Sculpin

These are my links for July 28th through July 31st:

• Rules for Radicals - How to make grassroots organizing work, from a man who organized Chicago’s famous stockyard slums and ghettos. My favorite is Rule 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” (Bike activism has a built-in advantage there: bicycling is fun!)
• Seed Bombs by Kathryn Miller - A prolific seed bomber.
• Seed ball - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Seed grenades!
• YouTube - libertyville usa - Anti-choice demonstrators are asked, “What should happen to women who get abortions, if abortion were to become illegal?”
• Just Soap - Bicycle Blender - A bicycle-powered soap blender.
• kickin’ it old skool of athens on Flickr - Photo Sharing! - From the Philolsophers flickr pool.

Via Metafilter, Max Dohle’s Stapelgedichten. “Stack up some books, take a picture: a poem is born.”

The Invention of the Zero Memory Not wanted on the voyage The moon by whale light Crossing open ground The nothing that is In the shadow of memory Where late the sweet birds sang Ghost circles Sparks Pale fire Unquenchable fire

Update: I like my next one a lot better.

These are my links for July 14th through July 21st:

• Changing Lanes - News - The Stranger, Seattle’s Only Newspaper - More on the Stone Way road diet that isn’t. Brilliant, people — isolate the Burke Gilman Trail from the bike lanes.
• The Case of the Disappearing Bike Lanes — Sightline Institute - The mayor’s selling us out.
• The Ethicurean: Chew the right thing. » Blog Archive » How green is your rice? - Were Mason and Singer right? Research into energy use and transport, comparing Californian and Bangladeshi rice.
• GNU Screen tutorial - Jonathan McPherson -
• embroidery and embroider - beautiful Assisi work.
• NeedleNThread.com: Needle’nThread.com: Video Library of Hand-Embroidery Stitches - Index - I recently discovered that I have not magically become competent at my old embroidery peeve, the chain stitch. Maybe that’ll change now that I can see how to do it right.

“So, this is why they call it the core,” I keep muttering to myself. That hip injury I got in yoga last month? It just goes and goes and goes, and it’s having wacky secondary and tertiary effects. Tweak the hips and you tweak the femur, then the lower leg, then the foot, and then it’s time for The Ow. Meanwhile, going up rather than down from the hips, weird back effects are happening. So I’m not so hot with the walking, standing, sitting, or bending over at the moment. I can, however, sprawl with the best of them, as long as I do not try to do anything rash like turning over. It’s been like this all week. Long week.

This was really not the plan. As much as I enjoyed PT, I really do not want to start on another round of it right now. I hope this works itself out.

So “One Local Summer” is on hold for a while, on account of too much standing, and so is a lot of email and other internettery, on account of too much sitting. I’ll read, but probably not write much. (I’d wanted to write a post about how awesome it was to hang out with Ben last week. In a nutshell: Ben, it was great to hang out with you, I really like this person you’ve become, your philosophy of awesomeness is both inspiring and reasonable, and I think I’m going to try mounting those etched plates on springs.) Not to mention all the yoga and gardening and frisbee-throwing and bike-riding I had in mind for this summer. Pah! I’ll be making it to breakfast with friends this Sunday, though, I’m sure of it, even if I have to bundle myself into a laundry basket and be hauled into a taxi.

From “Classic Book About America’s Indians Gains a Few Flourishes as a Film” by Edward Wyatt in the New York Times on May 9:

…The fact that [Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee] has been translated into 17 languages and has sold five million copies around the world was not enough to convince HBO that a film version would draw a sizable mainstream audience. When the channel broadcasts its two-hour adaptation of the book, beginning Memorial Day weekend, at its center will be a new character: a man who was part Sioux, was educated at an Ivy League college and married a white woman.

”Everyone felt very strongly that we needed a white character or a part-white, part-Indian character to carry a contemporary white audience through this project,” Daniel Giat, the writer who adapted the book for HBO Films, told a group of television writers earlier this year.

*headdesk*

These are my links for July 9th through July 11th:

• Eyeball Pincushion How-to - a photoset on Flickr - CRAFTblog had it right: “Stunningly creepy”. That’s not a bad thing, by the way.
• listeningtowords - “Find, listen, and discuss free lectures from around the web.”
• Brian Jungen Gallery - Jawdroppingly awesome: Northwest Coast Native American art masks made from Nike athletic shoes.
• Seattle Public Art - downtown - When I was a kid, I clambered over Henry Moore’s “Vertebrae” whenever I got the chance. Touching it helped me understand and love the art in a way that merely looking at it wouldn’t have granted me. Too bad SAM’s instituted a no-touch policy in its park.
• “From this morning’s lollapallooza editorial…” — The Phil Nugent Experience - By buckling now, [the Times has] exactly pinpointed the moment when the arbiters of conventional wisdom decided that they could no longer support the Iraq War without looking like a laughingstock.

I hope I’m not jinxing anything by saying this, but even as hot as it’s been outside, it’s been surprisingly okay here. Our thermometers say that it’s over 93 F outside, but only 77.5 in the house. I think that the solar-powered attic fan that Josh put in last year is doing a lot of good.

Another wonderful thing: linen sheets. (Cissa tipped me off to these; thanks again, Cissa!) I think I bought these as an anniversary present for Josh last year. It’s taken about a year for them to be broken in enough to suit me, but now I’m loving them. They breathe, they absorb, and they don’t cling like cotton does. With linen sheets, a cotton futon, an all-cotton mattress pad, and (believe it or not) a wool comforter, I slept like a rock last night. I’d say they were worth the investment.

I made that raspberry butter today. The trick was to balance getting a good strong raspberry flavor against the risk of over-softening the butter.

I didn’t take any measurements, but I started with perhaps a 3:2 ratio of raspberries to butter by volume. The raspberries went into a small saucepan and were crushed and cooked gently with a little cranberry honey until they’d broken down and released their juices. Then I pushed the mixture through a fine sieve.

This is the point at which recipes tell you to mix the raspberry juice with the butter. I tried mixing a sample of butter and juice together, and I was underwhelmed. It wasn’t the raspberry knock-out I’d been hoping for. So I returned the rest of the juice to the pan, added a little more honey for body, and reduced it to a syrup, which I let cool somewhat. Then I slowly added it to the butter, whipping the mixture with a fork. I decided to push the edge of how much raspberry the butter could absorb while still maintaining a recognizably buttery texture; every once in a while I’d chill the butter to make sure that I hadn’t made butter-raspberry soup. In the end, I used all the syrup.

The result: a mixture that’s the deep color and taste of raspberry sorbet with a buttery undertone, and a texture like that of the lightest possible whipped butter. Should be really good on crepes. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go lick the bowl.

ETA: With nearly-backyard raspberries and PSBA honey, I thought I’d created something spectacularly local. Not so much. I’m chagrined to learn that Smith Brothers moved its dairy operations from Kent to the other side of the mountains; now the cows are near Royal City, SE of Wenatchee. Apparently, dealing with environmental regulations here in salmon country was too onerous for them. Furthermore, it’s described as a “giant dairy operation” that has had trouble with the locals for all the usual CAFO reasons. (More.) It’s good to know that they’ve agreed to do better, but I do not know if they’re actually doing it. I may be able to do better myself, one way or another.

Last week’s One Local Summer dinner from me was a bit underwhelming, seeing as how it consisted of a pound of apricots greedily scarfed down. So I was determined to do it up this week. Thus, homemade pasta.

Funny thing — I’d been meaning to make butter for over a year now, and a day after I get around to getting the cream, there in my RSS reader is a post in The Wednesday Chef referencing a article in the New York Times Magazine about making butter. I briefly tried shaking the cream the way we used to in Girl Scouts, for extra bonus hippie points, but that didn’t last long. Forget that; there’s a reason churns were invented. The stand mixer is great for making butter. I did try washing some of the butter; unfortunately, I was out of ice, and washing the butter in cool water was definitely not working out as well as washing it in icewater would have been. Besides, I made so little of it that I’m sure we’ll use it up quickly. I’ll make raspberry butter with some of the stuff we didn’t use tonight. If I’m lucky, Josh will make buttermilk pancakes to put that butter on.

The butter’s excellent. I minced some basil from Rents Due Ranch, then crushed it in a mortar with a little salt before mixing it 1:1 by volume with butter, adding a very small amount of local spring garlic, and letting it sit for several hours.

Then Josh and I made whole-egg fettucine. Two eggs from Skagit River Ranch, five ounces of locally-milled white flour (I think the grain’s from Montana), and five ounces of home-milled emmer flour with grain from Bluebird Grain Farms, plus enough water to make it all hang together. That emmer dough is stiff, yowza. Rolled, cut, cooked, and dressed with a little basil butter, and I am a happy woman. Turns out that making pasta with two people is an order of magnitude easier than making it by yourself, not to mention more fun.

For dessert, homegrown raspberries from our P-Patch.

Photos, alas, did not turn out so well. We had a late dinner, having blown off cooking to go throw a frisbee down at the park for a while instead. If I want good photos, I ought to make dinner earlier, so it can be lovingly photographed in the golden summer sun. On the other hand, I can’t see passing up some good frisbee-throwing just to take a stupid photograph.

Note for Grouchy Chris: yes, we used not one but two semi-obscure crank-powered kitchen appliances tonight. Apparently Chris thinks that we have a houseful of cranks here. I can’t imagine why.