11 January 04
The Serendipity of Soups
Making soup is an activity we do a lot of in the winter; it usually involves making stock from the vegetables from last week’s soup (peelings, etc. thrown in from the freezer). I rarely follow a recipe, but soup almost always involves sauteing some alium or other, followed by root vegetables, followed sometimes by tomatoes, followed by the stock, followed by soaked beans, followed by leafy greens and seasoning. All the items above alter depending on what looks good to buy at the local food Coop, so no soup is ever really replicated. Getting really fancy involves springing for tarragon and a little wine in the soup.
Today, though, it turned out particularly well. I’m not quite sure why, but I suspect the presence of large quantities of garlic in the stock along with flageolet beans. These green, elegant beans are the “freshest” tasting of all dried beans and also have a wonderful texture. They are also harder to find than the pinto, black, white, or kidney beans we usually use, and cost more when found. I also used red chard and a leafy variegated thing which may have been related to mustard or dandelion but which was neither.
Bread, cheese, and soup: dinner for winter nights.
10 January 04
Discovering Digital Audio
Our installation of Panther, the new version of the Mac operating system, has prompted me to start playing with the Apple music jukebox program, iTunes. And in so doing I’ve finally become clued into the digital music scene. The world of internet music is quite in flux, but some trends are getting clearer. Business models are emerging for selling music over the net. The iTunes music store is doing quite well, seems to hit the sweet spot: reasonable prices for downloading (99 cents a track), an ever-growing selection of music, and fair licensing terms. And shareware music, where you can download before paying for the album, is now a viable alternative, examples being the Berkeley record label Magnatune, and the independent CD distributor CD Baby. There’s plenty to explore, and I’m learning that a laptop with a minimum of hardware and software can make for an all-in-one music box, allowing for recording, editing, and playback with great ease.
9 January 04
Macked(Mac’d?)-out
I went to Mac World today with a colleague, our systems administrator, who is fated to run an office full of PCs but loves the great design and good ideas put out by Apple. It was raining and we took the train and bus, arriving fairly late—around noon. We went into the conference hall and gasped, a couple of gals in a thoroughly guy world.
I’m so tired I can hardly type, but the image of two grown men wearing mini-Pods (the new, colorful miniPod, not yet for sale but part of the Apple employees’ uniform for this week) and wondering why we could imagine that an Apple version of the Tablet PC might be worth making (so very coy, they were) will stay with me for some time.
8 January 04
More California Election Fun
It’s 2004, and presidential primary season is upon us. This is the process by which the political parties choose which candidates to run for the U.S. presidency in a series of state-by-state elections.
I am registered as an independent voter, but according to current California law, I can vote for the candidates of a particular party in a primary election if I so declare (and if the party authorizes non-partisan voters to cast ballots for their slate). The California primary is on March 2nd (known as “Super Tuesday”, since many states are having their primaries that day), and I’ll be choosing to vote for one of the Democratic candidates, though I don’t know who yet.
Today I got a memo from our county registrar of voters today, enclosing a form to fill out to choose which political party to vote for March 2 California primary election. (Since we live out in the boonies, we must vote absentee by mail.) But the form is due back on January 16th, so I had better remember to send it in, lest I miss the fun on Super Tuesday!
7 January 04
Baseball News
The Eck, as Chris reminds me, was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame yesterday. Dennis Eckersley pitched for Boston as a starter, had a break and a bout with alcholism, and had a second career with the Oakland A’s as a fabulous closer. Doc Rock used to watch him at the Coliseum and said he only had two pitches but he always nailed them.
Paul Molitor was also inducted into the Hall of Fame yesterday and is apparently miffed that Pete Rose, the Bad Boy of Baseball, chose this week of all weeks to admit that he had, in fact, yesiree bob, bet on baseball while a manager for the Cincinatti Reds. For this crime he has been permanently barred from baseball and the Hall of Fame.
Pete Rose was possibly the greatest hitter the game has ever seen. He certainly had the most hits. But his gambling habits got the better of him, as he admitted on Monday. He also made some dubious decisions as a manager.
The Hall of Fame is an American oddity and, in my opinion, an anachronism. There’s a Basketball Hall of Fame, a Football Hall of Fame, a Tennis Hall of Fame, and no doubt a Trivial Pursuit Hall of Fame. This is the place where the ball that was someone’s 300th strikeout is housed and on display; where the boots worn by some fabulous base runner are kept; and on and on to the nth degree. But it is also the bastion of morality in sport, and gamblers and low-lifes are not welcome.
The fact that Shoeless Joe Jackson, who is supposed to have “thrown” the World Series (against the Cincinnati Reds, of all teams) along with seven of his teammates in 1919, is disbarred from baseball and the self-righteous Hall of Fame so long after his death is a scandal. So, I would argue, is the barring of Pete Rose. If Ty Cobb, a wife-beating, racist, homophobic maniac who routinely maimed his opponents on the field is in the Hall of Fame, I see no reason to barr the others. Paul Molitor, shut up and take your place gracefully. Like the Eck.
6 January 04
The Future Of Search
I’ve finally found a web search engine that can give results that are much more useful than Google’s. This is Vivsimo, and its innovation that it can organize search results into useful categories on the fly. These clusters appear on the left-hand side of the search page in a tree that you can click on to expose deeper levels of the hierarchy. For work I have been doing lately a fair number of searches trying to catalog resources on California invasive species, so I know the useful resources on the web pretty well now. After playing around a bit with Vivsimo, I think its ability to categorize results (e.g. search on “yellow star thistle” and have it return a clustered set of results on yellow star thistle control) is going to be very handy.
For a quite an informative set of pieces on search technology, see Tim Bray’s blog here.
5 January 04
Vatican II and the Equalization of the Liturgy
Back in the days when I still attended Mass more or less regularly I always sought out the ones with no music. Not because I have no musical ear and hate singing-quite the contrary, actually-but because the music we are now forced to endure is so saccharine as to render the whole ceremony vacuous (or worse). This is a purely personal position, you understand. But Vatican II, with its well-meaning (and no doubt long overdue) proletarianization of the Mass, happened at a time when the worst excesses of pop culture could (and did) destroy Catholic liturgical music. When they aren’t trying to sound like Hollywood scores, contemporary American Catholic hymns sing about love and peace and soaring like eagles and guitars (which should never be brought within 100 yards of any sacred place, in my humble opinion).
This is not the Catholicism I left the Anglican church for so long ago: I wanted the beauty, the guts, the blood, the tangible fusing with the ineffable. It was a strange journey and has marked me, probably more than I’ll ever know. But if they keep making us sing that stuff, I’ll keep staying away. (Signs are that it is indeed compulsory: musicless Sunday masses are no longer permitted by the California bishops.)
Mel Gibson is now famous for his adherence to a Tridentine sect for whom the Latin Mass is the only acceptable medium for approaching the divine. I would never go to one of these ceremonies, but more for political than religious reasons. I have no argument with these people when they say that the Mass as currently served up in parishes across the continent, two, three, four times a Sunday is like eating porridge with treacle. (I don’t know if they DO say this, but someone should.)
Going back to St. George’s in Madrid in December with the beautiful singing of old, beautiful hymns, took me by surprise. I’d forgotten about the pleasure of beauty mixed with the divine. I would love to hear what Beth’s choir sounds like. And I wish someone could write contemporary holy music that didn’t sound like John Denver overdosing on aspartame.
4 January 04
Orclets In The Kitchen
Every now and then, our kitchen gets overrun with ants. This seems to happen either in the middle of winter, when the ground is saturated and they may have to move above ground, or in the dead of summer, when I think they come inside looking for water. Right now one is crawling across an envelope next to the laptop bearing a fallen comrade.
These are gourmet ants. They excel at finding bits of asiago cheese and morsels from lemon-apricot bars. I expect them soon to develop a taste for our favorite Chilean merlot, and to walk off with a vat of soup carrying the pot.
We show them no mercy. These are invasive Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) that arrived in California about 100 years ago, spreading up the coast and in urban regions. They have displaced native species of ants and have thus been linked to the decline of the coast horned lizard in Southern California. These ants in California are remarkable in that they have very little genetic variation, much less than the native population back in Argentina. In effect, the entire California branch of this ant species forms a giant supercolony. By now they’ve probably created a large database of our eating habits, and have shared it with the NSA.
3 January 04
Buying a Goat
Since I mentioned it on our Christmas card this year, several people have asked about the goat I said we bought. We did buy a goat, but it will go to people we’ve never met. This is done through Heifer International, a charitable organization for sustainable development. The goat we paid for is given to a family in a developing country; if it bears any offspring, that family’s obligation is to give the kid to another family in need, and so on. So there’s milk all round. You can also buy a cow, a sheep, a pair of chickens, rabbits, and even a hive of bees, but we like the sassiness of goats. See Numenius’ sketch of one we met last March up in the Capay Valley.
Other organizations I think are worth supporting: Doctors Without Borders, an excellent French organization specializing in critical medical relief; Oxfam; Planned Parenthood; and the Point Reyes Bird Observatory.
2 January 04
Hermione Gets A New Cat
Several days ago I installed Mac OS 10.3 (“Panther”) on our iBook laptop named Hermione. We’re quite pleased with this update of the operating system. Our favorite features include the fast user switching (Pica doesn’t have to log out completely if Numenius want to switch to his desktop for a bit), the more tightly integrated look and feel, and the already quite good email application, complete with a trainable spam filter and a nice interface for sorting mail into different mailboxes according to rules that one defines. A little clunkier than we hoped is the new font manager: I doubt it’s up to handling thousands of fonts, but that’s hardly needed for what we do with the laptop. Now it’s the time to reinstall software: I just put on software for connecting to our GPS unit—what every geographer needs!