You should “read the whole thing”:http://feeds.feedburner.com/Warrenelliscom?m=1661 (don’t worry, it’s quick), but the part that made me laugh the most was the last line:
bq. I suspect Patrick wouldn’t go as far as me. But he is essentially Small-Time, and I am Internet Jesus.
Well, yeah, at least two people who might read this do know, but for the rest of you, “witness the lovely protectionism of mid-to-late-60’s America”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3833078/:
bq. In 1966 the American Federation of Musicians, convinced that British bands were getting a disproportionate share of musicians income, had the Kinks banned from touring in the United States. The organization finally relented in October 1969.
Presumably the AFM pressured the government to deny them work visas. The part that seems so frigging weird to me is, well…_The Kinks_? I mean, were they worried that if they banned the Beatles or the Stones there would be riots (not that weren’t anyway :), so they picked on someone who was arguably less-popular but still better known than most of their contemporaries?
It seems likely that this ban had a significant effect on the band, “since it kept them from playing the most lucrative market during a critical time”:http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11%3Ajtkku3y5anok%7ET1.
Anyway, here’s a nice little dose of the Kinks, from ??Do You Remember Walter??:
bq. Yes people often change,
but memories of people can remain.
??The Denial Twist?? by the White Stripes is the siren song–it will lure you onto the rocks, yes indeed. Save yourselves, I am lost!
My God, It’s *Perfect*.
bq. If you think that a kiss is all in the lips
C’mon, you got it all wrong, man.
But I did some googling around as part of a conversation I was having with someone on YM, and came across “a transcription of the Harper’s article”:http://homes.cerias.purdue.edu/~spaf/Yucks/V4/msg00015.html that I’m fairly certain is where I first read about it.
It seems pertinent that the conversation was of the “Why are men so damn stupid?” variety.
Incidentally, I did not piss my pants re-reading it, but I came awful close.
So, I’m actually doing this here because it’s the easiest way to make this available to the people in the yoga immersion, many of whom have asked for the recipe (some in more amusing circumstances than others).
The original recipe is from Martha Stewart. It called for heavy cream and sixteen pans (OK, maybe just three) and other things with which we (mostly Anne, who first did the recipe) did not wish to bother. Plus we wanted to make it vegan, for maximum acceptance. As with the prior entry, blame us, not her, if it ends up unsatisfying.
The amounts are kinda arbitrary here–this is how much we made to take to a party with 30-odd people; you might need less. Also, this is very amenable to having proportions changed: if you want more or less of one thing or another, use it. Anne says that doubling the brandy works well. 🙂
Sweet potatoes with apples
* 6lb sweet potatoes[1]
* Salt
* 8 Granny Smith apples[2]
* Lemon juice (to keep apples from browning)
* 6T butter or equivalent
* 3T maple syrup
* 2T brandy
* 4T orange juice
# Bake sweet potato’s in a 375 degree oven until they are cooked through.
# Peel and mash cooked potato’s with a little salt.
# Lubricate a 9×13 baking dish with butter or equivalent.
# Transfer mashed potato’s to baking dish.
# Peel and slice apples, tossing with lemon juice to keep them from browning.
# In a heavy skillet melt butter or equivalent, and when the butter starts to bubble, add apples. This will probably take three batches with 2T butter/1T syrup each time.
# Let apples caramelize. This is boring. Consider practicing pranayama.
# Layer caramelized apples on sweet potato’s in baking dish.
# When you’ve caramelized all of the apples, use the brandy and orange juice to deglaze the pan. The usual caveats about alcohol and open flame apply.
# Cook pan sauce down by half.
# Pour pan sauce over the contents of the baking dish.
# Place in a 375-degree oven for half an hour to warm through and let everything mingle.
# Serve.
fn1. Anything you find in a US supermarket is a sweet potato, even if it’s labelled a yam. Real yams are entirely different -beasts- tubers. So saith “Alton Brown”:http://altonbrown.com/, and so I believe. I think we used Beauregards, but that’s only because Anne and I find it amusing to say it with a broad southern accent.
fn2. Honestly, any firm-fleshed, tart apple, but Granny Smith’s are particularly good for this.
So, over the last couple of years I’ve developed a taste for spiced tea, but haven’t ever found one pre-made option that I have favored unequivocally–the ones that had as much ginger as I liked were too sweet or what have you. So I decided to try making my own.
I don’t remember the original source for this recipe, but I’ve mucked about with it a bit so I don’t know that I’d be doing any favors if I credited them. 🙂
* 2-1/2C water
* 2 cardamom pods, crushed
* 3 whole black peppercorns, crushed
* 1T fresh ginger, peeled
* 1 cinnamon stick
* 2 cloves
* 1 “leaf” of star anise
* 1C soymilk
* 1-1/2T honey
* 3t loose black tea (or tea bags)
# Bash the spices lightly about in a mortar and pestle
# Put the water in a saucepan, add the spices, and bring to a low boil.
# Turn down the heat and let simmer for 10 minutes.
# Add soymilk and honey and bring back to a simmer.
# Add tea, turn down the heat, and let steep for 2 to 3 minutes.
# Strain into two cups and serve hot.
Authentic? Who knows? Chai seems to be like curry, in that no two people do it the same way, so who’s to say my option is less authentic. It sure is tasty, though.
I don’t know that there’s any more obvious lead in to ??Mr. and Mrs. Smith??, a movie I heard described as “beautiful people shooting at one another”. That does pretty much sum it up, but I think Roger Ebert is right when, “in his review”:http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20050609%2FREVIEWS%2F50524003%2F1023, he says:
bq. None of this matters at all. What makes the movie work is that Pitt and Jolie have fun together on the screen, and they’re able to find a rhythm that allows them to be understated and amused even during the most alarming developments. There are many ways that John and Jane Smith could have been played awkwardly, or out of synch, but the actors understand the material and hold themselves at just the right distance from it; we understand this is not really an action picture, but a movie star romance in which the action picture serves as a location.
For better or worse, that is it exactly. And I was entertained, even if it *was* a festival of cartoon violence.
Vince Vaughn, incidentally, seems to have totally jumped tracks in his career. Not that he doesn’t do it well, but I wouldn’t have guessed he’d end up in this role five years ago.
Tomorrow we intend to watch a movie I will feel much less guilty about enjoying, ??The Girl with the Pearl Earring??.
And someone comes on the line and tries to tell me I owe someone $2K+. I asked what it was about, they said, “A card with citibank that was in default.” I told them they had the wrong guy, never had a card with them. The guy said, “I have a social, last four digits XXXX”. Nope, not me. Sorry. 🙂
I must admit I had to get the guy to read the number off twice because the first time my head was so full of voices shouting “Identity Theft” I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying.
That long before he was Dumbledore Mk. II, “Michael Gambon”:http://imdb.com/name/nm0002091/ was the thief in “??The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover??”:http://imdb.com/title/tt0097108/.
That should creep out anyone who’s taking their kids to those Harry Potter movies.
then you would surely not understand why there would have to be “an entire web page devoted to Iron Maiden album covers with Spongebob Squarepants inserted into them?”:http://kebawe.com/wallpapers/maiden/SpongeEd.shtml
But rest assured, there must be such a thing.
So, at least “according to Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_day. *no one knows why it’s named Boxing Day*. It’s silly, but in a wonderful sort of way–it’s apparently centuries old, but no one knows why the hell it’s called Boxing Day.
Not because it’s not as funny as it used to be (’cause really, it is), but because it’s just harder to get me to laugh now–I look around and sometimes think things have truly come off the rails.
But “their bit of commentary on the attacks on Christmas”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005/12/long-jolly-slog-i-hear-they-got.html is great. I especially liked:
bq. “On Secularmas, they do not exchange presents,” says Giblets. “They exchange identical cardboard boxes filled with rocks and mold and broken childhood dreams and nothing!”
The default theme that RockBox uses is much less pretty than that of the default iRiver firmware, but as you might have guessed from the way I said that, RockBox is themeable, and the non-default themes are at least as pretty as the iRiver firmware.
In other words, RockBox, err, rocks, in every conceivable way.
So, today I installed “RockBox”:http://www.rockbox.org/ on my “iRiver IHP-140”:http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IriverPort.
It’s not as pretty as the original firmware (which, incidentally, I can still get to because, well, the RockBox guys are pretty smart), but it has two feature that I always wished for that the original firmware never had–1) the ability to use .m3u playlists that also work under “mpd”:http://musicpd.org/ (that is, ones that use forward slashes, as $DEITY intended), and 2) the ability to create playlists on the fly by queueing up tracks interactively.
I would seriously recommend it to anyone who has one of these players, and once the iPod port is to a reasonable point, I’d push people to use it on those too–you get access to actual *free* formats, like OGG and FLAC, instead of being tied to MP3 and AAC.
!http://www.harmony-central.com/ProductImages/Large/000000253.jpg!
You might then think that at this time more than any other, I would be able to make a distinction between those things that I think I might want want–largely because they’re “neat”–and those things I need.
But damn, it sure does feel like I need “a nixie tube clock that looks like an H&K amp head”:http://news.harmony-central.com/Newp/2005/Hughes-Kettner-Tube-Clock.html
John Goerzen is a Debian developer for whom I’ve got a lot of respect. He has also recently been let in “on the secrets of underwear drawer rotation”:http://changelog.complete.org/node/428.
And his workplace just had a big fire, and “he’s logged the thrills of working IS during times of crisis”:http://changelog.complete.org/node/431.
I mean, some guy posts an insanely inane idea for a movie he thinks Pixar should do to Bruce Perens’ old email address at Pixar, and CC:’s the debian-devel list. Really, I should have more compassion, and not post a link to his message for the purposes of ridiculing him in public.
But I’m not yet enlightened, and it’s *so* excruciatingly bad. How bad? “Read it yourself”:http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/12/msg00566.html.
Gaaah, I think I became stupider just reading it.
…insofar as I can only stomach about five seconds worth of cultural criticism at a time these days–since that’s about how long it takes me to look at Anne, shrug my shoulders and say something about how the cultures on the skids or vice versa.
I don’t have the energy, and besides, what the fuck to do I have to be outraged about? I do stupid shit, you do stupid shit, “they” do stupid shit, this is the human condition. Laugh a little, or a lot, but calm down. You will be happier if you accept that stupid shit will be perpetrated for as long as the race is viable.
Mind you, some of the stupid shit I see makes me wonder how long that may be…
However, having decided for another reason to link to it, I must say that I participated in almost none of eXile’s “90 90’s shams”:http://www.exile.ru/2005-December-02/that_90s_sham.html. I don’t mean that as a value judgement (see above), just as an observation. My purity test score is low, my music collection is full of oddball items, and I don’t go to the movies. I guess I’m realizing, I ignored huge swaths of my peers experiences, period.
Oh, what was the reason I was going to link to it? The site is built using “Mason”:http://masonhq.com/.
Yeah, I’m a geek.
It’s not that I care so much about the people who are trying to push products through telemarketing–I am on the do-not-call list and all–but it seems to me the people who are actually on the other end of the phone deserve some compassion.
After all, I can’t imagine that it’s anything other than a job that combines mediocre pay and soul-crushing work. I suppose that in some cases it may be a specific choice someone makes because it leaves them free to do other things, but in most I expect it’s what they do because it’s all that’s available.
So when I get solicited, I usually say, as politely but firmly as possible, “Thank you, I’m not interested.”
Well, today some guy calls from Earthlink, and I do my normal, “Thank you, I’m not interested.” and the dolt tries to tell me why I am wrong not to be interested.
And I snapped.
Not in a shouting-obscenities-and-banging-the-phone-on-the-table way–which I’ve been known to do, but usually in a more Spider Jerusalem state of mind, that is, with a smile on my face and giggling–but in a harangue-on-a-theme, “You should not presume to know enough about me to tell me that I’m interested in your product.” way.
After it was over and I went down to feed the cats I started to wonder where our little version of capitalism went totally off the rails. Why is it that companies I do business with, often over long periods of time sometimes seem intent on making me regret having a relationship with? That just seems stupid.
So, “Ogged”:http://www.unfogged.com/ links to a Guardian column that has an “amusingly incisive commentary”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/britain/article/0,,1606559,00.html that reminds me of a line from ??The Stand?? which Stephen King quoted in his introduction to trade edition for ??Sandman: World’s End?? collection, “Country don’t mean dumb.”
bq.. At university I once came across the following true story in a textbook. A young teacher from Leeds had accepted a temporary job teaching a class of four-year-olds out in one of the most isolated, rural parts of north Wales. One of her first lessons involved teaching the letter S so she held up a big colour photo of a sheep and said: “Now, who can tell me what this is?” No answer. Twenty blank and wordless faces looked back at her. “Come on, who can tell me what this is?” she exclaimed, tapping the photo determinedly, unable to believe that the children were quite so ignorant. The 20 faces became apprehensive and even fearful as she continued to question them with mounting frustration.
Eventually, one brave soul put up a tiny, reluctant hand. “Yes!” she cried, waving the snap aloft. “Tell me what you think this is!” “Please, Miss,” said the boy warily. “Is it a three-year-old Border Leicester?”
p. Of course, I have to admit that I thought the payoff was going to be more, err, sexual in nature. But that’s just the sort of gutter mind I have.
Earthlink has produced a “customized firmware image”:http://www.research.earthlink.net/ipv6/ for the Linksys WRT54G router that will allow you to get IPv6 addresses on their network. Many IPv6 addresses, apparently.
I don’t think it’s going to displace the Sveasoft firmware I’m using (though I might try to figure out how to get the IPv6 addresses using that), but it’s awfully cool that Earthlink 1) took the time and 2) was able to hack the firmware like this and make it available to their customers.
Oh, and the link where I got this information is a very nice overview of the interesting stuff that is available for the WRT54G family. Definitely worth reading, and, if you’ve got $60 laying around, definitely worth picking up one.
But if you’re going to do it, consider doing it quickly–the newest WRT54G V.5 is apparently castrated and unable to use these replacement firmwares (and, since it’s no longer Linux-based, is unlikely ever to).
…I don’t see how you couldn’t find Taylor Guitar’s “Factory Fridays”:http://www.taylorguitars.com/video/factory-fridays/ anything but interesting. Take a look at how some awfully fine guitars are built.
I haven’t really read it in years because, well, I haven’t read the newspaper in years. But “Mark Evanier”:http://newsfromme.com/ mentioned that today is the strip’s 35th anniversary, and he links to “a decade-old essay he did on Trudeau”:http://www.povonline.com/cols/COL099.htm that’s really quite a funny read.
So, I saw the original ??Batman?? once all the way through in the theaters. Every other time I’ve tried to watch it, I’ve gotten bored or fallen asleep (no, I’m not kidding).
I remember ??Batman Returns?? as much because I saw it with Anne and Dave McGhee just before he left town for another co-op stint that was going to keep him out of town beyond when I was planning to graduate (let’s be honest about my level of certainty 🙂 as anything else. It was certainly more interesting than the first, but kept a cartoonishness that I found a little off-putting.
I have only vague memories of ??Batman Forever??. Mostly they revolved around how much Tommy Lee Jones should have sued his agent for. Joel Schumacher seemed to me to have no respect for the characters, wanting to make something more in the vein of the 1960’s TV show, which also annoyed me. I may have noticed Nicole Kidman’s heaving bosom, too.
??Batman & Robin?? I saw during some downtime at Patrick’s wedding. I was amused when George Clooney was on ??The Tonight Show?? a couple of weeks ago, and Leno made some comment about how Clooney had produced his fair share of dogs, and Clooney made some comment about having given his best shot at killing the Batman franchise.
So–and I say this as someone who’s never been a huge Batman fan, really, outside of ??The Dark Knight Returns??–I was somewhat cynical about the level of praise that ??Batman Begins?? was getting. I mean, I TIVO ??Ebert & Roeper??, and enjoy their reviews, but I decided their notion of good comic book movies was a bit different from mine when they heaped tons of praise on ??Spiderman 2??, a movie I thought it was OK, but certainly not great.
Anyway, my expectations were high, and I was prepared to be disappointed, especially knowing that the screenwriter was responsible for the ??Blade?? movies, of which I do not have a high opinion–I also note that he worked on ??The Puppet Masters??, and plays a (basically positive) part in the “long essay about PM making it to the screen”:http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/rossio.html. Christopher Nolan could direct the hell out of the movie, but if it had a bad screenplay, it was still going to suck.
It did not suck.
Not only did it not suck, it exceeded my expectations, high as they were. Sure, Katie Holmes’ character could have been a little less of a cypher, or, in fact, acted by someone other than Katie Holmes. And there were various other small things that could have been different.
But, really, I think it succeeded in capturing a huge swath of the character *without* feeling like it was being crammed full of exposition like a duck intended for fois gras. The look was surprisingly down-to-earth, and Christian Bale is just one hell of an actor.
I mean, from ??American Psycho?? to this?
Actually, the really weird thing I notice on IMDB is that at 13, he was the lead character in ??Empire of the Sun??.
Well, I expected watching this movie to be a bit of a chore, and it was. I guess you could argue that such expectations are self-fulfilling, but getting Keanu Reeves to play a character who was originally modelled on Sting–both in his blondness and his Britishness–was just stupid.
That said, Rachel Weisz sold the absolute goddamn fuck out of her role. Shame it was in such an otherwise mediocre movie.
who _can_ you laugh at?
Which is to say, the linux-themed, despair.com-styled poster “you can find here”:http://www.arouse.net/despair-linux/ are really quite amusing. Especially the Mandrake and Ubuntu ones.
Because it’s time.
So, to stimulate those neurons of yours: “boxer”:http://flickr.com/photos/tags/boxer, “alabama”:http://flickr.com/photos/tags/alabama, “evolution”:http://flickr.com/photos/tags/evolution.
My big accomplishment today–it was an otherwise fairly busy day, still catching up from the last couple of weekends–was adding VERP handling to the AnteSpam daemon process.
Those of you who don’t hang out in email handling circles probably don’t recognize the acronym“1”:#fn1, but if you’re subscribed to a mailing list these days, you’ve probably seen it in action.
What happens is that during the SMTP delivery process, when the mailing list server hands the message to whatever server hosts your mail, it is given a special address as the originator of the mail. This is often, but not always, of the form @bounce-mdorman=tendentious.org@bounce.antespam.com@–the important bit is that the address to which the mail is being delivered is included (albeit mangled) in the address from which the mail seems to be coming.
This might seem weird, but when you send to a non-existent address, any bounce message is almost certainly going to be delivered to that specially encoded address, and modern mail transfer agents make it easy to route all mail for @bounce-*@bounce.antespam.com@ to a program which can then extract the address whose delivery failed and behave appropriately–in the case of mailing lists, by removing the user from the list.
Now you might ask why we would want this–it’s not like we’re running mailing lists, we’re checking for spam.
There’s two reasons.
First and foremost, this will allow us to recognize, in an automated way, that an address doesn’t exist on the destination server, and we can mark that address as non-existent in our database, and refuse to even accept mail for it in the future. This cuts down on the load on our servers and our customers servers.
Second, this means our system will not run afoul of senders who have implemented SPF and customers who pay attention to it. Right now, if a sender has SPF records, and our customer honors them, we will probably not be able to deliver the mail from that sender because when we try and do the delivery we use the original sender address during the SMTP transaction with the customer’s mail server, and we aren’t cleared to send mail for that sender. If we’re using an address that’s in our domain, we are certainly allowed to send it.
Both of these are important quality of implementation issues.
The cool part is that, after an hour of investigation and testing, the actual diff turned out to be a one-line change–we were already using the QMQP protocol to hand clean messages to the postfix system for final delivery (because it operates well over unix sockets, and I was sick of having postfix listening on non-standard TCP/IP sockets for what was ultimately an entirely internal transaction), and it turns out that, because the postfix QMQP service strives to be compatible with qmail’s QMQP service (it was written, I understand, because securityfocus wanted to keep using ezmlm, which depends on QMQP, but wanted to move away from qmail), you just have to use a specially constructed sender address, and postfix will do the hard work for you.
1 “VERP”:http://cr.yp.to/proto/verp.txt stands for ??Variable envelope return paths??, and was pioneered by the qmail MTA, largely for automating bounce handling in its companion Mailing List Manager, ezmlm. Yes, I just wanted to try out the footnoting.
That, if you really want (or, alternatively, if your wife just feels like amusing herself), you can get “Orange County Chopper Boxer shorts”:http://shop.orangecountychoppers.com/nshop/product.php?dept=mens&category=&view=detail&productid=OC-3590C11&startColor=&groupName=Mboxers&page=:
!http://a1204.g.akamai.net/7/1204/1401/04110808011/images.barnesandnoble.com/images/8500000/8506400.jpg! because of the “Mieville Seminar”:http://crookedtimber.org/category/mieville-seminar (or perhaps more accurately, the knowledge of its existence). Enough interesting stuff was said in the bits I read that I figured it couldn’t be a bad book.
And, indeed, it’s not. Neither, though, is it a great book. I’m hard pressed to articulate the things I didn’t like about it. I think it’s the prose. It’s not that the prose is bad, it’s just…too much. There’s so much going on, and sometimes the prose gets in the way of the story–not by clanging and making one cringe, but just by being a little too self-obsessed.
Still, if you’re willing to overlook some missteps and aesthetic quibbles for a book that has boundless ambition, you could do a lot worse.