May 2002 Archives

Wow, all those hits yesterday. Musta been from the subway map thing. Hey, I'm not complaining. Of course, the real question is how many of them will be coming back?

Interesting linkage:

• The rise of the "Creative Class". A really interesting, cross-disciplinary look at what makes cities live, not just livable. I think that you could link a number of these ideas with ideas about "New Urbanism", which is promising to be more than just the latest fad in city planning. It's almost as if New Urbanism sprang up as a response to the needs of the Creative Class.
• Sonata in X. Funniest if you've used the older (i.e. butt-ass slow) versions of OS X.
• The (entertainment) world's most famous urban legend is true. Well, sorta, kinda. With video!
• An early draft of the script for Episode 3. I'd pay $10 to see this....
• Marx was a capitalist? He famously wasn't a Marxist, but a new book suggests he actually liked the market.

And in other news, I might redesign the site next month.

Or maybe I'll just add some links.

Who knows? I sure don't....

The New York City Blogger Map.

My trip out to the Bay Area was a success, and I'm not the only one to think so. Go Karen!

I'm back.

Taking a red-eye flight back from the West Coast and then showing up at work is not a recommended combination. So why do I keep on doing it?

Updates for the next couple of days won't -- I'll be in California with only sporadic internet access, seeing my sister sing over the long weekend. Play nice while I'm gone.

The forces of evil and the forces of good met again in an epic clash this evening. Titantic warriors strode forth to the verdant plain of battle; their weapons, seemingly crude implements made of wood and leather.

At least tonight, the forces of good prevailed, 3-1, behind the pitching of Pedro.

There's nothing quite like the Red Sox and the Yankees squaring off. It's the greatest rivalry (not arguably the greatest, it is the greatest) in all of sports, in any sport, at any level. Sure, there are lots of great sports rivalries--Ohio State/Michigan; Celtics/Lakers; Redskins/Cowboys; Man U/the rest of the English Premier League--but there's nothing quite like Red Sox/Yankees. It really is as good as it gets.

Oh, yeah, the Film Exchange Project.

I don't actually have any pictures to post for the simple reason that I never got a roll of film to put up. Bummer, eh?

But....

My pictures are up over at The Sardonic Bomb (thanks, Scott!). I'm kinda surprised that they came out as well as they did....

More yummy linkage:

• Today is Try To Make Shit Happen With Your Mind Day! Yesterday was Tell Yourself For The One Hundred And Seventy Seventh Time This Week That You're Over Him Or Her Day! Priceless stuff.
• Save the High Line! I've always thought that it'd be a great place to put a cafe, at least during the summer. These people are the ones actually trying to save it.
• Boilermakers make freeze-dried beer, not boilers (and, for that matter, one wonders how these Boilermakers would make a boilermaker with their new invention).
• Margret Berry makes The Case For Cocktails. From The Morning News, a ezine that has very rapidly become my favorite zine on the web. Of course, they don't call themselves a zine, instead preferring the oxymoronic appellation of being "a Web-based broadsheet". It doesn't make much sense to me, since a broadsheet newspaper refers explicitly to the kind of paper it's printed on, and since web-based publications aren't printed on paper at all...
• Every politician lies when he runs for office. But GWBush has taken that kind of prevarication to a whole new level, according to Rubert Kuttner and the American Prospect....

Mysteries Of The Unknown, part of an on-going series:

Someone cleaned up my kitchen today.

And I Don't Know Who. (cue creepy music of choice)

Hmm. Blogspot seems to be screwing up a lot of folks' sites today.

I hope they've got a backup plan....

Oh dear.

Steven Jay Gould, dead at 60 (my only complaint about this story is that it doesn't put "creation scientists" in quotes, the way it should be). Whatever the controversies he stirred up as a serious evolutionary scientist (it's a rather lengthy debate that few are qualified to judge), he was a first-class champion of rationality and the best popular (popular, as in "suited to the means of the majority", rather than popular as in "commonly liked or approved") science writer of his generation. He will be missed. I suspect the scientists who crossed swords with him will also feel his loss.

Some linkage:

• The world's most erudite police blotter. Elegant, understated, and just plain funny.
• You want mad cows? I'll give you a mad cow. Well, technically I suppose that it'd be a mad bull, but...
• The Guide to New York Jargon.
• Most people get more "conservative"as they get older. Kevin Phillips shifted the other way.
• Novels come from the strangest places.
• Wired's Top 20 Sci-Fi Movies. Gattaca at #2? The Matrix ranked higher than 2001: a space odyssey? I have my own list, and it doesn't quite match up with theirs....
• Lucian Freud is still painting self-portraits.
• More on Orwell and his legacy.
• "Birds" have nothing to do with ornothology; "getting a leg over" isn't a stretching exercise (well, I suppose it could be if you do it wrong), and "Nancy" isn't a teen-aged girl detective. At least not according to this dictionary of British slang.
• Despite the New York Sun's rapid slide into utter irrelevancy, it's still the most visually distinctive paper in the city, and it's a joy to look at (if not to actually read). Andy Crewdon breaks it down.

Added some questions to the FAQ. Again.

Slogan seen on the handbag of a Japanese tourist yesterday at lunch:

The Obscure Desire of Bourgeoisie

Seems to me that they're drinking too many Sapporos before watching their Bunuel films over there in Tokyo town.

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The new Moby album is pretty darn good. Very Play-like. Not as good as Play, but that's like complaining that Billy Budd is not as good as the book about the whale...

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Made some minor changes and updates to the FAQ.

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Dinner party tomorrow night. I don't know what's more worrisome: that I don't know what I'm making, or that I don't know how many people are going to show up...

Finally recovered from making Mother's Day dinner.

Five courses:

1. Cold Cucumber Soup
   One onion, chopped. A clove of garlic. Heat with some olive oil at medium heat at the bottom of the bot until translucent. Then add 58 ounces of chicken stock (four cans, or 1.25 cups more than normal, to make the soup thinner than the usual creamy soups; if you're using canned stock, chill the cans before adding to solidify any remaining chicken fat) and one medium thickly sliced potato. Simmer until the potato is done. Then add three peeled, sliced cucumbers. Simmer until the cucumbers are soft. Add lashings of skim milk and about 1 tablespoon of butter. Puree. Chill (this will take a long time; you might want to use your freezer). Once cold, add one julienned cucumber. Serve. You may want to add more cucumbers and, more importantly, substitute shallots for the onion at the beginning.
    
2. Smoked Salmon Salad
   Take slices of country bread, drizzle with honey, and bake for 10 minutes in the oven. Remove from oven, put on plate, add assorted salad greens (I was going to use frisee but a quick glance at the price convinced me to go with a mesclun mix instead) and raw shallots. Add a few cherry tomatoes and top with your smoked salmon. Serve with a slice of lemon on the side.
    
3. Tuna Spring Rolls
   Take one bunch of spinach. Wash, dry and trim the roots off. Then, take a pound of sushi-grade tuna and cut into roll-sized strips (the recipe I borrowed this from suggested 10cm x 2cm x 2cm, but my egg roll wrappers just weren't that big; I ended up with somewhat smaller bits of fish). Make spring rolls consisting of one piece of fish and a few leaves of cilantro. I got 18 rolls out of a pound; a more consistent approach to sizing probably would have yielded about 15 rolls. Deep fry the spinach at 350 degrees F for four to five minutes, and set aside. Then deep fry the tuna rolls for 30 seconds (more or less, depending on size) at the same temperature. Plate, cover the rolls with the spinach, and serve.
    
4. Pasta with Clams and Mussels
   Chop five to six shallots and put in large pot, and a couple of garlic cloves. Add white wine to cover. In a separate pot, boil pasta until al dente. Add mussels and clams (amounts vary according to taste, but figure about 1/2 to 2/3 pounds of each per person). Steam for 7-8 minutes. Remove shellfish. Drain pasta and add to wine/shallot mixture. Over heat, toss and add pepper and other spices of choice (I just used some parsley). Mix shellfish back in, plate and serve.
    
5. Roasted Nectarines
   Start with one nectarine per person. Half and pit your nectarines (which is really rather difficult and if I had to do this again, I'd use peaches or something easier to pit). Put on roasting plate. Add a little dab of butter to each half. Liberally douse with sugar. Roast in a 350 degree F oven until done (probably about 30 to 45 minutes). You can leave it in the oven to keep warm. Plate and serve with a little scoop of ice cream.

Hmm... those crack webmonkeys over at the NY Post are at it again:

In addition to the above picture, they also ran a picture of the Pav next to a story who's only possible connection to the singer was a very brief reference to the HBO series The Sopranos...

A few interesting articles:

• An LA artist hacks the freeway system
• A. O. Scott takes on George Lucas in what will probably be the best-written review of Episode II ever
• Anthony Tommasini looks with regret at what once was a long and glorious career
• Lakshmi Chaudhry of Alternet wonders what happened to the Cato Institute
• Jeremy Lott on Canada: We're Not America!

The Great Monitor Hunt of 2002 is finally over.

Faithful viewers may remember that last month I was having endless trouble with the worst monitor ever made. I am happy to now announce that I have reached resolution (after thinking long and hard about if it was really worth the extra money to get an Apple Studio Display), I am now the proud owner of a Samsung SyncMaster 753DF.

It really is a much better monitor than the ViewSonic (despite the fact that it uses a shadow mask as opposed to an aperture grille (i.e. Trinitron)). I guess that says more about the ViewSonic than it does about the Samsung....

OK, so I'm feeling somewhat less anti-social right about now.

Now all I have to do is figure out what I'm going to make for Mother's Day dinner. Last year was, if memory serves, five courses. This means, of course, that I have to top myself this year. I've got a decent handle on two-and-a-half courses. But I really have no idea what the rest of it is going to be...

A man famous for making women beautiful died the other day.

I could ponder why the passing of a makeup artist should actually be news. And I'm sure that I've got a couple of hundred words tucked away somewhere on gender roles, make-up, and why society deems that sort of thing to be "normal" (speaking of which, did you guys catch that first episode of Frontier House where that woman completely flipped out over not being able to wear make-up for the group photo? It was like an anthropological dispatch from Mars (or, in this case, Venus). <Spock>Fascinating.</Spock>).

But, in the interests of time (and the interests of not boring all three four of my readers to tears), I'll refrain.

As a long-time admirer (far too often from afar) of female pulchritude, I will say this: the vast majority of women I've met are far more beautiful than they think they are.

The problem with blogging when I'm tired: my mind wanders, and I'm possessed by a strange urge to footnote, hyperlink, and otherwise annotate everything I can get my grubby little electronic hands on.

That, and I've got this little nagging voice in the back of my head telling me that I've got something else to say but I just can't quite remember what it is and that if I stay up just a little while longer I'll remember what it is, and it will be shining and brilliant and dazzling.

Yeah, fat chance, eh? I think I'll just go to bed now and save the world from my incoherent brilliance.

Oh yeah, one more thing: I think that ... nevermind.

Word(s) of the Day:

Main Entry:mis·an·thrope
Pronunciation:'mi-s^&n-"thrOp
Function:noun
Etymology:Greek misanthrOpos hating mankind, from misein to hate + anthrOpos human being
Date:1683
: a person who hates or distrusts mankind

Main Entry:mis·an·throp·ic
Pronunciation:"mi-s^&n-'thrä-pik
Function:adjective
Date:1762
1 : of, relating to, or characteristic of a misanthrope
2 : marked by a hatred or contempt for mankind
synonym see CYNICAL
- mis·an·throp·i·cal·ly /-pi-k(&-)lE/ adverb

I suppose it would have been only appropriate if I'd pulled these definitions from Bartelby. But I didn't. C'est la vie.

You are a David Weinberger.
You are smart, savvy, interested in why people do what they do,
enjoy questioning yourself and are not balding.
Take the What Blogging Archetype Are You test at GAZM.org

Random thought after I took this test and got a guy I'd never heard of before (not entirely inaccurate, particularly that bit about not balding): Does anyone really know how large the blogsphere really is?

I mean, you could probably get a rough estimate by counting the number of Blogger users there are and then adding to that all the LiveJournal, Diaryland and Pitas users. Those are all pretty easily countable. But then you get into systems like GreyMatter, Radio/Manila, MovableType, and slashcode which aren't so easily countable. And then there seem to be a million "other" systems out there, not to mention freaks like myself who eschew automated systems and massage the raw HTML with our bare hands. Even if you take out all the inactive and abandoned blogs you still end up with a pretty damn big number.

An accurate link map of the blogsphere would be an interesting thing, methinks.

I have some new neighbors. They just moved in this week. They have a yappy (and whiny, too) little dog who is going to drive me insane. Grumble. The Koreans have a very sensible way of dealing with yappy little dogs.

Massinova is back! And the hordes rejoice.

Went to go see John Harbison's The Great Gatsby last night at the Met.

Over all, I liked it. I'd like to see it get a chance in the regular repertory. While not revolutionary, I liked the music enough and the staging was quite effective. Sasha has some excellent suggestions on how to strengthen the opera, even though I like the music more than she does.