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February 4th, 2010
12:28 pm - t-mobile
so my cell phone is on the verge of death due to an incident which exceeded the safe impact specifications for some of its modules.
anyone have an old t-mobile phone and charger they haven't recycled yet?
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January 29th, 2010
06:24 pm - it's kind of pathetic how
when we don't have stuff to do, we don't know what to do with ourselves.
have i expressed a similar sentiment here before?
tonight: pizza, porter square books, vegetation.
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January 24th, 2010
11:06 am - dinner tonight?
We have 4 seats available for dinner tonight. We would prefer they were filled by 2 groups of 2.
Any omnivorous sorts out there want to come to dinner? Or have omnivorous friends who'd like to come? $60.
Quickest way to reach me is to call. Otherwise, I will confirm around 2pm.
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January 13th, 2010
10:23 pm - Still not dead
Phoebe Damrosch’s Service Included was mostly good – if you skim the angsty late 20s Williamsburgher love life studio apartment angst, you wind up with a fairly well observed sketch of customers at a high end restaurant and a fascinating glimpse of what it’s like to learn to work front of house for Thomas Keller. Also, a mildly funny, if rather melodramatic and name-droppy account of what it’s like to serve the New York Times restaurant reviewer. Unfortunately, wishing Ms. Damrosch’s writing transcends her demographic is neither here nor there, since much of this book’s undeniable charm arises from her incredulous responses to the world’s expectations that she actually grow up.
The Artful Eater is a wonderful set of ruminations on various humble ingredients – salt, pepper, apples, carrots and the like. It’s a collection of some of Edward Behr’s pieces from the first 10 years of The Art of Eating, and thus, inevitably, one of the most thoughtful and reflective anthologies of food writing out there. Behr is not a natural stylist – his spare, minimalistic writing comes across as stilted rather than Hemingway-esque, but style is unnecessary when you can litter your essays with sentences such as “Much of the arcane history of carrots was written in the 1950s and 1960s by Otto Banga, Dutch carrot specialist.” While a few of the essays show their vintage, Behr’s genius is in how concisely he has captured the enduring character of each of these ingredients, in how slowly and carefully he has tasted and cooked with them, and how he’s able to make each one romantic again, even to a jaded reader like yours truly.
I don't think there was any way I could have disliked The Dragons of Babel, Michael Swanwick's companion to The Iron Dragon's Daughter. It's just as fucked up and full of brilliant bits of wordsmithing, the same elegiac and forgiving anger at the world, at stories, at everything, just as full of riotous picaresque and fairytale adventure. And this one isn't in the least bit nihilistic, and substantially less cyclical and cynical, which makes it much easier to swallow - it has a happy ending, as fairytales should. One day I will reread this, for it's also less tidy than the first book, and there are questions I want to answer which may yet reduce this book in my eyes, but now, hours after finishing, I'm content to just bask in it, to hold it in my mouth like the taste of a lover, the aftermath of a brilliant meal.
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January 7th, 2010
12:48 am - Still not dead
Part the first for 2010.
Sherlock Holmes was flat out awesome. Well crafted, stunningly designed, full of laughably slashable moments, and dude, Jude Law and RDJr. As long as you're not expecting a traditional take on the stories, it's hard not to like this. In particular, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) swan_tower needs to see this.
Started reading for the year, but that's another entry. For now, some Boston food PSAs.
A sort of Chinatown roundup. Hei La Moon on Beach Street has definitely taken over from China Pearl as our dim sum joint of choice. More authentic flavors, more rustic dishes, a slightly wider selection (over the course of several visits) - skins and folding technique still leave a lot to be desired. Windsor Dim Sum Cafe on Tyler Street is a close second now - best skins in Chinatown (though still not great, in the grand scheme), fillings slightly tastier than China Pearl but not as good as Hei La Moon, and selection not as good as Hei La Moon. Gourmet Dumpling House on Beach is our go to joint for anything that's not dim sum. Their soup dumplings and pot stickers are really pretty good, and their other dishes are all very well done, and they have a broad menu. We finally found a favorite Chinese bakery in Chinatown - Lo Yuen on Beach Street, practically next door to Gourmet Dumpling. We came to this conclusion after buying pastry from Hing Shing (also on Beach) last week, and getting the same pastries from Lo Yuen this week. Lo Yuen has much better crusts (to our palate - they're thicker and more rustic, but have a confident, assertive texture - Hing Shing's are thin but undistinguished), and their nut cakes are vastly better. No firm conclusion on who has better bean paste, though. Also, melon biscuits at both places are only so-so, because both have very similar, slightly too smooth fillings.
Finally, a mere 11 years after we moved to Boston, we went to No. 9 Park, which is, if you don't know this already, the high end place in Boston. Lovely romantic views over the Common, and very well laid out - only one or two tables in the whole place are less than perfectly situated. The food is very, very solid. The kitchen's technique is nothing short of amazing, even if the dishes on the whole are pretty conservative. Deep wine list, only semi-painful markups. Good service, but poor pacing - we couldn't believe how quickly we were taken through 3 courses. Also, it's really quite expensive for what it is. The bar menu looks amazing, though, and I really want to try it.
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12:29 am - bodywork
So D is looking to do something to build up strength and improve her body mechanics.
Does anyone have specific suggestions for gyms/yoga classes/etc. in the Porter-Davis-Harvard-Union area?
I really would like fairly specific suggestions - "do pilates!" is not useful, "do pilates at this gym with this instructor" is. Suggested combinations of activities would also be helpful.
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January 6th, 2010
06:20 pm
When someone from the South (including Florida, in this case), says "God Bless You," what is the range of possible meanings like?
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January 4th, 2010
12:45 am - Notes from Omaha, day one
In Omaha, NE, saving the world again.*
In transit in Chicago Midway, there was a large, shaven-headed man with a faint air of Bruce Willis about him, quietly reading Stephen King in a wheelchair by the window. He had a protective boot around one foot, and various blocky bulges showed through the leg of his track pants on that side. A while later, airport staff brought over another large, bald man in a wheelchair, this one with metal braces along one arm, and an awkward baby face, nose too small for either face or body. They slung his USMC pack on the wheelchair handle and left, and that's when I realized. The two sized each other up for a moment, then started trading stories in a nasal accent that sounded like dirt roads and cornfields. Next to them, an amazingly clean cut boy in a pea coat and t-shirt eyed them and chewed his lip, clutching his pleather bible.
Ahead of me in the boarding line was a pale teenage girl with chestnut hair (I recently rediscovered the meaning of the word, after boiling chestnuts to peel them). Black stockings disappeared into arsekicker boots on one end and a shapeless crimson skirt on the other, beneath a long sleeved black velvet blouse with slightly puffed shoulders. On her head was a black hat pushed too far back - the womens' hat that's like a bowler hat but has a much fuller roll to the brim.** I couldn't tell if she was a Gaimaniac in the making or simply a very conservative Christian.
The flight into Chicago shows you just how different from NYC and Boston it is - tract after tract after tract of workingman's divisions, and the huge slashes of the downtown grid.
It is, true to type, very flat here. The towers of downtown are startling in this context, springing up from nothing like Ayers Rock.
On a whim, I asked my cab driver if there was a memorial to Omaha beach in the city. He told me that if there were a memorial it should be on whatever island the beach was actually on, and that there is an Omaha in every state of the Union. Also, all those codenames were abbreviations anyway.
* My job does not actually involve saving the world, but I have decided to henceforth refer to it as though it does. Perhaps this will make it more fulfilling.
** Anyone know what that's called?
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January 2nd, 2010
09:48 pm - Still not dead
Happy new year, everyone. May this year be better than the last in every possible way.
Wrapping 2009...
I used to think Pyr was a pretty decent small press, but between Kay Kenyon and now Mark Chadbourn's The Silver Skull, I have to seriously question their editors' taste. This one was so bad I couldn't even finish, and he's signed up for a trilogy too. Now to see if Justina Robson's going off the rails.
Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman was very decent, but I didn't think particularly outstanding in either the writing or the treatment of the superhero genre. Very well executed, but it was basically Astro City done as a novel.
The Collected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen is a collection of many of the things I hate about MFA litfic. On the one hand, it had a semi-interesting premise, somewhat interesting characters, and pretty decent wordsmithing (I liked Larsen's restraint). On the other hand, it tried to be complex and open-ended, and failed miserably, mostly by degenerating into a bog-standard pathos bath in the last quarter, before collapsing completely in the lamest climax ever in the last 10 pages. Pretty pictures and neat infographics, though.
I've been trying to get round to reading Perfume for the last 12 years or so, and finally succeeded. Not bad, but it struck me as a wee bit juvenile.
In cover-to-cover cookbooking, I started reading the Momofuku cookbook simply because it was the book of Chang, but it's actually a really good book. Chang (or at least Meehan channeling Chang) is a very readable writer in the Bourdain school, and the techniques in the book are very, very solid, with a few fantastic tricks. Aside from everything else, the definitive book of ramen has yet to be written, and this is probably the best stopgap there is at the moment. Highly recommended unless you're vegetarian.
Also, Japanese Kitchen Knives is really, really phenomenal. Not useful or interesting unless you're pretty maniacal about knifework, but just as the Momofuku book is a stand in for the ramen bible, this could be a stand in for the sushi bible. Also, knife pr0n!
Those Left Behind is Firefly candy. I know I'm late to the party. Chew is a highly promising Image cop book that shows all the signs of going the way of every other promising Image book ever - up for a couple story arcs then straight down the tubes. Cannibalism and weirdass scientific phenomena, decent but not particularly awesome execution. Phonogram is a slightly older Image book, and was really pretty cool, but I suspect much cooler to someone who cares more about music than I do.
Also, I spent a lot of time reading the new Rogue Trader, the first RPG I've attempted to read in a long, long time. Those of you who'd be interested in this have heard my rant already.
I feel I'm missing a couple of titles here, which will come to me eventually, but for now, the count for 2009 was:
Graphic novels: 28
Novels: 21
Non-fiction: 9 (including Rogue Trader)
Cookbooks: 3
Too awful to finish: 1 (not counting The Dark is Rising)
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December 9th, 2009
01:28 pm
Would anyone who's in the Boston area over New Year's be able to take care of Gnocchi for a few days? Specific dates are Dec 30-Jan 3 or 4.
We're happy to offer the use of our guest room, or for her to go home with you for that period.
Alternatively, if you wanted to just come take her for walkies and make sure she's fed, that would work too, but she'd much rather have people around.
Thanks!
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November 23rd, 2009
09:55 pm - Still not dead
Sudhir Venkatesh's mass market sociology book was sufficiently memorable that I can't remember its name and can't be arsed to look it up.
Bright of the Sky by Kay Kenyon was slightly original, but had so many gigantic problems it was basically like reading your way through a superfund site. Girlfriend in a closet? Check. Cultural misappropriation? Check. Cardboard characters? Check. To think she has a trilogy planned.
K Blows Top by Peter Carlson was lightweight but terrific. Krushchev, Ike and Nixon are such characters, all you need for a story is to put them in the same book. A perfect way to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the wall coming down.
The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick was a re-read, but just as fucked up and compelling as the first time round.
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08:47 pm
Poll #1489556 Hawkers!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 5At your best guess, roughly what percentage of the population of Boston knows what a hawker / hawker stall is? At your best guess, roughly what proportion of the population of Boston would associate a "hawker / hawker stall"" with the sale of food? With 10 being completely commonplace, how common is the term hawker in modern US English?
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November 22nd, 2009
November 13th, 2009
12:15 am - by the way
That poll in the previous entry?
Please feel free to point your friends to it. We'd be interested in a wide sample.
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November 12th, 2009
04:13 pm - a poll!
Because latvianchick and I have been debating this endlessly over the last few weeks.
Poll #1484557 a poll!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 21Does "Journeyman" carry broadly positive, broadly negative or broadly neutral connotations? What kinds of associations does the word generate for you?
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October 27th, 2009
09:27 am - Life
is either flirting with me or taunting me. It's hard to tell which.
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October 26th, 2009
09:33 pm
Girlyman marathons make everything better, even cleaning.
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06:29 pm
Still on most days, I hear myself say / Everything's easy
Then reality catches up with me, and I am sad.
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October 12th, 2009
02:58 pm - iso sculptor/musician
I have a friend who has the guts of an upright piano sitting in his closet. This is literally the whole string assembly, no hammers, and the wooden frame supporting it. It does not include any of the external case, or any of the hammer or key assembly.
Anyone know a sculptor/musician who might be interested in cleaning this up for use as a piece of art/decor?
Feel free to repost on your journal.
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October 1st, 2009
10:44 am - OS X
Anyone have a Mac OS 10.5.x install disc which latvianchick can borrow? She needs to install DevonThink pro, which requires 10.5, and she only has 10.4 right now...
Thanks!
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