Today was an adventure - in a good way, overall.

The driver from the car service picked me up promptly (even a few minutes early!) so I was on schedule to get to Newark Penn Station with ample time for reading, getting a snack, and otherwise loitering (though, really, if I’m a ticketed passenger, it’s not loitering, right?)  I know the main roads fairly well, but my friendly driver took an exit and got us on some backroads. I was excited at the prospect of learning a new secret ninja route to the train station. Instead, I now know a new secret ninja route to the AIRPORT. Yes, indeedy. He thought he was supposed to be driving me to the airport and when I noticed that he had taken an exit (from which there was no longer access to main roads to get to the train station) I spoke up and said, “Um… I need to get to Newark Penn Station, not the airport.” The driver actually took the flat of his palm and slapped himself in the forehead, muttered something to himself and then apologized profusely–and had to drive around the entire perimeter of Newark Liberty International Airport to get us back on the road.

But I got to the train station in time, so all was well. A little less than four hours later, we pulled into South Station here in Boston.

Since I’ve now taken the Acela express train to Washington D.C. several times and to Boston today, I feel comfortable saying that it is very much worth the extra few bucks just for the comfort factor. While regional service isn’t tragic, the Acela is definitely a nicer ride. I know some people who say it’s not that big a deal, but I ask them to try reading a book or doing a crossword puzzle comfortably on a four-hour regional train ride where you’re wedged in sardine-style with the person next to you. It won’t work. Also, if you ever have to get to Boston, taking the train is just a better option than driving. It’s a fairly beautiful ride since almost the entire second half is a ride along the Connecticut coastline so you’re seeing lots of little beach enclaves with waves splashing up against rocks and other such loveliness.

In true nerdy fashion, the first thing I did when I checked into the hotel was get the laptop out of my bag and connect to the internets. I felt right at home. Except that at home, I’m not on the 25th floor of a building overlooking all of downtown Boston. There will be photos later since I neglected to bring the USB cable for my (not that great) digital camera.

Blah blah - did stuff at the convention center - blah blah - figured we could call it a day until tomorrow - blah blah - weren’t hungry yet and decided to head over to Newbury Street to do some shopping. In doing so, we discovered my new favorite shopping street (and it might be my favorite shopping street ever since there aren’t that many terrific shopping streets that are affordable). The first thing that caught my eye was a Paperchase store right on Newbury. Not a Borders with a Paperchase boutique: it is a full Paperchase store. I could’ve done some serious damage, but instead I got a gold and pink velvet patterned change purse that was 75% off ($3.25) and some beautiful kraft paper notecards with intricate floral curlicue patterns in varying colors of metallic ink. (Photos of these to come as well.)

Further down Newbury Street, we walked into Tealuxe. It’s a tea shop with a glorious selection of loose teas to purchase by the gram. We got a list of their flavors and after a few minutes debating in line, I purchased 50 grams each of five teas:

• Puttabong 2nd Flush Darjeeling - black tea, “A bright bouquet and wonderful complexity, termed ‘the champagne of tea’”
• Pear and Pomegranate (black tea with pear and pomegranate)
• Lady Londonberry (black tea flavored with lemon and strawberry)
• Buckingham Palace Garden Party (Earl Grey tea with jasmine and blue cornflowers)
• Chocolate Raspberry (black tea flavored with chocolate and raspberry)

I have a feeling I’ll be going back tomorrow to get more. There’s a coconut green tea that sounds divine (and my coworker bought some and let me smell it - DAMN, it smells delicious) as well as Kashmiri Chai (chai with cardamom, peppermint and nutmeg) and Moroccan Mint (since it reminds me of the tea I had in Tunisia - strongly brewed mint tea is a “thing” in Northern African countries like Morocco and Tunisia).

Finally, we had a delicious dinner at Stephanie’s on Newbury. I had my New England clam chowder (mine only inasmuch as having some while here was a goal of mine) which was absolutely delicious and probably contained a full cup of cream. This was followed by pan roasted sea scallops with garlic, corn chowder, roasted red skin potatoes and thin onion strings (like onion rings, but not) accompanied by a glass of pretty tasty rioja (Marques de Caceres Rioja Crianza 2003). I ate all but half a scallop and skipped most of the potato and onion starch-fest because I wanted to leave room for dessert. And we got dessert. That was a roasted pear turtle cobbler (warm roasted pears with chocolate and caramel, topped with pecan crumble served with vanilla ice cream). I totally couldn’t finish that, but what I did have was incredibly flavorful and rich and wonderful.

So now I’m in my hotel room, drinking some of the mint verbena tea I brought with me from home in hopes that I will be able to digest all this food and feel not so much like a stuffed pig on a spit when I awaken tomorrow morning.

A week or two ago, I heard a short interview with Harold McGee on my local public radio station - WNYC. The audio is available online here. McGee is a food scientist; his book “On Food and Cooking” is sort of the bible of molecular gastronomy and general foodie craziness (it’s been around for 20+ years and was completely revised and updated in 2004). I was fascinated by that short clip (where he spoke with my favorite public radio host, Soterios Johnson) about the chemistry of forcing water into rice and pasta, cooking sous-vide, and the window of time to cook something to perfect doneness.

So I ordered it from Amazon because it seemed right up my alley. It arrived earlier this week and it just makes me feel all powerful flipping through the pages (which, incidentally, feel really nice. Good paper choice, production folks at Scribner/Simon & Schuster!)

I’ve been flipping around and reading the chapters/sections that capture my interest: the milk and dairy section gave me a better understanding of cheeses and the differences between ice cream, custard (ice cream + egg yolk) and gelato (custard with more butterfat). The chapter on eggs opens with the answer to, “What came first? The chicken or the egg?” (appropriate for today, I suppose). His answer: eggs existed long before chickens did—he sides with Samuel Butler who said, “a chicken is just an egg’s way of making another egg.”

Interesting stuff on muscle fibers and how they determine whether meat is light or dark, judging doneness of meat by feel, the chemistry behind the onion’s tear-producing skills (a sulfur compound known as the “lacrimator”—lacrimose means tearful) which is essentially a molecular bomb that hits the nerve endings of our eyes and breaks down into hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid. Yes, the same sulfuric acid that we would add to sugar in high school chemistry class to create a pillar of stinky black carbon in a beaker. It’s also the same stuff that will burst into flames if a 100% pure piece of it comes in contact with air - it reacts violently with water, so the moisture in the air does that. A 98% pure piece of it will burn through paper just by touching it. Fun stuff. And that’s what makes us cry when we’re cutting onions.

I skipped past the fruit chapter for now and am about to start Chapter 8 –”Flavorings from Plants: Herbs and Spices, Tea and Coffee.” Mmm.

Easter breakfast with the family is finished (I made a kick-ass Asparagus and Leek Frittata - except we didn’t have leeks or shiitake mushrooms, so I used scallions, onion and red peppers instead. It worked out OK.) Yay, food!

I blame the suckfest (that was today) on the time change.

Or perhaps my petulant four year-old inner child is to blame. I haven’t decided.

Waking up this morning sucked, getting into the car and having the gas light go to empty sucked, getting to the gas station and finding out that pump I pulled up to was broken sucked, being called “sweetie” by the gas station attendant also sucked, going to Dunkin’ Donuts to get a hot chocolate and whole wheat bagel with cream cheese was good - until I pulled up to the window to pay and learned that they were out of hot chocolate (I got chai instead) and out of vegetable cream cheese. I asked for scallion - to which they said yes… and then no. So I got no bagel with no cream cheese and just went to the train station to wait out the remaining time.

Once on the train, I was just overwhelmed by (non-bagel related) sadness of a nondescript and nonspecific nature and was sitting there like a fool, crying. Not bawling… but the tears were flowing in freakish silence and being dabbed away by a Dunkin’ Donuts napkin. Not the softest stuff, so I was quite rosy-rimmed in the eye region. I got to work, turned on my computer, and it froze up. I restarted it and then it refused to accept my password. I think one of the keys was stuck, so I just did some random hitting of shift and caps lock (case sensitive passwords) to jostle it loose and managed to login. Trying to print an agenda resulted in a printer error - not a jam, but an unspecified driver or software error that prompted a pop-up box stating, “printer error” with the only option being to cancel. I hit “cancel” and restarted my computer again. Meeting, meeting, lunch. Nothing looked appetizing, and I couldn’t even find something to provide pure sustenance sans enjoyment… so I went for the cheap option. A slice of pizza. Meeting, spreadsheet, cancelled meeting… and time to go home. On the train ride home, I was wedged between two over-cologned middle-aged men, which just made that 50 minute voyage endlessly pleasant.

For dinner, I explored the as-yet-unexplored (in my world) potential of Brussels sprouts. I have a vague recollection of wanting my mother to buy them for me when I was 9 and wanting to use them as huge heads of lettuce for my Barbie dolls. Instead, they were cooked and I distinctly remember a noxious sulfurous stench which has turned me off of them ever since. Well, according to the package, the sulfur stench can be avoided through proper preparation methods.

To that end, I cooked them for about 10 minutes in a little milk (low-fat), butter (not low-fat - but compensating for the fact I did not have heavy cream for this recipe suggestion), garlic and basil. Then I removed them from the heat and squeezed a little lemon juice on them, sprinkled chopped pecans on top, and added a little salt and pepper. Toss to combine and hey - they aren’t half bad and they smell pretty good, if a little garlicky (I’m not a huge fan of garlic, but it serves a purpose.)

You know what also serves a purpose? “Jump Around” by House of Pain. The purpose it serves: inviting me to make a fool of myself by rapping along to it. Yessir. Of all the things I could possibly remember from my high school days (useful things like calculus, history, chemistry, and perhaps even driver’s ed), this is what’s stuck with me.

House of Pain - Jump Around

And “One Pure Thought” by Hot Chip. The purpose it serves: making me want to dance (and my friend Sara can attest to this… I think we’ve done the whole “dancing in the car” thing to this song a handful of times now). Nothing else does that right now. It’s magical and mood-lifting.

Hot Chip - One Pure Thought

Until tomorrow, then. Arbitrary reassignment of time. Ugh.

It’s hard to complete a performance self-evaluation when not actually at work. I can’t think of all the things I need to make note of because I’m not sitting at my desk, looking in my work email, surrounded by the trimmings and trappings of office life (which I truly don’t mind.) I tried to do it at home last year, too, but this is just proving that it doesn’t fly. I think I might stay at the office a bit later than usual tomorrow night to finish up that type of work. I’ll just take that out of the running for Sunday night entertainment.

Without further ado, some interesting stuff:

♦ A solid review/analysis of “There Will Be Blood” from /Film (spoiler-filled, so don’t read if you haven’t seen). I liked this bit:

Many have compared the film’s start to silent films, as they should, but Anderson uses them to blatantly rev up the intensity that will come to characterize his entire film long after dialogue is instated. He’s also leashing us to his new, fiery craft. So heavy-handed and quiet is the symbolism here that the scenes seem crafted while incredibly stoned; they are like a sinister moon walk. Such scenes shouldn’t work because this is the type of blatant tripe that desperately screams to the Academy, but Anderson knows this, and he is proving a point. When a hand aggressively marks the fresh face of an infant with oil above his eyes, the comparisons to the Catholic tradition of Ash Wednesday are grotesquely clear. Anderson is setting up the world in TWBB as a place where humans merely survive, a No Country for Old Gods: just men, the Earth and nothingness.

♦ Have you ever wondered how exactly a GPS works? Other than “it uses satellites”? There’s a clear and interesting explanation of the workings of GPS receivers on HowStuffWorks.com.

♦ The somewhat controversial blog, Stuff White People Like. I’ve looked through many of the posts and, apparently, I am quite stereotypically caucasian. I like musical comedy, modern furniture, Michel Gondry, standing still at concerts, recycling, expensive sandwiches, kitchen gadgets, Sarah Silverman, public radio, plays, sushi, indie music, Netflix, Arrested Development, The Daily Show/Colbert Report, wine, traveling, gifted children, tea and Wes Anderson movies - among many other things. On recycling:

Recycling is a part of a larger theme of stuff white people like: saving the earth without having to do that much.

Recycling is fantastic! You can still buy all the stuff you like (bottled water, beer, wine, organic iced tea, and cans of all varieties) and then when you’re done you just put it in a DIFFERENT bin than where you would throw your other garbage. And boom! Environment saved! Everyone feels great, it’s so easy!

This is important because all white feel guilty about producing waste. It doesn’t stop them from doing it, but they feel guilty about it. Deep down, they believe they should be like the Native Americans and use every part of the product or beast they have consumed. Though for many white people, this simply means putting plastic bags into a special drawer where they will accumulate until they are eventually used to carry some gym clothes or bathing suit. Ultimately this drawer will get full and only be emptied when the person moves to a new house. Advanced white recyclers will uses [sic] these grocery bags as garbage bags.

♦ I want to bake these cookies. Chocolate Chunk and Dried Cherry Oatmeal Cookies. I mean, look at them!

♦  Yesterday morning on NPR, I listened to a bit of “Speaking of Faith.” The show yesterday was called “The Inner Landscape of Beauty”, an interview with John O’Donohue, who died on January 3 of this year. I caught it about 15 minutes from the end and the host then mentioned that the entire recording was available on their website - so I’ve downloaded it to my iPod and can listen to the full thing on the train tomorrow because what I did hear was actually quite engaging. While it’s been clearly established that I’m not a religious person, I can appreciate a general sense of spirituality - not tied into any all-powerful divine being, but just appreciating our lives as being worthy of reverence because they are fleeting and short. I might listen to the full thing and find myself turned off completely by god-talk, but I’ve transcribed a bit from the end that really struck me. He was speaking about how our world/society/external factors don’t really support the recognition and encouragement of beauty - and how we can recognize it ourselves:

When is the last time that you had a great conversation? A conversation which wasn’t just two intersecting monologues, which is what passes for conversation a lot in this culture, but when [you] had your last great conversation in which you overheard yourself saying things you never knew you knew. That you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you thought you had lost. And a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the two of you on a different plane and then, fourthly, a conversation that continued to sing in your mind for weeks afterwards, you know? And I’ve had some of them recently and it’s just absolutely amazing. They’re like, as we would say at home, food and drink for the soul.

He continued to talk about how what you’re reading is also important to your experience of the world - and that you need to stretch your boundaries that way, too.

This evening, I took a friend from work rock-climbing with me (well, she climbed - I belayed, which was fine). We were pretty friggin’ hungry afterwards, so we decided to get Ethiopian food in the nearby town of Montclair (where my apartment used to be - and a tear trickles down my cheek).

I’ve been to this Ethiopian restaurant, Mesob, before (their site is down at the moment, but there are details on baristanet). However, work-friend hadn’t had Ethiopian food before, and I find it’s one of those things that can regain its “first timey-ness” when you get to introduce someone to it. Num-nums.

If you’re not familiar with Ethiopian food (and, please, save the “What? They have food?” jokes for your NASCAR-watching relatives) you are served on a large platter lined with a flatbread called injera (I think of it as being much more like a crepe than a flatbread - the texture, consistency and appearance are that of an extremely large crepe) made from teff flour. Teff is a grain/grass; they grind it up into a flour, mix it with water and let it ferment for a few days. Once it’s become a bit like a sourdough, it’s baked into huge thin rounds (about the size of a dinner plate) that are soft and spongy and bubbly and sourdough-tasting.

Your entrees (various meat and vegetable dishes) are spooned atop this largest piece of injera. They’re all a bit stew-like and wet; you tear off pieces of the bread (you have another plate full of it) and use it to pick up mouthfuls of your entree by the fingerful.  Or thumb and index finger-full, anyway. No utensils. Just your hands and the bread and the stuff that you’ll be picking up with it.

We shared a sampler platter consisting of several kinds of beef (spicy, mild and cubed with herbs), chicken, lamb, Portobello mushrooms, crushed chickpeas and green beans with carrots. I had some of their kemem shai - a glorious spiced black tea with cloves, cinnamon and cardamom - and my friend had their hibiscus tea. It was all so delicious. We tore through it, and there was still a good amount left, so the waitress packed it up for me to bring home (yippee! lunch tomorrow!!)

There’s another great Ethiopian place in New York called Meskerem. They have two or three locations in Manhattan now, but I’m familiar with the one down on MacDougal, near NYU (my old stomping grounds). I couldn’t find a main page for them, but I did find this entertaining review of one of the locations in the New York Times, all the way back from 1996. It starts:

Americans seem to have an innate fear of Ethiopian food: “Isn’t that the food you eat with your fingers?” people ask hesitantly, as if it were a vile practice.

Yes, same as with hamburgers.

When you think about it, what could be a sillier objection in a country where, for generations, people have been using their fingers to eat foods from knishes to pizza, to say nothing of hot dogs. If New Yorkers have had bad experiences with Ethiopian food, it’s likely that they’ve been to bad Ethiopian restaurants.

If that’s the case, Meskerem, which opened a year ago on a quiet block of 47th Street near 10th Avenue, can demonstrate how good Ethiopian food can be.

Take that, ignorami!!

Now I have some homework to do for work (not work-work, just some things to think about/brainstorm for a meeting in the morning) and I have to figure out what the HELL I’m going to wear tomorrow - for a high of 32°F and a low of 17°F. That’s not taking into account any wind chill, either.

After a very long (feeling) week, last night was a welcome change. My friend Sara and I went to the home of my friends Kofi and Theresa where we decided to make them dinner (since Theresa had treated us to amazing homemade black bean burgers the week before.)

We spent the entire week planning our (ultimately simple) menu. Soup, salad and dessert. Salad was simple - romaine lettuce, tomatoes, and artichoke hearts. But the soup! And the dessert! Boy, howdy.

THE SOUP: Sara follows many vegan cooking blogs and she sent me a link to a Valentine’s Day food competition on one of them where Liz of Food Snobbery is my Hobbery posted her recipe for Squash and Beet Dal.

OMG. A++++ WOULD BUY AGAIN!!

Roasted vegetables (I used butternut squash with the beets and onions), spices most often used in Indian cooking (mustard seed, coriander seed, fennel seed and cumin seed), garlic, tomatoes, red lentils and salt. That’s essentially the soup. It starts smelling awesome about, oh, a minute into the cooking process when you toss those spices into a pot with a little bit of hot canola oil (we used sesame) and they all start popping and releasing flavors and scents. Mmmm. I pureed the roasted vegetables before adding them so it would be a creamier soup, and also took about a third of the cooked lentil, tomato and spice portion of the soup (before adding the roasted veggies) and pureed that, too. It worked out nicely. And the color is just gorgeous - as you might imagine from something that’s got beets in it.

THE DESSERT: From PostPunkKitchen (ppk.com), Sara procured a recipe for vegan Apple Crisp… which she made with Bosc and Anjou pears and Roma apples. Mmmm.

OMFG - SECONDS! SWEET TREAT!
Warm and sweet and crispy and cinnamoney and syrupy and tangy and delicious. (And since I’m not a vegan, I gave myself a little extra treat of whipped cream on the side.) I can’t say too much about the preparation since she was peeling and coring and cutting up the fruit while I was working on the soup (so that we could put the crisp in the oven whilst we ate soup) but I didn’t hear her swearing or otherwise disliking the process. (Feel free to testify in the comments!) But so good - it just needs to sit for about fifteen minutes after you pull it out of the oven so you don’t burn your mouth and so the crispiness gets crispier and the syrupiness thickens up (cornstarch, ahoy!)

All in all, we decided that we done good.

We each took some soup home with us to relive the glory. And I’ll probably make it again sometime. Though in a smaller serving since this was a LOT for one person to enjoy. It was a lot for four people to enjoy, though I did increase the recipe by about a half since serving sizes/yield weren’t provided and it seemed that the author of the recipe was cooking for two… so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to make more.

A three-day weekend is also quite enjoyable (even if it fills me with the usual “what will I do with this extra free time?” worry). On Monday, I can bum around the bookstore… maybe take myself to see a movie - but a less serious one this time. Far less serious - like “The Spiderwick Chronicles” mayhaps? I haven’t read those kids’ books, but I remember that the trailer in the theatres looked pretty creepy for a kids’ book/movie.

Yesterday was action-packed indeed. I got a haircut, went shopping and had lunch with my friend Sara, then got tea at a diner with my friend Theresa and went shoe-shopping. We actually found some great shoes on sale for 65-75% off their original cost. I ended up buying two pairs and paying $37. I felt all savvy. It almost makes up for having purchased a $170 pair of shoes a few months ago. Here they are:

The black ones will be getting a lot of mileage indeed; the red ones won’t get as much, but they’re still cool as hell and I wear a lot of black, so they can be my little “pop” of color.

Now for the adventure. I got home from shoe-shopping and left again 15 minutes later to pick up my friend Vin and drive 80 miles south on the Garden State Parkway to check out the only Sonic Drive-In in the state of New Jersey.

For many months now, Northern New Jersey has been “infected” with Sonic TV commercials. Whenever it comes up in conversation, people get pretty vocal about it - “Why the hell do they show those commercials here? It’s a tease… we don’t even have a Sonic within 2 hours of us!” There are active message boards of people just whining about it.

Well, technically, we do have one within 2 hours of us - it’s an hour and a half away. It is sort of in the middle of nowhere, though. We passed by a power plant that looked a bit freaky since the lights in the parking lot and on the various buildings were a strange orange color and the fog in the air was glowing orange above the trees. Creepy. I expected the car to stall, radio stations to change, and Mulder and Scully to knock on my door.

NOTE: just checked it out online. I remember the sign outside the facility said “Amergen.” Well, folks, that building was the Oyster Creek Generating Station in Ocean County, NJ - a nuclear power plant. So, if this was a TV show, that glowing might’ve been indicative of something more sinister and weird than just orange-colored light bulbs in the parking lot. It’s owned by the same company that runs the Three Mile Island Facility. That’s just some trivia - I am actually pretty comfortable with nuclear energy as a source of clean power.

Anyway - Sonic. It was an interesting cultural experience. Vin’s first comment was, “Wow, it actually IS a drive-in.” The commercials don’t play up that part, so we weren’t quite prepared for our first-time Sonic experience — parking in the drive-in space, placing the order at your personal menu board, paying via credit card at the board and waiting for the server to bring a tray or box of food out to the car. Some of the servers were actually sporting roller skates. And, hey, that’s fun.

We sampled burgers, fries, popcorn chicken, their limeade and a root beer float. My brother requested that I bring back some food, so I brought a cooler and an insulated lunch bag for his corn dog, chili dog, and Sonic Blasts. Then we made the long drive back, in a sudden torrential downpour, which got me home about midnight.

Adventure!

I love this cereal. Trader Joe’s Super Nutty Toffee Clusters. Yup. There are pecans and brazil nuts and almond slices and these crunchy toffee clusters. And flakes. But the other stuff is the more exciting bit.

I’ve been sitting here, watching episodes of “Lost” on the ABC website (I started watching season 1 on Friday night since I’d never watched an episode and I think it’s good to be hip with the pop culture. Let me say that the thing that bothers me most about the show is that I can’t suspend my disbelief that a group of this many overly attractive and photogenic people would be on one flight and all end up surviving. They really should’ve cast a larger percentage of average-looking people. I mean, really - how many guys with impossibly blue eyes could there be, as well as an overabundance of extremely fit people. There are two people who represent anyone with a BMI greater than 12%) and munching on handfuls of this cereal, dry.

It’s just tasty. If you’ve got a Trader Joe’s near you (and don’t have any nut allergies) this cereal must make it onto your shopping list.

In other food news, my friends and I made a kick-ass chili last night - and brownies. We made plans to hang out and watch Hell House, a documentary about a haunted house, called a “hell house”, put on by a fundamentalist Christian church down in Texas, and Shoot ‘Em Up, a laughably bad (and I think somewhat self-aware in that way) action flick with Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti.

For the chili, we used bison meat because it’s leaner and higher in protein than beef, and was also the only meat at the supermarket that was designated as being free of hormones and antibiotics. I browned that, and then we threw in some onion and garlic. Then, some crushed tomatoes, tomato paste and herbs and spices: cilantro, cayenne pepper, chili powder, a dash of basil, black pepper and salt. Finally, dark red and light red kidney beans, black beans, some splashes of beef broth as it reduced down… and a few squares of 70% dark chocolate at the very very end (once everything was all cooked up and soaked in lovely flavors.) We bought a loaf of whole wheat ciabbatta bread and warmed that up in the oven so it was good and toasty - and had that crusty goodness (with some butter) along with the chili.

Num-num-nums. And then we made brownies. Since the chili was from scratch, we felt perfectly justified making the brownies from a mix - but with add-ins. They were dark chocolate fudge brownies and we threw in chopped up Reese’s Peanut Butter cups. Num-num-nums.

And I am making myself hungry right now, despite having eaten not long ago. I’ll just have to cook up something tasty tomorrow.

Another installment of things that I find entertaining or interesting. Yay!

• A reading meme from someone named Eva (not me). I’ll be writing up my version later tonight.

• Hey, Mac users with Netflix accounts! Soon you, too, will be able to take advantage of the Netflix instant-viewing feature on your computers! That’s right - Netflix announced that they’re working on a Mac-compatible version of the online instant-viewing service. Not surprisingly, the thing holding it back has been that Netflix uses a Microsoft-based DRM service that only works with Windows. Gizmodo said it best, “only holdup is/has been the lack of a Mac-native DRM system that Hollywood approves as sufficiently draconian.”

• “Loneliness is marked by a sense of isolation. Solitude, on the other hand, is a state of being alone without being lonely and can lead to self-awareness.” That’s what I’m talking about. Thank you, Psychology Today, for this little article about the difference. I’ve been accused of being “lonely” - but I think my friends would disagree. I like my alone-time, truly, and sometimes I may feel lonely (that goes with the depression, I think) but overall, I think I’m far more of a lover of solitude than a sad and lonely person.

• Cookthink.com: A very cool idea for a site: “To find a recipe based on what you’re craving, plug up to eight tags into our Cookthink search tool.” Some more info in the little screen portion below. I was craving scallops and dill. So I popped those in. It brings up a little cloud of additional foods/ingredients you can click - or not. Submit those and voila - a recipe for Spicy Scallops With Bell Pepper, Fennel and Dill (that does sound quite good. Too bad I’m going to dinner at a vegetarian restaurant with friends tonight.) If it’s not quite what you want, you can click on a “show me more recipes” link, and you get other things in the same “family” - Barley, Zucchini And Tomato Salad With Mint was one of the secondary results for the shrimp and tomato search.

• Smart kids read “Lolita”? - Books That Make You Dumb [site]

Ever read a book (required or otherwise) and upon finishing it thought to yourself, “Wow. That was terrible. I totally feel dumber after reading that.”? I know I have. Well, like any good scientist, I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality. How might one do this? Well, here’s one idea.

Amusing, if nothing else. Their “methodology” is pretty interesting, too.

• YouAreBeautiful stickers - a cool community art/social commentary project. Their artists/mission statement is:

You Are Beautiful is a simple, powerful statement which is incorporated into the over absorption of mass media and lifestyles that are wrapped in consumer culture.

The intention behind this project is to reach beyond ourselves as individuals to make a difference by creating moments of positive self realization. We’re just attempting to make the world a little better.

Intention is the most important aspect of the You Are Beautiful project in its idea of purity. Nothing is sacred. Everything that has a perceived value becomes commodified. We work extremely hard that this message is received as a simple act of kindness, and nothing more.

Advertising elicits a response to buy, where this project elicits a response to do something. The attempt with You Are Beautiful is to create activism instead of consumerism.

You Are Beautiful uses the medium of advertising and commercialization to spread a positive message.
Projects like these make a difference in the world by catching us in the midst of daily life and creating moments of positive self realization.

Send an SASE (and maybe a few dollars - though they’re not required) and they’ll send you some stickers that say “you are beautiful.” Or you can download and print your own. Adhere them to things, take pictures, and send them in for posting on the site. They’ve done huge wall and billboard installations of the same sentiment.

There. I just revealed the tree-hugging hippie portion of myself.

I read today that one of my favorite music videos of all time (and definitely of 2007) for a song I really like was selected by Directors File as one of their top ten videos of 2007. Well, yeah. I know I’ve posted it before, but I think that was on the “old” blog, so here it is on the new - “What’s a Girl to Do?” by Bat for Lashes.

And one that’s quickly moved to a top position in 2008 (though that’s not a big deal since it’s only the 22nd of January) is this one by Hot Chip for “Ready for the Floor.” Other versions have been pulled down by the record company (when will they learn??) so here’s hoping this one stays up for a bit:

The video made me love the song. The song made me really like the band (and yes, I downloaded some free mp3s from music blogs to learn this), and THEN I bought their previous CD and pre-ordered the upcoming CD from Amazon. They got $30 of my consumer spending dollars. See how that works?

Also, I want to make this herb bread.

All right then. “O Fortuna” is up in my playlist. I think I’ll call it a night after that thunderous finish and finally finish reading “Seeing.”