making the news, again

Not bad, as reading goes. This LA Weekly article summarizes pretty well why I admire Earth and Fire’s work so much.

network w[o|a]nder

It’s so odd to tune into a radio broadcast set up by someone you know and hear a relatively obscure band you’ve been listening to for years, but in utterly different contexts.

wish list

Here’s what I’d like: an engine where I can search for a place name, and find all the various ways people have referred to a given place. For example, Venice is also Venezia, and in Boccaccio’s Decameron it’s Vinegia. Or, Roland (in Orlando Furioso) goes to an island named Ebuda. And I forget: is this a made-up island? Or does it actually exist? And if it does exist, is it called Ebuda or something else?

I could google it of course, but that’s imperfect more often than not, and often produces a ton of irrelevant results to sift through. Oh, semantic Web, how I dream of you.

definition of “text”

Reading Geoffrey Rockwell’s research notes often makes me want to poke some more around TAPoR. Today, I found there a wonderfully elegant definition of text – “any record of human communication that can be digitally represented.” Certainly not a definition that would have been possible even a decade ago; but now that we Have The Technology, it is exactly appropriate. Nicely done.

conversation

(at computer, working, frustrated) “Rr, I wish…”

   ”….?”

[silence]

(still facing the computer) “I wish you would use consistent indentation.”

   ”Me?”

“!! No. Your indentation is delicious.”

ohh, you twit.

Asked by Woodward how history would judge the war, Bush replied: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.“

This morning, I despair for a bright light out of the White House. Not the bright light of People I Happen To Agree With, but that of any semblance of intelligence.

On the other hand, things seem to be the Chinese sense of interesting pretty much all over. [Harper’s has an RSS feed, by the way.]

how do you quack in italian?

Well, the photos get a resounding vote of “enh” from me. They’re just uninspiring. You had to be there, if nothing else then for the olfactory paradise of chopped herbs and ground spices.

N.B.: if you’re a staunch vegetarian who is nauseated by the discussion of preparing meat, you might want to skip the rest of this post.

I’ve got to say, thinking that I could easily cut up a whole duck, just because I know fairly well how to do the same thing with chicken, was erroneous. Duck skin is rather more strongly attached than chicken skin is; plus, I couldn’t figure out how to partition it. Ethan’s googling powers saved me, of course; what I’d failed to understand is that the duck is both more fatty *and* more bony on its back than chicken. So I decided to save some of the bonier parts for a soup (to be made tomorrow) and soon I had three containers. The contents of one of them will be rendered, and will make for a good cooking medium for potatoes, fish, what have you.

I’ve got to say, I’m pretty proud of myself for not throwing away any part of the bird, which had admittedly been cleaned before they sold it to me. Its meat is providing us with two meals each, and we’ll have soup and cooking fat besides. Not bad, for a generally wasteful world.

So, here’s the recipe I made. It comes from Alexandra Greeley’s Asian Soups, Stews, & Curries, which I really must return to Mrs. Zogathon someday soon. Next time I make this, I’ll use more ginger, galangal and lemongrass, and will add some fresh chili peppers. This was surprisingly mild.

If you don’t know where to get certain ingredients, check to see if you have an Indian and/or Southeast Asian grocery store nearby. You can always resort to places like Whole Foods, but their herbs are both expensive and not as good. Also, for the love of all that’s holy, don’t use the Thai Kitchen brand of coconut milk. Use Chaokoh instead. Have four cups of it on hand.

Get a 4- to 5-pound duck, clean it and cut into serving pieces (or you could just get duck legs, I guess).

Prepare your herbs and spices. Throw all of the following in one bowl:
     1 stalk lemon grass, trimmed and thinly sliced;
     shred 3 kaffir lime leaves;
     one 1″ piece fresh ginger, peeled and chopped;
     two Indonesian bay leaves, crumbled (I used regular Western bay leaves);
     1 tsp’s worth of galangal root, minced;
     1 tsp ground coriander;
     1 tsp freshly ground black pepper;
     1/2 tsp ground cumin;
     1/4 tsp ground turmeric;
     salt and sugar to taste.

Take 8 shallots and 4 garlic cloves, peeled and rouhly chopped. Put them in a blender or small chopper, add just enough water to process, and blend until smooth. This she calls “curry paste,” why, I don’t know.

Heat 1/3 cup of vegetable oil over medium-high heat. Add the onion-and-garlic paste and stir around for 2-3 minutes, until it’s fragrant. Add all the other spices, stir well and cook for about 5 minutes. That’s what she says, anyway; I cooked for about 7-8. Add a bit more oil if the mixture is too dry.

Add in the duck pieces, and make sure they’re thoroughly coated in the spices. Pour in the coconut milk (mix it up first if it’s separated; it’ll be hard to mix with all that meat in the pan). Reduce heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 1.5-2 hours. If the sauce gets too thick and/or shallow, add some water. For garnish, fry up some shallots and/or garlic until crunchy. Honestly, I skipped that last part.

Mmm, tasty. Do make some sticky rice to sop up all the saucy goodness. Make sure you stir the sauce before spooning it onto the rice; some of the herbs and roots stay crunchy, and in every tender bite there’s a little explosion of flavor.

In other news, my Italian class did marvelously well on their exam, all things considered. (They are a good and genial group, but this class is their very lowest priority. We do what we can!) The average grade was 7.5 percentage points higher than the average quiz grade! I’m duly impressed, and they seemed pleased too. We did the simple past today, their first Really Tough Topic, and they did well. I dare say I’m proud! And to think that I’ll have children someday. If that’s how it’s gonna be, at least sometimes, then I’m all for having children. Because, you know, I need convincing to have children.

G’night. Let me know if you make the duck; I’d be curious to find subtle but tasty variations.

simple, as all genius.

All I wanted was to have all of the tags I’ve used so far in a project (in multiple files) at my disposal in drop-down lists in oXygen.

Problem is, while oXygen is great at learning all of the elements and their attributes you’ve used so far in a single document, this knowledge cannot be easily shared between documents.

Creating a DTD turns out to be impractical, because then I cannot easily add new elements to it.

The solution was, as usual, simple: with each new file I create, I include all of the previous files into it as entities. This way, oXygen sees all of the elements I’ve used thus far, and has no trouble learning new ones. When I’m done editing the newest file, the entities referring to other files are wiped.

This makes editing so much easier!

food!

We arose rather atrociously late today – 11am; not bad, though, for a Saturday, especially considering we didn’t go to sleep until 3:30 last night. After extremely minimal puttering, a bank errand was run, and then we went food shopping. Since it’s now rather late in the day, the cooking-for-the-week extravaganza has been deferred until tomorrow; but I’m already excited. Besides our usual (already rather eclectic) array of food, we got the following, which I’ve never cooked with before:

duck
galangal root
fresh lemongrass
kaffir lime leaves
some other sort of leaves that should be good fresh, don’t know the name
an array of curry pastes:
     red (a laaaarge tub!)
     masaman and leang (small tins)
thai peanut noodle sauce
msg (to be used as a seasoning in judicious amounts)
fresh young coconut to shred

Artichokes are coming into season, too. They had gorgeous, huge ones at Whole Foods. So we got two, and they’re enough for a lunch, steamed and with a dipping sauce.

Photos, I hope, tomorrow. It is spring outside.

should maybe undersleep more often

Sunlit moss in unexpected places is one of my favorite things.

Woke up in time to read all the news, blogs, e-mail. Left the house earlier than needed for the first time in ages, feels like. Asiago cheese bagel, passing Muzak van (I kid you not, they exist), blogging this, and I’m still on time for work.

There’s a new library opening in Kansas City, and I think of George.

Intricate shadows of tiny bare tree branches, on brick, and again I wish for a camera with me.

They’re promising temperature in the 70s next week. !!!

can we just please get our priorities straight? please?

Mr. Walters is furious with Canada for exposing innocent US to DANGERS UNTOLD.

Meanwhile, we kill and maim and heighten surveillance and cheat and give to the rich and rob the earth. For goodness’ sake.

Roooooob!

Rob Wittig, one of my favorite contemporary writers and artists, appears in a New York Times article today: “Call me Email: The Novel Unfolds Digitally.” (Subscription required, sorry. Look to NikkiNewsNet for a login cheat, if you will; and NNN is wonderful reading in its own right as well.)

And after you read the article, run do not walk to Wittigwords.

frye on disciplinarity

Willard McCarty, a London-based computing humanist and one of the best all-around people I’ve ever known, posted this quote by Northrop Frye to the Humanist list:

“It takes a good deal of maturity to see that every field of knowledge is the centre of all knowledge, and that it doesn’t matter so much what you learn when you learn it in a structure that can expand into other structures.”

-”The Beginning of the Word”. Ontario Council of Teachers Keynote Address, 30 October 1980. Indirections 6 (Winter 1981). Reprinted in Northrop Frye, On Education. Markham, Ontario: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1988, pp. 9-21.

I should remember this, in about half a year when I’m really on edge about finishing the dissertation and having an argument or anything at all to contribute to the field. Oh, generally this sort of thoughts doesn’t plague me, but it happens to everyone, right? Well, it helps at times like that to think of your discipline as the absolute caput mundi (okay, I just really wanted to use this phrase). The arrogance of such thoughts, I assure you, is always mitigated by the awareness of all that other knowledge out there, knowledge I will never experience first-hand. I’d very much like to have some sort of common language with others, any single other and all of them, who hold knowledge that is inaccessible to me.

Sometimes it bothers me that anything I do, including my chosen profession, is so closely tied to self-expression. It seems… well, arrogant. On the other hand, it’s also an indicator of high-level personal involvement which, for me, is easier to maintain than a constant state of keeping everything at arm’s length.

aaaaaa curse you bluetooth!

Dear Self,

Next time your keyboard commands get all out of whack, and it seems like there’s a stuck command key but none of the keys on your keyboard are stuck,

maybe it’s a depressed key.

of the Bluetooth keyboard sitting on the desk to your left,
still turned on,
under some papers.                                                                                                                 d’oh.

thought/cycles

Pouring, roof-pounding rains have had us on floodwatch since yesterday. I came outside during a lucky lull, wearing the matte black coat over loud purple and intense burgundy. Tiny, unmistakable light-green shoots of grass are poking up through the jagged black rocks of the parking lot.

Suddenly missing the Black Rock Desert, I got in the car. Mileage is sucking, and a pang of regret: can’t ask my dad about the mileage, because he’s gone. It may not be anything to worry about – been doing a lot of city driving, and so warming up the car for several minutes before each 2-mile drive – but the point is, I can’t ask him, ever.

The air smells of ocean, like a Nor’easter. A sparrow perched, chirped and cocked its head at me as I was walking into Giddings House.

currently playing: amon tobin - “dream sequence” (bricolage)

shake-up

What happened? Why am I dormant? Is it that the winter has lasted so long? Is it the gray, rainy, cold day? Is it an overwhelm of work and lectures to hear and life to live and paperwork to fill out?

Today, I can’t relate to hibernation. Today, I burn.

currently playing: the future sound of london - “papua new guinea” (accelerator, disc 1)

images people post

This little toy aggregates and displays the latest images that LiveJournal users have been posting. “They may be subject to copyright and may not be work safe,” reads the warning. LJ users seem to post images rather frequently – every time I reload the page, all of the new loads are completely different. Of course, LJ has what, over a million users? So the volume is not that surprising. Amusing, though.

While we’re at it, Ethan pointed me at Random Personal Picture Finder ™, which makes up a random string likely to be commonly used by digital cameras, and searches Google Images for it.

Eightday

Halley questions the week’s seven-day length, and I for one am with her. Actually, it’s more that April (well, post-friends’-wedding last weekend really) is one continuous work stint.

You know, I like it. It’s liberating. I don’t get to ignore laundry or bills or my teaching for too long; but most tasks can be put off if they need to be – and these days there are tangible results after every encoding stint, spurring me on. This, these days right now, is when I get to actually say what I’ve been waiting so long to say about the Roland corpus. I say it by putting angle brackets around my argument. By this coming weekend, I’ll have enough encoded that we can start playing with the semantic patterns that emerge. It’s been a long time coming, but now that it’s less than a month to presentation, the work is flying, exhilarating. I feel focused, and remember once again why I love my work so much.

because it’s the weekend, that’s why.

“I was gonna be done with this file by noon. Noon!”

“Well, you know. Noon – eight – geologically speaking, they’re practically the same moment.”

I’m doing enough work to be satisfied this weekend, even considering that April is so busy we aren’t supposed to have weekends. In-between, we’re finding out that candy apple red works well not only on bleached hair but on henna-treated as well.

quicksilver!

No, not the recent Stephenson novel, but this free gadget for Mac OS X users. Allows you to use the keyboard to launch applications and do much more – Dan Dickinson’s tutorial is excellent for discovering most of its features. I like this app much better than LaunchBar, which isn’t bad but got to be kind of a nuisance. Quicksilver is just… slick. And with a gorgeous interface to boot.