Some new recipes up at my food blog: pad thai, berbere (the Ethiopian spice mix), and berbere chana.

Anathem was a birthday present last year, and it made the perfect jury duty book. I hauled that thing (1000 or so pages) to the courthouse every day for three days, and sat in that (very nice, airy, light-filled) room with it until it was done. I like big books and even finished all three of Stephenson’s baroque cycle, so I was looking forward to this one. On the other hand, I’ve had my issues with Stephenson, so, you know.

Anyway, the book is pretty much “The Name of the Rose” meets “Idiocracy” meets “The Urth of the New Sun”. It’s got the first’s (more or less) monastery setting and rambling philoso-religious dialogues (which are an excuse for the author, whether Eco or Stephenson, to show off lots of library time), the second’s humorously stupid future (some 3000 years in the future and the masses still walk around wearing sports jerseys and drinking “sugared beverages” from gigantic plastic cups), and the third’s assault of words you don’t understand (in Stephenson’s case, because he made them up; in Wolfe’s, because they are archaic dictionary words no one actually uses any more).

**** The Wire (season 1)
*** Star Trek
* Honey West
*** The Shop around the Corner
**** The Prisoner
*** Mutiny on the Bounty
***** Touchez pas au Grisbi (aka Hands off the Loot)
** The Master Touch (aka Un uomo da rispettare)
** The Trouble with Harry

Now with stars (out of 5)!
*** Rachel Dewoskin - Foreign Babes in Beijing
**** Timothy Mo - Sour Sweet
*** Nordhoff and Hall - Mutiny on the Bounty

rich: i had a lame gobot and the way it transformed is you stood the stupid thing up on it’s back bumper
luna: i totally wanted a 2xl
luna: but my parents were too poor
luna: http://www.2xlrobot.com/
luna: 2xl was huge
optic: you had one gobot?
rich: yes, 1 gobot
luna: lol 1 gobot
optic: 2xl wtf
luna: it wasnt even 1 trasnformer
optic: what did the gobot fight

I can’t decide if today’s Comics Curmudgeon is a better takedown of the Family Circus or of Jorge Luis Borges. Either way, hilarity ensues.

Norma Field - In the Realm of a Dying Emperor
Philip Pullman, editor - Detective Stories

John Barnes - Caesar’s Bicycle
May Sarton - I Knew a Phoenix
Iris Murdoch - The Green Knight

New track I recorded last night.. somehow drifted from rearranging the studio into making a nice spacey acid track. 303, 808, 909, 727, and a really key loop from my Hammond Auto-Vari 64.

Dragon

After reading a bunch of Game Theorist, I’m starting to think that economist parents may be even more scary¹ than psychologist parents.

–
¹ I use “scary” in the affectionate sense, being a sort of amateur-psychologist parent myself, with enough game/mathy obsession to be a potential amateur-economist parent as well.

optic: lol http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vNxjwt2AqY
optic: i am starting to get a vision of my future life that is both weird and comical
cnote: that is pretty adorable
cnote: you should do videos like that too
optic: sure
luna: i wish i could be entertained for 4 hours like that
optic: agreed
cnote: it’s basically teh same thing we do with the internet
luna: i think he looks like he’s having way more fun than us
cnote: agrd

Miss Austen Regrets was surprisingly good, especially if you consider the trickle of not-so-good based-on-jane-austen’s-life movies we’ve gotten in the last few years. Olivia Williams (who was also Jane in the Kate Beckinsale Emma) is a great Austen, and the story is very good. It doesn’t take any simple path of making parallels between Jane and her books, but showing her more as the genuine novelist, worried about being able to write and trying to support her family as best she can. The dialogue is witty and austenesque, but not to the point of being unrealistic, and Jane is drawn as an intelligent, wry, sometimes difficult person — as you’d expect and hope she was.

Slate’s Jacob Weisberg yesterday published an article that basically says “we sure have been wrong about a bunch of big things; here are some other things we might be wrong about!” followed by a list of bad things that, hey, might not be so bad after all. I’ll grant Weisberg the premise that we are often wrong about things that pretty much everyone “knew”, but this list is basically an exercise in wish fulfillment. Nukes are good! Climate change is ok! Detroit is fine! Plenty of gas! Sure, statistically, a couple of these commonly-held beliefs are likely wrong, but good luck figuring out which ones. And good luck betting against them.

I went to my first tournament today. My main goal was to not finish last. My that-would-be-awesome goal was to survive the first cut and make it into the elimination rounds (thus earning my Salle Auriol patch). And of course the real goal was to not embarrass myself. On those standards, I did fairly well. The field was 25 fencers, ranging from a C rank to unrated (ranks are A-E and unrated; I’m unrated of course). We had five pools of five, then five more pools of five. You fence everyone in your pool, a 5-point bout, then everyone is ranked based on wins and points, then you go into a single elimination. For this tournament, they cut the field to 16 after the pools. I won one in my first pool, none in my second, and finished 22 out of 25. So I didn’t finish last (yay!), didn’t make the cut (boo!), and didn’t really embarrass myself (yay!).

yes, that’s me in the neon green socks.

When I bought my house, it was equipped with a bunch of those ceiling lights that look like boobs, like this one. We’ve been doing a lot of redecorating of course, and E’s taste has started to influence mine — we’re moving away from dark, modern, and asian to more colors and a little more color and flash. So I started looking for an interesting chandelier on craigslist and found this:

In the pictures, it looked arty and elegant; in reality, it was definitely a little more kitschy 80s than we thought. But we still liked it and figured, for $40, it was worth the risk. Well it turned out looking great in our minimal dining room, and a big improvement over the boob.

G.G. Fickling - Honey West
Roger Lowenstein - When Genius Failed
Roger Lowenstein - Origins of the Crash

What’s the fuss, gus?
What’s the trouble, bubble?
Why so mean, bean?
Why the hissy, missy?
Why the squirmin, herman?
Why the wiggles, giggles?

Elusive
An old-timey style track, with lots of 303 and 808 and a little 909 and that’s pretty much it.

At about 6-8 weeks, Nora’s main mode of expression was still crying; she didn’t have many other sounds in her vocabulary. Around that time, she got a cold or something and was stuffed up for a while and started sneezing. She’d often sneeze a couple of times and then try to sneeze again but miss, instead emitting a super loud AWOO sound which was hilarious. It was the first non-crying sound we’d heard her make and pretty much the cutest thing we’d ever heard (probably not the last time I’ll say that). We kept trying to catch it on video but never succeeded. And now, at three months, she’s figured out how to sneeze without accidentally saying AWOO (though she makes similar sounds along with her growing vocabulary of coos and shrieks) and we’re afraid we’ll never hear it again. The elusive AWOO is sort of like the sound at about 0:43 of this video, except it actually sounds like she is saying “AWOO!”

Yesterday’s Comics Curmudgeon highlights a “Hi and Lois” strip that pretty much covers the “modern suburban malaise” genre. I like Josh’s take on “Revolutionary Road” too — it does kind of make sense as a “Titanic” sequel.

After my great blog malaise (thanks for the suggestions), all I really enjoy reading right now are comics and food blogs. Politics, go to hell. In other news, this is my first Optic post using my new WordPress install rather than my old Movable Type install with the handcrafted crossposting script. hoorah.