Clashingblack

Hors d' ouevre: Portobello caps with salsa, walnut, and gorgonzola filling.

Went over pretty well, but next time I'm gonna take the gills out before I put the shrooms in the oven. The walnuts provided the right amount of crunch; I wonder what other nut might work in there. Would cashew be too salty?

Main course: Pork medallions with a sauce of dried cherries and balsamic vinegar.

The cherries were really re-hydrated after two reductions, and really kept their flavor throughout the whole process. I overcooked the pork a little, though, because I trusted a thermometer more than my own eyes. I should have gone with my first instinct, seeing as how I learned the "trust your eyes" lesson from my first attempt at the crepes.

Dessert: Crepes with honey plums.

I am really glad I practiced the crepes earlier in the day, because I learned how to spot the cues that the crepe is ready to be flipped. I didn't flip so well come showtime, however; I think I messed around with the level of the heat a little too much. I could probably solve the whole problem by just learning to flip the crepes in the air, but I was afraid to try that for the first time in someone else's kitchen.

Maybe next time I'll do something involving small birds. They really bug me, first thing in the morning.

Against all necessity, I have started up another blog. It's not even a mirror of this one: it's just something I created because Google said I could. I'll give it a few days (or weeks) and see whether I prefer Vox or Blogspot. So far, Vox has been easier on the image imbedding, but as an information studies student I'm kind of a sucker for Google related things.

In other news, the Front Page down by Dupont Circle sells buckets o' Corona for $12 during happy hour. Now I need to find a place that offers the same deal with Ayinger Celebrator.

I got the cooking bug this week-- I think it's left over delusions of epicureanism after a week in Oregon/Washington wine country. Whatever the cause, I'm breaking out the portabello mushrooms and the crepe pan (not for the same recipe) and getting dirty in the kitchen this weekend. If the menu turns out right, I'll post the results. If it doesn't, I'll have a nice review of a local wood oven pizza place.

For my players nearing Tashalatora.

Waterfall03

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I went to the Stump! Trivia night at Madam's Organ the other night. (It was the wrong Tuesday for Ben Andrews, my favorite bluesman, but that's a hymn for another time.) It was my first outing to one of these bar trivia nights, and I have to say that winning the first time out really skews my perception of the scene. I had gone in expecting crowded tables, belligerent nerds arguing technical points about their answers, and cutthroat competition... kind of like the academic competitions I took part in back in middle and high school. Perhaps middle and high school academic competitions would have been different if we'd had Guinness on tap and David Bowie on the PA, as they did at Madam's that night. After the third or fourth time I'd rushed to get my team's (correct) answer in as soon as possible, I started to get embarrassed that I was taking this seriously; indeed, that I was paying attention to the other teams beyond the sauciness of their names (team Penis Mightier takes top honors for simultaneously being literate and raunchy) was, I now realize, something of a faux pas.

Fortunately, given the team I was with, we were able to both relax and kick ass in minutiae. Team No Homers Club included a globe travelling Foreign Service Officer who regularly crosses off titles from the New York Times bestsellers list; a Boston-raised lawyer with encyclopedic knowledge of baseball, American politics, and The Simpsons; and myself. I claim that my strength is literature and general trivia, but the sadder truth is that I'm an IMDB and Onion AV Club junkie, and I know ridiculous details about movies and series I've never even watched. (Case in point: I missed that question about who Megan Fox was because I didn't know all the actors in the 2007 Transformers movie, but I can tell you that the male lead was Shia LaBeouf, who also starred in Holes, and I can pronounce his name properly.) Between knowing where La Paz was, recognizing university mascots, and connecting Don Herbert with his most famous television role, we stayed in the lead all night despite being the next-to-smallest team.

First prize, which is being held in trust by our lawyer friend, is $30 in bar credit that can't be used until next trivia night. Given the pleasantness of our victory (my first), I am perfectly content to return to this scene and never win again as long as they keep the Guinness and "weepy British music."

Reality

My in-laws inundated me with iTunes credit this Christmas, which turned out to be a great way to fill in a few gaps in my album collection. I finally picked up Pink Floyd's The Wall, which I haven't had since I lost my cassette tape back in 1995, and got that essential Johnny Cash performance at Folsom Prison. But by far the best acquisition was David Bowie's Reality, his latest (though at this point, not recent) album. I haven't stuck an album on repeat this way since... well, since Scary Monsters, probably.

While the album's sound shifts from arrogant ("Never Get Old") to sorrowful ("The Loneliest Guy") to reflective ("She'll Drive the Big Car"), there's a resolute beat and dark tone that ties the whole thing together. I've heard "Pablo Picasso" covered before (memorably performed by John Cale at a concert with Siouxsie), but Bowie's version here is nearly Boingo-esque with its grungy saxophone and echoing distortions. I thought at first that Bowie's voice had an aged brittleness to it in some places (he was, after all, 56 when the album was produced in 2003) but the energy in his shouts on "Never Get Old" and the smoothness of his backing vocals on several tracks suggest that he has as much control over his voice as ever, and that age has merely added another texture to his repertoire.

This is one of those albums that I want to force all my friends to listen to, so they'll know what's going through my head when I appear to be sitting there in a trance, nodding my head and staring into the ether. I hear that true Bob Dylan fans are like that, too.

Found myself missing Istanbul and Turkey today. Specifically:

• Seeing the Bosphorous from my balcony, and tankers going under the FSM bridge.
• Good tea served in a little glass (seriously, I can't drink it from a ceramic cup anymore).
• Doritos ala Turca, which are sesame-and-kashar flavored
• Seasonal peaches and cherries and those little green plums (geez, maybe I'm just hungry)
• The extra bold headlines in Milliyet and Hurriyet
• The water seller who came right to my door
• People treating street cats with affection (I never saw a live rat in Turkey)
• The street car that goes down Istiklal Caddesi
• The St. Bernard genes in the dogs around Mt. Uludag (it's all Bebe's fault)

I hope my friends going to Bosnia hurry up and get to Sarajevo soon, so we can use it as a launching point to get back to Turkey. Geri don, geri don, geri bebek...

... you not only know what's going on in Kenya, but lose sleep over it. Up until this week, Nairobi had been high on our list of potential posts for our next tour of duty. Now we're not sure what's going to happen over there. What's even scarier is the possibility that protracted turbulence in Kenya could destabilize its neighbors, and nobody needs that.

Bliggedy bloggedy

Ton comma Ian J.

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Fraggle Rock - Complete Third Season

An unformed close-reading thesis about The Fraggles:

Observations:

• Mokey has functional eyelids which rise to show shock or surprise
• Wembley has mobile eyes which can shift his focus in different directions or twirl about
• Boober has no visible eyes
• Gobo and Red have visible eyes with no special features

Thesis:

• Mokey's usual partially-lidded eyes suggests serenity, or dreaminess, a certain disconnect from the present space; when her eyes are wide open, the contrast displays more surprise and awareness than other fraggles, suggesting greater perception of the circumstance.
• Wembley's mobile eyes can shift side to side suggesting suspicion or trepidation, or whirl to suggest dizziness. His multiple perceptions lead to his indecision (his wembling), which at times can overwhelm him.
• Boober's obscured eyes suggest limited perception, or "blinders." Mokey may be the "dreamy" one, but Boober's pessimism and paranoia is in many ways a more complex fantasy which only he can see (and it is all he can see).
• Gobo and Red have constant vision, unfiltered but occasionally unprocessed. The similarity of their perception may be the reason for their extensive rivalry: they see the same way, but respond differently to what they see.

Conclusions:

• The puppeteers and writers for this show were subtle and brilliant
• Four-plus years of training in literary theory have trained me to dissect a children's show
• I am perhaps a little pretentious about my Jim Henson fanboyism.