Teleidoscope

Fri, Mar 30, 2007

Spaghetti Sauce and Bagniat

Posted at 11:02 pm MDT to Technology

I used to help my Mom and Nonna can home-made tomato sauce. Which is fun but exhausting. In my experience, whichever weekend in late August-early September you decide to make sauce will turn out to be one where the temperature outdoors reaches triple digits in the shade, and cooking down a few of pecks of tomatoes into a year's supply of sauce in that kind of weather is wearing. You start out using every burner on the stove and all your biggest pots (including the canning kettle) and as the water cooks off you consolidate the batches until the canning kettle is freed up for the actual canning. So every burner on the stove is going from early in the morning until well into the evening.

Actually, the first thing you do, the day before, is line a big basket with cheesecloth, set it in the kitchen sink or on a prop in a big tub, and fill it with layers of quartered tomatoes and a little salt. Tie the cloth together at the top so that a little pressure will be put on the tomatoes, and leave it to drain over night. That reduces the cooking-down time.

We usually made two batches of sauce: a huge batch of spaghetti sauce and a smaller one of a hot sauce called something like 'bagniat' (accent on the final syllable). I never liked bagniat so I never paid that much attention to the recipe: lots of hot peppers went into it, some bell peppers and tomatoes, onions, garlic, Italian parsley, and maybe a little celery. The big batch had the same basic ingredients, but the hot peppers were only present in token quantities and the percentage of tomatoes was much greater.

Regardless, one thing that was important was to make sure that some of the ingredients other than tomatoes started out in each pot. And there was a fair amount of ladling saucepan-fulls of sauce back and forth between the various vats of the main sauce to help even out the cooking-down process and flavors.

I don't know what variety of hot peppers was used. (Probably whatever was available in Connecticut in the 60s and 70s, which would most likely have been Italian varieties in any case.)

The tomatoes we used were regular field-ripened tomatoes. I don't think paste varieties were available in quantities suitable for canning. Some years we were able to add a few paste tomatoes to the mix.

Actually, I think, the bagniat was sometimes made by adding a lot of hot peppers to some of the main batch, after things had cooked down a bit. But 30 years later I can't be sure. (Dad and Nonna did the tasting to decide if there were enough hot peppers in it yet -- Mom refused to taste it.)

All of the ingredients that went into the sauces were, at most quartered. The onions were peeled and I think the peppers were stemmed but everything went in in big chunks. Certainly the initial cooking-down included seeds and skins. That was because we had Nonna's tomato sauce strainer to puree the sauce after everything was cooked down and soft.

Google for 'Victorio strainer' and you will find Nonna's stariner's modern descendant, which has some plastic parts and different gaskets. I have one of the new ones... they still work the same. It's basically a food grinder with a special long snout with a mesh cover. When you run the (boiling hot) cooked-down veggies, the good stuff comes out the sides of the snout and down a sort of hopper, and things like seeds and skins and celery strings come out the end of the snout. (Put down plenty of newspapers: things splash and spatter, and stuff comes out around the handle.) Nonna's strainer was all metal and the gaskets were the kind of rubber canning jar gaskets that were used with the old-style glass-lidded canning jars with the wire bails, so the gaskets were easy to replace every year or so.

After everything had been put through the strainer (the bagniat went through last, so the hot pepper oils wouldn't get into the main sauce batch), it went back in to pots on the stove to cook down some more. It was at this point, after cooking down and straining out the skins and stuff, that thesauce batches more or less fit into the other available pots, and the canning kettle was washed and preparations began for the actual canning.

We used those old-style jars for years, too. The modern metal-lidded kind got added to the mix after a while, but I can't remember when or if Mom ever completely stopped using the older style ones. Bagniat always went into pint jars. The main sauce batch went into a mixture of pints and quarts. We occasionally had a jar go bad in storage (bagniat more often than tomato sauce I think: it was a bit less acid) but it was never a huge problem. It was always easy to tell when a jar was bad: the contents turned an ugly color.

I've made sauce a few times over the years I've lived in this house. Not recently: I've been traveling too much. I've still got some homemade applesauce in the pantry (and it's still good to eat) because for a year or two I didn't realize one box of jelly jars had full rather than empty jars. I made it with quartered gala apples and a little water cooked until soft and run through the Victorio to take out the seeds and skins, then cooked a little more before canning. I think the trick with both apple and tomato sauce is the first phase of cooking with the seeds and skins: it gives more complexity and depth in the flavors.

The tomato sauce we made was fairly watery, due to time limits and exhaustion and a lack of paste tomatoes. So when the time came to make actual spaghetti sauce, the sauce would get cooked down some more, and some tomato paste was always added. (Of the plain commercial sauces, Hunt's is closer to the texture and flavor of what we made than Contadina, which seems more like thick tomato juice. I suppose it's a little like the difference between orange juice with and without pulp. Costco has recently switched to carrying Contadina instead of Hunt's, and I am annoyed).

The ingredients that went into my Mom's spaghetti sauce for the final cooking besides sauce and tomato paste were onions (depending on how oniony the sauce batch was) and garlic, rosemary, sage, thyme, dried basil, and marjoram. (She never used oregano because my Dad didn't like it.) And then meat (sausage or meatballs or both) and/or mushrooms.

Long Lasting Red Sauce for One Person

When I make red sauce I usually use a 2 quart Corningware casserole in my microwave.

Put some olive oil in the bottom and add dried herbs: onion, garlic chips, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, marjoram, basil, a bay leaf, a dash of oregano (since my Dad isn't here to complain), some fennel seed.

Then break up a pound of meat in the casserole: ground beef or pork or mild Italian sausage, though recently I've tended to use buffalo when I can get it, which is usually. Even in Boston there was ground buffalo in the supermarkets. (If you use sausage or pork or beef that isn't very lean, you don't need the olive oil.) When I lived in Danbury, CT in the late 70s there was an Italian deli that made its own sausage including a heavenly fennel sausage. I started added fennel to my sauce when I stopped being able to get the good fennel sausage.

Stir the meat and herbs together.

Put on the cover and stick it in the microwave and nuke for 5 minutes.

Stir it again and nuke for about another 5 minutes, until the meat is pretty well cooked. (One 10 minute zap works almost as well as two 5 minute ones, if you're busy.)

And one large or two medium cans of Hunt's tomato sauce and one large or two small cans of tomato paste. Stir well (it works best if you put the paste in first and stir so it coats the meat). Optionally add a can of mushrooms, drained.

Put your pot of water for the pasta on the stove and start it heating and put the sauce back in the microwave for 10 minutes at about a 3 or 4 power setting. When the the nuker rings, the water should be just about ready for the pasta. (Adjust the time and heat settings if you have a wimpy stovetop or a wimpy microwave.)

Stir the sauce and put the casserole back into the microwave. Put the pasta into the water and turn on the microwave on a low setting (2 or 3) for however long the pasta will take to cook. When the nuker rings, everything should be ready.

Drain and serve the pasta, spooning sauce from the casserole. Let the sauce cool, in the lidded casserole, until it is safe to put the whole casserole into the refrigerator.

This batch of sauce makes four to six (or more) meals for me, and gets much better with time: the flavors of the herbs blend.

The next time you want pasta, put your water in the pot on the stove and the casserole of sauce into the microwave. Nuke on low to medium power for 10 or 12 minutes while the water heats (the sauce should NOT be fully heated through at this point). Add your pasta to the water, and nuke the sauce again at medium low power for the time it will take to cook the pasta. Serve when the nuker rings, and return the casserole with the remaining sauce to the fridge until next time.

As the level of sauce in the casserole decreases, adjust the reheating time and microwave power you use. For the last couple of servings, don't nuke the sauce while the water is heating, only while the pasta is cooking.

Almost the only times I have had a batch of sauce go bad before I finished it were times when I was travelling so much that I went something like 2 weeks or more between uses. Five days between uses is not a problem because the sauce is in a container that had been full of boiling hot liquid for a noticeable amount of time during the initial cooking, and the whole thing gets heated to pasteurization temperatures every time it gets re-used.

I don't take large Corningware casseroles with me when I go to corporate housing, so I have to do the initial cooking on the stove top and transfer the sauce to a microwave safe container for the chill and nuke cycles. (Relearning how to make sauce on the stovetop without scorching it was ... interesting.) The sauce keeps better in glass, and Gladware and Ziploc nukable bowls get really tired after they have been used for a few batches of sauce: I think the sauce gets hotter than they are really rated for.

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Thu, Mar 29, 2007

Spring Storm

Posted at 6:50 pm MDT to Current Events

What a difference a few months makes!

It has been snowing since some time last night (our weekly Friday storm came in a little early). Early this morning there were several inches on the ground.

But by noon, even though it had never quite stopped snowing, the driveway and road (sites of the monster drifts until far too recently) were wet but bare. Even most of the grass was bare... yucca plants must be cold: they all had little heaps of snow left around their roots even when the grass around them was showing green.

Now, as evening approaches, it is snowing harder again, and the snow is beginning to accumulate again. But they are predicting 60 degree (Fahrenheit) highs for Saturday and Sunday, so I don't think this snow will be much of a problem.

And at least it is only snow. A small town near the Kansas border was pretty much leveled by a tornado at 8 PM last night. At least one dead, a dozen or so hospitalized, and huge amounts of property damage. (I heard one report that claimed the tornado was 600 feet wide, or it left a 600 foot wide swath) In a small farming town, that probably didn't miss much.

One reason I like being near the mountains is that really bad tornados are rare here. The same rock formations that give me gale force winds several times a year also disrupt the flow so it's harder for a vortex to form.

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What kind of Nerd are You

Posted at 12:31 am MDT to Miscellaneous

What Be Your Nerd Type? Your Result: Literature Nerd   Does sitting by a nice cozy fire, with a cup of hot tea/chocolate, and a book you can read for hours even when your eyes grow red and dry and you look sort of scary sitting there with your insomniac appearance? Then you fit this category perfectly! You love the power of the written word and it's eloquence; and you may like to read/write poetry or novels. You contribute to the smart people of today's society, however you can probably be overly-critical of works. It's okay. I understand.
Science/Math Nerd
Anime Nerd
Artistic Nerd
Musician
Gamer/Computer Nerd
Social Nerd
Drama Nerd
What Be Your Nerd Type? Quizzes for MySpace

I think the quiz is biased toward gaming and against other kinds of computer geekiness. There's nothing about hardware hacking or programming.

Yes. I'm up far too late: my sleep cycle has been screwed up since I was sick last week and spent 30 hours out of 36 in bed. I don't know how cats do it...

I've written stuff for this blog almost every day since it started (even though sometimes the posting has been flaky). This will take care of today's entry. Maybe this evening, after finishing my taxes, I can spend some time reading or writing fiction.

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Wed, Mar 28, 2007

Tax Software Solution

Posted at 10:02 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Loading WinE and running TaxACT Deluxe is working well. I have a couple of questions for our company accountants mostly related to our shift from S-Corp to C-Corp in the midle of the year, but otherwise, I'm ready to electronically file. I'm getting a big refund from the Feds and owe the state a little -- not enough to trigger penalties or estimated tax payments for the coming year, so that's all good.

The biggest problem I had with doing my taxes turned out to be finding my last-year's tax documents. I got all organized last spring and put the return hardcopies, w-2s, etc in a folder, which I couldn't find.

And because of TurboTax's obnoxiousness, I did last years taxes on an old Win2K box which I haven't used since (the TurboTax CD was still in the drive). I'm not sure what the password was... it took me an hour and a half of trying dfferent passwords and account ids before I found an admin password that worked. I reset the password of my main account and tried to print out a hardcopy set of the returns... The antique printer which is the only one Win2K has drivers for would not print. (It hasn't been used since last tax season either.) Fortunately, TurboTax had a pdf option, and I was able to use Samba to pull the PDF (and the Turbotax data file, just in case) across to my Linux box.

I have to say, I think I like TaxAct better than the recent versions of TurboTax, which had gotten obsessed with bells and whistles, and asking questions in a fussy order. TaxACT seems more like what I remember TurboTax being like 8 or 9 years ago. When it was good, and helpful, and not annoying.

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Tue, Mar 27, 2007

Tax Software

Posted at 9:15 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

March 26 2007

I spent part of this weekend getting my records together for doing my taxes.

I am extremely annoyed that there is no tax software usable on Linux. TurboTax, which I have used on Windows in previous years, didn't work last year from my VMWare Windows installation, and reportedly even their web-based Online version (which I don't trust since Intuit has gotten very arrogant over the years) won't work with Linux systems. It takes deliberation to make something not work on browsers across platforms.

I'm googling for alternatives. If I get annoyed enough,I'll just print the forms formt he web and do the taxes manually, though I must admit I've gotten spoiled by electronic filing overt he past few year.

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Hail Spring!

Posted at 9:15 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

March 23 2007 23:21 GMT

That's a Pun.

I'm currently in the midst of the first spring storm complete with token amounts of thunder and lightning and serious hail: half inch size, and enough of it to turn the ground white briefly. I'm impressed. I get a lot of hail in this particular microclimate, but it's usually 1/4 inch fish-tank-gravel sized stuff mixed with rain. I'm hearing lots of thuds from the roof and clanks from the stovepipes for my woodstove and stove vent.

The storm has made the air opaque enough that the satellite dish lost the TV signal for a while, but the TV is back, so the cell must be moving past me.

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Septic System

Posted at 9:14 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

March 15 2007 00:21 GMT

Well, I know what my tax refund, if any is going to be spent on, probably along with a lot of other money. This isn't really unexpected: the current system is 35 years old and was non-standard to begin with, and it's been pretty marginal for the past few years. I think the huge amount of moisture we have had over the past few months kind of swamped it. If I had been home more, I would have had to deal with this sooner.

The existing tank is supposed to be pumped tomorrow. Then I need to hire an engineer licensed by the county, and then someone to do the actual work. One of my neighbors put in a new septic system a few years ago, I should find out who they used.

I can think of lots more fun ways to spend my time and money than this. Though it is probably the septic system's turn: I've spent a bunch of money on the well and pump over the years, and the furnaces and stuff, and haven't really done much with the septic system except get it pumped and roto-rooted a couple of times.

The truck has an appointment at the mechanic's tomorrow. I hope the septic guy doesn't need me... The woman who set up the appointment said I didn't need to be home, but the system is weird enough that I expect at least a phone call.

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The Sharpton/Thurmond Connection

Posted at 9:13 pm MDT to Current Events

Feb 26 2007 5:29 GMT

Sometimes reality is just weirder than fiction. Genealogists and historians have discovered that activist Al Sharpton is descended from slaves owned by relatives of Strom Thurmond.

Rev. Sharpton seems to be amused by it.

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Chimpanzees with Spears

Posted at 9:13 pm MDT to Current Events

Feb 24, 2007 5:08 GMT

Chimpanzees have been observed making and using spears for hunting. Actually, the tools are apparently used as stabbing weapons, not thrown, and they average 60 cm long, so it might be more accurate to call them wooden swords or wooden daggers.

The spear users are a subspecies that has been previously suggested for species status, which would give us 3 species of chimpanzees where a few decades ago only one was generally known. (I have a mental image of bonobos with signs: Make Love Not War.)

There is also archaeological evidence of a different chimpanzee tribe that has been using stone tools for thousands of years.

Both the spear users and stone users are savannah dwellers, not the deep-forest dwellers Jane Goodall studied. The Tetrapodzoology science blog has some good links and references.

One thing that occurs to me is that if there are a bunch of chimpanzee species, they are all much more endangered (because of the fragmented population) than we believed chimpanzees in general to be. Another is that if they have culture, they are vulnerable to cultural disruption if key tribal members are killed by poachers. And chimpanzees in captivity (especially those born in captivity) are probably more or less insane from PTSD and cultural deprivation.

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Acme

Posted at 9:11 pm MDT to Media

Feb 4 2007 18:01 GMT

Seen via MakingLight. Someone has done a complete concordance of all references to Acme in Warner Brothers cartoons.

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Oops.

Posted at 8:54 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I've just found a bunch of old articles that got buried on the site instead of being properly posted.

I'm going to edit them to show when they should have been posted, and may eventually move thenm to their correct dates.

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Infoworld: Out of Print

Posted at 8:53 pm MDT to Media

I have subscribed to the Infoworld trade paper for several years, but I have been on the road so much that I honestly can't say that I have read a paper copy in ages. I subscribe to some of their blogs and columns via email, and occasionally browse their other online material.

Apparently I am typical of their current readership. They have just announced that they are ending their hardcopy edition.

I get the feeling this is a sign of something... maybe that at least some branches of the publishing industry are experiencing a rush of brains to the head. For something as topical and ephemeral as tech industry news, the lead times needed for paper printing just can't compete.

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Mon, Mar 26, 2007

Windows Emulation

Posted at 7:29 pm MDT to Technology

Well, I found some Tax software that is supposed to run on modern Linuxes with WinE, the Windows Emulation layer.

I found a version of WinE for 64-bit Kubuntu and got all the dependencies loaded, but my display locks up when I try to run it. There seems to be a bug in the ATI radeon and drm Xorg drivers (video drivers) distributed witht he 6.17 Linux kernel. The system locks up, and when I reboot, I find hundreds of messages like:

 
Mar 26 01:29:20 sophia kernel: [ 1640.335798] [drm:radeon_cp_reset] *ERROR* radeon_cp_reset called without lock held
Mar 26 01:29:20 sophia kernel: [ 1640.335823] [drm:radeon_cp_start] *ERROR* radeon_cp_start called without lock held
Mar 26 01:29:20 sophia kernel: [ 1640.335849] [drm:radeon_cp_idle] *ERROR* radeon_cp_idle called without lock held

I've had video lockups occasionally more or less forever on this laptop. Mostly there are a few things I'm careful to avoid doing, and things don't lock up.

But I'm annoyed enough about this tax software thing that I'm going to try installing a different video driver to see if it will fix things. This could be interesting...

7:15 pm Ready to reboot and try using the new driver.

7:30pm The reboot was clean, the new driver that doesn't use the drm module is working, and WinE no longer locks up the display.

Maybe tomorrow evening I'll actually do my taxes.

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Sat, Mar 24, 2007

Robert Hewitt Wolfe and the Dresden Files

Posted at 9:09 pm MDT to Media

Robert Hewitt Wolfe was the producer of the TV series "Andromeda" during the first two seasons, when there was lots of excellent world-building and complex character development. I loved that show, and the online community that developed around it, and hated when RHW was fired and it was gutted.

This week, I noticed in the credits that he is producing "The Dresden Files". No wonder it has more depth and subtlety than most SciFi Network series.

I have read the novels by Jim Butcher and liked them (the writing does improve over time, but even the first couple of books are readable. (Book 8, Proven Guilty, is sitting in my to-be-read file at the moment, and Book 9 is due out soon.) The show is different, but both the show and the novels are very good in their own ways.

I think I like the Bob in the show better than the one in the ones in the books.

The most recent episode of the show "Storm Front" has the same name as the first novel, so we are reaching the point where the show and the books can be compared directly.

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Thu, Mar 22, 2007

Darling Clementines

Posted at 8:53 pm MDT to Technology

We have arrived at a sad time of year. The winter clementine season is coming to an end. The last box I bought mostly taste all right (many of them are wonderful) but about half of them are strangely shriveled and dried out inside.

The nice thing about modern logistics is that I don't need to wait until November to have good clementines again. The southern hemisphere crop should be showing up in the stores in another month or two.

This is a marvel of the modern world. Even a century ago, my relatives were eating dandelions in early spring to avoid scurvy. Yuck. (I am probably a hypertaster: genetically more sensitive to bitter flavors than most Caucasians. Dandelions are way outside my comfort range.)

This would have been a problem for me: I seem to always crave enormous quantities of citrus and vitamin C. I always buy lots of fruitcake fruit in the fall when it is in the stores. Much more than I need for holiday baking. I snack on small amounts of straight candied orange peel and candied lemon peel and candied citron and fruitcake mix.

I should probably learn to candy the peels from organic citrus, just for completeness. Or how to make marmalade, which I prefer to most kinds of jam. I wonder where one gets citrons... somewhere on the web no doubt.

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Wed, Mar 21, 2007

Comfort Food

Posted at 9:03 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I was fairly sickly as a child and missed a lot of days of school. I was seldom seriously ill (I still have my tonsils) but it seemed like I constantly had low-grade upper-respiratory crud.

Today reminded me of those days: sore throat, sinus headache, minor earaches and dizziness, occasional bouts of nasty coughing, frequent chills and a stomach uninterested in food. The swallowing problems are a recent addition, but make things trickier.

I started drinking tea quite young partly because milk was a very bad idea when I was having these sickly spells. But today my diet reverted even further. In the brief periods I did not spend asleep, my menu has included gingerale, toast and bouillon soup with tiny acini de pepe noodles. All the things my Mom used to give me when I was home sick from school. I tried some clementines a while ago, and I'm not sure yet whether I am going to regret that.

If I was running a fever, I might be able to burn this crud out of my system, but my body temperature, as usual, is running low. I wonder if I should look into one of those home sauna cabinets some day (I'm not the hot tub type).

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Tue, Mar 20, 2007

Enough Eyes...

Posted at 10:08 pm MDT to Current Events

There is a saying in the open source community (I think from Linus Torvalds originally): "with enough eyes all bugs are shallow."

Applications of this principle have begun to affect some areas such as court cases and patents, with the Groklaw community holding the SCO court case documents under a microscope and various groups rallying around via the web to help analyze the technical aspects of court cases or dig for prior art to fight some of the stupider patents that have been issued.

Now I read at MakingLight and Steinn Sigurðsson's science blog that the Justice Department has delivered 3000 paper documents to the House judiciary committee investigating the dismissal of federal US attorneys. This tactic is sometimes called a paper bomb: the object is to answer the subpoena or discovery order (technically) but bury the useful stuff in a mass of paper that the opposition cannot possibly analyze thoroughly in the time available. It isn't quite working this time.

The House committee staff are posting pdf files of the documents on the web, and Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo is organizing a swarm of volunteers to separate the wheat from the chaff. By the time the pages are all up on the web (probably some time tomorrow) people will have examined the documents and flagged bits that may be worth the committee's attention.

Of course various quirks and oddities that may turn up during the analysis will also be widely discussed on the web. Some are already beginning to show up at Daily Kos and elsewhere.

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Mon, Mar 19, 2007

Synchronicity

Posted at 9:55 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I have a business meeting (conference call) every work day at 11 AM Pacific time, which is noon Colorado time.

Naturally, on the Wednesdays when the cleaning ladies come, they arrive a few minutes before noon.

And today, when the septic tank guy who was due last Thursday afternoon finally showed up, he arrived just after the meeting started, and left shortly before the meeting ended. Very annoying, but at least he showed up.

Tomorrow I need to start calling engineers and contractors to see about replacing my old, non-standard septic system with something that meets modern code. Sigh.

It's probably just as well I hadn't had the chance to to anything about the series of hog-wallows that constitutes my driveway. The trucks and equipment for working on the septic system are sure to tear things up, especially if we get any rain. The ground was dry today, so the truck did not generate new ruts.

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Sun, Mar 18, 2007

Specworld

Posted at 9:54 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

A group of paleontologists have created a very extensive ecosystem for an alternate Earth where the Chixulub meteor was much smaller and most families of large animal life forms were not wiped out, but instead continued to evolve.

Their very extensive website has a few broken links to some of the illustrations and discussions of particular species, but I believe they are in the process of moving to a new hosting site, so things may be in a state of flux. Even with the occasioanl broken link, it is an amazing site and a lot of fun.

I found the link throught the Tetrapod Zoology weblog, which has become one of my favorites. I haven't really enjoyed Natural History magazine and Scientific American for a few years, but some of the science blogs are filling the gap in my data intake.

Now I just need to find some good online links on history and archaeology.

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Sat, Mar 17, 2007

Zombie Master of Culter

Posted at 11:22 pm MDT to Media

The blog MakingLight had a discussion of publishing that turned into a thread on zombies and a child thread on zombies that turned into a discussion of publishing. Stuff like that is one reason I like that blog.

As a side effect of the zombieness, someone found a thread on another blog that needs to be brought to the attention of fans of the works of Dorothy Dunnett. Especially the Lymond Chronicles (which I mentioned in my Christmas list back in November).

Gods, I love the web...

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Techlands Format Update

Posted at 8:54 pm MDT to Creative Work

Shawn said he got stuck on one of the Techlands pages and couldn't find his way to the other pages, so I have adjusted the format to include a link back to the TechLands homepage at the top of each page as well as at the bottom.

I hope to have the new chapter done in a week or so.

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Fri, Mar 16, 2007

Mayan Sprit Guides to Purify Sacred Sites after Bush Visit

Posted at 10:42 pm MDT to Current Events

Link found at Making Light.

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The Second Coming

Posted at 9:50 pm MDT to Media

This is one of my favorite poems, and suits my mood this week. (There's a bumper sticker that says: "Where are we going and what are we doing in this handbasket" that would also be apt.) The poem is seasonally appropriate, too, since Yeats is an Irish poet.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
 The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
 Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
 Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
 The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
 The best lack all conviction, while the worst
 Are full of passionate intensity. 

Surely some revelation is at hand;
 Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
 The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
 When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
 Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
 A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
 A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 
 Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
 Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
 The darkness drops again; but now I know
 That twenty centuries of stony sleep
 Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
 And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
 Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

by William Butler Yeats.

My senior year in high school I did an advanced placement English class. The goal was to place out of Freshman English in college by taking the AP English test that was available along with the SATs. (I got 790 out of 800 points, and did more interesting things than English composition with my Freshman class choices.) Our teacher was Timothy Sullivan, and there were a lot of books by Irish authors on his book shelves, including a translation of the Tain bo Cuailnge (The Cattle raid of Cooley: the story of Cuchulain) that I liked a lot at the time and now own. I found it in a book store a few years ago.

There is a principle called Huffman coding that says terms that are used a lot should be short and terms that are used less frequently can be longer. It probably says something about ancient Irish culture that they had a word as short as 'tain' for cattle raiding.

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Thu, Mar 15, 2007

Dodge Dakota

Posted at 9:49 pm MDT to Technology

I worked at the company office today: took my truck in to the mechanic and Justin from the office drove me back to the office and then over to the mechanic again in the afternoon. Thanks, Justin.

Well, I don't think my next truck will be another Dodge. My previous truck, which served me very well, was a Dodge Ram 50, which was really a Mitsubishi in drag. But the Dakota has just spoiled things. The 4-wheel drive is basically dead until I can get it repaired, which will take a few days and a bunch of money.

I'll probably arrange to have the repairs done while I'm in California next month, but I am very annoyed.

Real world driving, for me, involves horrible mud, ice, and snow, interspersed with occasional patches of dry pavement. Apparently, the Dakota 4-wheel drive mechanism can't take even brief patches of dry pavement. Not a problem I ever had with the Ram 50. But the Ram 50 had front-wheel drive when it wasn't in 4-wheel drive mode, which may make a difference.

I've noticed that the new Dakotas don't have a regular cab option, either, and I don't think they have small hybrid pickups. I don't think Mitsubishi sells pickup trucks in the US any more (at least in this area). When the time comes, I'll probably look at Ford and Toyota... maybe whoever has hybrids

It's really too soon to think seriously about trading in the Dakota, though: I got it in December 2000, but it has less than 65,000 miles on it. And I'm gotten spoiled by not having a car payment, and I've got a car-sized expense for a new septic system glaring at me at the moment.

The septic tank guy never showed up to pump it. He called in late afternoon to say he was delayed, and promised to call this evening to reschedule, but it's after 9:30 pm and I haven't heard from him. I haven't been feeling well this week and today was stressful trying organize the logistics of the mechanic, so I'm exhausted. I was trying to fall asleep on the couch earlier this evening, but stayed up because I was expecting the phone call. If I don't hear from him by midmorning tomorrow, I'll have to start calling his competitors.

And I need to start finding an engineer to design the new system, too.

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Tue, Mar 13, 2007

Cute Commercials

Posted at 11:03 pm MDT to Media

Two cute commercials I've been encountering lately.

The Denver St Patrick's Day Parade has a radio commercial with what sounds like the "Beef, what's for dinner" guy...very deep-voiced and 'western' sounding. The commercial begins when someone asks him why he is wearing a green cowboy hat and he explains that he is going to the parade, which has a theme of "Irish Roots and Cowboy Boots" this year. The other person says "I didn't know know that you were Irish" and he answers "I'm not, but my horse, is". Then the horse snorts and whinnies and he says "Whoa, Shamus, easy boy..." A regular announcer gives some information about time and place for the parade, and finishes by saying that it is not required that you or your horse are Irish.

The other commercial I think is cute is one for a carpet cleaner featuring a lady who is supposedly a dog-sitter whose carpets have been messed up by her 'guests', one of which looks like a black and white toy fox terrier. At the end of the commercial, the terrier is lying on a dog bed and barks a couple of times, and the lady makes a mouth-closing gesture with her hand and says "Use your Inside voice", and he barks again, softer. I like this one because of the 'indoor voice' (I rather doubt that really works with dogs) and because the dog with the indoor voice looks like a fox terrier.

My family had a not-quite-toy fox terrier beginning in 1969: his parents were toy fox terriers, but he was a throwback and was as big as his mom when he was three months old. We named him Buzz because we got him the weekend of the first moon landing. John Glenn's name didn't make a good dog name.

Buzz looked a lot like the RCA dog: he had one ear that was always pricked up, and th eother sort of flopped over.

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Mon, Mar 12, 2007

Venison or Buffalo Stew

Posted at 6:10 pm MDT to Technology

One of my crock-pot recipes. Buffalo and venison are very lean, so the only fat in this is the olive oil.

1 lb venison chunks or buffalo meat chunks (available at Whole Foods and other markets)
2 Tablespoons olive oil
2 medium onions, peeled and quartered
3 long ribs of celery, chopped
1 lb mini-carrots
1 lb creamer potatoes, quartered
1/2 lb mushrooms, rinsed, trimmed and quartered
3/4 cup red wine
1 cup vegetable stock or broth (from a box)
1 1/2 cup water
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
approx 3/4 teaspoon dried rosemary, crushed
more water
1 Tablespoon cornstarch
salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

In a skillet, brown the meat in the oil. Add the browned meat and vegetables to the crock pot.

Pour the wine into the skillet and stir to deglaze. Pour the wine mixture into the crock pot and add the stock and water and herbs, and a little salt and pepper (more will be added near the end).

Note: Beef stock or broth might be ok with buffalo meat, but don't drown the flavor of the meat being used.

Turn the crockpot on low.

Eight hours later, add more water or stock if things have cooked down too much. Taste the gravy and add salt and pepper as needed.

Dissolve the cornstarch in a little water and stir it in. Let the stew cook at least another half hour.

This recipe works well in a 5 quart crockpot. I ladle most of each batch into wide-mouth quart canning jars (only about three quarters full to allow for expansion), allow to cool and then freeze.

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Sun, Mar 11, 2007

Library Envy

Posted at 10:03 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I visited my friends Chuck (Happy Birthday, Chuck!) and Nanette today for the first time since Christmas (I have been extremely hermit-like these past few months, even by my standards). They have done some beautiful renovations to their farm buildings and landscaping over the past few years, and changes are still in progress.

I am especially envious of one of their latest projects. They have reroofed, resided and drywalled an old barn, and will be fitting it up as a library for Chuck's books. An old garage is being set up as a library for Nanette's books. (These are my kind of people...)

Looking around my house (which is so full of books I barely have room to breathe and don't have room to use my weight bench without book avalanches) I desperately wish I had outbuildings I could turn into a library.

I think this may be the year I have to start doing something serious about my basement. If I get it waterproofed, I may be able to move some of my books down stairs.

I should probably also look into some of those companies that do custom fitted shelves and storage units. If I had proper floor to ceiling units instead of cheap portable bookcases (some of them literally collapsing under the weight of the books heaped on them), things might be much less cluttered around here, and less precarious.

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Sat, Mar 10, 2007

Rain

Posted at 6:03 pm MST to Miscellaneous

A sign that spring is here: it's precipitating all over the place, but what's falling from the sky is rain, not snow.

This doesn't mean there won't be more snow this season: traditionally the wettest months in the Denver area are March and April and a cold snap can dump a lot of snow on us, and this is still early March. But snow that we get from now on is not likely to stick around long before melting. There are a few patches of snow left where the deepest drifts were, but this rain should get rid of most of them.

And rain is a lot more compact (10 inches of snow is an inch of rain?) and doesn't need shoveling. The precipitation is more than welcome to come as rain.

Maybe it will wash some of the mud off my truck.

My personal rule of thumb: if it snows before noon on the fourth of July, it is ithe last snow of the season, if it snows after noon on the fourth, it is the first snow of the season. I don't actually think I can remember a time when we've had snow at this altitude in July... and I think maybe a dusting once in late August.

But serious overnight coldsnaps with precipitation happen in June and early September enough to make things a challenge for my friends who have an organic farm. Some years they have crops planted in the fields by this time -- Farmers' Market starts the first weekend of April, I think. But I don't think that's the case this year.

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Fri, Mar 09, 2007

A Day Out of the House

Posted at 10:56 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Today was a nice change of pace. I did billable work this morning, but at noon I went over to the ReleaseTeam office to get caught up on company status and chat with my co-corkers. The 'chat' lasted until 5pm, but we made some progress on a few topics, and I got a chance to see my business partner's new truck.

We also got a cellular modem activated. I don't quite have it working on my Linux laptop yet, but I should get the final pieces in place this weekend. This will be very handy while travelling: I'll have broadband access anywhere there is a Sprint phone signal.

I took the back way home, which goes by Flatirons Mall. It's been months since I went to a mall: I did my Christmas shopping in downtown Boulder and at the big-box shopping center near my home and never made it over to Flatirons.

I bought supper in the food court and then spent a few hours wandering in the mall. I didn't buy much in the mall proper: I got some jewelry cleaned and left a ring at the jewelers for some maintenance, and bought a small jigsaw puzzle. I haven't done a new jigsaw puzzle in a while. (I have made a rule: I have to finish doing my taxes before I can work on the new puzzle. That will give me some more incentive against procrastinating.)

On the way out, I stopped in Borders book store adjacent to the mall... it's always a bad sign when you have to ask for a shopping basket in a book store, but I didn't really spend very much considering I haven't been in a book store since before Christmas (there is a reason I have 'club' cards for both Barnes & Noble and Borders).

The affiliation card came in handy: it gave me 30% off the most expensive book in my order: a work-related reference on using CSS on web-sites that was quite expensive.

I also bought a World Atlas: my previous world atlas is about 25 years old, which is a problem when writing stories involving the Balkans and central Asia.

The rest of my purchases were science fiction (including the new Dresden Files paperback) and manga.

The back way home from the Mall goes by a Safeway, so I stopped and stocked up on some things. It was after 9pm when I got home.

Tomorrow I'm going to have some serious incentive to get my treadmill working again. After months of a very sedentary lifestyle (with brief intervals of snow shoveling) my legs are not happy about walking around the mall and other stores for more than three hours. I'll need to do some walking and yoga to unkink them.

My feet aren't happy about spending that much time walking in shoes, either. I don't usually wear shoes in the house, partly because of the really horrible clay mud and dust that gets tracked in, and I've been wearing moon-boots outdoors for the past few months. My feet have gotten spoiled by the past months of freedom.

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Thu, Mar 08, 2007

Translations of Genji

Posted at 9:53 pm MST to Media

There are three major translation of the Tale of Genji.

The Waley translation was the first one and brought tale to the attention of the English-speaking world, but it was not particularly faithful to the original. It was published in 1926-1933. The story was restructured to fit western ideas of story arcs, and the translator may have taken too much advantage of Heian subtlety in dealing with a story that is basically about sexual and political intrigue. Waley's Genji has been described as too much of an Edwardian gentleman.

Seidensticker (1976) makes much more of an attempt to reflect the original text and culture without adding whole scenes or watering down the sexual side of the political intrigue. Everything is still very subtle and oblique, of course (Heian society was oblique, and the style of Genji is small-clique gossip,where nothing needs to be said directly because everyone knows everyone else). But at least the story is all there and in the right order.

Royall Tyler's translation is even newer (2001), very faithful. I think it was based partly on more recently discovered manuscripts or old commentaries, but I may be misremembering. It has excellent footnotes and
appendices on the cultural stuff, which can be important when all of the characters are referred to only by nicknames and titles which change over time.

I like Tyler's prose better, though I may be prejudiced: he translated some wonderful stories about the Kasuga Deity that I'm very fond of, and some old Japanese collections of tales. (The Japanese attitude toward the supernatural is in some ways very similar to and
in other ways very different from Europeans in the same period). Seidensticker's prose can be a little dry.

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Wed, Mar 07, 2007

Some Weblog Stats

Posted at 11:44 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Making progress...

About three quarters of the page-views for this weblog appear to be bots of one sort or another. Some of these are pretty neat: the blog has been indexed by bots from China and Japan and a couple of other countries.

In January there were an average of 7.19 unique users per day that were probably not bots, with 6 days when there were 10 or more unique visitors. The unique visitors generated an average of 20.29 non-bot pageviews per day.

In February, there were an average of 8.46 probable non-bot users per day, generating an average of 34.32 page-views. And there 10 days with 10 or more non-bot users.

Slicing things a different way, the site was viewed by 951 IP addresses over the course of the 2 months, of which 207 were probably not bots. At least two of the non-bot addresses were me. I have a fixed IP at home, but I haven't been able to figure out what IP or IPs correspond to me during the week I spent in California in Jnauary.

Of the non-bot visitors, 103 (about half) viewed multiple pages, and about half of those (52) visited on multiple days.

This is very encouraging: there are people who were interested by my ramblings enough to explore the blog pages, and some have liked what they read enough to keep coming back. And their numbers are gradually increasing.

I didn't have the logging turned on for the first few days of the blog. The earliest access log is dated from the evening of October 16, 2006, and the oldest articles were posted the evening of October 13. So far I have posted 165 articles (not counting this one) in the past 145 days (not counting today).

Knowing I have an audience gives me incentive to keep blogging. Thanks.

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Tue, Mar 06, 2007

Zatoichi

Posted at 9:50 pm MST to Media

I believe the HD TV format has taken off faster in Japan than it has here. There are a lot of Samurai movies from the 60s and early 70s (and even earlier) showing up on the HD KungFu channel, and I'm sure they wouldn't have been remastered to HD if there weren't a market for them.

They've shown 'Hidden Fortress' and 'Yojimbo' and 'Sanjuro', and some fairly tacky stuff late at night. Last week I caught the end of 'Sambiki no Samurai' which was a favorite of my Japanese language professor. I stayed up way too late last night watching something billed as "Bandits vs Samurai Squadron". It's real name is apparently 'Kumokiri Nizaemon', which is the name or alias of the main character.

And for the past week or so they have been running many of the Zatoichi series of movies. There were a lot of Zatoichi movies (they're showing Zatoichi 12 at the moment) not counting the remake that was done a couple of years ago.

I'm catching the series somewhat out of order but apparently Zatoichi was a great swordsman who went blind and became a travelling masseur and gambler (music and massage were the two traditional professions for blind men in Japan in the old days). He uses a cane that is a camouflaged sword and frequently ends up helping people who are in trouble with either the yakuza or the authorities or both. There are generally a lot fewer yakuza and/or officials around when he leaves a town than there were when he arrived.

I have to say, Zatoichi going blind was probably a good thing for the population of Japan since it probably slowed him down at least a little. As it is, even with him blind, I'm fairly sure his body count in one of the movies they showed last night reached triple digits. That sword-cane has to qualify as a WMD.

The standard Zatoichi fight involves him being attacked from all directions by a bunch of sword-wielding thugs (maybe a dozen to twenty or thirty) and cutting them down in droves. Swish zing swish, and four guys collapse in different directions while the rest of the fight continues down the alley or across the street. It's fairly stylized: most of these were made before buckets of spurting blood was acceptable on-screen. (People bleed from small injuries in the more recent films, but not much from the sword fights, which is a little odd.)

As a special treat, and to provide a contrast with the wholesale slaughter, the writers sometimes establish a skilled but nefarious swordsman early in the movie, so that there can be a one-on-one duel that lasts more than a few seconds as the climax of the story. Some of the fight choreography is impressive, especially since one of the participants has his eyes closed whenever he is facing the camera.

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Mon, Mar 05, 2007

Giant Cats

Posted at 9:23 pm MST to Current Events

There are reports of giant feral cats in Australia. Huge members of Felis domesticus growing into small leopards. I suppose that's what we have to expect when we bring small predators into an environment that is relatively predator-free.

I wonder if they are able to catch wallabies and such, the way regular cats sometimes catch bunnies. (I suspect the Australians might be happy if the gaint cats would only concentrate on catching rabbits.)

I wonder if there is anything in the Australian environment that will give them the nudge toward becoming sabertoothed kitties.

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Sun, Mar 04, 2007

Islamic Names

Posted at 12:40 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I haven't posted any fiction lately because I am trying to find some good sources on Islamic names. In particular, I need to create plausible names for Islamic characters in the Balkans a generation or two from now. Information about naming that I have found so far seems to only relate to the Christian population (there are some very good sites generated by the SCA and other historical groups).

I have seen one comment (on Iraqi names) indicating that Shia and Sunni names are recognizably different. But it didn't mention what the differences are, so all it provided was information that there were more ways than I had previously realized to get it wrong.

The one important Islamic character in the story that has been named so far is Turkmen, and has an odd family background. After 60 years of Soviet rule, followed by Turkmenbashi, I think Turkmen names may be ... diverse... so I think the name I have given him is plausible. His given name probably needs a spelling adjustment from Turkish to Turkmen, but should be close.

I would appreciate any pointers to good sources of information on Islamic names and naming, especially in Eastern Europe. (I'm going to post this question elsewhere on the web, too.)

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History of Bookbinding

Posted at 12:04 pm MST to Technology

One of the regular commenters at Making Light, who is a bookbinder, has posted a five-part history of bookbinding beginning here.

Wonderful stuff. I'm linking it here partly so I will be able to find it again easily.

I took a course on the history of books and printing my senior year at Wesleyan. The rare book room has copies of the Gutenberg Bible, the Bay Psalter, and many other keys items in the history of printing so we were not limited to looking at illustrations in textbooks. But most of what I remember of the class (30 years later) had to do with typefaces and formatting and printing technologies.

In those days, offset printing was bleeding edge.

In the early 80's one of my early tasks as a programmer was to adapt the brand new technology of the Xerox laser printer to use in word processing. Among other problems I ran into was the fact that the initial design of the laser printer was intended to replace a landscape mode lineprinter (the kind that usually printed on green and white striped paper. The printer interface code I wrote had to constantly remind the printer that it should be operating in portrait mode. We also needed to adjust the character set the printer provided because the ASCII character set that came standard did not have some of the characters our software needed.

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Sat, Mar 03, 2007

Using Kitchen Toys

Posted at 7:50 pm MST to Technology

I've been using my new kitchen toys. Supper tonight was cucumber salad, sliced with the mandoline slicer, salmon grilled in the George Foreman grill, and cauliflower puree made using the rice cooker in steamer mode and my food processor.

Brunch was waffles, made on my waffle iron not the GF grill because I was in the mood for regular waffles, not Belgian style.

Man, do I have a lot of dishes to wash.

The lock on the food processor disc caddy broke (the plastic deteriorated) so I had to disassemble it with a screw driver. But now I'll just leave it unlocked. It lives on a very high shelf, and it isn't as if I had little kids in the house who need to be protected from the sharp blades.

Grilled Salmon with Cauliflower puree is a recipe from the booklet that came with the food processor and turned out to be a wonderful combination of flavors. I should find that booklet and see what else is in it. Aside from anything else, food that's been processed to death should be easy to swallow.

I got the food processor (a CuisineArt) at Costco several years ago, and like most of the appliances sold at Costco, it was a large model and the deluxe package. I've never used most of the attachments that came with it, and it might be fun to try some of the others, some time. I generally use the regular processor blade, but the caddy also contains a dough blade and three slicer disks. The package also included a second processor bowl, so in theory I can be working on two unrelated batches of stuff in parallel. The second bowl is stashed in the back of a cupboard and is still in the original plastic bag.

I think there was a biscuit recipe using the dough blade. Maybe I'll try food processor biscuits tomorrow.

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Fri, Mar 02, 2007

Rice Cooker

Posted at 6:03 pm MST to Technology

I'm impressed. Today I tried cooking brown rice in the new 'smart' rice cooker I bought a few weeks ago. Cooking brown rice at 6000 feet is a nuisance in and of itself, and rice cookers I've tried in the past at this altitude always scorched even plain white rice on the bottom and left the batch unevenly dry and sticky.

The new rice cooker -- the Aroma Sensor-Logic -- did a wonderful job. It cooked the rice to a state of moist fluffiness and then switched to warming mode. I just put in the rice and water, pushed the 'brown rice' button and let it go.

When it was done I stirred in a a couple of pinches of kosher salt. The rice I used is 'Lundberg Country Wild' which is a blend of different colors and varieties of rice and has more depth of flavor than plain rice. It's excellent for uses where the rice will be standing mostly on its own. For risotto and other applications where the rice will be blended with other ingredients, I use medium grain rice, either brown (if I can find it) or white.

I should note, however, that there are a few things I don't think brown rice works in. Wild Oats market has an excellent sushi bar. (This is one case where Wild Oats is much better than Whole Foods, where the sushi bar uses horribly bland rice. I don't think they season it properly.). They offer a choice of white or brown rice in their sushi, and I have found that Inarizushi (little pockets of deep-fried tofu filled with sushi rice) is just not right when it's made with brown rice. Brown rice sushi might work better for varieties of sushi that have more strong flavors.

Tomorrow I'm going to try steaming some cauliflower for cauliflower puree to experiment with some more of the rice-cooker's features.

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Thu, Mar 01, 2007

Shades of Meaning

Posted at 10:02 pm MST to Miscellaneous

The Whorf-Sapir hypothesis states in its strong form that the vocabulary and grammatical structures of a language place limitations on the way its speakers perceive the world. The strong form has been generally superseded in linguistic theory, but I think the weaker form -- that it can sometimes be easier to notice and remember things you already have words for -- is still generally accepted.

The converse is also true, in a way that can be useful for someone trying to write science fiction or fantasy. Oddities in a language can tell you useful things about the world its speakers inhabit.

In Japanese, there are two kinds of water: mizu is what we would call cold water, and yu is what we would call hot water. Yu can be manufactured from mizu, but adding the adjective for 'hot' to mizu is as bizarre as trying to talk about warm ice would be in English. That simply isn't the way things work.

In European languages the presumption tends to be that hot water is water that has had something done to it. In Japan, if you see a natural spring of 'water', it may be important to know whether it is mizu or yu: if you guess wrong and are not carefull, you could get scalded. I suspect that the presence of large quantities of natural yu in the environment, even though it is less common than natural mizu, helps support the view that they are two related substances "alike in dignity", rather than variants of a single substance.

I'm sure there are similar mappings in other languages.

This may be completely out of left field, of course.

(Yes, I've been watching Japanese movies again. The original "Zatoichi" was on this evening.)

( And don't ask me about color words in different languages. Oi.)

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