 minutes and cooking 1 1/2 minutes more. Drain cooked fish on brown paper. Continue until all fish is done.

4. Run hot water down the drain and pour almost all the oil out of the pan. (2-3 T should remain). Over medium-high heat, fry the mustard and fenugreek seeds till they pop. Add curry leaves and fry 1 minute more. Add onion and fry, stirring constantly, until onion is browned, 5-6 minutes.

5. Add ginger-garlic paste, and chillies; fry 30 seconds more. Return fish to pan along with tumeric and vinegar. Cook 1 minute. Stir well. Add sugar, stir, and take off heat. This is better the next day but 2 hours in advance is plenty.

We ate this with dhal, rice, okra and tomato, pappadums, and mango-lime chutney.

Like A Pilot In His Ship

Actual dialogue between me and Zoë in the cab on the way to Tanglin Mall the other day. Happily, the cabbie was Chinese.

Z: What's that?
B: A mosque.
Z: What's a mosque?
B: It's like a temple, but for Muslim people. They go there to pray and to hear people talk about god. It's kind of a lot of work being a Muslim person because they believe God wants you to do prayers five times every day. Early in the morning, before bed, and then three other times too.
Z: [thoughtfully] I think that's dumb because god doesn't actually exist.
B: Well, I agree with you in a way, but you shouldn't say that it's "dumb" because you will hurt people's feelings.
Z: It's like when you get a sweater from your grandma that you don't like but you say "I love it!"
B: Right.
Z: I don't believe in god but I believe in spirits.
B: OK, honey, you can believe whatever you want.
Z: I don't have to believe the same thing as my mommy and daddy. I can drive my mind anywhere I want.
B: What, like a car?
Z: Right. Like when you imagine different things. I can drive my mind anywhere.
B: Cool.

Fly Fly Fly, Little Starbuck

Belated BSG blogging (since Belle and I are only now starting to watch season 1 - still 35% off!) In episode eight, "Flesh and Bone", Starbuck has to extract information about a possible bomb from an apparently borderline psychotic Cylon prisoner. There's sort of a Clarice/Hannibal dynamic that starts to develop, although that's not quite the way it ends up going. Anyway, I thought they missed the opportunity for a much better title.

OK, A Whiffle Bat?

I'm not disputing the fact that men in our society "care less", on average, than women about whether the house is clean. But let's think about why this might be? Messy male commenters, what did the house you grew up in look like? Were the common areas messy? The bathrooms gross? Dishes festering in the sink? Did you turn your underwear inside out for a second wear? If the answer really is yes, then you probably came by your slobbishness honestly. I would actually be willing to bet, though, that people brought up in a house like that had some family problems besides chores division, and are likely as not going to rebel by making things in their own homes perfect.

If the answer is no, why wasn't it messy at your house? Again, the answer could be: I was raised by my single dad and we all chipped in, and while it wasn't white-glove clean it was fine. Again, though, if that's the answer I bet you are not one of the truly slobbish.

I think the most likely answer is: my mom picked up after everyone, although my dad and I had chores of a typically masculine kind such as mowing the lawn or raking leaves or making dad's special waffles on sunday or whatever. I was nominally responsible for cleaning my own room, and I had to be harassed to do so, and my mom actually dealt with the laundry side of things. Or, everyone had chores of an load-the-dishwasher type and for the heavy stuff we had a cleaning lady.

[I should note, here, that it is possible for men to be unfairly overworked if the "guy" chores happen to be very demanding, as when you have to use a snowblower all the time, or split wood, and there's no reason why women can't rake leaves.]

Now, as to the fact that men living alone are often slobs, we have to ask when and where this is. College apartments? Everyone is a slob in college. How do men who have lived alone all their lives generally do in the cleaning stakes? Any of you know any 50-ish, never married men? All the ones I've ever known had really, really neat houses. What about widowers? Unless their wife just died and they are suffering from depression or something, again, neat. Guys in the military are not known for their cavalier attitude towards matters of neatness, are they?

[UPDATE: This post wasn't actually done; I meant to save it to drafts...]

My point is just this: guys do not have magic blinders on that make them unable to see dirt. How can we tell? Because when household or employment structures demand it, they can see dirt just like a regular person. My step-dad was raised by a very strict father who was a colonel in the Army. He actually used to make white-glove inspections where he ran his gloved fingers along the edges of the upper shelves of the bookcase. Penalties for failing were, um, strict. Oddly enough, my step-dad was able to see even small amounts of dust, even on lampshades. (The effects were not life-long, perhaps...)

It is easy to see basic game theory at work in the putative all-guy household; it is rational to maximise your tolerance of mess because whoever is the least tolerant will do much more of the work. I think all my "guy's are just messy" commenters will aknowledge this. Why, then, not think that in the two person, mixed-gender household the same dynamic is at work? It is rational to dip slightly below your set level of caring about dirt, because then you will do less work, and the house will likely be as clean as you wanted. This doesn't mean men are all manipulative bastards or something, except insofar as everyone is a manipulative bastard. It just means that if they go with the flow, conform to the percieved stereotype of not seeing dirt, and generally follow a path sanctioned by society, they will reap some real rewards. The fact that internal pressures will make their wives or girfriends feel that the messy house is in some way "their problem" doesn't get these guys off the hook. I just don't believe that people magically do not notice when the bathroom smells bad. I think when they say, "I just don't think it's dirty" they are saying, "I don't feel like doing anything about it right now and if I put it off just a little more, I may not have to do it at all." And don't pretend that guys never purposefully do a really half-assed job so that they won't have to do it again. The flip side of "she's never satisfied with how I do the dishes" is "he doesn't wash the bottoms of the plates!"

Friday Random Ten: What's On The Little Computer Edition?

Just this week Zoë was complaining about this computer, "but there's NO SPEAKERS!!" Luckily, I can read. This is like a "what might have been" playlist. Well, you can sort of hear it.

1. The Wife Of The Soldier/Steeleye Span
2. California Dreaming/Me First And The Gimme Gimmes
3. Glittering Girl/The Who
4. Wild World/Jimmy Cliff
5. Can't Help Thinking About Me/David Bowie
6. Tornado of Souls/Megadeth
7. Lonely In Your Nightmare/Duran Duran
8. Non Coeur S'ouvre a ta Voix/Saint-Saens
9. Electricity/Midnight Star
10. Ni Batteri/Sigur Ros

Oh, I'm Sorry. Did I Just Hit You In The Jaw With a Cricket Bat? My Bad. Chicks Get Like That Sometimes

How is it that Matt Yglesias has such toolicious commenters? Seriously. Just read the thread for this post on Judith Warner's NYT op-ed [broken link fixed, thanks Gary!] Her thesis is that since women in two-earner households do 70% of the housework, then maybe the age of total gender equality has not yet arrived. Matt quotes a sneering Jon Podhoretz, points out why the J-Pod has utterly missed the point, and goes on to say:

All of which is just to say that it has not, in fact, proven to be the case that opening up the doors of professional life to women has brought about the sort of equality that one would have hoped. A deeply entrenched set of social expectations winds up assigning a disproportionate share of the housework to mothers. Specifically because this set of social expectations is deeply entrenched, most women find conforming to those expectations to be the rational thing to do given the options available which serves to further entrench them and to give the unequal outcomes a veneer of having been freely chosen. Meanwhile, though women who choose to remain childless can now compete on an equal footing in the professional arena with men who may or may not be parents, shouldering a disproportionate share of domestic burdens is going to tend to disadvantage you in the workplace even in the absence of actual discrimination.

Wow. That's radical. So radical that I hope nearly every male commenter decides to flunk out of feminism 101 in an uncontrollable reaction to Matt's radical ways. Let's see...

Salmon Burgers, etc.

I think that just reading my blog gives the impression that we only eat pork chops fried in lard, with butter sauce. That is totally not true. It's just that so many of the things we eat are so easy to make that I feel stupid even giving the recipe. This isn't a good heuristic for evaluating recipes, though, since lots of people want recipes that are super-easy. And so...

Salmon Burgers

1 lb (450 g) salmon filet
1 red onion, chopped finely
1 T minced ginger
2 T teriyaki sauce
2 T mayonnaise (scant)
1/2 c chopped cilantro
2 t sesame oil
2/3 c plain breadcrumbs
salt, pepper, chili pepper
[optional: flour; a beaten egg; a plate full of panko breadcrumbs)

1. Remove pin bones from salmon, if needed, and chop finely. (I recommend chopping it into small strips and then chopping the strips across with a big chef's knife. I don't think the food processor would be good.)

2. Mix all ingredients together. Form into patties. They will seem a bit coming apart-y, but they will firm up when cooked.

3. Either fry the patties in a lightly-greased non-stick pan (my choice tonight), or bake them in a 375-degree oven for 10-15 minutes, or give them the full anglaise treatment (dredging each patty in flour, shaking off the excess, dipping it in the beaten egg, and then in the panko) and either bake as above (very nice) or go the hell on and fry in 2 inches of peanut oil. Needless to say this last option is the tastiest, but not by much, so feel virtuous and avoid it, if you like.

This makes an awesome sandwich on a good whole-wheat roll, with a pickle made of thinly sliced cucumber, shallot, and chillies. But how about:

Steamed Carrots:

peel carrots and cut into rounds on the diagonal, put in a microwave-safe bowl
grate 1/2 inch ginger and put in bowl
add 2 T water to the carrots
cover with plastic wrap; microwave for 4 minutes or so, till tender
add salt, pepper, 2 t butter, and 1 t maple syrup

Brown Rice with Sesame:

1 c brown rice
1/2 c raw sesame seeds
1 T peanut oil
1/2 t sesame oil
1 c (or 2 c, see below) chicken broth or water

1. Toast sesame seeds in a dry, heavy-bottomed pan over medium heat, stirring constantly, for 4-5 minutes, till golden brown.

2. Add peanut oil and rice to pan; cook 2-3 minutes more, till rice is fragrant.

3. Add sesame oil and broth to rice mixture; bring to boil and then transfer to a rice cooker; cook till done (about 30 minutes). If you don't have a rice cooker, then add 2 c broth rather than one, and cook over low heat for 50 minutes, then let stand covered for 10 minutes. Fluff and serve. Mmmm, hippie-ish. (But good!)

See Mandos; it's not all about the lard. Who loves you, baby! And woof! Gotta give you something to eat every now and again ;)

When You Finished, Choke It/'Cause I Want To Smoke It

I think we should all draw a libertarian moral from these wise lyrics via Ry Cooder (on Chicken Skin Music) (also, if you don't listen to Ry right now you are a fool. My dad is an amazing 12-string bottleneck slide blues guitarist, which has given me a unique perspective on the sheer genius of Ry Cooder. F'realz.):

Want One What?

Hey, do you guys all know the random fact that Rufus Wainwright is my cousin? Of an attenuated sense; his grandad and mine are first cousins. I don't actually know him, though my mom knows his dad. Loudon's hippie sitch was given the WASP seal of approval back in the late sixties when my grandad (then married to Juan Trippe's widow in a random third marriage move) learned that Loudon had made $1,000,000. Consensus was, if being a big hippie could merit that much of the long green, it was OK. Notably, at the same Thanksgiving dinner where this conviction was expressed, my dad (high on pharmaceutical-grade speed lifted from said Betsy Trippe Wainwright's medicine cabinet, which by all accounts was an object lesson in the utility of having a considerate primary physician) spent the entire dinner finely slicing and even more slowly consuming a single pea. I think he was trying to make a point, but...

UPDATE: I've thought about this a little and maybe Betsy was Juan Trippe's daughter? That would make her kinda young, but within the half-your-age-plus-five regime so beloved in my family. Let's just all wait for my mom to post a comment, shall we?

UPDATE 2: I think you can all tell a lot about my family's standards for WASPy naming when I tell you that before I knew the sex of either of our kids I was trying to convince John than "Wainwright" was a totally reasonable first name. Seriously; he could be called "Wain". That was after I got talked out of "Stuyvesant". I know lots of people named Stuyvesant! It's a kick-ass name! OK, we're nuts.

Rice Pudding II

I posted another recipe here a while back* (that one being more authentic because my friend's Gujarati mom taught it to me), but this is super-tasty as well. Even John liked it, and he doesn't like rice pudding, q.v.

1 c arborio rice or sticky rice
2 c milk
1 c water
2 cinnamon sticks
8 slightly crushed cardamom pods
6 whole cloves
2/3 c gula hitam (black sugar) or grated piloncillo or dark brown sugar
1/2 c coconut cream (pouring the top off an unshaken can of coconut milk or using a tetrapak of coconut cream** is the easiest way to achieve this goal, but if you want to squeeze freshly grated coconut in a few tablespoons of water, then rock on with your bad self)
4 ripe baby bananas or 1 ripe regular big old banana

1. Bring rice, milk, water, spices and sugar to a boil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Reduce to a simmer. Cook until rice is very tender and creamy, stirring occasionally, adding more milk if needed.

2. When rice is done, add coconut cream and bananas. Serve warm. (If you want to serve it cold you will need to thin it with milk or coconut milk as it seizes up quite firm. Still tasty, though)

*Shit, I've had a blog for a long time now.
**This always makes me think of the scene in the Lars von Trier Kingdom miniseries where the crazy Swedish doctor is up on the roof in the rain, screaming out the various glories of Swedish culture, in which a gutteral cry of "TETRAPAK" figures largely.

Can't Get It Out of My Head

Got the new Fountains of Wayne album for X-Mas; now I've caught two earworms off it. "Maureen", little powerpop ditty. And their grunged out live cover of ELO's "Can't Get It Out of My Head". But some of the songs are sort of sappy.

Speaking of mining 70's gold, we're listening to a lot of Darkness these days. Urge Overkill have gotta be saying: we were a decade too soon. To make matters worse, the Darkness snagged the hook for "Sister Havana" - give or take a note - in "Get Your Hands Off My Woman" . (I couldn't figure out what the lyrics were until I checked online: " Octoped, you've got six hands too many/And you can't keep them to yourself" Ooooh. PZ Myers would love it it.)

Presumably you've seen that Darkness video. For that matter, the Fountains of Wayne video is good too. The David Hasselhoff video is only so-so.

iBleg

I've got a weird problem with our iPod. At the moment it ONLY works on our iBook or my old iMac at school. If I plug it into our spanking brand new iMac it shows but, if I try to put tunes on, it freezes the whole system so I have to turn the machine off. I've reinstalled the iPod software - reset to factory settings. I can do that fine, but get the same result. It's sort of inconvenient because the MUSIC is on the big machine. So now I've got to attach the iBook to the big machine. Move 10 gigs of songs onto the iBook. Then plug the iPod into the book. It so happens that the three machines have three different systems running: the iBook is 10.2.8; old iMac is running 10.3; new iMac is running 10.4. It's an old iPod. Three years old, I think. One of the click-wheel ones. Any clues why an old pod might not like 10.4? Or why it might like iTunes 3 but not iTunes 6?

Galantine

This recipe for galantine that Ben linked to in comments below looks soooo awesome. Although, it takes a week and John's response (to the aspic) was "slimy slimy slime." That's not really cost/benefitting out so good. But then I showed him the slice, and he had to admit it looked good. The aspic would just melt in a heartbeat here, anyway...It does remind me a little of an appetizer I had at a very fine restaurant here in Sinagpore (Au Jardin Les Amis) a few years ago on Valentine's day. It was a sort of chicken chaud-froix (jellied white sauce with tarragon on cold chicken). It was so sparkly and amazing, just sprung to life from the pages of the Larousse, but...it was actually rather bland. I felt that hours of work had taken place for little result. Perhaps some labor-intensive French recipes are just a form of conspicuous consumption? Nah.

Norriswatch!

"The Justice Riders realized that whatever they would do or become they would not tolerate evil, oppression, or injustice." (via Bookslut)

The book description is anaphorically unbuckled: "From the gold and silver mines of California and Nevada to the wide open plains of Texas, the American West was a wild frontier in the 1870s where dangerous outlaws pursued devilish dreams of fortune. But there were other men of simple faith, unsung Civil War heroes who adventured west to bring justice to places that had none. Those they called "The Justice Riders."

So they called the places 'the Justice Riders'?

Pâté

Mmmm, tasty pâté. This is not very hard to make and everyone will love it. The recipe only looks long because it contains variations. And I took pictures! One thing I have wondered about is that old recipes for pâté call for small amounts of saltpeter to make the inside stay pink rather than turning grayish when cooked and, especially, when sliced. All I know about saltpeter is that it is an ingredient in gunpowder and causes impotence, so, that's not sounding really good. Is there some modern-day equivalent? I guess modern commercial producers use sulfites for this, probably? It's not such a big deal if the meat looks gray; I just wonder if it's possible for the home chef to do anything about it...PS, Mandos, this recipe is for you, kid.