when it's your favorite panda's birthday or you want to make any occassion more festive, the obvious choice is to make panda cupcakes!

okay, originally i presented this to laura as her new favorite website ever, but let's be honest: hi! monkey is basically the most wondrous out of all of man's creations.

on research

Sure, I could’ve gotten all subjective about it, and said “but when I hear ‘Michelangelo’, I think of David before they think of the nunchucks,” or “Raphael is more a turtle than an artist in my mind,” but that’s a dangerous road to start down. Once you start letting your personal biases interfere with serious scientific research like this, it pollutes your data. And that kind of subjectivity not only changes the whole attitude of your research, it affects your project in unpredictable ways. The polluted data starts seeping out into other projects — infecting them, if you will — and creating these unscientific monsters, half natural phenomenon, half human bias. Fleeing the scientific community that shunned them, they seek solace underground, searching for results outside the establishment, delivering truth and justice as they see fit, living off delivery pizza. And that’s just the beginning.

(the xkcd blag)

math is dead

So apparently technical support agents don't understand basic math. I guess this isn't a huge shock but HOLY CRAP is our education system really so woefully horrible? Or is it just that these people are willfully making themselves sound like idiots because they'd rather do that than be responsible for losing Verizon $70? Meanwhile, thank you Ms. Simon for teaching this to me by moving all the desks to the edges of the room and explaining 1's, 10's and 100's by the cunning use of the floor tiles. And then making us walk through the hall chanting "Ones! Tens! Hundreds!" like some kind of math mob.

But the real reason that math is dead, much like sting, is that my favorite graffiti in all of new york is gone. On a concrete “jersey” barrier on west 4th between Lafayette and the Bowery, where some construction has been going on for some time now, someone had spray painted the quadratic equation. It's possible it has simply moved, as it has been spotted elsewhere before. However, there are still concrete barriers there and they look freshly painted, so I'm afraid that we will never know which of the two values x turned out to be.

sweet cuppin' cakes

I had some ganache left over from the first installment of The Great Yellow Cake Bake-off and Regional Pro-Am of 2038, and I needed to do something with it before it went bad. I didn't really have enough to fill or ice a cake, so I decided: Cupcakes! Yaaaaay!

This was Cook's Illustrated's "Yellow Cupcakes with Chocolate Ganache Frosting," which is only available on their website to subscribers but was easily found elsewhere via google.

The money shot:

Vitals:

Fat

Butter

Flour

all purpose

Leaveners

Baking powder

Ratings:

Flavor

Very good, but I wish it had a rounder finish. Maybe my vanilla is just too cheap.

Texture

Good. Tender but not too delicate. The tops were a little funky but hey everyone loves icing.

Moistness

Spot on.

Aesthetics

Very good. A nice golden yellow, not so yellow that it looks artificial. Consistent but not overly consistent crumb. Some of them were a wee bit misshapen on top but that's more because I'm incapable of using a spoon than anything in the recipe.

Miscellaneous notes:

• Last time I noted that my oven seemed to be running a bit cool, so I obtained an oven thermometer. I have not yet carried out an extensive experiment, but so far it looks like my oven's thermostat is actually pretty good.
• Dishers are great for cupcakes because you can scoop each one out to an identical size. Unfortunately, I am incapable of actually using one apparently because I ended up with 10 cupcakes instead of 12, and some of them had tops that were way too big.
• As we shall see in later installments of The Great Yellow Cake Bake-off and Regional Pro-Am of 2038, Cook's Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen is CRAZYGONUTS when it comes to cake baking. By which I mean they completely eschew this blog's eponymous method in favor of, well, tossing all of the ingredients in a bowl and mixing them together (their full-on cake recipe is actually only slightly more complicated than that). Results: delicious! I don't have a stand mixer, and I did find that with the hand mixer it was a little hard to mix in the butter when I wasn't creaming it with the sugar first.

So, in short:

Pros

Good product all around, easy to make.

Cons

Flavor not round enough at the finish; I can't use a spoon.

you may say that i ain't free, but it don't worry me

Alright, let's get it right out in the open: I am a heretic.

The Godfather is one of the most revered films we have. Consistently ranked number 1 on imdb, number 3 on AFI's list of the top 100 American films, lauded by critics and audiences everywhere, the crowning achievement of the glorious age of cinema known as the 70's.

There's a better one.

Nashville is, in my mind, far and away the best movie of the 70's. It is a film with realistic human drama, deep emotions, humorous satire and beautiful music. Perhaps most importantly, it expresses a singular vision and style betraying the mind of a true director.

Robert Altman died today. I believe he was one of the greatest directors, in part because the medium of film is intrinsic to the style for which he is so well known. There is no way to make an “Altmanesque” novel or video game. The Godfather basically never seems to be more than a film adaptation of a novel, however great that novel or its adaptation is, whereas Nashville achieves a transcendence by using film in a way that is more than just another a medium for telling a story.

This should not be read as a dismissal of the achievements of The Godfather, which in many ways is the acme of the classical Hollywood style in which the filmmaking itself is so perfectly executed as to be virtually transparent. But where Francis Ford Coppola is perfecting what is for very good reason a well established film vocabulary, Altman is creating one all his own, and on top of that, actually succeeds much of the time.

I say much of the time, as even Altman's obituaries seem to go out of their way to point out that his body of work is widely viewed as being “uneven.” Did he make bad movies? Of course he did. But to think that anyone could ever achieve greatness without the risk of failure is foolishness. Over his long career, Mr. Altman had the chutzpah to achieve greatness several times over.

And let that be my lesson for today.

yellow cake... fuckin' right

I have felt as if I've been neglecting the cake family of desserts in my sporadic baking endeavors. I was thinking about it, and I don't really have a good old reliable yellow cake recipe. I looked over a bunch of different ones, and many questions arose:

• Which is better: shortening, or butter?
• Does cake flour really make a better, more refined cake than all-purpose? Is all-purpose + a little corn starch a reasonable substitute?
• We know that a cup of flour is supposed to be 5 oz, but what is a cup of cake flour supposed to weigh?

and so on. therefore, gentlemen, behold: The Great Yellow Cake Bake-off and Regional Pro-Am of 2038!

Our first entry comes from Marion Cunningham's classic tome The Fannie Farmer Baking Book. The cake is the basic master recipe for “Yellow Cake with Chocolate Butter Cream Filling and Frosting” (page 307). Please note that I only utilized the cake portion of this recipe; the filling was a different buttercream (also from Ms. Cunningham, specifically her "Uncooked Butter Cream Filling" on page 412) and the frosting was a simple ganache.

First, the money shot (photography by Laura):

Next, some vital facts:

Fat

Vegetable shortening

Flour

2.25 cups cake flour

Leaveners

2.5 tsps Baking powder

And now, we rate:

Flavor

Very, very good, which surprised me since there is no butter in this cake. Hooray for vanilla!

Texture

A very delicate, fine crumb with just a few larger bubbles. Very good over all.

Moistness

Poor to fair. This cake was just way too dry, so much so that I could tell from the moment I cut into it.

Aesthetics

This cake was very pale, not surprising since it was made with bleached flour and vegetable shortening, the vanilla and egg yolk as the only source of color. Marion prescribed the use of two 8-inch pans for this cake, which proved to be ill-fitting; I would have been better off with 3 layers, or maybe 9 inch pans. As it was, one layer had a very prominent dome, and the sheer height of the layers combined with a paucity of buttercream (it always seems like more when you put it on) just screamed "yikes, that's a big piece of cake!" Overall, acceptable.

Miscellaneous notes:

My oven seems to be running a bit cool. This led to an increased baking time, which I am concerned may have in turn led to a drier cake. It does however, confirm that there is too much batter in this recipe for two layers; a dome usually means that your pan is too hot or that there's too much batter in the pan.

So, in short:

Pros

Very good flavor, texture. Only medium difficulty level in preparation (assuming the cons didn't come from something I screwed up and didn't realize...).

Cons

Too dry, too dry, too dry. Also, I'd prefer a cake made with all-purpose flour because plain (as opposed to self-rising) cake flour can be both hard to track down and expensive.

tyler's ultimate human

Chances are you have a credit card. If you do, chances are you get some kind of "reward" on purchases, whether it's a cash refund, airline miles or some kind of elaborate point system. And chances are that your credit card company has two tiers of purchases: special purchases that give you extra points or savings or whatever, and everything else for which you get a tiny little pittance, usually worth about a half of a percent of what you spend. The "special" purchases usually give somewhere between 1 and 5 percent back.

The "special" purchases category pretty much always includes gasoline. Sometimes it's the only thing in the "special" category. Since I don't drive, I don't buy gas; at least, not directly. I do pay to use public transportation. In fact, public transportation is a major expense on my credit card statement; it's the one thing I always use my credit card to pay for.

One thing pretty much everybody can agree on is that we (as a country) use too much oil, and furthermore that effective public transportation is a good means of making economical use of that resource. Using public transportation is good for the environment, the economy, the social fabric of the city, and on a mass scale is even good for national security (dependence on foreign oil and all that). But our financial institutions specifically reward customers who choose to drive their own cars.

I'm not saying that they should get rid of the extra rewards for gas, but wouldn't it be nice to similarly reward the rest of us?

sherlell: are you yoda?

I was just struck with a thought: what is the worst song on my computer? Every time I see one of those itunes meme things, people are all ashamed of what they listen to etc, so i thought, let's make a list of horrible crap.

I was then immediately struck with another thought: that's a blog entry if i've ever heard one! And here we are.

So here are some pretty awful songs that are on my computer...

2 Nu - This is Ponderous

I'm starting in my WLIR shrieks-of-the-week file, because there's some stuff in there I definitely don't like. This song is one of them... no singing per se, just this guy talking over some really lame synth effects. it's like these guys played with every stupid sound their new expensive keyboard could make. the only one missing is that frog thing you can hear in the otherwise great New Order track "Perfect Kiss."

Adam Ant - Puss n' Boots

Ok, generally speaking I like Adam Ant, but any song that starts w/ the sound of an ill sounding cat meowing is just not so hot.

Band Aid - Do They Know It's Christmas?

I don't need to explain this.

Bob & Doug McKenzie (and Geddy Lee) - Take Off

Ok, this song is intentionally bad, but bad it is, eh?

Bronski Beat - Hit That Perfect Beat

Possibly the gayest song since Liberace stopped recording.

Crazy Joe and the Variable Speed Band - Eugene

2 ginger ales for my girls!

The Cure- Hey You!!!

Ok, I really like the cure but what the hell. I think I am including this on the list for the 3 exclamation marks alone.

Dee Dee King - German Kid

a.k.a. The rap persona of Dee Dee Ramone. I think I might as well stop here. this is really just about as horrible as they get. really, if i have anything worse than this i will be amazed. this song is really, really bad. wow. oh my god i want to smash my head into the keyboard listening to this.

Duran Duran - Wild Boys

I've decided to limit myself to one Duran Duran song, and I'm picking this one. At first I thought it would be a tough call between Reflex and Union of the Snake, but this one is worse.

Electric Guitars - Wolfman Tap

“Man,” you were saying to yourself just the other day, “I wish someone would write a song about a tap-dancing werewolf.” Well my friend, have I got a song for you...

Erasure and Lene Lovich - Rage

A synthpop protest song about vegetarianism.

Meco - Star Wars (disco version)

and it's the first one not in the WLIR file. Really a crime against all humanity. i actually have a bunch of star wars techno remixes and etc, and they are all quite awful, but this one blows the hardest.

Napoleon XIV - They're Coming to Take Me Away

My dad used to sing this song for some reason. In the actual recording, the guy's voice gets progressively higher and higher and i find it rather frightening.

A*Teens - Take a Chance On Me

This is an Abba cover group in the mold of a european manufactured teen band like S Club 7. This is maybe the worst of their covers - it's really fast for no apparent reason.

Billy Joel - Time to Remember

Sappier than sap from a sap maple on the day before the great sap harvest of 1973.

B.J. Thomas - Hooked on a Feeling

This song is AWESOME for exactly 37 seconds, and then it becomes total crap.

Chris DeBurgh - The Lady in Red

Are you paying attention Vh1? This is what an awesomely bad song sounds like.

Go West - King of Wishful Thinking

Sort of sounds like Fine Young Cannibals, sort of sounds like, well, everything and nothing at the same time. Commercial dreck of the highest caliber... possibly written by Martin Page... and I'm right! Google Martin Page some time, he basically wrote every pop song in the history of the world.

Johnny Mathis - Brazil

Ah Napster... I remember fighting to download this song from someone, because I heard about 10 seconds and HAD to hear the rest. This has to be the most ridiculously over-produced version of this song ever. Johnny Mathis, what a tool. Sorry mom.

Kenny Loggins - Return to Pooh Corner

I like the Pooh books, and even the Disney cartoons, and I think that's why I downloaded this song. I think I actually liked it for a short period, and then came to my senses and realized it was complete shite.

Meatloaf - Life is a Lemon

mwahahahahahaha. when i was in junior high i thought this was what rock and roll anger sounded like.

Michael Jackson - Black or White

Surprisingly, even compared with all of Jacko's disco-inf(l)ected stuff, this has aged far worse. The production is more gimicky and sounds really dated.

New Order - Blue Monday (DMC Mix)

I was surprised to find that this mix is only 7:11, shorter than the regular 12" blue monday. It is just filled with all sorts of retarded little clips, starting with Thunderbirds, going through "there is nothing like a dame," cutting crew, a bunch of other random crap, and ends up with Bugs Bunny.

The Nylons - This Island Earth

What the hell is this, an eco-friendly song by some bad imitators of the Starlight Vocal Band?

OMD - Electricity

And people say that Falco is cheesy. C'mon.

Styx - Mr. Roboto

A friend of mine in college told me her sister did this in show choir, which is just perfect.

Thompson Twins - Don't Mess with Dr. Dream

Well this song is just a total mess.

Toto - Hold the Line

Fun Toto fact! John William's son Joe used to be their lead singer!

Was Not Was - Walk the Dinosaur

And in the file of songs I completely forgot existed... somewhere between Wang Chung and Kung-fu Fighting is this song, which includes the following lyric: “The sun was spitting fire, the sky was blue as ice, I felt a little tired so I watched Miami Vice.”

Well, in the end, I didn't find a song nearly as bad as Dee Dee King. That song is awful. I mean it's bad. Really, really bad.

By the way, you know what song is actually awesome? “David Duchovny” by Bree Sharp. That is passion my friends.

Some other thoughts brought to mind by looking at basically every song I have... has anyone ever seen a movie where John Malkovich makes a clone of himself to send to space? I haven't, but i think it exists. Oh well. Stay tuned for “songs that i have just decided are awesome” and, if i remember in a month or so, “what's the worst song on brian's computer: special holiday edition!”

lyrics meme answers

bastards. here are the answers...

1. Assassins - The Gun Song
2. Björk - I've Seen it All
3. Abba - SOS
4. Dream Academy - Life in a Northern Town
5. Weird Al Yankovich - Theme from Rocky XIII
6. Johnny Cash - We'll Meet Again
7. The Beatles - Across the Universe
8. Suburban Kids with Biblical Names - Love Will
9. Sting - Brand New Day
10. The White Stripes - Ball & Biscuit
11. Duran Duran - Hungry Like the Wolf
12. Brian Eno - Needle in the Camel's Eye
13. Sting - Russians
14. George Michael - Faith
15. Regina Spektor - Field Below
16. Cabaret - Tomorrow Belongs to Me (On the revival recording Denis O'Hare sings the word "mine" really, really emphatically. It's kind of scary.)
17. Roy Orbison - Crying
18. Jim's Big Ego - She's Dead
19. Billy Joel - Uptown Girl
20. Queen - Radio Gaga

i'm 25 and my sunglasses are broken.

guess the lyrics meme, v2

play 20 tracks off of shuffle, pick your favorite lyric from each one, and let people guess the songs... parantheses are me interjecting, not lyrics

1. What a wonder is a gun/what a versatile invention./First of all when you've a gun - (big pause)/everybody pays attention!
2. All walls are great if the roof doesn't fall
3. When you're gone/how can I even try to go on?/When you're gone/though I try how can I carry on?
4. Like sinatra in a younger day
5. It's the rye or the kaiser, it's the thrill of one bite/let me please be your catering advisor (mwahahahaha!)
6. And will you please say hello/to the folks that I know/tell 'em that I won't be long./And they'll be happy to know, that as you saw me go I was/singin' this song.
7. Thoughts meander like a/restless wind inside a letter box
8. I noticed she's been listenin'/a lot to Joy Division/lately
9. I'm the train and you're the station/I'm a flagpole to your nation (so overt i have to love it)
10. It's quite possible that i'm your third man girl/but it's a FACT that I'm the seventh son
11. Straddle the line/in discord and rhyme (I include this solely because I used to think the line was "disco and time")
12. Why ask why?/For by the by and by.
13. How can I save my little boy/from Oppenheimer's little toy?
14. Before this river/becomes an ocean/before you throw my heart back on the floor./Oooooh, oh baby, I reconsider my foolish notion
15. And darkness spreads over the snow/like ancient bruises
16. Oh Fatherland, Fatherland, show us the sign/your children have waited to see./The morning will come/when the world is mine
17. I love you even more/than I did before/But darling, what can I do?
18. I bet Jim Morrison is there/and Kurt/and Jerry/and the guy from Sublime/and other people who have died.
19. She's been living in her white bread world/as long as anyone with hot blood can./And now she's looking for a downtown man;/That's what I am!
20. We watch the shows,/we watch the stars/on videos for hours and hours.

let's see that comments section light up!

gratuitous food network post

If the world of "domestic doyennes" (cringe) were a highschool, Garten would be the effortlessly hot, pot-smoking writer and Martha Stewart would be the psycho valedictorian who secretly wants the school to blow up. Paula Deen would be everyone's learning-disabled best friend. link.

weird cover ideas

“imperial march”/“mars bringer of war” style orchestration of “total eclipse of the heart.”

the key

i've made key lime pie before, but the consistency wasn't quite what i wanted; it was too much like delicious lime pudding in a pie crust. this time, i did a bit of a mashup of some very similar recipes, and it was spot on. i've seen recipes with some weird additives (gelatin, cream cheese, sour cream) but the trick to getting the right consistency (not too pudding-like, not jello) seems to be the beating the egg yolks good and proper. little excites me more than having something not so great the first time, and then finally getting it just right, so i figured i'd share.

Key Lime Pie

• graham cracker crust
• 3 egg yolks
• 14 oz. can of condensed milk
• 1/2 cup of nellie & joe's lime juice

1. Beat the egg yolks with an electric mixer on high for 5 minutes. Really do it for 5 minutes, don't do it for 3 and decide that's enough. Time it.
2. Keep beating, slowly adding the condensed milk, over a period of 4 minutes.
3. Mix in the lime juice.
4. Pour into the crust, bake at 350 for 10 minutes.
5. Cool on a rack. When it's cool, stick it in the fridge, preferably overnight.

notes: I haven't actually tried it with any other type of lime juice. america's test kitchen compared regular (persian) limes to key limes and decided that regular limes are fine, but the word on the street is that this particular brand of lime juice makes a huge difference. i can tell you that the flavor is awesome, but i don't know how it compares to using regular lime juice+zest. if you want this brand of lime juice in new york, you have to go to d'agastino's. i know, i know.

if you make the crust yourself, use 12 crackers worth of crumbs, 6 tbsp of butter, 2 tbsp of light brown sugar, a pinch of cinnamon and a pinch of salt. bake at 350 for about 10 minutes (i have a recipe that says 7 minutes, but it really needed more). if you have the 9.5 inch pyrex pie dish (which is far and away the most popular pie dish around), don't build the crust up into the ridged part of the side. there is not enough filling and you will be left w/ a giant standing ridge that is a little more in danger of burning that if it wasn't there. however, if you know you are going to give this a whipped cream top (as opposed to just serving it w/ a dollop of whipped cream on the plate) you can let the crust be a little tall so there is a place for the cream.

also, since i last made this, i have learned that you can freeze egg whites. put them in an ice cube tray!

in other food-related news, rachael ray is going to be on celebrity jeopardy, which is really the only rachael ray-related thing i've had any desire to watch since i heard her say EVOO for about the gajillionth time a few years ago.

finally, this overheard from last week is absolutely hysterical.

in which i am superficial

I wrote this bad poem on the subway.

This woman across from me on the train
Is just one of the ugliest people I have ever seen
And I ride the bus.
Queens, represent.

saving it for a new subtitle

here's one of those stupid blog questionnaires. meh.

1. One book that changed your life
I don't really have a good answer for this. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams.

2. One book you've read more than once.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, also by Douglas Adams. How lame. Ooh, I have a good one! From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg.

3. One book you would probably want on a desert island.
I might actually read past the first few chapters of Gödel, Escher, Bach if I had it on a desert island. It occurs to me that nobody ever gives what should be the obvious answer to this question, which is something pornographic.

4. One book that made you laugh.
Note in the margin on page 118 of my copy of The C Programming Language: "i laughed aloud at that. god i'm sad."

5. One book that made you cry.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.

6. One book you wish had been written.
The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams

7. One book you wish had never been written.
Mein Kampf.

8. One book you are currently reading.
Downtown by Pete Hamill.

9. One book you have been meaning to read.
The number one on this list for me is The Power Broker, a biography of Robert Moses. But it is just so long, so very very long.

link spam

why am i posting this here? will anyone who actually MAKES these websites read it because i posted it? the answer; is no.

but it makes me feel better...
when good restaurants do bad websites.

so in answer to your question, i don't know

An excellent sentence from the new york times: … the idea of a tarted-up hand puppet succeeding at the Helen Hayes portends a terrifying future in which the next stars of “Phantom” are Topo Gigio and Madame.

geekout with your leeks out

Today i threw out an old computer. I don't really feel sentimental about any pieces of technical equipment these days, but I've had this computer a long while and it has served me very well. I'm not really nostalgic about the machine, but I may be nostalgic about the things I used it for and how it marked certain changes in my life. Kind of like an old chair.

This was an NEC PowerMate V133, which ran a Pentium 133 and had I think 32MB of RAM when I bought it, which I thought was extravagant. It's very likely the RAM was upgraded somewhere along the line. I got the computer when I was a high school freshman. Mr. Hackney was jealous of it.

I used this computer to write pretty much everything I wrote in High School. I wrote a paper about my favorite short story, "The Toynbee Convector," on this computer. I wrote a paper about gender roles in the X-Files on this computer. I wrote my college entrance essays on this computer.

The first time I listened to a Star Wars soundtrack, it was through the CD player on this computer. When I sang "Saying Goodbye" on senior day, I typed out a crib sheet with the lyrics and chords on this computer. The first computer program I ever wrote ran on this computer.

I got a new computer when I went off to college (a notebook which died unceremoniously midway through my senior year). Sometime after that, the NEC, which stayed at home, got Debian linux installed on it. It wasn't really fast enough to run any of the fancy GNOME or KDE things, but I didn't really use it so much - only when visiting from school.

After moving back home after college, I used it as my main machine until I just couldn't take it anymore (probably about a month) and hooked up the one I am still using now (the one which replaced the notebook). The NEC became a mail server which ran and ran and ran and ran very quietly and very dependably until one day its power supply up and died.

I do name my computers, but not the way most people do; I reuse the names as the functions change. The first name the computer in question had was calvin, but later on the computer I'm using now became calvin and the machine I just threw out became "box." I called it that because all of my computer names are from calvin and hobbes, and when I first put linux on it, it felt like a computer should: like it had taken on the qualities of calvin's cardboard box. If I only turned it on its side, it could do anything I imagined.

things you should do if you are john

1. go to a bookstore
2. go to the cookbook section
3. find "the best light recipe" (the "light" cookbook from america's test kitchen)
4. turn to whatever page the preface is on
5. read christopher kimball's preface
6. fall over

really everyone should do this because it's great. it's even better if you bring another person with you so that you can read it aloud to him or her. or just read it to random strangers in the bookstore, clearly they will love you for it.

link spam

an oldie, but a goodie: Fight Club: the return of Hobbes.

song obsession update

• New Order - Crystal
• New Order - Here to Stay
• The Cloud Room - Hey Now Now
• They Might Be Giants - Ana Ng

that's right, those are two more recent new order songs. you gots a problem with that? i didn't think so. interestingly enough, both of these songs actually have titles that relate to their lyrical content! crazy.

i'm not really into the cloud room song anymore actually. i had a very brief little period with that one but it's pretty much over. i haven't really felt totally addicted to any song for that matter in some time. blech.

People on the bus wearing

People on the bus wearing matching bright red disney world 2005 tshirts.

also, a most excellent video. via xkcd.

Which Eddie Izzard Quote Are You?

Original Sin
Take this quiz!

One thing you could do is put out a series of albums all called "Monkey" but with an increasing number of exclamation marks on each one. then, in the press you refuse to differentiate them by the number of exclamation marks, only by how emphatically you shout the word "monkey." act confused and incredulous when people can't figure out which one you mean.

fuck algebra

i have been known to complain that a familiarity with calculus should be something that's expected of all college graduates, much in the way that a vague familiarity with hamlet is. i mean, i'm not asking for history majors to be able to solve differential equations here, but they should know what a derivative is, and maybe an integral.

but i don't even know why i bother to think these thoughts when a journalist for the fucking london times CAN'T EVEN MULTIPLY. Ok, it's not like i'm really so hot at arithmetic myself, but if i was going to publish an article in, well, anything, let alone the sunday fucking times, you can bet i would check to make sure that my arithmetic was right. plus i own a calculator. EARTH TO STUPIDHEAD: 2^16 is 65536, not FOUR BILLION.

ok, so actually he got that right, but somehow managed to decide that a 16-bit binary number could have 2^32 values. again, STUPIDHEAD. and i don't bring that name out unless i really mean it.

IPv4 addresses have 32 bits (not 16) and IPv6 addresses have 128 (not 32) bits. and what the fuck is up with all of the scare quotes? "internet address", "16-bit", "32-bit". It's not like the guy you talked to just made these terms up, that's what the fuck they're called. guy from the times: you are officially as retarded as the people at the cheesesteak place that put up a sign that says "This is America, speak english" with superfluous quotes around the words "speak english." at least they make delicious cheesesteaks; you've probably never even made a proper tea, which we all know is england's gift to the culinary landscape.

my hair is too short

i got my haircut today. it looks ok but is a bajillion times shorter than i asked. like, i don't remember my hair ever being this short, ever.

in other news, people are annoying. there is no such thing as a computer lab or reading room at this school without an obnoxious person talking on a cellphone, listening to music on their headphones so loudly i can sing along (gloria! gloria!), or in this case teaching a class on how to make a webpage in the next room and SHOUTING THE WHOLE TIME.

to complete this generally misanthropic whiny post, let me say again that the keyboards on macs suck. they make my hands hurt, which granted doesn't take too much but holy shit they are the worst.

moments of pure geekitude

did you know that the cvs pserver protocol uses the strings "I LOVE YOU" and "I HATE YOU" to report successful and failed authentication respectively? it's true!

when i went to write this post, i had some other geeky moments to recount, but i can't think of what they were now. i thought the cvs bit was funny enough to post on its own however. i should write a song where i alliterate chorizo with chortle.

i am not the only one who uses my orca oven mitt as a sock puppet

so i am totally addicted to america's test kitchen now. it is basically just way better than good eats, which i still like. good eats easily wins for style and humor, but alton brown tends to violate one of Brian's Rules, the one that says you shouldn't be pedantic and wrong at the same time.

while america's test kitchen avers that they do things "the right way," they eliminate the idea that it's right simply because they know better than you; they just tested every other possible way and decided on the best one. there really is no "knowledge" being presented here, just test results.

alton still wins for personality and humor though. oh, and cleverness. the smoker out of a giant flower pot, a hot plate and a pie pan is just ingenious. plus his guests are great. i particularly like deb the nutritional anthropologist and shirley corriher, easily the most adorable old lady food scientist ever.

none of the people on america's test kitchen are really endearing, but only one of them really grates on me. that would be bridget. i was going to write that it kind of bothered me that chris (the nerdy guy with the glasses) seems to be a total perv around bridget, and they exude the sense that they're carrying on an affair. but then i thought that such a comment would be inappropriate and juvenile. besides, other bloggers have tread in these waters before.

ok, i liked the way the template i had looked, but technically it was driving me nuts. of course, that's partially because of the ass-backward way the blogger posting form insists on mangling my posts (hello? 1998 called and it wants its endless stream of <br> tags back!) . bah.

we also create false promises

for the beatles loving girls who read my blog but not boingboing...

so after reading this article by ben brantley in the times, i was kind of annoyed because most of his rant is predicated on the idea that musicals being based on pre-existing material is a bad thing. yes, yes, i get that it's not his central point, but still. if you think about it, most "great" musicals are based on previous source material. for example, here are the shows represented on some "best of broadway" compilation i have:

Oklahoma	play (green grow the lilacs)
Carousel	play (liliom)
Annie Get Your Gun	original
Where's Charley	play (charley's aunt)
South Pacific	short story collection (tales of the south pacific)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes	novel
The King and I	memoir which had already been a movie
My Fair Lady	play, took the changed ending from pre-existing movie
Bells are Ringing	original
West Side Story	play, but we'll say original
The Music Man	original
Gypsy	book
The Sound of Music	memoir
The Fantasticks	play (les romanesques)
Camelot	book (the once and future king)
Hello, Dolly	play (Einen Jux will er sich machen), adapted into a play (The Matchmaker) adapted into a movie.
Fiddler on the Roof	short story collection (various by shalom aleichem)
Funny Girl	original?
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever	original?
Man of la Mancha	original but drawn from a book
Mame	play (Auntie Mame) based on a book
Cabaret	book (berlin stories) and movie (i am a camera)
Hair	original
A Little Night Music	movie (some ingmar bergman movie)
Chicago	movie which had already been made twice
A Chorus Line	original
Annie	comic strip
Evita	original... sort of based on a biography
Dreamgirls	original
Cats	book of poetry (old possum's book of practical cats)
La Cage aux Folles	movie
Les Miserables	novel
The Phantom of the Opera	novel
Sunset Blvd.	movie
Rent	opera (la boheme), but in the spirit of west side story, say original

i don't mean to say that these are the shows i think are the best, i'm just using it as a list from an outside source of what are pretty inarguably some very, very popular shows. only 12 out of 35 (a definitive minority) are original, and that's counting west side story and rent. hell, make it 13, cats is pretty far removed from its source material, whatever you think of it. 5 of them were based on movies, and 4 of those are old enough and popular enough to have been revived.

most were based on either plays or books, and the fact that today's writers are now turning to movies and popular music speaks to the fact that movies and pop music have largely taken the place of books, plays and musical-theater-music in today's culture.

while i'm at it, some other well-regarded musicals based on movies: promises, promises (the apartment), sweet charity (nights of cabiria), kiss of the spider woman.

as long as no one tries to make a musical based on a video game. i don't know if i could handle that.

finally, how do you write an article about how the musical is very close to being dead but not quite there without invoking the "fabulous invalid" line? i guess brantley was too afraid to base his article on pre-existing material.

smallER

so believe it or not i already have two unfinished blog entries in the hopper about articles in the nytimes that are retarded, but i couldn't let this one slide. "Better Sound in Small Packages" by Michel Marriott, besides having a grammatically questionable title, has factual errors and is basically a shill piece for the consumer electronics and recording industries.

The big error is here: "DVD's have enough storage capacity for an album's worth of uncompressed music on them; CD's require compression, though not as much as MP3's and other formats read by digital audio players." That's just wrong. DVD's may contain higher quality audio by using a higher sampling rate or a higher bit-depth, and they may contain more audio information in the form of surround tracks, but standard audio CD's absolutely do not use any type of audio compression. On top of that, while DVD-audio (which is probably what this article is talking about, but who knows) isn't compressed, the standard DVD format ironically DOES support compressed audio, though I don't know how often it is actually used.

what really gets my goat though is how this article seems to unwittingly shill for the electronics companies. Regardless of what you think of it (and I don't necessarily think much) the triumph of the iPod and mp3 players in general (which DO use compression schemes) is a triumph of consumer preference over audiophile nonsense. The point is that in the market, portability totally trumps fidelity, for the simple reason that most people are listening to most of their music on the street, in the subway, on the bus, in a car, or even on a plane. These are places with a huge amount of noise. if you're really interested in listening on a nice stereo, go buy the CD; you can always rip it to your iPod.

So how is this shilling for the consumer electronics industry? Well, they loooove a format change, because that means everybody has to go out and buy brand new equipment to play their music. and the recording industry loves it to, because then they have to go out and buy all new music so that they can play it on their new equipment! so here's an article all about how horrible all of the music you have now sounds and how you should be keyed up to purchase what they want to sell you instead. honestly, i don't think that it's gonna happen again, what with the advent of the itunes music store etc. of course, that's a format change too.

when you get to the second page of the article, you realize that all of that has just been a set-up for more product shilling, this time for a few dsp processes that make you think your audio sounds better, when in fact all they do is make it sound more impressive. these audio effects have very little to do with the seemingly-misguided studio engineer who asks "Why shouldn't the listener at home hear what I hear in here?" (I don't set out to demean the engineer. I'm sure he does a great job, but the fact is there are very good reasons why, chief among them that they don't really care).

There's a scene in 24 hour party people where tony wilson wants to hear joy division's newly-recorded first single in the car. Another character complains that it will sound like shit in the car, but he replies that that's where most people will hear it so they should make sure it sounds good even there.

holy priceless collection of etruscan snoods!

watching the davinci code, I kind of felt like I was watching a riddler episode of batman.

julia child in a fireman's hat

mwahahahahaha.

to miss o

dear karen,

i just wanted to assure you that i'm ok. i know that you will be expecting me at one of the concerts this week, but i have to do a presentation on wednesday night and tuesday night will just be a whole mess of crazy. believe me, i'd rather be rockin' out. it's been such a long time since we danced in the rain in central park when you opened for devo... almost 2 years! i wanted to come to one of your february shows but unfortunately didn't have five bajillion dollars to give to a scalper.

i hope the microphones at roseland are tasty.

/brian

song obsessions

song obsession update:

• The Association - Cherish
• The The - This is the Day
• Brian Eno - Baby's On Fire
• Dean Gray - Dr. Who on Holiday
• Annie - Chewing Gum

You can pretty much kill me on that last one, as its pretty much the worst kind of electropop possible. What can I say, it's super catchy, and the video is hot.

Dean Gray is actually a pseudonym for a couple of mashup artists. "Dr. Who on Holiday" is track 2 off of their illicit "American Idiot" mashup "American Edit." In this case, they've mixed Holiday with "Doctorin' the Tardis," itself a mashup of the Doctor Who theme and "Rock and Roll Part 2" by Gary Glitter. That one was done by The Timelords , who were in reality The KLF, in 1988. "Dr. Who on Holiday" however seems to contain a fair amount of the original Glitter track as well. The last 30 seconds or so of the track threaten to be too much, with The Timelords' chanting "Doctor Who, The Tardis" with that noisy guitar playing the melody right on top of them, Gary Glitter yelling "Hey-ey," Doctor Who's radiophonic "ooh-ooh-OOOH" whine, Green Day's drums and on top of it all Billy Joe Armstrong belting out "on holiday" over and over. I think there may even be a little of the other, fairly unintelligible chant from the middle of Doctorin' the Tardis in there somewhere. As if that weren't enough, our friendly remixers put Billy Joe through an effects processor. But somehow it all gels together for one of those really zen mashup moments.

wikipedia meme

picked up this meme from the blog of an old friend who doesn't know that i read it. pretty sure she doesn't know this one exists. one day i will alert her to my presence.

Do a Wikipedia search of your birthdate, minus the year; list three interesting events, three people who were born, and three people who died on that day.

Events:

• 1964 - Jean-Paul Sartre is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but turns down the honor. -could that be any more jean-paul satre-y? they're good thinkers you know, the french.
• 1976 - Red Dye No. 4 is banned by the US Food and Drug Administration after it is discovered that it causes tumors in the bladders of dogs. The dye is still used in Canada.
• 1987 - John Coolidge Adams's opera Nixon in China debuts at the Houston Grand Opera in Houston, Texas.

Birthdays:
Many cool people were born on my birthday, but i managed to pick 3.

• 1938 - Derek Jacobi, English actor
• 1938 - Christopher Lloyd, American actor -in my mind, there is no way christopher lloyd was born in 1938. strangely, i have no such prejudice about derek jacobi.
• 1903 - Curly Howard, American actor and comedian (d. 1952)

Oh what the hell, here are some other fun ones: Joan Fontaine, Timothy Leary, Catherine Deneuve, Jeff Goldblum, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme (charlie manson devotee who tried to assasinate Gerald Ford), Ichiro, Annette Funicello, Robert Rauschenberg. Oh, and Brian Boitano.

Deaths:
Much more boring. Here are 2 that i've actually heard of...

• 1979 - Nadia Boulanger, French composer and composition teacher (b. 1887)
• 1906 - Paul Cezanne, French painter (b. 1839)
and hey, i'll go with this guy cause his bio is pretty cool
• 1565 - Jean, Vicomte d'Aguisy Grolier de Servieres, French bibliophile (b. 1479)

taking a brief respite from writing up my psychology of music paper. believe it or not, usually i try to produce a well written blog entry unless its a one-liner that i send in via cellphone. this entry however seems to be more of a stream of consciousness how-my-day-went i am a teenage girl blog entry.

Today started out horribly. In my head anyhow. I set my alarm for 8, which is for others i know just a normal time in the morning but consider that i've been going to bed at 6am for the last month or so and I hope you will agree that it is not exactly... agreeable.

I had to get up so early so that I could go to the concert hall where jeff works so that i could pop some balloons. yes, pop some balloons. I was recording impulse responses for an acoustics project. Acoustics is my horrible class this semester. it seems every semester i have one class that is just horribly horrible and destroys my will to live. ah well.

after bringing the equipment i had back to school, i decided i should go to the library. and i did. i was reading this book on auditory scene analysis and everything was horribly horrible again. i am not a violent person but seriously i was ready to destroy this book. Bregman (the author) is not very big on the old academic writing "first you tell them what you're going to say, then you say it, then you tell them what you said" bit. so the book can get a little hard to follow. 40 pages of talk about whether or not there's such a thing as a trajectory grouping and i had no idea WHY he was talking about that.

after i got to a certain point (and after i got to a certain point) i left the library. I went outside. i had a cup of coffee. and then i came back into the library. but before i started again, i did this old concentration/meditation/self-hypnosis thing i used to do before every show. and WOW did it work. my head cleared, i found myself able to focus, and more importantly able to regain focus if i lost it. for the first time in a week i didn't feel on the verge of a nervous breakdown. i took out anotebook, and started going through the chapter, actually taking notes. and now i have pages of notes in front of me which i am transcribing/fleshing out into my paper on schema-based auditory scene analysis.

Meanwhile, I also have to present on this topic tomorrow. And not just my paper: 2 other people's papers as well. It's a "group" presentation given by one person, which is pretty dumb because it's not like you can come up with a presentation as a group. actually the professor used to do group presentations but they were inevitably disastrous. I'm kinda peeved i got stuck with it. my other group members wanted to meet to make the presentation, but other than the general "no exit" quality of making a powerpoint w/ other people, the amount of time it would take me to travel to nyu to meet with them and then go back to queens is about as much time as I plan to spend putting it together. of course, the standards aren't very high. the presentations we've had so far have mostly sucked. actually, i taped myself donig a bit of the talk the other day, and was a bit annoyed because i'm a much better presenter in my head than i actually am.

ugh my computer setup is the worst in the history of the world. the orthopedist doesn't think i have carpal tunnel... yet. "minor nerve irritation." the good part was he has me on 4 aleve a day. yeehaw for drugs. i think i'll take some now.

you know i have tons of work to do if i start writing a blog post with actual substance

let's talk about how.

it's my experience that when i say "how does it work," i mean something completely different from most people. if i ask someone "how does the vcr work," they will show me the remote control, and the various buttons. to change the channel you press this button, etc. the tape goes in here.

excuse me, but that's not how it works, that's how you use it.

i see the same problem on a bunch of wikipedia pages. for example take XMLHTTP. I have no clue, after reading that article, how XMLHTTPRequest works. I know how you use it (via browser scripting languages), what you use it for (to communicate asynchronously between client and server in a web application) and some examples of applications that use it. I even know how some web browsers implement it (IE used to use an ActiveX component).

But I still don't know how it works, and hence, I still don't what it is. "What I cannot create I do not understand" -Richard Feynman.

However, my criticism of Wikipedia here should not be seen as general. There are many articles on technical subjects which are quite excellent.

But to the extent it is a problem, I think that this is a kind of manifestation of the old "computers are scary" syndrome. There definitely seem to be wikipedia editors who are frightened that if they include "technical" details like i am suggesting that the articles would be more like a technical manual and thus these details are not "enyclopedic." I would argue that this is somewhat backwards. Details like the "known problems" section of the XMLHTTP article are far less encyclopedic.

i am now going to take a very foolish stab at reformulating feynman for my self: when you understand how it works, you can understand why you use it that way, and when you understand why you use it that way, you can understand how you use it.

god be praised!

At long last, the return of Shake Shack. At first, I thought, well, maybe I'll wait for nicer weather but then the call of a double-crack burger was just too much.

And hoo-boy am I glad I went. No line! (it was between 4 and 5 in the afternoon) And on top of that, everyone got a free $2 gift card "because we love you." I'm serious, that's what the cashier said. The sign to the left of the order window says "we missed you too!" in ginormous letters.

Oh, and a stray french fry found its way into my little wax paper burger-sack. Conclusion: shake shack is awesome.

Celebwatch 2005! A ragged looking

Celebwatch 2005! A ragged looking Tim Robbins (is there any other kind?) making a cellphone call outside the brill building.

gentlemen...

BEHOLD! the TWO TERABYTE FLOPPY DISK!

$ fdformat /dev/fd0
Single-sided, 1 tracks, 7806682 sec/track. Total capacity 1963888830 kB.
Formatting ... done
malloc: Cannot allocate memory
$

Don't you just love it

Don't you just love it when a music book is by some british dude who uses quavers and crotchets instead of eighth and quarter notes?

rant-a-riffic

i think it says a lot that as much as i care about music, i couldn't give a shit about the grammy awards. i mean, i watched the fucking SAG awards, but i didn't watch the grammys. ok, so i was in class during the grammy awards so it's not like i had a choice, but i probably wouldn't have watched them anyhow. some of the performances interest me (thanks internet!) but the awards are pretty lame. take for example the following list of nominees:

• The Arcade Fire
• Beck
• Death Cab For Cutie
• Franz Ferdinand
• The White Stripes

What field do you think these bands were nominated in? If you could name the type of music they make, what would it be? Well, apparently it's not rock, because this is the list of nominees for best "alternative" album of the year (an award which is not televised), all of which by the way, were WAY better than most of the nominees for best rock album (which is televised). For the record, Franz' "Do you want to" was nominated for "best rock performance by a duo or group with vocal", but the white stripes aren't making rock music? who the hell comes up with this shit?

Also, the sheer number of awards is insane. In the "rock" field for instance, there are no fewer than 7 awards: solo w/ vocal, duo or group with vocal, hard rock, metal, instrumental, best rock song (this is for the song itself: the other awards are ostensibly for the "performance"), and best rock album. All in all there are 108 awards.

Let's repeat that in case you missed it: the recording academy gives out no fewer ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT grammys every year. Total number they show on tv: eleven.

In a field where we celebrate rising above categorization, the academy's response is to be as specfic as possible. i'd love to meet the guy who had to decide that feel good inc. was a "pop collaboration with vocals" while "daft punk is playing at my house" is a "dance recording."

most inane categories: "pop instrumental" album and performance. if it's an instrumental, then it's not a pop song. even if it was written by burt bacharach.

conclusion: the grammy awards are irrelevant. not that i'd turn one down or anything.

"perfect situation" is probably the worst weezer song ever. i really like it. i know, i know, i am a horrible person. meh. grammy rant coming soon.

jerry, how could you

oh man.

i saw a commercial for what i thought would be the deleriously wonderful Devo 2.0 on the tv. this led me to the the website (http://devo2-0.com). a fairly competent bunch of kids covering devo songs, and hey, a girl as the lead singer. why not! most of the performances seemed pretty good for a bunch of 12 year olds, even the drummer (all-important for devo). at first i was amazed. how awesome that DISNEY of all people is pushing songs like "freedom of choice" on youngsters. the videos reveal that the kids don't quite have the insane energy of the original band, and that the keyboard girl probably shouldn't be singing. but hey, i'll take what i can get; and there are even references to potatoes! so what if they made it "freedom of choice is what you want" instead of "freedom from choice"; the basic message is largely intact, and besides they're not the first. also, the two new songs aren't bad.

then i got to the beautiful world video.

let me be clear: i was not expecting them to leave the S&M stuff in "whip it". i was not expecting them to cover "jocko homo" at all, lest have the kids rolling around in giant condoms in the video. and i was definitely not expecting this version of beautiful world to live up to the original. i was surprised they even dared to include it. the original is easily among the greatest music videos ever made. i was CERTAINLY not expecting images of starving african children and men being blown up with grenades. but holy crap; they changed "it's a beautiful world for you, but not for me" into "for you, i guess me too."

ugh.

this pretty much renders the song completely pointless. i'm wondering why they bothered to cover it. couldn't they just stick to the less obviously politically perverse stuff if they were going to strip the songs of any signifigance whatsoever? how are mark mothersbaugh and jerry casale (who directed the videos!) justifying this to themselves? are they telling themselves the song is just even more ironic now? come on.

i think it says a lot that much of the sexual stuff made it through. they toned down "girl u want" a bit, and also made a "boy u want" version which is pretty fun. but they also covered "uncontrollable urge" and "jerkin back and forth." what the hell. granted, devo's "sexy" songs are mostly about sex as a primal instinct which shows us for what we really are, but i think that's exactly what's going on here. the establishment is fine with sexualized youth (regardless of what they say) because sex sells. a primal society is a controllable society.

to their credit, they did steer clear of what is probably the least ironic of their "protest" songs, "gates of steel." i only hope this leads some kids to go find the first devo album, which is among the most awesomely mind bending listening experiences in rock and roll.

bonus points go to the bass player, who in his website bio wrote "Maybe I could be the singing, guitar-playing, bass-playing DEVO-Ninja."

BEHOLD the power of music in a movie trailer: Brokeback to the Future!

i lied, since actually 2 of them are covers. but "tainted love" is rarely heard in its original verison these days. since everyone sucks:

"this is not a love song" is by public image limited
"love to hate you" by erasure
"tainted love" - i actually have both the soft cell cover and the gloria jones original
"love and destroy" - franz ferdinand
"love is strange" - the everything but the girl cover of mickey & sylvia
"strangelove" - depeche mode
"love will tear us apart" - joy division

WHYYYY? WHYYYYYYYYYYY? I LOVEDED YOU PIGGY! I LOVEDED YOU!

itunes meme. hooray for lameosity!

it's worth noting that a fair amount of my stuff is either poorly tagged or completely untagged. this is because i have the stuff fairly well organized by file name and directory. i still use xmms to listen to my music, because frankly my file system takes care of the organization for me. oh and searching too. earth to everyone working on complicated new search tools: the unix locate command is both awesome and a gazillion years old. no it is not as fancy as spotlight/google desktop search but i don't really care. also i rarely rip cds, so this is not fully representative of my music collection.

to do this, i pointed daapd at my music files and looked at the share in itunes on a mac laptop i happen to have sitting here. this also leaves out the approximately 50 ogg files i have on my computer.

How many songs? 2070

Sort by artist
First: 2 NU. god i hate that song.
Last: Zappa. last properly labeled artist: Yello

Sort by song title
First: (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (devo version)
Last: Zoot Suit Riot

Sort by album (really, really poorly tagged so who knows how accurate this is)
First Album: 1 (the beatles album)
Last Album: Ziggy Stardust the Motion Picture Soundtrack (guess which track i have off of this!)

First song that comes up on shuffle: Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Laurie's "Bill Shakespeare" sketch (It's absolute crap! What is he talking about? He's going to put on a bow and arrow and potter down to the seaside? This is Prince Hamlet, not King Canute! He might as well kill himself if that's the best idea he can come up with.) This is exactly why i don't use these programs, cause i don't want a track like this to come up on shuffle. yeah i know i could make it so it didn't, but it's easier for me to just have a humor directory and not include it in my stuff.

How many songs come up when you search for "sex"? 7

How many songs come up when you search for "death"? 5. The best is easily "Death!" which is a track from Edward Scissorhands.

How many songs come up when you search for "love"? an astounding 95. this includes such not-so-lovely titles as "this is not a love song", "love to hate you", "tainted love", "love and destroy", "love is strange", "strangelove", "love will tear us apart" and of course "i loveded you piggy." anyone want to guess the artists of all of those tracks? careful: one of them is a cover.

two sort-of-related-to-devo posts in a row!

via toothpaste for dinner drew hits me right where i live.

and this is how...

you indoctrinate the young.