man this is all i do on this blog anymore.
Still have the other one... Harry Nilsson on there.
I have been crushing particularly hard on those last two.
And it's a silly meme from leslie. Directions:
Brian should be a kid, not a republican!
when i was a small child growing up in brazil, macgyver was my hero
Basically everything on here I'm embarrassed by i watched in the 80s after school or whatever. hmm i'm gonna break the rules and add a 4th one as well, cause i don't think adding degrassi jr. high really counts.
New blurbs include Calexico and a revisit to Tehuitzingo, now my favorite taco place in the city. see the map here.
EDIT: I somehow completely forgot to include 2HB by Roxy Music.
i just dumped a bunch of pictures from the last year and a half or so (not too many) off of my phone. i thought hey, let's do a series of those pictures here on my blog, in roughly chronological order.
Bus stop, Friday March 31, 2006. 12:22 AM.
this started life as a brief comment in an email, and quickly ballooned to rant-sized proportions so i thought it would make good blog-fodder.
i thought spiderman 3 was really good, but then again i haven't agreed with the general consensus on recent superhero movies. i thought spiderman 2 was just 'ok' except for that one scene in the operating room which was amazing, and i really didn't like batman begins much.
but in any case, yeah, i really liked spiderman 3. there were definite cheese moments, and toby maguire really can't cry and that did come close to ruining the movie. but in the end, i think sam raimi did a fairly good job of making a movie not about a superhero but about a young guy who happens to be a superhero, and the people in that guy's life.
and honestly, i think that's what's most interesting about spiderman. does anyone really care about his powers? can his one-liners (in retrospect somewhat lacking in this installment) sustain anything more than a half-hour children's show? for me, spiderman works best as a kind of teenaged version of the watchmen, albeit more of a morality play than the watchmen can allow for in its bid for complexity.
were there bits that made me cringe? oh yes. but within the context of a comic book movie, i could accept most (most) of them. and the ones i couldn't, well, whatever, they were over fast enough. and with any movie like spiderman, where I am familiar with the content before seeing it, I am definitely going to think about the choices i would have made in contrast to the director's (the only really important complaint i had was that there was just not enough queens in the movie at all :).
a lot of reviews, professional or otherwise, seem to focus on how there seems to be "too much" going on, with multiple villains and romantic subplots and whatever, but frankly I had absolutely no problem following it, and i didn't feel it lacked cohesion in any way. i recall being specifically impressed at one point with the ease with which raimi seems to be able to careen from the humorous to the tragic. furthermore, the way significant events pile up on top of each other seemed to me like a conscious decision. confluence was in a way one of this movie's major themes.
as an aside... there is a little bit of a dance sequence in the middle of this movie, and some comments i've read might lead others to believe that it is a scene out of a musical. they would be wrong. the way it is framed and shot struck me as more like a fight scene without the violence than a fred astaire number. if i had to pick one moment from a movie that was close to the dance sequence in this movie, it might be the jazz flute scene in anchorman.
somewhat inspired by jim leff of chowhound's jackson heights map, I present to you my work-in-progress map of tacos in manhattan. yes i know all of the good ones are in east harlem.
A (not so) new breed of spam uses some real-sounding text and an image as the ad. Here's the particularly interesting text of one I just received, which says a lot of nonsense about programming. The subject was game jeannedarc.
Iron Mountains See Ered Engrin.
Information Processing - 8-bit single byte coded graphic character sets.
Yes, assembly language is definitely worth the effort.
It was a walk in the park.
But as soon as I hung up, Higgy straightened up importantly.
If the nCode parameter is less than zero, the filter function should pass the message to DefHookProc without further processing.
Sets the background image for situations where the browser does not support windowless controls.
Here as elsewhere, everything was bathed in the golden glow of a myriad motionless candle flames.
Here are the steps to create DocObject container using MFC 4.
Iron Mountains See Ered Engrin.
I had to take some stuff out of the bottom of my closet because someone was coming today to run some cables through there. Among the stuff I found was remnants of this one time when I dressed up as Ford Prefect for a dress up day at camp.
Ford Prefect is of course a horrible costume choice, because it isn't really so much a costume as a bag (sorry, a "satchel") of specific things to carry around. I probably initially thought I would be Zaphod Beeblebrox, but then realized that getting a second head and a third arm was a bit beyond my reach for what I could do. In any case, here are some picture of my props.
First, there's the Hitchhiker's Guide itself, for which I used an old Wizard tip-calculator. I made a black case for it with large, friendly letters which read "Don't Panic."
Apparently I did not make an electronic thumb, but I did make a sub-etha sens-o-matic out of a foam-rubber brick wrapped in electrical tape, and labeled with a Dymo!
I was real thorough though, check out the back! 
In celebration of the passing of Passover, it's time once again for The Great Yellow Cake Bake-off and Regional Pro-Am of 2038!
this time up the occasion is rebecca's engagement to nate! And hence horrible decorating:
by the way, some photography by laura, namely the pictures like this that make my horrible decorating skills look somewhat presentable; the rest of the photos (the ones of the cake making process) are by me.
And we have finally, for reals, entered the america's test kitchen arena. Our cake recipe today is Cook's Illustrated's aptly named "Yellow Layer Cake." I pulled this from their website somewhere along the line, I'm not sure if it's still there. Some perusing in my not-so-local barnes and noble found the same recipe in The Best American Classics and I'd be willing to bet it's in the straight-up The Best Recipe too.
Frosting is again via Marion Cunningham, whose buttercream was absolutely wonderful on the last cake. Also, Marion has a far more extensive list of frosting recipes than the other sources I have. This time there's a classic 7-minute frosting on the outside and a chocolate sour cream frosting for the filling. More on the decorating below, but first...
MONEY SHOT!
one cup of flour, siftedand
one cup of sifted flour.The first one means you measure a cup of flour, and then sift it, the second one means you sift the flour and then measure it. Almost no recipes ever use the latter, because a) it is fraught with ambiguity: (do you dip and sweep into the sifted flour? or sift straight into the cup which by the way is what cook's illustrated wants you to do, or what?) and 2) if you're not careful, you end up wasting a ton of flour that you sifted but didn't actually use. I'd never seen cook's illustrated write it this way and in fact have heard Mr. Kimball talk about how you should always measure and then sift because sifting changes the volume of your flour. But I double checked it and determined that they did indeed mean 2.25 cups of sifted flour. Some versions of the recipe seem to actually say
2 cups cake flour sifted.In any case, I weigh most of my ingredients, so I just looked up what 2.25 cups of sifted flour is supposed to weigh (213.75 grams) weighed it out and then sifted it. Yeesh.
very goodbut should have just said
good) except without the winy flavor I disdained in them.
Inside this cake was a pale yellow which is exactly what I want (too bright a yellow might seem artificial). Outside it was a bit mottled (and sticky!) exactly like the cupcakes, but like I said about those, everyone likes frosting. When they came out of the oven, the tops were very wavy, but they flattened out after cooling. Also, one side of each layer was significantly higher than the other; maybe I should have turned them halfway through baking.I went all sorts of crazy decorating this cake.
7-minute frosting is usually done all swoopy, but actually goes on smooth fairly easily. Don't ask me how I got that spiral in the middle, it was a fortuitous accident. The frosting itself is basically a meringue, which is not my favorite thing but 7-minute is one of the classic frostings, so I felt like I had to do it once. The sour-cream-chocolate filling was good but sets up very thick, which was kind of odd in relation to the super-light 7-minute. It also has a very distinctive tang, causing the very first comment at our tasting
to be is this sour-cream frosting?
Because this cake was for a particular occasion, i also wanted to write on it. Anyone who knows me knows that my handwriting on paper is not so great, so this had disaster written all over it! But, it was an opportunity for me to flex my coronet skillz.
When I started writing (in plain melted chocolate) I had a lot of trouble, as you can see. 
But by the time I got to the end of writing (the ATS in CONGRATS) I'm starting to look like a pro! Could it be that practice makes perfect?
No! I was just afraid to cut open the coronet too much. If you don't cut it enough, it's very hard to control the chocolate as it comes out and nigh impossible to keep it flowing. So if you ever do this, be sure to cut a good size hole in the bottom of your coronet. After that, the job is very similar to caulking. Incidentally, I personally caulked around the edge of the sink in the background of that picture. Truly I am multifaceted. In any case, Rebecca declared that the way the cake was decorated represented our progression from childhood into the adult world, as many of those present started high school together 12 years ago and were now celebrating Rebecca's engagement! crazygonuts.
After all of that work, the cake naturally got smashed by one of those iron-maiden style subway exits. If you look carefully at the first phot in this post, you can see on the right that there's frosting stuck to the side of the box. Laura did an excellent job of making my cake look awesome though, don't you think?
Since I was making two identical layers, I decided to do a little experiment. One pan was greased with butter and then floured. The other was sprayed with Baker's Joy, which is this spray-on stuff that is supposed to be like butter and flour in one shot. The results were pretty clear:
The butter obviously wins. What isn't visible in the photograph however, is that there was a spot on the buttered pan that I touched by accident when moving it, and the cake stuck in that spot.
As mentioned in Sweet Cuppin' Cakes, Cook's Illustrated cakes generally make use of the one bowl
mixing method, rather than the far more common creaming method. What you do is mix together all of the dry ingredients (including the sugar), then mix in the butter, and finally add the liquid. From what I have read, it sounds like this produces a somewhat heavier cake with a little more texture. However, it is much easier to perform with a standing mixer which I do not have, than with a hand mixer, which I do. The recipe I made here actually includes instructions for using a hand mixer, but I somehow missed that entirely. In any case, those instructions call for using a pastry blender to mix the butter in, and I don't have one of those anyhow. But I would have cut the butter in with a couple of knives or something had I actually read the instructions properly.
Bottom line: close to excellent. A, but not A+.
i've really been obsessing over one song at a time, and right now its mostly mr. blue sky. curse you random episode of dr. who!
I was going to call this song obsessions update - pure pop edition,
but really it's songs I heard on the TV edition.
We Belong
is on some hotel commercial, and I Should Be So Lucky
figured in a pretty funny French and Saunders sketch I saw.
well, john came very close in his answer to our previously featured screenshot quiz bonus round, but not quite. The first screenshot is, as John correctly answered, from Dark City, and depicts Jennifer Connelly standing at the end of a pier in the movie's final scene. The second screenshot is from Requiem for a Dream, and depicts... Jennifer Connelly standing at the end of a pier in the movie's final scene! tricksy.
And in completely unrelated post, more worthy of Graham's blog: a guy running for parliament in Finland has his campaign website available in klingon. Some have thought it is blasphemy to mix politics and Klingon. Others say it is good if politicians can laugh at themselves.
First, here are the solutions to the previous screenshot quiz.
Kudos to all three of our contestants, and kudos again to leslie who besides turning in a spectacular entry, performed a remarkable feat of filmic deduction on number 1.
And now, a SUPER BONUS ROUND. Identify the following 2 screenshots, and be sure you tell me which is which:
Hey it's time to play guess the movie from the screenshot! brought you by leslie, who's own attempt at this was really easy, so i tried to make my screenshots less than obvious. pop-up text hints! hooray! also, most of them you can enlarge by clickety-clicking.
we have previously covered the eating of bánh mì, but today i went to a different bánh mì place, this time in chinatown. A Chau Deli is at 82A Mulberry St, between Canal and Bayard. The sandwiches are delicious, large (about twice the size of nicky's) and super cheap; the #1
is $3! It has a variety of vietnamese cold-cuts, some pâté, cucumber, pickled carrots and cilantro. The coldcuts seemed a little less processed and generic than what you get at nicky's. And so cheap was this that I decided to try a sardine sandwich too ($2.75). It was good, but not nearly as good as sandwich #1.
I only ate half of each one, figuring I could give the rest to a homeless person. but let me tell you, today must be a homeless person holiday because there was not a bum to be found between chinatown and the village. seriously, it must have been the first time in 20 years that there were no homeless people in washington square park. what the hell. for you conspiracy theorists, note that today is the day the city starts their annual official homeless census.
finally, coming up to nyu entails, as it so often does, the usage of a mac. i really don't dislike macs on principle (well, the DRM thing doesn't exactly enthrall me) so much as on practice. The keyboards, as previously noted are quite painful to my wrists. and now, the computers here in the library all have mighty mice
which want to right click everything until you look it up and find out that it's supposed to sense whether you are clicking on the right or left. but there is nothing about the mouse itself which suggests it does this, so instead I just sit here getting frustrated about how this computer seems to keep getting stuck right-clicking everything making it impossible to use. Then once i figure out the problem, i find i have to lift my right finger up when I click in order to reliably click the way i want to. this is, i hasten to add, exceedingly uncomfortable and I might not even be able to do it if my piano teachers hadn't made me do finger-independence exercises when i was a kid. i appreciate that this might work well with a little getting used to, but for chrissake, stop telling me that everything apple makes is so fucking well designed. attention getting and cool are NOT good design principles, i'm sorry. though i can certainly understand why they are good for sales.
soft rock edition apparently.
well, i guess only the first 2 were soft rock. oh well, the list evolved since I wrote that first sentence a couple of days ago.
this article from the times about congressional roomates is a friggin riot. don't you be eatin' my cereal again, chuck schumer!
bizarre star trek trivia for the day: king abdullah of jordan had a cameo on star trek voyager. no i am not kidding.
some comments on un-important a-doings these days.
first up, inductions to the rock and roll hall of fame! Takin' 'em one by one...
then there's the iphone (i refuse to camelcase it, i'm sorry). i've basically been thinking for a long time that apple was going to eventually be putting out an all-in-one this-is-your-life-in-your-pocket kind of a product, but i thought that the ipod would ever-so-slowly evolve into one; instead they've jumped in headfirst. it is shiny and sparkly, but still, this comment attached to david pogue's review in the times really says it all about the media coverage.
and finally, suck it mcgwire!
this shouldn't really be funny, but it's really funny: Transportation Security Administration on Service Animals.
why isn't my blog funnier? it should be funnier!!!
statistics about a google image search for the word funny
(20 pictures on the first page of links):
teh google has failed at determining what is funny by algorithmic means. comedians, consider your jobs safe... for now.
