Sculpin

These are my links for September 23rd through September 27th:

• Skeptic: eSkeptic: Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 - A review of “How Doctors Think”: “How Doctors Think They Think.”
• Modern Mechanix » Farmer Grows Pumpkins with Human Faces - I’ve wanted to do this for ages. (I thought it was an original idea, but if the Internet teaches me anything, it’s that there aren’t that many original ideas and none of them yet are mine.) Spooooky. Can you imagine a whole field of heads?
• The Bob Lancaster Gallery of Unusual Playing Cards - I like the 9 of hearts and the 7 of diamonds in the Art Quilt deck.
• GM sugar may hit the market in 2008 - More RoundUp for everybody. Boo.
• Frozen images - 22 September 2007 - New Scientist - “In January I dropped some bricks into my pond, which is a metre deep. In March the pond froze over and an image of the bricks appeared like a hologram in the ice (see Photo). What caused this? [Answer…]” Paging Andy Goldsworthy…

This Grist essay about crappy toys reminded me of what may have been the best Christmas present I’ve ever gotten.

I might have been six or so. Other kids sit on Santa’s lap and want a Barbie Hot Times Igloo with Light-up Polar Bear Friend or something. Not me. When Santa asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I shouted, “Banana bread!” Or so I’m told. I don’t remember it. What I do remember is that for Christmas I did get banana bread, baked (or so said the note) by Mrs. Claus herself, a whole loaf of my very own that I didn’t have to share unless I wanted to. Along with it came the recipe and (oh joy!) a whole set of wooden kitchen utensils just for me — spoons without holes, spoons with holes, and even a fascinating wooden meat tenderizer. I’d never seen one of those before and had no idea what it was supposed to be, though I assure you that possibilities presented themselves. It takes a very confident person to give a small child a spiky wooden mallet.

What about you guys? What stands out as a truly wonderful present?

The problem with Terry Pratchett’s books is that — and I’m not quite sure this is a problem — I wind up having Terry Pratchett sorts of dreams. Especially if I’ve just read one of his books for the first time.

I just had a dream about someone who was named either Mincemeat Princeton or Princeton Comma Mincemeat. I’m not quite sure what it was he did, but I’m sure it was fussy. No surprise that I’ve got my paws on the new Pratchett, then.

Before this week, all I knew about woodstoves, I learned from a poem by Lew Welch. He seems to be right about the bark.

As the weather cools down, I’ve been spending some time learning how to operate our soapstone stove-insert. It’s kind of tricky to light it when it’s cold. Those soapstone panels soak up a tremendous amount of heat, and it takes some patience (and a whole lot of kindling - always more than I think it’ll be) to get it up to a good operating temperature. When it’s going, though, it’s super cozy. Next time there’s a blackout, it’ll be party time at my place!

The stove has an electricity-powered blower to help warm the room. The blower’s nice, but I wish it could be crank-powered like this fabulous lamp. Hook it up to an old bicycle… that’d be neat.

From “The Unmentionable Odour of Death in September” in Casaubon’s Book:

Without intention, but without caring enough to consider and assess the consequences of their actions, the wealthiest, best educated, most privileged, luckiest people on earth are going to kill millions, perhaps billions of the poorest, most desperate people on earth by their actions. We are going to commit an act of murder that exceeds anything ever accomplished by the Nazis, Pol Pot, Stalin or any of the great “villains” of history. We are, of course, still denying moral responsibility, or any connection to the bad guys.

And while we do it, we’re going to sit around and debate whether it is “fair” for us to have to give up our appliances, our car rides and our plane trips to visit family. Because, after all, such discussions show our virtue. They show that we’re very seriously willing to actually begin to consider not killing these people… we’re just not ready to actually stop doing it. Give us time, we say…give us time. Soon, I’m sure, we’ll stop, but if we stopped now, it would be hard for us…

The only thing we can do is to cease making more dead. The only thing we can do is to stop killing. The only thing we can do is to recognize that this cannot be a question of comfortable accomodation, that while we can warmly congratulate ourselves on the steps we take, we must always be driven and prodded forward- further and faster -by the reality that lives as valuable as our own are on the line. We must do what generations of humans have tried, and often failed (but occasionally succeeded) at doing - treating others as we would be treated, doing to others nothing that is hateful to us.

And we must stop seeking the perfect technology, the 50K solution, the magic bullet. Instead, we must, as Auden says, love one another, or die.

Via the LJ Seattle community:

Throughout 2007 we have seen a steep increase in the number of protesters at our health centers. They carry disturbing signs, hand out misleading information, and harass people as they enter our health centers, in a misguided attempt to scare people out of getting the services they need.

Starting September 26th, a group called “40 Days for Life” is planning to launch a round-the-clock protest at our Madison and University District health centers, which is scheduled to last 40 days and nights. These protesters’ goals are to incite fear, gain attention for their hateful point of view, and intimidate our patients and staff. They want to shut us down - but we won’t let them!

We are fighting back! With your help, we can show the protesters that Seattle LOVES their Planned Parenthood!

We need you to join our visibility team! Help us show the protesters that Planned Parenthood is welcomed and supported in Seattle. On designated days, volunteers will be standing outside of clinics wearing Planned Parenthood t-shirts, waving signs with messages like ‘We Love Planned Parenthood,’ and encouraging people to donate to our Pledge-a-Picket campaign.

If you would like to sign up for a shift with the visibility team, please email hr.vol@ppww.org or call 206-328-7713 for more information. Thank you!

I love pledge-a-picket campaigns. And I’m pretty fond of Planned Parenthood. I got birth control through them when I was uninsured. And once, when another medication was interfering with my birth control pills and a condom broke, I went there for Plan B. (Note on my Plan B experience: ow, the cramping. Yow.) And, if you hadn’t guessed, I’m firmly pro-choice. I believe that enforced pregnancy is morally insupportable. That’s not something I consider to be up for discussion with me.

Last Saturday I stopped by the Chef In Residence table at the University Farmers Market and asked a question or two of Elise Fineberg. (She’s the pastry chef at Taste down at the Seattle Art Museum. And she’s also, I have to say, totally hot. Yow. But I digress.) I think that was Hsiao-Ching Chou next to her, but I wouldn’t swear to it. Anyway, I’ve got a sizeable crop of delicata squash coming in and my ideas of using it basically came down to, “Roast; eat; iterate.” I wanted to get some ideas about what would go well with the squash. Chevre was her first thought, and mushrooms, and various herbs. And brown butter sauce. She had an Asian pear at hand and pointed to just the right coloration for the butter. Hsiao-Ching or her doppleganger suggested taking it in a sweeter direction with maple syrup, I think it was, and brown sugar, but that hasn’t generally been my thing; on the other hand, I’ll have enough squash on hand to try a few things that do not immediately appeal.

I thought I might try making a delicata squash ravioli with sage and brown butter sauce. So I started by browning some butter for the first time. But I am confused. I’ve basically made a sort of ghee, as I understand it. There’s a hazelnut-colored sediment of milk protein or something that’s fallen out. Is this part of the brown butter, or is it a byproduct?

Here I am with a wee bit of the flu and a cobwebby blog, so I’ll do a little catching up. In a nutshell: I’ve been domestic.

Most recent things first: rosettes. I’m a real vulture for going-out-of-business sales, and when Martha By Mail went under, I snapped up some fantastic Halloween rosette irons on the cheap. Finally we got around to trying them out. These are implements for making crispy little deep-fried Scandinavian cookies. You make a thin, simple batter, dip the iron in most of the way, then deep-fry. I think they’re best sprinkled with cinnamon sugar — imagine an airy, crispy essence of cinnamon toast. It took a little while to get the hang of it; you want to have everything at exactly the right temperature, or you wind up with rather abstract rosettes as the batter drips off the iron. Soon, though, we had it down. I hope to make crispy deep-fried pumpkins, spiders, and bats for my friends soon!

In body news, my hip still hasn’t quite healed, though I’m not gimping around too badly. Apparently I’ve got some kind of a problem with my right obturators, deep inside the hip; my rotation’s pathetic. This does not please me, though I’m a little amused by the horrible sounds that joint keeps making. I suppose I should go back to PT and/or find an LMT to work on them. (I love Mark the LMT, but crotch massage is past my boundaries for a male massage therapist. Maybe any massage therapist.) Ugh. In the meantime, I’m just rolling them out with some small Yamuna balls, which helps a good deal, and hoping the problem will magically go away.

I’d planned to replace much of our front lawn with a big vegetable garden this summer, but with one of my hip joints still in limited service, I decided that Combat Gardening was probably not in the cards for me. So I called the Seattle Urban Farm Company, who came out and installed a beautiful new raised-bed vegetable garden in two days flat. They even included automatic drip tape irrigation, with the line cleverly snaked under our walkway and the remaining grass. It’s marvelous. I can hardly believe how fast everything’s grown; I’ll be harvesting the first bok choy this week. (Pot stickers!) I’m definitely calling these guys again. For a few days after the garden went in, I felt slightly unmoored– there’s this great garden in front, and yet I am not sore. How can this be? Eh?

I’ll definitely be calling them again anyway, because once the fall planting season cools down a bit, we have plans to put a chicken coop in the back yard. (We’re getting ever closer to hippie paradise here at House of Cranks.) SUFC has a chicken expert on staff. Brad loves chickens. To hear him talk, you’d imagine that they are the sweetest, most wonderful animals in the world. I don’t know about that. Josh is still more pro-chicken than I am, but I’ve come around on the subject. I’m interested in the eggs, mostly, and I’m also a little curious about what I might be able to train a chicken to do. (Apparently, dog trainers often work with chickens to hone their skills. There are even “chicken camps” for trainers.) Plus, some of them can be very pretty.

Speaking of front yard changes, we finally had our alder tree taken down. It was in pretty weird-looking shape after the developers next door sheared off all the branches on the west side of the tree. Plus, I have a strong suspicion that I’m allergic to the thing; it’s either that or the birch, or both. In any case, we called up Seattle Tree Service and they came out and took the thing down. The process was fascinating. And I got to see it a little more clearly than usual because one fellow was being trained. Ours was his very first tree ever. At first I could hardly watch; he’d put on his climbing gear upside down, and I thought, “Oh no, catastrophe ahead.” But Mike, the certified arborist who’s the boss, corrected him without freaking him out (would that all teachers were that good) and got him ready to climb up and limb the tree. He was all ready to go when he looked up and said, rather tremulously, “Do you think there are squirrels in that tree?” The tree came down safely with no squirrel attacks or other catastrophes. Hard to believe that thing was just sixteen years old; some years it grew more than an inch in diameter. Alders are amazing.

We kept the wood for firewood. I was sure we were going to get a splitter. No way could we get that tree split ourselves. And by “ourselves” I mean “Josh”. You know, we all have our oddball gifts in this world — I’m a bizarrely fast and accurate collator, and Josh can pack boxes like a pro. And then there are our anti-gifts. Do not, on any account, give me an axe and a load of wood to split. Many years ago, at the peak of my physical condition, I spent ten weeks in the backcountry of Yellowstone doing trail work. Every day, I’d try to split some wood for the fire. And pretty much every day I was grateful for my steel-toed boots. I am world-class lousy at splitting wood. So, while I could help stack the wood, all the splitting was up to Josh. And Josh did it. The man is a machine. We’ve now got a woodpile that must be about 8′ by 6′ with some more left over.

He really has been pouring it on. (Josh, you rock.) The new shelves he built in the shed are fabulous. I’m amazed at how much more space we have in there (using the opportunity to get rid of some junk didn’t hurt) and I’m excited to see that we can probably fit a workbench in there. Maybe I’ll even get that glass kiln I’ve been wanting for years but had no place to put. (Yes, because what I really need is more things to do.)

Josh went gonzo on those shelves the day after I made macaroni and cheese for us, his dad, and my mom. If that’s what a really good macaroni and cheese dinner does, well, heck, I will make some more. I used the Beecher’s recipe that was in the P-I recently. It felt like some pretty high-stakes entertaining: this was my first butter-and-flour roux (as opposed to an oil-based roux), my first white sauce, and my first cheese sauce. The next day, I read about a cheese sauce that had curdled. Boy, am I glad I didn’t know anything could go so wrong. Served it up with some salsa and some steamed local broccoli; for dessert we had some homegrown plums, roasted with a little Zulka sugar and topped with a dab of whipped cream.

In other food news, Josh and I learned to can last month. We’ve put up some rhubarb and strawberry-rhubarb jam, and still have lots left to can. I hope that someday soon we can have another canning day.

Whew.

These are my links for September 3rd through September 16th:

• Tortilla Apparition #669 on Flickr - Apparition #669: Morrissey’s image manifests itself on a burnt tortilla in the apartment of “La Cindy”. Los Angeles, California. From “The Great Tortilla Conspiracy”.
• A Soviet Poster A Day - A new Soviet propaganda poster scan every day, with witty and informative commentary. Via Boing-Boing.
• Mac and cheese, cheese, cheese - Best mac and cheese evarr.
• angry chicken: not made in china. - Making and buying toys.
• How can I preserve and display a tablecloth? | Ask MetaFilter - What a neat idea: having guests sign a tablecloth and embroidering over their signature.

Seed Packet

In three months’ time it will seem
as though you bought
a 99-cent ticket to the Big Top:
a small green vehicle with orange
circus hubcaps will appear
in your garden, and send out of
every exit pattypans
yellow and green, clearing your fence
in their ruffs
and frills, and still more
clowns of the vegetable kingdom
will brave thistles in striped, edible hats
with marigolds dangling
here and there for keeping bugs away,
the whole troupe freckled
variously and sniffing the day lilies
with zucchini beezers and golden honkers,
not a nose in sight, but impossible blue
hubbard shoes fleeing up the paths
on their lifelines.

– Brendan Galvin