One of my favorite things of the many, many I’ve stolen from Sumana is the notion that blogs get a “house style.” This, for the record, is the reason long works (novels, movies, etc) get capitalized but not italicized on NFD.
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That’s no battle station
A few weeks ago, Kara and I went out to dinner at a fancy restaurant for her stepdad’s birthday, and I got to meet several members of her extended family for the first time. It was a really nice dinner and we all enjoyed ourselves. Then we walked out to the car, got in, started the engine, glanced backwards and realized that someone had smashed in the rear passenger window and stolen my bag, containing books and my laptop, and a couple hundred dollars’ worth of new clothes Kara had just had delivered by UPS. Have I mentioned that it was raining?
The waitstaff at the restaurant informed us that this was the fourth such smash-and-grab from their parking lot in three weeks. There is no camera or floodlight there. I still need to call up the building owners for a polite discussion about that.
The whole situation sucked a lot, but we got the window replaced and Kara got some of the clothes replaced by a kind friend for her birthday. My car insurance covered the window but not the contents; Kara’s home insurance would have covered them, but in neither instance did the damage meet the deductible. (I had to buy a new windshield after a rock chip incident last summer, too, so I have now replaced about 40% of the glass on my car out of pocket.) The fact is that we are very fortunate to have afforded such luxuries to begin with, and remain both fortunate and luxurious.
I replaced the laptop with a much newer, shinier, more expensive version, but then my boss took the opportunity to buy a nice new Mac Mini for my desk at work (I had been using the aforementioned four-year-old Macbook) and I returned it. The laptopless life is one plagued with tiny inconveniences, so I’ll probably buy it again in a few months when they update the hardware.
The point of this post is to eulogize my old dingy white Macbook, which, for a refurbished computer at the very low end of Apple’s lineup, did me proud for three and a half years. I used it as my only work machine for much of that time; it accompanied me to London, Innsbruck, Winston-Salem, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, London again, Paris, and Taastrup, where I dumped a glass of water into it and actually managed to grow mold on its hard drive. And then I replaced said drive and used it at the new job for another six months! No one could have asked more.
Thanks, Macbook. You were a good computer.
Geek Note: For reasons I can’t remember now, I named the laptop DEATHSTAR on our home network when I first bought it; after the hard drive resurrection (and, for the first time, the switch out of Boot Camp to native OS X), I rechristened it Fully Operational. Apparently every Death Star gets destroyed, though, so I have moved on to a new naming convention. Kara’s and my iMac is now the Batcave, the Mac Mini is the Batpod, and whenever I get the laptop again, it will be the Tumbler.
Update 2255 hrs: Kara has informed me that the iMac is named Hodge, after John Hodgman, and always will be, and HOW COULD I THINK THAT, and WHAT AM I GOING TO DO TO OUR CHILDREN, RENAME THEM EVERY TIME I READ A BOOK. (I say he’s only Hodge as long as Windows is running. He is a PC.)
I’ve been meaning to post about this forever! Not forever. Three weeks.
As part of my Christmas present, Kara got tickets for us to see Phoenix on January 24th. It was a really fun show, except for the fact that the people around us did not understand Brendan’s Grand United Concert Zone Theorem with regards to where idiots are allowed to stand. I was really ticked about this at the time, so we started leaving a little early, which meant that we were standing about two feet away when Thomas Mars started wading out through the crowd to climb up on a speaker and declare his love for Portland. Shaky phonecam proof:
He’s an odd-looking dude. But that was pretty cool!
This also makes xkcd more plausible
Sick Kara is zoning out watching The Lost World on TV. It occurs to me that the moral of all the Jurassic Park movies, as explicitly stated by Jeff Goldblum and borne out by events onscreen, is this: “Quantum physics guarantees that you will be killed by dinosaurs.”
I never really liked the films, but I could get behind that premise.
More on transparency versus regulation
Aaron Swartz has a better essay than I could have put together on why transparency alone is ineffective and even harmful.
Lamb Pseudotagine with Raisins
(Imagine there is a succulent picture of an orange-yellow-brown lamb dish in a skillet here, because I forgot to take one.)
I’m writing this down because it’s something I synthesized from whatever came up when I typed “lamb tagine raisisn raisins” into Google and I don’t want to forget it. It was really good. Thanks again, cast-iron skillet! (Thanks for the cast-iron skillet, Mom.)
We used a package of little loin chops for this, but the originals say shoulder or leg would work fine too, and since it’s marinated I don’t doubt it. Serves two and a half.
Meat
1 lb lamb of some kind
1/4 cup olive oil
2 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
1 Tbsp honey
2 Tbsp chopped cilantro
Pinch of saffron threads
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp ground cumin
2 Tbsp tomato paste
Salt and pepper
Toss this all around in a plastic container or bag, seal it and marinate in the refrigerator overnight. You can probably get away with a couple hours if you’re in a hurry.
Vegetables
1 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 sweet onion, halved and sliced radially
3 more cloves garlic, chopped
1 tsp ground cumin
1 1/2 cups stock of some kind
2 carrots, or 2 cups baby carrots, chunked
1 cinnamon stick
1 cup chickpeas
1 cup golden raisins
You also need a cast-iron skillet with an oven-safe lid. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.
Put the butter and olive oil in a skillet over medium heat and melt. Put the onions in and brown, then toss the garlic in just long enough to toast it. Add the stock, cumin, carrots, and cinnamon. Get the lamb out of the refrigerator and put it in, keeping it on the heat just long enough to get it white on both sides; the whole dish should be simmering.
Cover the skillet and put it in the oven; cook for 1 hour. Remove the dish and add raisins and chickpeas, stirring around a little bit so the raisins will flavor the liquid. Cover again and put back in the oven for 30 minutes.
Now you’re done! We had this with couscous, but you could do rice, of course, or put some chopped and peeled potatoes in when you add the carrots.
Attention requisition notice
Here are things that are great!
Work Made For Hire is a smart, clear, unbelievably valuable blog about negotiation and freelancing. If you have ever argued a point or signed a contract, you need to be reading it.
MANual of Style debuted at a perfect time for me, as I’m finally figuring out how to dress myself like a grownup–which is exactly what the blog is about. It’s written in a series of lessons, but it’s also interesting just as a window into trend versus classic in men’s clothing.
An author named Tony Buchsbaum proposed a ratings system for books because he was startled to think his thirteen-year-old son might read the words “cock” or (yes) “manpole.” I am curious as to how Tony Buchsbaum grew up without ever being thirteen himself (perhaps his parents considered it unlucky?), but it gets better: a thirteen-year-old named Emily takes his argument and, in two comments, completely dismantles it. It’s an Ebert-on-Schneider-level takedown.
Is the writer actually thirteen? Who knows (I don’t see any reason to doubt it), but she’s certainly much more familiar with the experience of being a teenager than the people who think they need to be sheltered from scary words. Ratings systems are harmful, and teenagers aren’t the only ones restricted by them.
This isn’t really a political post
Wait, wait, wait. The national Tea Party thing in Nashville only had an attendance of six hundred? Six hundred white people, many of whom wore costumes?
Guys, that isn’t national news. That is a mid-sized role-playing game convention.
Attention conservation notice
I know I’m kind of harping on this, but I remain really upset and angry about the Citizens United decision, and it would appear I am not alone. Public Citizen and three other organizations have launched Free Speech for People, a campaign to fix the problem, constitutionally or otherwise. Even if you don’t feel like signing their petition or throwing some money at them, they’ve got a blog that I hope will be a good clearinghouse for news on the fight.
Uncle John has made the case that requiring full disclosure of corporate campaign spending would be a good compromise solution–that transparency would allow voters to simply turn away from candidates if they didn’t like where their money was coming from. I respect that opinion, but I really couldn’t disagree more.
We already have disclosure requirements that the decision didn’t affect, and they haven’t yet solved anything. Disclosure didn’t keep Max Baucus from getting the tiller on health care reform after taking four million dollars from the health care industry. It didn’t keep Mitch McConnell from taking three hundred thousand from coal and then, coincidentally, fighting to keep mine owners from having to measure mercury discharge. It’s already a shock when an entrenched politician manages to say a few stern words about a regressive, destructive industrial backer; actual voting that way is unheard of. Doesn’t that indicate our ingrained acceptance that our representatives’ ballots are already purchased?
About half the people who voted against Obama didn’t believe he was born in the United States. A quarter of those, in turn, believed that he was born in Hawaii, but that Hawaii was not a state. What does that mean? That people don’t vote on passive facts; they vote on what they hear and see. Money isn’t speech, it’s volume, and when you turn the volume up too high, it distorts.