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The wallpaper at this place is great, and this too. Also, I want to let everyone know that as the masses have finally come around to the combination of brown and light blue, brown and pink is where it's at now. Finally, the Curtis Mayfield live version of People Get Ready is amazing.
This blog, design*sponge, looks neat, though I haven't had a chance to really check it out. Lotsa ads, but for things you would want. I'm actually thinking about doing some interior design stuff myself. I haven't worked out what I would need to do with the Ministry of Manpower to start what would essentially be a very small business, but I know another woman who did so and found it quite easy. A friend of mine is moving house, from a big place out by the Singapore Polo Club to a 1400sqf apartment near Orchard Road. She has hired a designer but he's not really listening to what she has to say. He seems to want to chuck all her stuff and start from scratch. I told her she already had lots of nice furniture, which could be re-upholstered or painted. I said she should spend the money on kitchen appliances and good flooring, and that I would eat my hat if I couldn't re-do her place for substantially less than what they were considering. So she brought her husband over to see my place and he seems pretty keen, so hopefully I'll be able to use them as my guinea pigs. I can see that the most difficult part of my job will be actually asking people for money and charging for my services. I suck at that, and I'm going to under-estimate how long it will take me to do things by several orders of magnitude. Like, I can paint you a trompe l'oeil mural of the Italian countryside! I mean, I actually can, but I will find it impossible to think, well, this will take me 100 hours, and since my labor is only worth 20c an hour...no, that's wrong, isn't it!
Unrelated: I thought I had posted about the Free Design on our old blog, but I couldn't find it (I looove the Free Design). I did find this, though. (Didn't it look clean and shiny then!) Scroll down to Tuesday July 17 (this would be, um...2003???):
Lately I've been wondering, has the Instapundit been losing it? Or is it rather the case that he's always had a vein of unpleasant right-wing flackery and I didn't notice at first because I was caught up in the magic of blogging?
That, my children, was 'back in the day'.
I don't know that I ever had these at someone's house before having them at a fancy Southern restaurant, so they're not really a South Carolina thing as far as I know. They're super-tasty, though.
Ingredients:
3 c flour
3 heaping t baking powder
1 1/2 t salt
2 t brown sugar
2 heaping T Crisco
4 T unsalted butter cut into cubes (or you could use all butter. Or all Crisco!)
1 1/2 c mashed cooked sweet potato (2 potatoes)
heavy cream as needed; start with 1/3 cup
1. Preheat oven to 450F.
2. Put flour, baking powder, salt and sugar in bowl of a stand mixer (or normal bowl if you're doing it by hand, which I hasten to add is very easy.) Mix dry ingredients together.
3. Add Crisco and butter. Mix with flat paddle attachment till fat is well cut in and mixture looks sandy (or, use two knives or a pastry cutter to do the same.)
4. Add mashed sweet potato and fold it in with a rubber spatula (you're trying to stir less rather than more, and in any case stop before it's fully combined).
5. Add cream plus more cream as needed to make dough. Stir till combined, favoring a less-is-more stirring strategy.
6. Pat out dough into a circle 2 inches thick on a floured board. Cut into biscuits, placing them as close together as possible. (NB if you put all the biscuits that are made from re-rolled scraps on one side you will be able to avoid them and fob these less-tender ones off on unsuspecting husbands or children.)
7. Bake 15 or so minutes. Let them get well-browned, since they are damp.
8. Take two four, and butter them while they're hot.
Zoë gets all the attention for her mad drawing skills. So her are some cute Mei Mei pics from the last two weeks.
No one should ever be allowed to use the word "emboldened" ever again in any context.* Thanks in advance.
*I will consider jokes about fonts on a case-by-case basis.
You know what's still just a great mashup? Teen Spirit v. Bootylicious by Soul Wax. The way the opening "Beyoncé...can you handle this, Michelle, can you handle this..." swirls around over the unmistakeable opening riff of Smells Like Teen Spirit is wonderful. It's also amusing to me that people producing the songs of cheesy pop acts have reproduced the sound of a lot of good mashups from a few years ago: inappropriately heavy guitars with standard-issue technologically enhanced melisma, a la Stroke of Genie-us (the seminal Strokes/Christina Aguillera mashup). The guitars create the illusion of 'rocking' (much as the skinny tie and eye makeup of Avril Lavigne were stipulatively 'punky'.) Kelly Clarkson, I'm looking at you. It's just a testament to how this Camille Paglia column plumbs the abyssal depths of self-importance, borne along in the submersible USS Contrarian Idiocy, that this isn't even one of the ten most annoying things in the column:
The waning of art film has been just one of the bitter cultural disappointments that the baby-boom generation has had to endure [indeed, perhaps no generation in history has suffered as the boomers have--ed]. Rock music, which exploded in the artistic renaissance of the '60s and '70s, seems to have exhausted its formulas. At the moment, hip-hop and disco-derived dance music enjoy far greater prestige everywhere....
In general, aspiring young performers emerging from the bland white middle class in America seem to be having trouble expressing or controlling emotion, with its myriad of subtle gradations. Unless they hail from the gospel-rich South, they lack direct experience of the vocal authority and operatic dynamics that most young African-Americans automatically absorb from church. And then Mariah Carey, who has phenomenal natural range, has unfortunately spawned a girly epidemic of glossy, manufactured faux crescendos.
In contrast, I've been deeply impressed with the visceral intensity and exquisite poetic shadings of Kelly Clarkson's moody "Irvine," which Matt Drudge has been playing on his Sunday night radio show. Clarkson claims to have composed the song in 20 minutes while lying in despair on a bathroom floor after a concert. The spare live production, with its ascending changes and haunting ornamental guitar slides, is gorgeous. As long as music of this quality is being made, the American fine arts will revive.
How many things have gone wrong in this passage? From listening to Drudge's radio show, to facile ecstasies about black people and how they're so authentic and musical, to finding deep meaning in a Kelly Clarkson song, I can only say: damn, Camille, that was some pharmeceutical-grade sh#t right there.
Zoë is very nervous about watching movies. She scares easily. I haven't been able to get her to watch the 5000 Fingers of Dr. T - which is, like, my second and third reason for even having kids. But she did consent to watch this YouTube clip. Which inspired her to imagine how the ladies might get dressed up on Doe-Me-Doe Day. That's their male assistant in the background with the extremely black hat.
Ah,I'm SO glad to see this finally reported in the newspaper, since it has been bothering me all my life. Taking the population as a whole, men cannot possible have substantially more sex partners than women on average. It's not confusing or mysterious; it's just logically impossible. Note the rather feeble explanatory attempt:
Sevgi O. Aral, who is associate director for science in the division of sexually transmitted disease prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said there are several possible explanations and all are probably operating.
One is that men are going outside the population to find partners, to prostitutes, for example, who are not part of the survey, or are having sex when they travel to other countries.
Another, of course, is that men exaggerate the number of partners they have and women underestimate.
Dr. Aral said she cannot determine what the true number of sex partners is for men and women, but, she added, “I would say that men have more partners on average but the difference is not as big as it seems in the numbers we are looking at.”
Dr. Gale is still troubled. He said invoking women who are outside the survey population cannot begin to explain a difference of 75 percent in the number of partners, as occurred in the study saying men had seven partners and women four. Something like a prostitute effect, he said, “would be negligible.” The most likely explanation, by far, is that the numbers cannot be trusted.
Yeah, I think the explanation is that all those dudes have a girlfriend in Canada. Seriously. You've never met her, but she's really hot.
I was explaining to Zoë about ancient costumes. The Romans wore togas. That sort of thing. (Actually this was a later stage of a conversation that started: what part of America is Rome in?) She decided to draw a Roman lady and her daughter picking plums. You can see the lady has picked quite a few. Her daughter appears to be wearing spandex jogging shorts.
I didn't get organized early enough to make mango cheesecake, so I made this instead. It was wildly popular, although some people seemed to be imagining it was low-calorie, which it was not. (One person raved about how the topping was "so light tasting!" Honesty compelled me to admit, "that's actually crème fraîche with equal in it.") Still, I guess it was a decent bit lower in calories than the same thing made with sugar.
Crust:
3 T unsalted butter, melted.
crumbs made from 8 McVitie's Digestive biscuits (or about the same number of slabs of graham crackers. If I had been able to find special sugar-free graham crackers for diabetics I would have used those, but I didn't)
5 t Equal Spoonful (I hear Splenda is better but they didn't have any at my local Cold Storage)
1. Preheat oven to 350F (150C)
2. Mix crumbs, butter and Equal together. Press into bottom and slightly up the sides of a springform pan.
3. Bake 10 or so minutes, till slightly browned.
Filling:
6 T unsalted butter
1/2 c fruit only marmalade (I used St. Dalfour's kumquat which is really nice)
5 oz Valhrona chocolate, chopped (I used the 70% bittersweet, which meant there was sugar in there too; a more careful baker would use unsweetened and up the sugar substitute slightly, I think)
1/3 c very strong espresso
1/3 c heavy cream
1 egg yolk
1 t vanilla
1/2 t Boyajian orange oil
1 1/2 c Equal Spoonful
1/2 c flour
4 egg whites
1/4 t cream of tartar
1/2 t salt
1. Heat butter, marmalade, chocolate, espresso and cream in top of a double boiler set over simmering water until chocolate is just melted. Let cool slightly.
2. Add egg yolk, vanilla, orange oil and Equal and stir still smooth. Add flour and stir just till no streaks remain.
3. Whip egg whites and cream of tartar together in a clean bowl till they hold stiff peaks; without sugar to add at this stage they will not get glossy and will become fully whipped when still dry and somewhat grainy looking.
4. Stir 1/4 of the egg whites into the chocolate mixture. Fold remaining whites in gently. Pour into crust and bake 25 minutes. Middle will not be totally firm. Run a thin bladed knife around the edge so that it won't crack while cooling.
Serve with crème fraîche sweetend with a little Equal. Suprisingly tasty, all in all. Not just the sugar-free-est thing ever, obviously, but I gave fair warning and I didn't kill anyone. Better diligence could yield a fully sugar-free version.
While Belle and I were working on this, Zoë was getting into the act. Look out, Sue - there's a Skrull!
I love the groovy Mr. Natural 'keep-on-truckin' laid-backness of how Sue's uniform is cut. Or maybe those are PJ's. Plus the hair.
1. This review makes me homesick for San Francisco.
2. I have to make a cake for a diabetic friend. Reviewing the options, it seems to me the best thing will be to make a cheesecake sweetened with fresh mango puree and Splenda or whatever. Cheesecake doesn't actually need that much sugar anyway. But then, aren't the sugars in the sweet mango just the same old thing? Is fruit-only jam, sweetened with white grape or apple juice concentrate, better for diabetics than normal jam? Well, it would have to be some better, but is it much worse than jam made of fruit and fake sugar, as it seems to me it should be? And lots of the recipes I looked at seemed indifferently diabetic/low calorie; is there any reason I should be going for low fat, too? I hope not, or this ain't going to taste real good.
3. This Onion article is funny, but extraordinarily biting. It elicits only the single, punched-in-the gut guffaw that might be barked out by the audience at a Beckett play.
So, in this incomprehensible Chris Muir cartoon, is that TNR-lovin', troops-hatin' dude supposed to be Yglesias? There's no point in asking whether it's supposed to be funny.
Relatedly, I see Matt beat me to blogging about Romney's ludicrous "has he forgotten about 9/11" non-sequitur, even though I could have done it earlier today when it was the middle of the night in the States. I guess hating America gives you extra energy.
When I first heard about this blogging pedophile in LA who was (understandably) creeping parents out, but who wasn't breaking any law by standing around perving on little kids, I thought, someone's going to pass a stupid law. Yesterday he was served with a restraining order which orders him to stay at least 30 feet away from every person under the age of eighteen in the state of California. That's...undoubtedly physically impossible in many places at most times. He can't teleport into a wall when a family starts walking towards him on the street and breaches the 30 foot barrier, so this just amounts to saying he can't go anywhere, ever, except unpopular national parks. There are plenty of sex offender regulations that I think are counter-productively harsh, such as those which make most of a city off limits to anyone on a sex offender registry by requiring them to live at least x distance from every school, church, day care center, etc. Those at least apply to people who have been convicted of crimes (even if I often think that too many people end up on sex offender registries). This guy hasn't even been charged with a crime, much less convicted of one. He's a repulsive person and unlikely to inspire anyone's sympathy, but it's not against the law to be a repulsive pervert. It's against the law to actually molest children. I sometimes think that public sentiment against child molesters would more profitably be channeled into educating people about the real threats, namely, the child's family and family friends. But then I think that might just engender harmful paranoia. The problem of what to do with proven sexual abusers who are almost certainly going to go on and commit more crimes is a thorny one. Measures that do nothing to lessen the threat to kids from their stepdad or skeezy uncle, and also violate the rights of people who may have committed statutory rape once in the far past but cleaned up their act, seem particularly dumb. But what would I do if I found out this guy was spying on my kids? It's against the law to arrange for people to fall down three flight of stairs, or to threaten to kill them. I guess if I thought I could get the cops to make his life difficult...hmm. But this is why we don't let individual crime victims and their families make laws on the spot, right, or there'd be people strung up from every tree?
From the NY Times:
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. O’Hanlon said the article was intended to point out that the security situation was currently far better than it was in 2006. What the American military cannot solve, he said, are problems caused by the inability of Iraqis to forge political solutions. “Ultimately, politics trumps all else,” Mr. O’Hanlon said. “If the political stalemate goes on, even if the military progress continued, I don’t see how I could write another Op-Ed saying the same thing.”
You'll find a way, Mike. I totally believe in you.
Getting people to loathe you can be the ticket to big time blogging success. The bloggers at the NYT's Dream Home Diaries are putting this theory to the test, and are halfway there. You really have to go back to some of the earlier posts, and you must read the comments to get the flavor of this whole bizarre enterprise.
They started with a proposed budget of $300,000 to build their dream/retirement home on a lot they had bought on a barrier island in Florida. Then they came up with a series of massive, strangely proportioned architectural drawings, about which all the commenters said the same thing: your house is too big. Also, it will cost at least 600 to 700 thousand dollars. Your (still college aged) children are not all going to be visiting you at once with your putative grandchildren, so you don't need that many bedrooms (and the extra laundry room). Finally, you don't need a roof deck on top of the third story.
The husband is sticking to his guns on the roof deck despite the facts that: he is afraid of heights; the deck can't be covered with anything (such as an awning) because it will all blow off in a hurricane (likewise any furniture will have to be taken up and down again fairly frequently); it will be incredibly hot and buggy up there; you will have to carry your glass of wine up all those stairs; the deck can only be accessed via a narrow spiral staircase, and this seems at odds with the forward-thinking-to-retirement aspects of the house (such the construction of an expensive elevator); and finally, most compelling, the builder says there will be serious drainage problems. What's up with this? It is the only way to see a teeny bit of ocean from their actual lot.
Now, I am perhaps prejudiced in that I am very attached to the vernacular architecture of the Low Country, where there are many islands like this, but honestly, people have been building houses in these places for ages. High ceilings, fans, screened porches? Is any of this, I say, is any of this getting through that head of yours? </Foghorn Leghorn> Most recent developments: the house will cost $700,000! OMG who could ever have known! They are curiously unfazed. They get a huge mortgage and do a little superficial penny-pinching, including the worst way to save $3500 ever; they themselves will get all the permits and arrange with the town government for water and sewer hook up, rather than letting the builder do it. (Keep in mind that they live far away).
The commenters melt down. The comment section has actually developed into a fairly good community bound together by searing hatred for the posters and lots of genuinely good advice on the minutiae of building, provided by well informed Floridians.
In their defense, the latest front elevation looks OK-ish.
More All Star Superman-inspired Zoë art. Dr. Quintum and his assistant, Agatha:
The thing that really impressed me is that Zoë drew the following without consulting the comic. She remembered what they looked like from the day before.
The only thing she really got wrong is that Quintum doesn't have a tie. Plus there's no mouse. But there is a mouse in our house. We were trying to see where he got in and then, damn! how did we fail to notice that our kitchen floor was actually built with a little cartoon Jerry the mouse house. So Zoë made a little sign.
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