Union Square, Wednesday August 2, 2006. 1:06 PM.

Riverside Park, Thursday July 27, 2006. 1:36 PM.

Key Food, Saturday July 1, 2006. 3:01 PM.

Bohemian Hall, Saturday June 17, 2006. 9:32 PM.

east village restaurant, Saturday June 3, 2006. 7:36 PM.

Riverside Park, Friday April 20, 2006. 3:52 - 3:58 PM.

NYU Library, Tuesday April 18, 2006. 10:54 PM.

NYU Library, Monday April 10, 2006. 3:43 PM.

picture pages

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.

no ramones, no mercy

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.

tacotacotaco

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.

new favorite wikipedia entry

List of foods named after people

spam spam spam spam

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.

trapped in the closet

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!

you ever listen to a song you've listened to many times and all of a sudden hear a really cool lyric you've never noticed before? that happened to me the other day, when I realized that in the last verse of Daysleeper, Stipe sings that the ocean machine is set to nine which i think is great.

return of the bakeoff

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!

Vitals:

Fat

Butter

Flour

2.25 cups SIFTED cake flour, which let me say is just annoying. For those who may not know, there is a difference between saying one cup of flour, sifted and 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.

Leaveners

2 tsps Baking powder

Ratings:

Flavor

Very good. A very similar flavor to the very similar cupcakes (which I identified as being very good but should have just said good) except without the winy flavor I disdained in them.

Texture

Lovely! A little less delicate then the last one, which is fine. Very even crumb, just a little chew. Excellent in fact.

Moistness

Good. 'nuff said.

Aesthetics

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.

Decorating

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?

Miscellaneous baking notes

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:

Baker's Joy
Butter and flour

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.

Conclusions

Pros

Very good flavor, excellent texture, excellent color.

Cons

A little difficult to make without a stand mixer; mottled, sticky exterior; uses cake flour and may have a confusing way of measuring it.

Bottom line: close to excellent. A, but not A+.

song obsessions update

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!

• Electric Light Orchestra - Mr. Blue Sky
• Pat Benatar - We Belong
• Kylie Minogue - I Should Be So Lucky

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.

SHAKE SHACK == LOVE

SHAKE SHACK == LOVE

and the show has reached a new low

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.

screenshot bonus round!

First, here are the solutions to the previous screenshot quiz.

1. Edward Scissorhands (this was actually my computer wallpaper at work when I was employed by Morgan Stanley).
2. Clue
3. Network
4. Stop Making Sense
5. 24 Hour Party People (the person in the photo is Howard Devoto, of The Buzzcocks and Magazine; this shot is his only appearance in the whole film).
6. Schizopolis
7. π
8. 2001: A Space Odyssey
9. The Muppets Take Manhattan
10. Radio Days
11. Rushmore
12. Being There
13. 12 Monkeys
14. Metropolis
15. Life of Brian
16. Nashville

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:

1. 
2.