fly to el paso, rent a car, grab some tamales, drive 3.5 hours west-northwest. you end up in marfa, tx. a neat place, with yurts. art's not bad either.
the winds have stopped, it's cold out and bright, and the heat is on. robert byron's road to oxiana recalls a much earlier time in travel, and neil young and crazy horse are on the turntable.
marfa is 3 hours fast drive from el paso, which has few charms for me except a panoply of tamale shops. in marfa, you can see donald judd's 100 untitled works in mill aluminum. the pieces are all of the same external dimension, but inner volumes are all variations on a theme and no two are the same. in the light that washes in through the enormous windows on the east and west walls, the mill aluminum surfaces of these massive boxes dissolve and become transparent. these two images are of the inside of the second shed. an unsettling yet quiet place, where solidity and evanescence coexist.
mugaritz is one of the vanguard restaurants (the owner worked at el bulli before setting up on his own). their kitchen burned down about a few days ago, and this video by this season's stagiaires captures some of the last days at the restaurant.
not quite everything, but with brilliant little comic twists. thx ben
rob carter's paper cutout visual history of charlotte NC. monty python-esque and worth seeing.
TONIGHT: Mon, Feb 8, 6pm. TAMPOPO, in the Adams Pool Theater in Harvard Square (map). Free and open to the public. Introduced by Tom Levenson (MIT). The ultimate movie on food and sex. A struggling single mother, with the help of a cowboy truck driver, aims heroically high to make the best ramen noodles. Told in parallel, the story of an epicurean white-suited gangster and his girlfriend whose pursuit of pleasures involve doing interesting things with live shrimp in bed. Woven around this core are episodes turning social hierarchies and connoisseurship on their heads, culminating in triumphal noodles and a death speech about yam sausages. For more information, see IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. IMPORTANT: If you do not have a Harvard undergraduate (College) ID card, you must arrive at the Pool Theater by 6.15pm to be admitted.More details at www.food24fps.com
nothing better than waking up in sheets line-dried in the cold. (and it's been cold.)
(for context, see da vinci's resume)
If it worked for Leonardo da Vinci, maybe it could work for me. The next time I'm looking for a job, I'll try this:"Most Illustrious Proprietor, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled developers of applications of business, and that the invention and operation of the said programs are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Company, showing your Management my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.
1. I have a sort of extremely light and strong functions and modules, adapted to be most easily ftp'd, and with them you may pursue, and at any time combine them with others, secure and indestructible by standard mean time to failure of hardware and denial of service, easy and convenient to compile and catalog. Also methods of unzipping and storing the data of the customers.
2. I know how, when a website is besieged, to shard data onto the cloud, and make endless variety of mirrors, and fault tolerant disks and RAIDs, and other machines pertaining to such concerns.
3. If, by reason of the volume of the data, or the structure of the btrees and its indexes, it is impossible, when conducting a search, to avail oneself of sub-second response time, I have methods for benchmarking every process or other function, even if it were interpreted, etc.
4. Again, I have kinds of functions; most convenient and easy to ftp; and with these I can spawn lots of data almost resembling a torrent; and with the download of these cause great terror to the competitor, to his great detriment and confusion.
5. And if the processing should be on the desktop I have apps of many machines most efficient for data entry and reporting; and utilities which will satisfy the needs of the most demanding customers and users and consumers.
6. I have means by secret and tortuous scripts and modules, made without leaving tracks, to generate source code, even if it were needed to run on a client or a server.
7. I will make secure firewalls, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the hackers with their utilities, there is no body of crackers so great but they would break them. And behind these, software could run quite unhurt and without any hindrance.
8. In case of need I will make big properties, methods, and collections and useful forms, out of the common type.
9. Where the operation of compiling might fail, I would contrive scripts, functions, routines, and other parameter driven processes of marvellous efficacy and not in common use. And in short, according to the variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means of data entry, reporting, and storage.
10. In times of low revenue I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and to the equal of any other in maintenance and the refactoring of code public and private; and in guiding data from one warehouse to another.
11. I can carry out code in Javascript, PHP, or C, and also I can do in network administration whatever may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may.
Again, the intranet app may be taken in hand, which is to be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of all your customers of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Google.
And if any of the above-named things seem to anyone to be impossible or not feasible, I am most ready to make the experiment in your data center, or in whatever place may please your Businessperson - to whom I commend myself with the utmost humility, etc."
"Seymour once said to me – in a crosstown bus, of all places – that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold."[thx mrm]
j.d salinger, franny and zooey
francisco migoya is an amusing individual.
One of the strangest desserts I've had was simply a long rectangle of meringue with the name of an island stenciled on it (I think it was Tahiti). I didn't get it. Was it supposed to be white like the sand of an island, hence I am eating the island? I thought for many days after eating this meringue about its meaning.
We had made this ganache before to fill large Valentine's Day chocolate hearts, using not only cream that was steeped with bacon, but we also dehydrated bacon, pulverized it and added it to the mix. The flavor in the heavy cream alone does not add enough flavor, you have to add actual bacon. Why fill hearts with bacon ganache? Because bacon = love.
We were talking about these guys in Spain who were making something called foams. The notion was so novel and exciting we just had to try it and we did. And it was fun because it worked and it was easy and you could do all sorts of funky flavors and combinations. We used it a lot. Too much maybe. And then the world was drowned in foam. But what I have also come to realize is that there hasn't been that much going on when it comes to bread.
seems to be a theme around these parts. observations from repeated attempts at cooking the same thing:
i got a text message from ike this afternoon, midway through a day spent in tantalizing proximity to, but not actually in the presence of, natural light: am i interested in a spanish wine educational seminar? what i know about spanish wines fits comfortably in a small glass, but amor sciendi, etc. so evening falls and a table of eight assembles at taberna de haro. deborah hansen, who knows her spanish wines, is doing another one in her occasional series of seminars about the wines of spain. so much of the pleasure of learning about things is acquiring the stories that form the fine texture of knowledge around facts (which are useful, admittedly, when playing trivial pursuit). we got some of that tonight. the five riojas, in order:
so, the wines were tasty. these riojas did not make me think of any identifiable fruit; in every instance, the flavours (separately from the aromas) didn't make me think "plums" or "cherries" or whatever, only "fruity" or "not so fruity." instead, it was the bouquet that was, in two cases, both arresting at the time and memorable after. i like herbaceous, astringent reds and alcohols, and the lanzaga and arbanta are the only two inexpensive reds i've ever run across that have the type of aromatic complexity analogous to that in cooked alkaloid-filled vegetables (like tea and bitter greens).2007 arbanta from bodegas biurko gorri ($11-ish). this is a style of wine intended to be drunk young. herbaceous (like patience gray's bitter greens), brisk with a bit of a salt, still fruity but dry in the mouth, and clean while still full-bodied. apart from the taste and aroma, the seasonality of the wine is appealing--it was meant to be drunk within the year, then replaced by a new year's wine.2006 crianza from vina real ($14-ish). a middle of the road glass about which i have neither notes nor a taste memory. i found it unobjectionable in every way though everyone else hated on it. at $14, i probably wouldn't buy it.2004 reserva from marques de murrieta ($22-ish). this one was neat. it had a light body without being lightweight, dry in the mouth, yet with enough acid to be refreshing and crisp. a sense of lightness. if it was a wood, it would be pennsylvania black cherry.1998 gran reserva from ramirez de la piscina ($35-ish). "velvet" is what i scribbled down. for a wine that i enjoyed a lot in the glass, i have almost no memory of it.2005 lanzaga from compania de telmo rodriguez (google failed me on price and availability). this was the weirdest one, but i liked it a lot--maybe i even liked it the most of the lot. it had the scent of a well-made cup of matcha, or some other tea that has been panfried rather than allowed to fully ferment. at the back of the mouth, it turned into alcohol fumes, but not in a bad way. it was dense. i think it may also be relatively inexpensive, which would be nice.
beverages: several weeks ago, hh was passing through on his way back to the exotic orient. we managed to get drinks at drink late in the afternoon. a dry pegu club, an excellent daiquiri (with barbancourt rum and a lot of lime), and a nightcap (lillet, gin, and aperol).
for general purposes, the egg consists of shell, whites, and yolk (by mass, approximately 10%, 59%, and 31% respectively). the average mass of an intact USDA-graded extra-large egg is 63g, of an intact USDA-graded large egg is 56g (sources disagree).
the approximate masses of whites and yolks for extra-large and large eggs: 37g/19.5g and 33g/17.5g.
this information is surprisingly difficult to discover on the internet. i know that you stay up at night wondering about these things.
