John & Belle Have A Blog

Black Liquorwitch

I think maybe Cuticle Bomb and (now that I recollect properly) Mint Condition could team up with another lame super-heroine: Black Licorwitch! She can make things taste like black licorice! But, not good black licorice, which I like, such as jelly beans, and even those long bars at the hippie co-op with the panda bears on the label. No, she can make things taste like those weird Dutch black licorice gumdrops which are a) hard, like you're eating an old pencil eraser b) really licorice-y (ordinarily not such a liability, but just wait for..) c) SALTY AS A M^%&^%&*CKER!!!! Now that I think about it, though, if she also had the power to give people the hangover they would have if, the night before, they had drunk an entire bottle of ouzo, then she might be a formidible opponent indeed. Ooh, or what if she could turn any substance cloudy by adding water to it, and then disappear in a jet of liquorish ink! Quick, to the Pernomobile!

UPDATE: Damn, I now see Doc Slack's comment in the thread below to the effect that someone already did the licorice thing. Sort of. What are the odds?!

Macron in Microsoft?

I have a dumb question. I've never figured out how to make the more obscure diacritical marks in MS-Word. Never figured out how to put haceks on Zizek. Never figured out how to put the right little lines over arete or dikaiosune. Can you help me? Do I need a plug-in?

League of Super-Lamers

What? No, I'm not talking about 60's era Legion of Superheroes, probably The Worst Comics ever. Last night John and I thought up two realllly lame superheroes. One, Cuticle Bomb, had a mishap with a radioactive tin of Burt's Bees cuticle balm. Now, whenever she uses her power, people's cuticles become all raggedy--even if they just had a manicure!!! And people are overcome with an urge to pull off a tiny protruding scrap of skin from their cuticles "just to neaten it up", but then they keep pulling and it deepens into a hideous raw area which bleeds. I guess she's mainly hired by the mob to enforce against Korean nail salons in NYC.

Then there's Near Mint--who can make things really minty! "Aaauggh, the freshness--can't hold on..." Strangely there's a Korean connection here too: my friend Kara once brought some eyedrops back from Korea that you put in and then your whole head tasted minty on the inside. It went down into your sinsuses. Probably the least appealing personal care product of all time; it's synastheserriffic!!

Who's Right?

Lenin: "Persons who think of politics as small tricks which at times border on deceit must be decisively refuted. Classes cannot be deceived."

Herodotus: "It seems indeed easier to deceive a multitude than one man."

Who's right, do you think?

Also, this is funny:

This failure to register any sphere of activity between junior high one-upsmanship and triggering apocalypse puts me in mind of an idea for an entire issue of Avengers in which they do nothing but play bridge. 'Hulk bid two no trump.' But that's another story ...

 

Consider This A JBB Open Thread

An internet milestone has been reached. As of this moment, the entire front page of Atrios consists of nothing but posts entitled "Open Thread" and saying "Yeah, yeah another stupid open thread." Really. 40-something of them. Scroll all the way down to the bottom. I assume it won't last long. Or is a blogger malfunction? I mean, with the blogspot people?

And Critias Was There, And You Were There, And You

I had a bad dream last night that I couldn't remember what the word "banausic" meant. As nightmares go it's pretty, um, run of the mill. Not exactly a noble nightmare, if you know what I mean.

To The Guy Who'd Throw A Party If He Knew Someone To Call

Theme song of the blogosphere. I can't believe I never heard this before.

Formerly, Levi Yglesias

I am somehow very charmed by the image of a 15-year-old Matt Yglesias reading his parents' copy of the Nation and saying, "I really don't think this chart presents a very accurate picture of consolidated corporate control of the media." Young Matthew was untroubled by this puported oligopoly, and is less so today. Insufficient filial piety is probably to blame. Kids coming up with their new-fangled notions, following the teachings of this or that preacher of the marketplace.

Microsoft: More Evil Than You Had Ever Imagined

Just now I had a fake trackback on my T. Rex post that led to...http://www.msn.com/!!! The official site! Microsoft is employing trackback spambots?! This seems like a big deal. To whom should I complain? I really want to let people know about this because I am frankly astonished that a huge corporation would put its reputation on the line by using this awful, awful tactic, one which has basically ruined trackbacks for many blogs, leading to their just being turned off, at a loss for all internet users. Seriously, this is fracked up. I'll see if I can get boingboinged or something so we can see if this is a widespread thing. Y'all should submit this link to the automated boingboing suggestion form (don't email Cory Doctorow or whomever, because it pisses them off). I have to think that blogosphere-wide outrage would shame Microsoft into cutting this shit out with a quickness. This is a Microsoft double-whammy to our family this week, because John just discovered that his favorite drawing software, Expression, has been bought by Microsoft. They have produced a working Mac beta (seems great, not super-buggy and loads of fun new features), but having gone to the trouble to do so, they won't be supporting Mac in the final version! Ha ha ha, it's almost as though a corporate directive from above ordered the development team to do this in an attempt to chip away at Mac's dominance of the high-end graphic design market!! Rassa frassin rootin-tootin cotton-picking/Yosemite Sam voice.

Chick 411

Well, it's not very frequently that I recommend beauty products around here. Longtime faves, some of which I have previously mentioned: NARS the Multiple;  Guerlain Terracotta pressed powder;  Clinique gel blush (God, they stopped making that for a while in the mid-nineties and my mom and I were feebly hoarding our nigh-empty tubes, just like philosophy stopped making that liquid blush called the supernatural, grrr.); YSL Touche Eclat, which is an amazing skin highlighter/concealer with a lamentable tendency to develop mold on the brush in Singapore, which is a drag if you paid mhhmmmhmhm* for it (if you dick around enough on their poorly designed website you can find it here); Shu Uemura foundation (I have olive skin, and it really is the best for that because it's formulated for Asian people). Actually, Shu Uemura have this foaming foundation base which is also pretty cool; you can use it alone or under foundation. And their eyelash curler really is as good as everyone says. Anyway, I discovered two new cool products recently. The one is by ettusais, some Japanese company, and it's seasonal, so you might just need to run out right now to the Isetan in Wisma Atria, but anyway it's this little round pot full of mousse blush. Funny feeling, like fluffy whipped cream. Very satisfactory application and though it looks like cotton candy in the jar it is great on. You can put just a little and look alive or pump it up for cutesy (but believeable) flushedness. No, but the reason I'm telling you all this is that I discovered a truly awesome product from L'Oreal, called ReFinish. It has a micro-dermabrasion exfoliator which you follow with a special moisturizer. You can use it 3x per week. It just makes your skin so amazingly soft, it's seriously unreal. And I've only used it twice! I've been dreamily running my hands over my cheeks in womderment. Four weeks from now I expect to look like Kiera Knightly Natalie Imbruglia. Seriously, buy this shit. And no, they don't pay me to do this. This is just skin-care evangelism from the heart. Though I think I'll make 50 cents if you buy one of the amazon-linked ones.

*redacted to increase marital harmony.

Daddy Art

A month or so ago NUS had an open house for prospective undergraduates. I got tapped to coordinate the philo department stuff, because I teach the intro course and do occasional cartooning. So I designed the banner and posters (my Bertrand Russell poster came out very nicely) and ... I got money to make balloons. (Oh, happy phrase.) So I cannibalized Plato and Socrates 'toons from my intro class. We've got enough of these babies to last for years, not to mention kids like 'em. Anyway, I thought you might be amused. (And so you don't think Zoë is the only artist in the family. Hell, Belle draws tons better'n me.)

Damn, He's Hot! Look At Those Tiny Arms! Or, Size Matters

This is really a question for PZ Meyers. Why did Tyrranosaurs have such dinky little front legs, so short they couldn't even use them to lift food to their mouths? It seems so dumb. I was considering it as I lay in bed last night and then I thought, aha, sexual selection! Their means of locomotion (rear legs) is such that they don't absolutely need front legs to get around. So maybe it was originally a signal, like, I'm so extrordinarily bad-ass that I can thrive even with these relatively wimpy arms! And then some kind of sexual selection feedback loop set in, and they were on a path to developing little nubbins and finally no arms at all, but they all got blown up by a meteor. The End. But then I thought, well, it can't really be the case that every time we see some apparent design flaw in a creature we're allowed to say about it, this is so stupid that only a really healthy, robust animal of this sort could survive, etc. You can't just claim sexual selection for everying, because chance ensures that lots of animals are just messed up from a teleological perspective. There's no guarantee that creatures will be optimally constructed; they just have to be good enough to stay alive and are saddled with all sorts of inherited templates which it is too late to change. So what do you guys think? Tell me what real scientists think so I can replace my imaginary version with a truer one.

Zoesaurus Singaporus

Zoë is a great artist. She has the uncanny gift of doing kid art the way a talented adult artist - commissioned to produce winning kid art - would produce kid art. Exhibit A: this T-Rex, who is a grumpy middle-aged guy in XL pants, possibly Osh-Kosh. I think he owns  a hardware store being slowly driven out of business by a Wal-Mart - or possibly a large meteor - and is perpetually annoyed by his inability to get stuff off the shelves.

Giovedi: Gnocca

This article made me want to go to Nice (I've never been anywhere in France but Paris, and that on bumped-from-the-plane stays en route to or from Italy). It also made me wonder what the hell the French name for gnocchi is:

But do not, under any circumstances, skip the classic niçois version of gnocchi (its name, even in French, cannot be printed here), made with Swiss chard and served with one of three sauces: gorgonzola, pistou or tomato.

Ummm. Even in Italian (in Rome, anyway), "gnocca" is slang for, shall we say, female genitalia? A friend of mine used to make me laugh with tales of his pal who, in the manner of local Roman restaurants, would announce a special of the day involving a stay at his gf's house: "Giovedi: gnocca." But, so, what the hell is the Niçoise that it's a) so offensive and b) so transparent to the average Times reader as to be unprintable? It can't merely strongly resemble a foul French word for ladybits, since that would presumably make it past the censor which caters to the monolingual (wait, that's starting to sound dirty too). What, they're called "les cunts"? I am really at a loss, and Google is either not helpful at all or helping me in ways I kind of don't want to be helped, if you know what I mean. Not by a robot, anyway. Wait, not by Google, I mean. Well-travelled JBB readers, enlighten me.

Pork Chops

Boneless pork loin chops can be good, but they are incredibly lean and therefore prone to dry out. Really dry out, to where biting into one is much like I imagine the experience of eating one of those little packets that say "silica gel--do not eat" to be. But this recipe solves that problem. With bacon! Actually, the bacon is optional, but I happened to have some really nice bacon from an organic bacon and ham-making farmer guy. Here in Singapore, astonishingly! In "the heartland", no doubt.

vegetable oil for the pan
2-3 slices lean bacon (mine are really yummy, like little thin bacon pork chops! but good pork chops, or we would have an epicurean vicious regress!)
10 shallots, chopped
6 cloves garlic, minced
2 T fresh thyme leaves
3 c sliced shiitake mushrooms
2 cups chicken broth
flour, salt, and pepper
8 boneless pork chops (preferably marinated in a little soy sauce for an hour or so, but it doesn't matter really)

1. Slick a cast-iron frying pan with oil and cook the bacon. Cut it up, discarding excess fat if you are feeling virtuous.

2. Dry the pork chops with paper towels and dredge them in the flour, salt, and pepper mixture. Add a little more oil to the pan if needed, and sear the pork chops for a minute or so on each side over medium-high heat.

3. Remove pork chops to a plate. Fry the shallots and garlic in the pan for 2 minutes over medium heat. Add mushrooms and cook a minute or so more. Add broth, bacon and thyme and let it cook for another minute or so.

4. Put the pork chops back in the pan and nestle them under the mushrooms. Cook just a little while more.

This is best served over polenta. It's funny, I made this last night and I thought, this is so tasty, but I would never make it for company. It's too family-only to have pork chops. But that isn't rational since it's actually very good. I'm having someone over for dinner this weekend, so I can't make it again, obviously, but it made me realize I have a bias against certain foods that I wouldn't serve them to company, for no good reason. Like, I would never make blackeyed peas, cornbread and greens for company either, except for a very close friend maybe. But why not, everybody likes southern food? I would feel like I didn't put enough effort into the thing. Hmmm. Maybe I'll make that on Saturday, although I'll probably have to supplement it with fried chicken and potato salad to retain my self-respect. And biscuits instead of cornbread--you can't serve cornbread to company! I was thinking of making a four-layer coconut cake for dessert, and it would be all of a piece. But it's so plain! We should be having seviche with green mango in a martini glass!  What do you all think?

Also, this reminds me, faithful reader Anthony, are you in Singapore? You should come eat at my house. Guaranteed 100% rancid bat free. Email me.