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Sentential Links #163

Clicking our way to happiness and fulfillment:

:: So we’re driving around, bickering, and Sarah says, “Whenever you call me a rule utilitarian it makes my womb clench.”

:: The question of whether we are alone in the Universe, and even if there are other planets capable of sustaining life, is certainly deeply ingrained in our minds. This is one of the biggest remaining unanswered philosophical questions in science!

:: Pics of celebs eating hot dogs. Get going. (And now I want a hot dog.)

:: DOLLHOUSE is disappointing so far; it’s like watching a guy do two seconds of juggling five butcher knives before he puts them down to show you slideshows of his Aunt Ethel visiting the Grand Canyon. (I still have yet to watch anything beyond the pilot episode, which I liked. I’ve got them all saved, but I haven’t watched them yet. I just liked this quote.)

:: I just want to say this: just because you’re a vegetarian doesn’t mean you don’t have to bathe.

:: What a fantastic story ! And what incredible music ! Don’t miss the experience of getting to know Wagner’s Ring. (A very nice classical music blog I’d forgotten I bookmarked.)

:: Full of excitement, danger and thrilling locations, this remains my favorite Bond film of them all. (Which one? Go look!)

:: When is endurance tenacity to be admired and when it is just plain bull headedness that goes against all common sense? What kind of criteria makes sense for determining when to hold on and when to let go?

:: But also, because this seems like a pretty darn good business to get into as long as we’re going to be having a Depression and nobody is going to be willing to pay musicians such as myself. After all, even jobless people will obviously be needing magical amulets: to help them get new jobs, to help them pay their bills, to help them get girlfriends even though their cars have been repossessed… (I want one that will bring me unending supplies of pizza and pie!)

:: DO NOT INSTALL IE8 ON VISTA HOME PREMIUM!!!!! (Aieee! That sounds disastrous. I had IE8 on the other computer, the XP machine, and while it wasn’t disastrous as SDB experienced with Vista, it completely gummed up the program I use to rip DVDs. So I switched back to IE7. Of course, none of this crap happens on a Mac!)

:: Wow it’s Leonard Nimoy’s birthday too! That man rocks, I love his acting, his photography, even his music! Now to celebrate the life of this true renaissance man here are 5 facts you may or may not have known about him! (I had no idea! Happy belated birthday, Mr. Nimoy!)

More next week. Tune in then. And before!

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Unidentified Earth #61

Time for this week’s puzzler! First, the usual housekeeping. UI 60 broke a streak of as-yet Unidentified entries, as Dave in Rocha pegged it fairly quickly as the giant letter ‘M’ that is maintained on the side of a mountain in Montana, overlooking the University of Montana in Missoula, MT. UIs 58 and 59 are still without guesses, though! Wow. I can imagine why no one would want to visit UI 58, as it is a place where one would find more cheer in a graveyard. UI 59 is rated as one of North America’s most scenic drives — when the road is open, that is.

So here’s the new one:

Where are we? Rot-13 your guesses, folks!

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“Will you take the longest road?”

Since finishing my re-read of The Fionavar Tapestry a week ago, I’ve been trying to think of something new to say about the trilogy. I re-read this series just three years ago, and many of those observations still hold. This is also the work of GGK’s with which I am most familiar over the years, so it doesn’t hold much for me by way of outright surprise. Still, I found myself throughout rooting for the characters, feeling a bit of the sense of betrayal when it turns out that Metran has turned against the Light, and the deep sorrow when Kevin Laine sacrifices himself in order to break the winter.

What I did notice anew this time was the character of Dave Martyniuk.

At the very end of The Darkest Road, Kim Ford reflects that of all five of the “real world” characters who have gone to Fionavar, Dave has changed the most, and on this re-read I got more, much more, of that sense. Previously I’ve tended to see Dave at first as something of a selfish jerk, but this time, I saw him probably more for what GGK intended: a nervous and tense man, driven to succeed but also very wary of not merely expressing his emotions but actually feeling them in the first place. Dave is reluctant to go to Fionavar at all, and he tries to break away in the transit, ending up alone on the northern plain, where he meets the Dalrei. His trials there lead him to make his own resolution with the internal conflicts he is fighting, most of which spring from his strained relationship with his father, a relationship that is emotionally, and possibly physically, abusive.

I further noticed that Dave Martyniuk, alone of all the major characters, is never really called upon to make a choice of self-sacrifice or self-denial. Instead, he becomes something else: a man who would be willing, if called upon, to make that choice when presented. Dave comes to terms with himself in a powerful way that I’d never noticed as strongly before.

Choice is really what drives this series, an endless series of choices presented to characters who can’t possibly be expected to know what it is they are choosing, and yet the choices are made each time; what’s more, the crisis that forms the spine of the series — the freeing of Rakoth Maugrim — is also depicted as the result of a series of choices made by many people in many places, over many years. The Fionavar Tapestry is not one of those fantasies where it seems as though everything that happens is in accordance with some ancient prophecy; there’s no sense that anything is truly fated to happen. In fact, the one group of characters who are tortured by the fact that they are trapped in a series of sad fates — Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere — are finally allowed the choices they’ve never been allowed before. The story of Fionavar derives enormous tension from the way characters make choices that may, or may not, turn out disastrous, and the moments of highest tension come from situations in which the choices the characters have are basically between “dying horribly now” and “dying horribly in a little while”.

So there we have it: Fionavar in 2009. I suppose I’m good for this series until 2013.

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Oddities abound!!!

:: In the “Weird as Totally Cool” Department: Lynn linked this bit about the largest model railroad layout in the world, which is located in Hamburg, Germany. There’s a video there, but you can actually see a better copy of that video at the official site for the Miniatur Wunderland. Amazing!

Here’s a detail shot from one cityscape of this amazing-looking railroad:

That’s some great modelmaking, there.

:: I dropped by BrightWeavings.net to see if there’s any news on the GGK front, and on the message boards, I found, amidst a discussion on literary snobbery, a link to someone’s LiveJournal wherein they reproduced a book with some truly staggeringly bad descriptive writing. Go look. It’s hilarious.

:: You never catch the fundraising pitch folks on Buffalo’s PBS station, WNED, rising to this level in order to part you from your money:

Now there’s a good sport! I hope the pledges came through for her; she should have had something to show for wearing Groucho glasses on the air and then getting hit with a pie.

:: I feel the need to revisit the Burst of Weirdness from three weeks ago, in which I questioned the need for a new version of Dora the Explorer that was described as “sexy”. Since then, I’ve seen the actual new Dora who is coming down the pike, and here she is:

Well, that’s not very offensive at all, is it? That’s about how The Daughter, who is in the “tween” age group, dresses, and so do many of her friends. Plus, it turns out that Tween Dora isn’t replacing Preschool Dora at all, but co-existing alongside. I’m not sure who encouraged the use of the word “sexy” to describe Tween Dora, but she’s not sexy at all. She’s a kid. Nothing to look at here, folks!

(Until, that is, Mattel decides to release Grown-up Dora….)

:: Speaking of Grown-up Dora, I thought I’d linked this a while back, and maybe I did, but a while back I saw a collection of grown-up renditions of Calvin and Hobbes somewhere, and this one really stuck in my mind:

To my way of thinking, that’s just perfect: older-Calvin still exploring those woods of his, but this time with Susie Derkins with him, an equal partner in all the exploration of that magical world we last saw C&H sledding off into. And Hobbes is along for the ride, even if in spirit only.

I grabbed this one from here; DeviantArt hosts a lot of other C&H fan renditions in an archive that’s worth searching through.

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Answering Anything! (Yet again)

Continuing with my answers to questions asked in Ask Me Anything! 2009, I have a set of queries posed by Dave in Rocha, one of the occasional posters at BfloBlog.com, Buffalo’s premier sports blog.

Do you buy into the concept of Tor-Buf-Chester? Do you think it can ever be a viable, marketable entity due to the fact that it crosses an international border? Are there other cross-border metro regions like this?

A bit of explanation: there’s a pundit out there named Richard Florida who has posited a notion that economic activity in the next, oh, hundred years or so and maybe beyond will be driven less by individual cities than by larger groups of cities — megalopolises, if you will. This isn’t a new concept, certainly; most people are, I assume, aware of the economic activity driven by the Boston-NYC-Philadelphia corridor in the Northeast, or the San Diego-LA-San Francisco corridor in the west. Florida also noted that Buffalo could itself be located in such a corridor, which he dubbed “Tor-Buf-Chester”, linking Toronto, Buffalo, and Rochester together into one larger economic entity.

So, do I buy into the concept? I do, with certain caveats. The biggest caveats are these: the region crosses an international border, and a big chunk of it lies in New York State, which is not a place that is particularly geared toward making economic activity easier. But I can see an era emerging in which Buffalo, and Rochester by extension, reap the benefits of proximity to Canada’s largest city and also its richest economic region, the “Golden Horseshoe” that extends from Niagara Falls all the way around the western end of Lake Ontario to Toronto, including St. Catherines and Hamilton. (In fact, Hamilton is itself a large city, so maybe the region should be named “Tor-Ham-Buff-Chester”. And really, why not include Syracuse as well? “Tor-Ham-Buff-Chester-Cuse” probably doesn’t roll of the tongue, but then, “Tor-Buf-Chester” sounds goofy as well.)

I’ve long believed that all the window-dressing Buffalo tries to do with regard to its image is just that: window dressing. Only the revival of Buffalo as an economic engine is going to really turn things around here, and there are a number of reasons — some local, some located in Albany — why that is currently unlikely to happen. Enacting policies that make a “Tor-Buf-Chester” type of entity a reality can only help, but as it stands right now, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of there there for people who want to talk about Tor-Buf-Chester as it is, right now.

Can you define the equation for the radiant exitance (aka emission) of a blackbody radiator as a function of wavelength? How, other than by taking the derivative, can you calculate the maximum point on that curve?

This question is in two parts, and so is my answer: “Yes”, and “By using math”.

Who is your favorite current Sabre?

Talking about “my favorite current Sabre” isn’t likely to be all that illuminating, because when it comes to hockey, I’m like that girl down at the local bar on game nights. You know, that girl. She’s the one who has never paid one single moment of attention to the sport that’s on the teevee right now until she started dating the guy she’s with right now, who happens to be a big fan of the sport on the teevee right now. She’s the girl newly dating the New York Yankees fan who declares herself a huge A-Rod fan because A-Rod’s kinda cute but can’t actually name the position he plays, cite his current batting average or home run total, or pick him out on the field. She’s the one who will nurse her drink all throughout the game and ask “When does A-Rod hit again?” when he’s already on base after his last at-bat. You know, that girl.

I may sound like I’m making fun, but I’m really not. When it comes to hockey, I’m that girl. Seriously. I don’t know much more about hockey than “Shoot the puck into the net.” I don’t know what “icing” is. I don’t know a forward from a defenseman. When it comes to the Sabres, I know when they’re winning and when they’re losing, and that’s about it. Put it this way: back in the 1990s, when the NHL was actually on teevee on a real network, that network — whichever one it was — thought it would help new hockey viewers to superimpose a blue dot over the puck, wherever it was, and then when the puck was shot, superimpose a red laser streak thing, theoretically to help solve the problem that on teevee, it’s hard to see the puck unless you’re an experienced hockey watcher and can thus infer the puck’s location just by taking in what the players are doing. Well, I was the viewer helped out by the blue dot over the puck.

So yeah, me identifying my favorite Sabre doesn’t mean much. But for the record, it’s Ryan Miller, just because of that funny ad he did last year.

When will then be now?

It already was. You missed it.

There’s only one question left, which will come…soon. Heh!

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Know Thyself!

UPDATE: Some correct guesses are in, as noted below. Another day or two and I’ll give out the rest of the answers.

What this blog needs to jazz things up is…a quiz! So, here’s a quiz. The following are quotes from fictional characters. Some are from movies, some from comics, some from books. Each quote has the speaker describing himself or herself. Identify the characters. Fun wow!

1. “I’m the best there is at what I do, but what I do best isn’t very nice.”

(Wolverine from The Uncanny X-Men

2. “In this town, I’m the leper with the most fingers.”

3. “You like me because I’m a scoundrel. There aren’t enough scoundrels in your life.”

(Han Solo in TESB)

4. “I’m the only cause I’m interested in.”

5. “I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the Flame of Anor.”

(Gandalf in Lord of the Rings: FOTR)

6. “I play videogames better than anybody.”

7. “Whacking. I’m hell at whacking.”

(John Book in Witness)

8. “I have an extensive collection of nametags and hairnets.”

(Wayne in Wayne’s World)

9. “I wanna be just like you. I figure all I need is a lobotomy and some tights.”

10. “I washed my face and hands before I come, I did.”

(Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady)

Who are these folks?

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Chicken Wing Soup, version 2.0

FINAL UPDATE: This post has become pretty unwieldy over the years, so please go to this page for the best and most current version of this recipe! Thanks!

UPDATED AGAIN 9-15-2013 with instructions for making a gluten-free version of this soup!!! See below.

EDITED AGAIN on MARCH 27, 2011! See below.

UPDATED BELOW on NOVEMBER 10, 2010.

A couple of weeks back I posted about my inaugural attempt at making Chicken Wing Soup. Yesterday, I gave it a second attempt, using some of the notions that I had already formulated from Batch Number One, and to my taste buds, this batch was significantly better than Batch Number One. So here is the recipe on which I have now settled:

Ingredients:

1.5 lb cooked chicken
1/2 lb potatoes, cooked and diced
1/4 cup Frank’s hot sauce

1 stick unsalted butter
1/2 cup flour

32oz Chicken stock
1 cup skim milk
1 cup lowfat sour cream
More Frank’s hot sauce or other hot sauce, to taste

Seasoned croutons for garnish

1. Cook and shred the chicken and marinade in the 1/4 cup hot sauce, the longer the better. (I marinated mine overnight until afternoon, about 18 hours.)

2. Put marinated chicken and potatoes into a crockpot and turn on “High”. Cover and let “crock” while you make the rest of the soup.

3. Melt the butter in a soup pot or stock pot over medium heat.

4. Add 1/2 of the flour and stir until it is completely mixed with the melted butter; then add the rest of the flour and continue stirring the roux until it is the color of light caramel, about three or four minutes.

5. Add the Chicken stock, milk, sour cream, and hot sauce, all at once. Turn up heat a bit, stirring constantly; taste and add more hot sauce if desired. Turn heat up again, and keep adjusting heat up a bit at a time, stirring all the while, until the soup is just reaching a boil. Allow the soup to boil for a minute or so, constantly stirring. (This allows the roux to thicken the soup.)

6. Pour the soup into the crock pot, over the chicken and the potatoes. Stir a few times, cover, and allow to crock on “High” for an hour or so. After that, to keep warm turn the pot down to “Low” until serving.

7. When serving, sprinkle seasoned croutons on top; best eaten with thick slices of crusty bread with butter. Even better with a cold beer!

Notice that this time I omitted the aromatics, opting not to saute onions and celery in the roux before adding the stock, milk and cream. I may go back to doing this in the future; this probably does make for a more complexly flavorful soup. This time I was mainly interested in getting the consistency and flavor exactly right, and this formula resulted in a really good product. I made this for a potluck dinner at church last night. I went in with a crockpot full of soup. I came home with a nearly empty crockpot. That tells me something.

UPDATE 11-10-10 and 3-27-11: OK, I can’t ever quit tinkering. So I decided to try something a bit different when I made the soup again this weekend past.

I love the flavor of the soup as prepared above, but the one thing that always vexes me is that it doesn’t totally blend together the way I want it to — what I think happens is that the sour cream never really integrates into the soup, but rather breaks apart into a whole bunch of really tiny bits that are suspended in the rest of the liquid. This doesn’t really impact the flavor, but the creamy consistency is never quite what I want it to be.

So when I decided to make the soup again the other day, I thought of a change to make. I left out the sour cream, and instead used half-and-half. So, here is my newest formulation of the soup!

3-27-11: I’ve added details on optional aromatics to add to the soup. It’s in italics in the recipe below.

Ingredients:

1.5 lb chicken, cooked and shredded
1/2 lb potatoes, cooked and diced
1/4 cup Frank’s hot sauce

Optional Aromatics:
1 small onion, diced
2 stalks celery, diced
1 carrot, shredded

1 stick unsalted butter
1/2 cup flour

32oz Chicken stock (I use a “No sodium added” brand. This dish doesn’t really need any additional salt.)
1 cup skim milk
1 cup half-and-half
More Frank’s hot sauce or other hot sauce, to taste

Seasoned croutons for garnish

1. Cook and shred the chicken and marinade in the 1/4 cup hot sauce, the longer the better. (I marinated mine overnight until afternoon, about 18 hours.)

2. Put marinated chicken and potatoes into a crockpot and turn on “High”. Cover and let “crock” while you make the rest of the soup.

3. Melt the butter in a soup pot or stock pot over medium heat.

4. Add 1/2 of the flour and stir until it is completely mixed with the melted butter; then add the rest of the flour and continue stirring the roux until it is the color of light caramel, about three or four minutes.

4a. If you wish to use the Optional aromatics — and I do recommend it — add them to the roux at this point and stir them about for several minutes, until tender, allowing their flavor to sweat out.

5. Add the Chicken stock, milk, sour cream, and hot sauce, all at once. Turn up heat a bit, stirring constantly; taste and add more hot sauce if desired. Turn heat up again, and keep adjusting heat up a bit at a time, stirring all the while, until the soup is just reaching a boil. Allow the soup to boil for a minute or so, constantly stirring. (This allows the roux to thicken the soup.)

6. Pour the soup into the crock pot, over the chicken and the potatoes. Stir a few times, cover, and allow to crock on “High” for an hour or so. After that, to keep warm turn the pot down to “Low” until serving.

7. When serving, sprinkle seasoned croutons on top; best eaten with thick slices of crusty bread with butter. Even better with a cold beer!

Basically, it’s the same recipe except with half-and-half replacing the sour cream. This resulted in a much nicer, creamier, more consistent texture to the soup. I suppose that you could go farther and use 2 cups of half-and-half, or if you really want a rich dish, use heavy cream. But I don’t think the dish needs that much fat.

UPDATE 9-15-2013: If you need a gluten-free version of this soup, fret not! Omit the making of the roux above. Just leave it out. I’d still saute the aromatic veggies in the butter, just for richness, but do not use the flour. Instead, just make the soup without the roux. Then, toward the end of the cooking process (you can do this anytime when you’re about to serve), whisk a bit of cornstarch into a cup of cold milk or heavy cream, and then stir that into the soup to thicken it. And hey, you might not even need to do that, if you like the consistency without the thickeners at all.

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Something for Thursday

I tend to select more introspective, meditating, or downright sad pieces of music for this weekly feature, so here’s something upbeat. Longtime readers know that one of my favorite film composers working today is Joe Hisaishi, a guy whose work is unknown to most filmgoers because he works in Japanese cinema and anime exclusively. However, if you have seen anything by my beloved Hayao Miyazaki, you’ve heard Hisaishi’s music. Sometimes filmmakers find themselves using certain composers on an almost exclusive basis, forming partnerships that result in great film music for great films. Examples include Steven Spielgerg/John Williams*, Alfred Hitchcock/Bernard Herrmann, and to a lesser extent, Robert Zemeckis/Alan Sylvestri.

Anyhow, here is a selection by Joe Hisaishi, from his score to Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. The track is titled “Procession of the Spirits”, and it is heard early in the film when night falls and all the ghostly spirit patrons begin to file into the magnificent bathhouse where strange supernatural things are afoot. In Hisaishi’s best scores he is able to combine Asian and Western musical ideas almost seamlessly, with wonderful and magical effect. Enjoy — here’s “Procession of the Spirits”. (There’s nothing to watch here; it’s just a title card accompanied by the music.)

Isn’t that great!

* Trivia question: What is the only feature film directed by Steven Spielberg whose score was not composed by John Williams?

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Providing Answers!

More answers to questions asked as part of Ask Me Anything! 2009. Roger‘s other queries are below:

What would fix the image of Buffalo?

Seeing as how national media and national discourse is so driven by narrative, and seeing as how Buffalo’s place in the national narrative is that of the perennial sad sack, I think that the only thing that’s really going to ever “fix” the image of this city is a major economic turnaround here. And when I say “major”, I don’t just mean “stopping the bleeding” or even “establishing consistent growth and an end to population decline”. I think Buffalo’s image only changes if this town becomes a boom town; then and only then will Buffalo be spoken of in terms that, say, Charlotte or Austin, TX are spoken of now.

Can this happen? I used to think it would; now I still think it could, although I’m doubtful it will because I just don’t see anything ever leading to the kinds of changes that need to take place in New York’s state government to make Buffalo and the rest of upstate move upward strongly as likely to happen. It’s just the way things are. And that’s the most frustrating thing: there’s no unrepealable Law of Nature that says that Buffalo has to stay the poor Rust Belt doomtown forever, just as there was no unrepealable Law of Nature that said that Buffalo of 1900 had to stay the technological boomtown of the US forever.

It can happen. There are things that I think would help it to happen. (A significantly more business-friendly attitude in New York State, more freedom in cross-border business with Canada, infrastructure improvements to take advantage of Buffalo’s location, et cetera.) I’m not banking on any of these things actually happening. Oh well.

Loss of sight or loss of hearing: which would be worse?

Loss of hearing. No question about it. I could figure out how to live a fine literary life if blind. It would be hard, but I’d figure out how to read.

But no more music? I want no part of that.

If the performer came to Buffalo, who would you, without real regard to cost, definitely see?

I’m taking this to mean, “Assume that you can get tickets affordably, no matter who it is.” Hmmmmm. If Howard Shore ever comes by to conduct the BPO in any of his various Lord of the Rings concerts, I’d be there in a heartbeat.

What is the definition of taterti, the WV for today?

For those who may not understand, “WV” stands for “word verification”, the string of characters you type into Blogger’s comment box to show that you’re a person and not a spambot. On Blogger these used to be literally strings of random characters, but lately they seem like actual words, or sometimes by luck turn out to be actual words, leading to a kinda-sorta blog game where people give definitions to the fake WV words. OK? OK!

Anyway, Roger’s WV at the time he left this comment was “Taterti”. This is an Italian word that means “potato-ish”. This word doesn’t get much use in Italian, but it is sporadically used in musical scores, when the composer wishes the low brass to produce a sound that resembles that of a potato farmer lumbering through the potato patch. Notable works that include such a direction are Brahms’s Symphony No. 5 in B Sharp Minor, Franck’s Quadruple Concerto and Requiem Mass, and Leroy Anderson’s Elegy for the Death of the Spider in my Bathroom.

More answers to come!

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All it needs is a laser

As a proud Maintenance Man, at The Store I have a nicely impressive tool bag, full of all manner of nifty hand tools and whatnot. Someday I’ll post pictures of my tools, just because I think tools are cool (I’ve come to the point where walking into Lowe’s or Home Depot gives me much the same feeling that walking into a toy store did when I was a kid). I actually have two tool bags, both of which I push around The Store in a shopping cart (we have a new style of cart, two-tiered but shorter, which are ideal for this purpose), along with my 18V DeWalt cordless drill, a Stanley hardware box, and a small electrical repair kit (which I have yet to use, as I know nothing about electrical repair — but I keep hoping).

However, there are also several other tools that I don’t keep in the bags but rather right on my person, so if I encounter a quick fix, I’m all set. I always have a 30′ tape measure clipped to my belt, a utility knife and a Swiss Army knife in one pocket and a small flashlight in the other (this flashlight is uncommonly bright, actually, since it has twelve LED bulbs. I always carry a small notepad, a pen and a mechanical pencil, and a telescoping magnet in my back pocket. The telescoping magnet is incredibly useful. Also, I carry a pair of wire-cutters, or diagonal pliers, as they’re technically known (also called “dikes” by old-timers).

But the real important tool that’s always on my person — my Walther PPK, my wand from Ollivander’s, my lightsaber — is my multi-driver. It’s made by Klein Tools, and this thing has saved my life (figuratively, obviously) on many occasions. Now, way back when, I sang the praises of Klein tools and their 10-in-1 driver, but now they’ve pushed the envelope a little farther: the 10-in-1 has been supplanted by the 11-in-1. This thing has two Philips tips, two slotted screw tips, two square-drive tips, two Torx tips, and three nut drivers.

Oh yeah. I am the Tool Master.

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