Month: October 2007

To Canadian friends — and if you felt like expanding the border southward, I for one would welcome our new Canadian overlords.

Jennifer gave Margaret and me tickets to see Bruce Springsteen as our 25th anniversary present, and the excitement is beginning to get to me. We’ll see the show in New York on Thursday the 18th, I think. I haven’t seen him live 1980 or so, when Margaret and Matt O’Riley and I saw the show in Cleveland. I’ve been scouting the set lists for the shows he’s played so far, and to my intense delight he’s been playing “Thundercrack” among the encores — I can hardly wait. I’m not staking my enjoyment of the evening on any particular song, but I take it as a good sign that he’s harking back to his very earliest material for this tour. Thank you, Jennifer!

By the way, the type design for the Magic album sure looks a lot like Hatch Show Print typography to me. If Hatch didn’t design it, the designer must’ve had that look in mind.

The other day, Margaret was in North Carolina and Pippa was at a choir supper, so I faced the prospect of feeding myself. That’s usually OK with me; though others turn up their noses at the makeshift dinners I patch together, I really don’t mind eating my way through several plastic bags of leftovers, making a sandwich out of stuff I’m not sure when we ate the first time, finishing off with some chips and cheese, or instant soup, or some other makeshift. But the other night, I had no need to resort to such frugal extremes: in fact, on top of the refrigerator rested a Meal, Ready-to-Eat, courtesy of my friend the Air Force Captain. (He assured me that he bought it fair and square, this is not the beginning of some devastating scandal that’ll cost him his rank and bring down the administration in disgrace. We can always hope, though. About the administration, not him.)

I was surprised at how much the main MRE sack contained. When you spread out the entree, side dishes, condiments, serving items, and the self-cooking over substitute, the whole thing covered most of the countertop.

The first step was to prepare the main course, a veggie burger in barbeque sauce.

This involved sliding the burger envelope into a plastic bag that has a chemical water-activated quick-heating element in it.

First, you tear the heating bag open:

and slide the foil-wrapped burger into the heating bag

Pour water into the bag, such that the water level reaches between the two line on the bag. Do not overfill!

(I was very proud to have nailed the water level part of the recipe.) Then let the chemical pouch slide down into the water and fold the top of the heating bag over. Slide them together into the box from which you extracted them, for a minute or two. Then pull ’em out and let them cook on their own. Note: be sure to leave the heating bag on a slight incline, or the water will leak out and Bad Things Will Happen. (You don’t want to ask.)

That’s really all there is to the cooking side of the endeavor. The rest comprises extracting ingredients from storage bags. for instance, there’s the condiment bag:

Time to make the Carbohydrate Electrolyte Powdered Beverage. (Doesn’t it just set your mouth a-watering to hear me say that?) Just tear open the bag, pour in some water after it’s been fully purified and the residue has settled out; squeeze the top of the bag closed and shake it up.

Yummy!
Now, to get the bun ready — or to be precise, the “Wheat Snack Bread.” In separate bags, the Armed Froces provide two thingummyjiggers that vaguely resembled slices of bread, or hamburgers buns, or soggy Ritz crackers.

There’s one —

There’s two, with the silicone keep-it-dry packets still pressed onto them. I removed the packets before I ate.

Meanwhile, the smell from the heating bag was getting intensely acrid; no visible change in the cooking department, though.

Time to slice open the main course:

Well, that burger and sauce actually look pretty good

Notice that the potato sticks are much more accurately denominated “potato twigs” or “potato stick fragments,” but they were tasty enough.

And there’s my dinner. If you set aside the smell of the heating chemical, and the proportions of the potato sticks, and the texture of the Wheat Snack Slices, it all worked out pretty well. The instant Carbohydrate Electrolyte Beverage reminded me of Gatorade; the burger was tastier than many vegetarian items I’ve eaten; and best of all, there was no risk that someone would try to blow me to smithereens — whether insurgent or mercenary.

Continue reading “A Culinary Gift”

I put a fair amount of effort into a long-ish blogpost yesterday, but I lost it due to my stupid Keychain problems. I’ll try to reconstruct it this afternoon.

I did what I should’ve done a couple days ago: I went to my user Library folder, found the folder at ~/Library/Keychains, deleted the folder, and cut loose. Now I have to re-enter all the passwords I had stored, but my system is astoundingly more stable.

Language Log has obtained a presentation slide from the inventor of the Crockus. Spoiler: it’s bogus.

My Adium upgrade seems to have hosed my Keychain file. Headaches ensue.

• I have enjoyed Stephen Fry’s work in various contexts; it’s now my delight to enjoy reading his blog., and not only because he slags “Dan Whatsit” and his “preposterously awful” book The Leonardo Code. And now I know many things not to say if I ever meet Stephen Fry.
  His paragraph, far down the column, on receiving compliments is highly pertinent; I am very maladroit at accepting compliments, and I have been trying to manage better when people say kind things about me.
• A link in Fry’s blog sent me to the bibliography of Dornford Yates, which informs me about quite-possibly delightful novels and a series of exquisite cover designs.
• I’m gearing up to write something about the Anglican brouhaha, but my higher faculties are unwaveringly fixed on finishing the technology article (which is coming around slowly but nicely, if I do say so myself). In the meantime, I appreciated Jason Byassee’s article in the Century, and the group blog over at Covenant.
• Posts at (and linking to) Dan Wallace on “Pauline Scatology” and Tall Skinny Kiwi on Bad Language have generated interesting conversation.
• Resources: Biblical Studies Bulletin 43 quotes something I wrote about Dan Whatsis as their “quote of the month” for March (yes, I’m slow): “The staggering popular phenomenon of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code testifies to the level of success that academic interpretive authority brings to bear on egregiously misleading interpretive claims: none at all.” I didn’t remember saying that, and it’s surely an overstatement, but I’ll stand by it as a bit of rhetoric.
• I have a stored-up photo blog about a once-in-my-lifetime culinary experience, but I don’t have time to post it right now.

I wish Apple made the iPhone an open platform as much as the next person, but if they’re going to try to put lipstick on the pig of a closed platform, why don’t they just argue that they’re making the iPhone theft-proof? If the thief can’t swap out the SIM to enable another account to use the same unit, ta stolen iPhone becomes useless as a phone (or else the thieves/purchasers will give themselves away by using someone else’s phone number).

Mark wonders what I think about Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows — not the recording itself, but the business model: “Self-released w/out a label! Discbox which includes vinyl! Downloadable for… whatever you want to pay! Interesting…”

Very much so — and it confirms the kinds of claim that many people have been making for a long time. You prosper in the digital environment by giving away what the internet makes easy and by charging for what the internet doesn’t facilitate (personal appearances, physical artifacts like packaging, clothing, books, and so on). It’s that simple, but some people and some corporate entities want to force the internet to conform to the properties and characteristics of a pre-digital environment. In the long run, they’ll be as successful as the dinosaurs who commanded mammals to respond the the ice age by voluntary mass extinction. Now, if you’ll pardon me, our car is running low on gas, so I have to go to the leather goods store to get a new buggy-whip.

Whoops, Metalepsis sent me a notice pointing to Radiohead, too (my mail client identified his message as spam, which it assuredly was not. Sorry to have missed you, M.)

Pippa regards her store-bought or hand-me-down clothing as raw material, subject to refinement and enhancement if the means present themselves. Over the past few days, she’s been hard at work on the Duke hoodie that Margaret and I gave her:

When I first took her to Michaels, the local crafts franchise, I ran into Pippa in one of the aisles; she was grinning like a lovesick sophomore, and she beamed at me: “I’ve found my people.” Yes, she has, and we love watching her and her work.