too much sugar for a nickel

Locavoring

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 07:15:54 GMT

Reading Plenty, aka The 100 Mile Diet (site), reminds me that part of my "eat less crap" goal for this year was to eat more local and sustainably-grown stuff. In the Bay Area, the main problem seems to be with grains; no one bothers to grown wheat or rice here, since the land is worth so much and you can make much more per pound with artichokes or oranges or whatever other exotic thing. But at least a start would be to try to locally source things that can be sourced here. I have no goal to become a food nazi, but a short period of local-only eating would probably force me to get out of the junk/fast food when stressed habit, at least.

Fortunately, since the last time I was a CSA member, it seems that there are now a few more choices in San Mateo County (the dead spot for Bay Area CSAs, for some reason). I decided to go with a trial month with Eating with the Seasons, which has a pickup spot in RWC. They are more of a produce aggregating service than an actual farm themselves, which should mean there's some additional variety. You can make choices, within what's available each week, for what you get in your box. And you can add on eggs, beef, and chicken (seasonally), which is handy.

Recent entertainment triptych

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 01:30:46 GMT

Best Amazon review ever: "The reviewer who called this book "simplistic, moronic trash" was being much too kind."

Also: The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks

And Steam Trek!

Dynamically updated NaNoWriMo progress chart

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 06:51:05 GMT

I've written over five thousand words in the last two days. Yowza. Am back on pace, and catching up on totals.

wordcount widgets

Made of awesomeness

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 19:22:40 GMT

Flash mob dance to Thriller in Dolores Park, from a couple weeks ago: youtube

The thing that I find both scary and hilarious about this is that there were hundreds of people who could do Thriller at short notice, without having to remind themselves of the steps much. More proof that my cable-less childhood was unusual.

Other miscellanea:

Carnations are the immortals of cut flowers. I've had a bunch of them in a vase on the table for at least two weeks, and they look just like new.

Reading 1890s Britons wax nostalgically for the good ole days is amusing.

Pepysdiary.com makes me ridiculously chuffed.

I am so in love with this picture that I've had it as my desktop background for a couple weeks. It's Mike Perry putting together (literally) his most recent book.

Keeping on keeping on

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 01:34:07 GMT

Thru 11/7:

6,154 / 50,000
(12.3%)

NaNo Day 1

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 19:44:26 GMT

2,219 / 50,000
(4.4%)

Bring it on

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 06:02:33 GMT

True story

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 05:11:43 GMT

Teenage couple seen in Target: her shirt reads "I love my boyfriend." His shirt reads "I killed the prom queen."

New Toy!

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 00:46:03 GMT

Ok, that's a stock photo, but mine *is* silver. Somehow "let's go test drive some" became "oh, great deal, let's buy it". I blame Ben. ;)

Christopher Brown on process

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 03:24:55 GMT

Painting is about the activity of making the painting, and people look at the painting that you've made, and that's the experience they have. But my experience is the experience of making the painting, of discovering this thing inside me that in a sense was waiting to come out, that I didn't know was there. And that's why I do it, and that's what I'm interested in, mainly.
...
One of the things that's interesting about painting is that it's recording not only what you think and what what you do, but it's recording your attitude in the making as well. It records your confidence, it records your sense of fear, it records your uptightness, your open-mindedness, your playfulness; all of these things are recorded.

You can almost plot the experience on a graph. You start out a painting with a lot of hopefulness and optimism, and then you hit the first snag, where it doesn't quite work out the way you thought it was going to work out. And so then you make a change, and as soon as you start to make a change, the painting a lot of times immediately goes downhill. And then when it goes downhill, you keep on trying to save it; there's this sense that maybe it's not so bad. And what happens is you get to a rock bottom where finally when you accept that's where you are, you have the chance to take what you've got and sort of start over with it, to re-see it in a sense, and see its potential outside of where you've started from. Like you've made this image, it didn't work out, but you can say oh, that's interesting, but it's not interesting for the reason that I began with it. I can see now that I can change it into this, and add this to it, and it becomes this other thing. So then you do that, and you start back up the mountain, and it gets exciting again. And that'll happen over and over, three, four, ten times in a painting. And finally you get to the point where the painting is related to your original idea, but very different in its final result.

It's on one hand a purely visual experience, but on the other it's an emotional experience. You've been to that land before, you know, and you know when you've gotten there again, and it's not fake; you can't fake it. That's what it's about; it's about the exhilaration, about the exhilaration of discovery, and that's what I'm after every time in here. And you come in in here with the optimism that hey, today could be the day. [laughs] It's usually not, but it could be.

Painter Christopher Brown, on a recent episode of Spark

Things I want to remember

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 06:41:39 GMT

How to Be Creative

What Holds You Back (from financial responsibility/freedom)

free nail polish

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 19:18:07 GMT

Free OPI nail polish

Fabric lust

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 20:28:31 GMT

This desperately needs to be made into a retro apron with blue edging.

Stuff from _Grub_

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 00:02:24 GMT

Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen by Anna Lappe (daughter of Francis Moore Lappe) and Bryant Terry is an accessible and non-preachy book on current food/agriculture/ecology issues. The last third of the book is menus and recipes, which I've only flipped through so far.

"A hundred years ago we had 7,000 apple varieties; today, more than 85 percent of them have become extinct. We've also lost more than 90 percent of the varieties of lettuce and corn. Today, almost all of our milk comes from one breed of cows, most of our eggs from a single strain of hens.... 85% of the soy grown in the US is now genetically modified, as is 76 % of the cotton, more than 75 % of the canola, and 40 % of the corn." [none of which is labeled in the US, of course] There's some pretty startling numbers on near-monopolies in the agricultural industry, too.

"Consumption of high-fructose corn syrup has increased 4,000 % since its introduction in the 1970s..." (there's a good title for a book: "The Corn Syrup Generation")

Nestle, Altria (which apparently is the new name for Philip Morris, heh), Unilever, Pepsico, Sara Lee, and ConAgra all have a yearly revenue higher than the GDP of Lithuania.

Most important fruits/veggies to buy organic (high levels of pesticides): apples, cherries, grapes, nectarines, peaches, pears, red raspberries, strawberries, bell peppers, celery, potatoes, and spinach.

Web links (there's tons more of these in the book's appendices):
USDA national organic labeling
CSA Center
FoodRoutes
Organic Consumers Association

edumacation

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 00:45:25 GMT

Both Stanford and Berkeley have free lecture podcasts available through the ITunes U thingie. Not the most usable interface to mess around with, but it looks like there's some interesting stuff there.

All of which I can use in my new post-masters life. Yes, you read correctly: Dweeb U finally sent me my MA diploma, 3 months after my graduation date, and 9 months after I completed all the requirements for my degree. 21st-century university bureaucracy, brought to you by ~~PeopleSoft~~ ~~Oracle~~ Blue Sun.

mmm, curling

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 00:24:21 GMT

Mainly so I'll remember it for later:

1. Strength

hamstrings & quads - step-ups, squats, ham curls (pushoff from hack, sweeping)
wrist & reverse wrist curls (for control on release and lifting stone to clean)
biceps/triceps (for sweeping)
calf lifts (pushoff from hack)

2. Flexibility

hip flexors - pretzel, etc.
hamstring stretches

3.Balance

1 leg Bosu ball poses,
Pilates & swiss ball balance stuff
yoga balance poses - mountain/tree etc.

On a wardrobe-related note, curling now happily serves as my arena for wearing the baggy tshirts that normally look kinda schleppy; layered over a long-sleeved shirt, they're the perfect weight combo (at least so far, in an arena in the summer).

beats head against wall

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 22:21:18 GMT

Whether it's to get around teenage driver's license restrictions, a simple joyride or the only way home in a crowded car, teens in the state have been climbing into car trunks, sometimes with deadly results.
A fatal accident in Glendora (Los Angeles County) last year has prompted one lawmaker to try to stiffen the penalties for drivers who allow passengers to climb into the trunk of a vehicle, with the goal of educating youth about the dangers of riding in the trunk.
...
It's unclear how much of a problem "trunking" is with teenagers. The California Highway Patrol reports that since 2000, there have been 153 collisions, including nine fatalities, where someone was riding in an unauthorized part of the car.

apparently civilization is doomed

or maybe both

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 22:18:35 GMT

I'm currently reading Shoshanna Zuboff's In the Age of the Smart Machine, which was published in 1988 and based on ethnographic research done in the preceding 10 years. From the introduction:

Imagine the following scenario: Intelligence is lodged in the smart machine at the expense of the human capacity for critical judgment. Organizational members become ever more dependent, docile, and secretly cynical. As more tasks must be accomplished through the medium of information technology..., the sentient[1] body loses its salience as a source of knowledge, resulting in profound disorientation and loss of meaning. Poeeople intensify their search for avenues of escape through drugs, apathy, or adversarial conflict, as the majority of jobs in our offices and factories become increasingly isolated, remote, routine, and perfunctory. Alternatively, imagine this scenario: Organization leaders recognize the new forms of skill and knjowledge needed to truly exploit the potential of an intelligent technology. They direct their resources toward creating a work force that can exercise critical judgment as it manages the surrounding machine systems. Work becomes more abstract as it depends upon understanding and manipulating information.... A new array of work tasks offer unprecedented opportunities for a wide range of employees to add value to products and services.

I'd have to say that over the last 15-20 years, technological solutions have caused both situations to occur, and a lot of mishmash of both. What would be interesting, I think, is from this vantage point investigate what happened when and where and why, and how it shifts on the continuum between these two extremes.

[1]She means sentient like via the senses, not as being self-aware.

Recent craftiness

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 08:30:53 GMT

Last week I managed to put together an apron, sans pattern, in a few hours to wear to Ardenwood for the historic 4th program. The buttonholes are handsewn and totally ghetto, but other than that it's pretty good, barring a few stupid choices in construction. Deciding to make the waistband and ties out of the short piece of fabric, requiring lots of joining, was probably less than ideal. It did lead me, tangentially, to the lovely sites dressaday.com, hotpatterns.com, and patternreview.com. Someday I will have a combination office/library/sewing room, and the world will tremble.

There are several vintage apron and dress patterns I'd like to buy and make, but unfortunately they're usually sold by sites that discourse a lot about the scriptural basis of headcoverings and the role of a woman as a helpmeet. It makes me uncomfortable to give those folks money, even though they're probably doing much less active damage to the word than, say, the US Department of Defense.

Today I made some strawberry-rhubarb-cranberry jam. I've been making s-r jam a lot this year; this version was more tart (no shock) but I think it would be good mixed with cream cheese or served with pork. We've got a bunch of ripe lemons right now, and I'd love to come up with a way to preserve them in volume, but apparently lemon curd actually has eggs and butter in it, not just fruit and sugar, which makes it hard to can. I may try making simple syrup with lemon juice and sugar, and then freezing it for later use as lemonade starter.

(Ug. Why are sleep patterns messed up.)

Charitable FYI

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 00:24:53 GMT

For those of you that travel occasionally and end up with odd lots of foreign change, you can send it to:

U.S. Fund for UNICEF
Attn: Change for Good Program
333 E 38th St.
New York, NY 10016

yeah, what he said

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 06:36:43 GMT

"Postmodernism attacks all forms of totalizing discourse, including talk of potentiality, in the belief that totalization is the logic of technocracy. There is surely a moment of truth in the demand for dispersion and difference, but these purely negative qualifications are an insufficient basis for a critical theory of technology."
Andrew Feenburg, Critical Theory of Technology

The Euro recap

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 19:07:53 GMT

Me in Florence. Excuse the insan-o hair, it was extra windy that day. Points to ponder: Rome is pretty much a sewer, albeit the oldest sewer I've ever been to. Going to Florence on a national holiday when everyone stays home from work is actually a pretty good plan. Barcelona is a cool city, but jack is open on Sundays. There are an astonishingly high number of abandoned houses in Italy. The after-effects of jet lag are handy if you want to get up early and watch the French Open final semi-live.

Tools that don't suck

Tue, 16 May 2006 23:02:23 GMT

The lovely folks at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason recently released Scribe 3, the most recent version of their free bibliographic and note-taking tool. Most academics and researchers are associated with a university that has a site license for something like EndNote, which is great but spendy if you have to pay for it yourself, and they're quite poky about getting the Mac version updates out there. Scribe, on the other hand, is cross-platform (built on a Filemaker runtime, I think), free, and easy to use (tho the tutorial isn't worth the time, just try it out yourself and it should be obvious). It's a lot more extensible than EndNote, too, since you could practically write a whole book on it in notecard fashion and then export it in various ways. (If anyone figures out how to change the default Source type, tho, let me know.)

Hoosier weather

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 21:46:50 GMT

In Indiana, weather was considered a *very* interesting topic of conversation. It was talked about off and on all day, every day. No one simply stuck a hand out the door and made decisions accordingly, oh no. The local television news was consulted, as was the radio, and for good measure it never hurt to call Time & Temperature, in case your hand was lying. Hoosiers have always put stock in meterologists; if, for instance, Bob Gregory - the best of all weather people - said bundle up you bundled up and if you were slightly overdressed then thank you, Bob, because that's better than freezing into a log person. If Bob said it looked like we were going to get heavy rains and we did, thank you, Bob, and if we didn't, thank you, Bob. Better, always, to be prepared for the emergency that *doesn't* arrive than to be found thumb-twiddling and half starved when rescued from the one that *does*.

Haven Kimmel, She Got Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

Recent irksome obliviousness

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 23:18:08 GMT

As Fenyman has been quoted as saying, "Don't you have time to think?"

1. Middle-aged woman at a recent talk on mindfulness and eating. She volunteers with great delight that since attending a recent conference on women and body image sponsored by her church, she now realizes that issues of body image in women and girls are practically universal and not just her own neuroses.

*facepalm* Welcome to oh, I dunno, the world I realized existed when I was in puberty.

2. Bob Stein, director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, announces delightedly in a lecture I attended the other week that a colleague is now blogging as he is drafting a book, and has found that he's getting helpful and substantive comments. The blogger's publisher feared that no one would buy the book if there was a blog, but instead has found that a significant audience is looking forward to its release.

*facepalm* Welcome to, hey, 5 years ago (or if you substitute 'discussion list' for 'blog,' 10 or 15).

(Amusing side ancedote. Apparently the IFB folks got some seed money from Microsoft to start developing multimedia book authoring software for teachers etc., and when they presented MS w/ the cross-platform alpha, they said they wouldn't continue to support the project unless they dropped the Mac version. They wouldn't, and the whole project got abandoned.)