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Sentential Links #83

Here are this week’s links, as selected by my rigorous selection committee. Except it’s not a committee. And it’s not that rigorous, either.

:: The idea, however, that at this moment in history one could still regard a Bush-Carter foreign policy comparison as unflattering to Bush is preposterous.

:: So, as we start the 45-day “month” of Black History, think about how people of different ethnicities can get real without rancor. And please let me know what that looks like.

:: I will never give up on the delicious experience of curling up in a cozy chair with a good book…but the chance to make use of car time to get lost in some stories is something I appreciate as well. (See, I’ve never really been able to get into the audio-book thing. I’d rather listen to sports-talk radio and yell at the hosts or the callers, or listen to the classical station and play “Name that composer!” in my head.)

:: I think there needs to be a basic unit of measurement for home repair, a way to gauge how long it will take to get a particular tinkering or puttering job done.

The Tinker Unit or t.u. (Seems like every week Lance writes a post that makes me want to kill myself because I didn’t write it. This is the one. I’m not sure if there’s any proper way to measure a unit of time for a ‘tinker unit’, but I’d posit the difference between a putter and a tinker as a tinker being a job where the right tool is not immediately obvious, and may actually involve using a tool for something other than its intended purpose. But you have to be careful here; this presupposes a knowledge of tools. Throwing some paint on a bare patch of fence doesn’t go from “putter” to “tinker” just because you used a brand-new chisel to open the paint can.)

:: I’m sure you’ve noticed that the threat of bad weather always sets off a shopping frenzy. (It does? Really? Hmmmm….)

:: Humanity’s Prime Directive should not be avoidance, but instead compassionate action. (Lynn pointed this one out. Looks like a very fascinating blog. This post is about the Prime Directive on Star Trek, which I’ve never been able to make up my mind about. I think that the idea is that moral lessons are best learned the hard way, and human interference removes the hard way, so to speak. But sometimes, as in the example episode this blogger cites, the resulting non-interference seems at least as morally wrong as the interference, if not moreso.)

:: The question now is, what do I do with them? (You play Godzilla and stomp on them, of course!)

:: A proper digital classical music store has finally arrived on the Web. (Oh, wow. I’ve been mulling over upgrading to DSL ever since we upgraded to this spiffy new computer, and this may be the deciding factor.)

:: A short story that starts with a guy whipping it out can only end in disaster.

All for this week. As noted, the “Special Edition” of Sentential Links, comprising reader-nominated links to the best things they read in 2006, will appear sometime later this week. So for the LOVE OF GOD, if you have a submission in that regard, SPEAK NOW!!!

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Further gnashing! Further rending!!

OK, I was going to do Sentential Links and all, but right now Blogger is moving with all the speed of the contents of a refrigerated bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s, so I’m just going to call it a blogging day. Grrrr.

I’ll be doing that “Special Sentential Links” thing later this week, so here’s one last call for nominations/submissions.

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Gnash, gnash, rend, rend

Oh, San Diego Chargers — how on Earth could you get the upper hand on the New England Stupid Patriots, and then just basically say, “You know what, we don’t want this game! You guys take it!” Gahhh, it makes me vomit. Idiotic penalties (headbutting a StuPat right in front of the ref, after you’ve sacked Brady on fourth down?!), selfish play (attempting an interception return into heavy traffic, resulting in a fumble), and an amazingly bad coaching decision (challenging a call that had so clearly been the correct call that not even the Charger faithful were cheering when Schottenheimer threw the red flag)? Giving LaDanian Tomlinson one carry in their drive after the StuPats had tied it up, and going pass-wacky, resulting in two incompletions and a three-and-out?

Between all that, and that “But I’m the Anointed One! I’m supposed to be winning!” look on Tom Brady’s face for most of the game, that game was the most vomitous football watching experience I’ve had since…whatever the last time the StuPats won the Super Bowl was.

Go Colts. (Sure, that always ends well….)

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Multiple items this week!

:: Via FanDumb, I see that Vladimir Putin recently toured a new intelligence headquarters in Moscow. Nothing weird about that, really, except for the insignia inlaid on the floor of the lobby:

If anyone can tell me why the Hell the Russians have put a big Batman logo on the floor of their new intelligence HQ building, please do. I’m all ears. I wonder if the passwords to enter various areas in the HQ are quotes from the old Adam West Batman teevee show?

:: PZ Myers points out a bit of modelcraft that mixes geek culture with a love of candy. An intrepid individual has constructed a model of Helm’s Deep from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers out of candy.

:: This isn’t weirdness per se, but it interests me to see that the “format war” between Blu-ray discs and HD-DVD may well be over, because of the decision made by the industry not usually mentioned as a big driving force behind the development of content-distribution technologies: the porn industry. And yet, the involvement of the porn industry is almost never mentioned in articles I’ve read that discuss things like the development of paid Web content or, going back farther, to the Betamax/VHS format war. Steven Den Beste noted (scroll down a bit):

Porn has led the way in new media for the last 30 years or more. It was porn which established the pre-recorded videotape industry, for instance. In more recent history, the first successful commercial web sites selling proprietary content were selling porn, and they worked out all the necessary details about accepting payment and creating per-customer logins and preventing those logins from being abused by being spread around and protecting their content from non-members.

Porn led the way on selling downloadable video online, too. The first download-and-burn-your-own DVDs were full of nekkid wimmen. There have been “mainstream” conventions regarding commercialization of the web where successful porn site operators were invited to speak to explain to “legitimate” site operators how it was done.

Interesting stuff. (Of course, I’m one who isn’t sure why we need a new format already in the first place. Don’t people like to own things for more than a handful of years anymore before having to replace it?)

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Behold my mad pizza skills!

I mentioned a while back that The Wife and I decided to use some Christmas money to strike one item from our long-term wish list: the KitchenAid mixer. So far we’ve used it a number of times, and it’s just a wonderful, wonderful thing. It’s totally worth the loss of a significant chunk of our counter space. (In this apartment, we don’t have a lot of counter space.) Not only does the mixer allow us to avoid the sore-arm syndrome that comes with using a hand-held mixer for more than two or three minutes at a time, but it allows us to do more involved recipes that would be totally impractical with a hand-held. Case in point: pizza dough.

For a long time I’ve been wanting to make my own Chicago-style deep dish pizza. Two nights ago, with the help of the mixer, I got my wish. Here’s how it all went down. I used this recipe, which I’ll annotate with pictures.

First, there’s the mixing of the ingredients to make a batter; then you add the remaining flour to turn the batter into a dough. If you’ve ever had the fortune (or misfortune, as the case may be) to work at Pizza Hut, this dough turns out to be slightly less sticky than Stuffed Crust dough, but it’s pretty close to that.

The recipe says to put it on the counter to rise and cover with a large bowl, but since I don’t have that much counter space, I put it in the bowl and covered it with a damp towel. Here’s the dough before rising:

And here it is after doubling in bulk.

The fist there belongs to The Daughter, who was tickled at the concept of punching down the dough. Now you let it rise a second time, again to double in bulk. While the dough is rising, you have plenty of time to get the tomato mixture ready and do some other topping preparation. Here’s Your Fearless Narrator, frying up some bulk Italian sausage for the pies:

(Hey, why don’t chefs wear overalls? You get lots of pockets for holding thermometers and utensils and whatnot, they pretty much eliminate the need for an apron, and you can hang a towel off the hammer-loop. The stuff I think of….)

Finally, the dough is done with its second rising, which turns out to take less time than the first:

That red mixing bowl on the right contains my tomato mixture. The recipe calls for a large can of plum tomatoes, but I prefer smaller chunks, so I went with two 14-oz. cans of diced tomatoes, to which I added some garlic, basil, oregano, salt, and pepper.

We punch it down again, and then start putting it into the pans. These are regular nine-inch cake pans. You rub them with oil, dust them with cornmeal (the recipe doesn’t call for this, but I did it anyway), and then plunk half the dough into each. Then you just use your fingers to “smoosh” it out, right up the edges of the pans, like so:

Here’s one area I would do differently next time: I didn’t smooth it out quite thin enough, especially in the corner where the bottom of the pan ends and the side begins. This resulted in quite a thickness of crust at that point of the final product. But hey, live and learn!

By this point, most of your work is done, as long as you’ve observed the cooking principle of mise en place. (This means having everything chopped, diced, sliced, and prepped before you get to the final assembly of whatever dish you’re doing. Nothing sucks like having everything almost ready to go, and then realizing that you’ve forgotten to dice the onion or whatever.)

With Chicago-style deep dish pizza, your cheese goes in the bottom of the pie. You tile the slices, like so:

Here, too, an opportunity for improvement next time: I probably should have made my slices thinner, so I could use more of them for a better tiling effect. Not a huge thing, but one of those little touches that probably would have made the final product slightly more refined. That gets added to the memory bank for next time.

Anyhow, now is when we add the “toppings”, even though with this pizza they’re more properly thought of as “fillings”:

On the left we have pepperoni and Italian sausage; on the right we have Italian sausage, mushrooms, and onions. Now’s the time to pour the tomato mixture on top:

When this is done, you may think with alarm that you don’t have enough tomato mixture. Don’t worry about it. It’ll smooth out in the baking process. Now we simply sprinkle fresh Parmesan cheese over the top, drizzle a bit of olive oil over each pie, and we’re ready for baking!

Deep dish pizza takes quite a while to cook. I baked them for about forty minutes, side by side, in a 450-degree oven. And after you bake them, it’s essential that you let them rest outside of the oven for at least ten minutes before slicing. Once a deep-dish pizza attains the proper temperature in the middle (180 degrees), it will hold that temperature for quite some time. You want it to cool a bit so that the liquids resolidify a bit.

I also had a problem with grease running off the top of the pies, and onto the rack below. This filled the apartment with smoke, so on a very cold night, we had to open the patio door and some windows. You can probably alleviate this by putting some water in a cookie sheet and putting it on the rack below, but I didn’t try this, and I’m a little concerned about how any resulting steam would affect the pizza.

But anyhow, once the smoke cleared, we had a wonderful final product. Behold:

As I said above, the crust was a bit too thick at the corner edges. Also, I’m considering next time substituting melted butter for the olive oil in the dough recipe, in hopes of a flakier texture. This is my usual practice with new recipes: I do it exactly the way the book says to do it, but when I make it a second time, that’s when I start tinkering with it.

The proof, though, was in the eating, and all pronounced it delicious. So there you have it: I can make my own Chicago-style deep dish pizza. How awesome is that!

(And no, it is not a casserole. Anyone who says it is can bite me. It’s a pie, not a casserole. No disagreement with me is possible on this point.)

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Skiffy! (again)

I found this nifty quiz over at Jason Bennion’s blog, and given its focus on books and sci-fi, it’s right up my alley. Without further adoo:

1. Science fiction, fantasy, or horror?

I enjoy all three. Right now I’m on a bit of a fantasy kick, but I tend to vacillate between F and SF. Horror tends to come and go; I’ll get into a horror mood which will last for a year or more and then I won’t read much horror for quite a while. But I love all three genres.

2. Hardback, trade paperback, or mass-market paperback?

For sheer reading pleasure, I prefer hardbacks. However, they’re expensive, obviously. Therefore, only a very few authors are on my list of persons whose books I buy for full-price in hardback (or whatever the Amazon discount happens to be). In fact, Guy Gavriel Kay is the only such author I can think of at the moment! Lots of Science Fiction Book Club volumes are hardbacks, so there’s those, but with that club I tend to limit myself to their reprint anthologies or omnibus volumes, thus maximizing the bang for my buck.

I used to hate mass-market PBs, but of late I’ve retaken a shine to them, and in my quest to build the World’s Zippiest Space Opera Collection, I’ve had to re-embrace the MMPB in a big way, since that’s the only way to get a lot of these books. Printing seems to have improved so that in fantasy MMPBs, the maps are more legible. I had a copy once of Lord of the Rings in MMPB in which the maps of Middle Earth were nearly illegible — and unforgivably, they omitted the detail map of Gondor and Mordor that’s in most copies of Return of the King.

Trades are nice, too. Hmmm…basically, I just like books.

3. Heinlein or Asimov?

Asimov. Although I frankly haven’t read nearly as much Heinlein as I should. What Heinlein I’ve read, I’ve liked. But with Asimov, I’m always a little sad that his stories and novels have seemingly fallen out of fashion. I thought he was a good writer. (of fiction, that is. Everybody agrees that his non-fic was always first-rate, and his essays on the SF world are sheer brilliance.)

4. Amazon or brick-and-mortar?

Brick-and-mortar. I want to pick up books, flex them in my hands, smell the pages (no, I don’t know why I do this, but it’s been a habit of mine for as long as I can remember); then I want to carry around a batch of books until I decide it’s time to go, whereupon I try to decide which of the stack I feel most justified in buying. I like the feeling of discovery; I like browsing. Amazon just isn’t built for browsing, although it does have tools that help in that regard.

However, Amazon’s got other benefits that make it indispensible. Its vast inventory, for example: if I want to order something for the day it’s released, I just go with Amazon, and they’re the bee’s knees if I know exactly what I want.

So it depends on what kind of shopping I’m doing. If I’m just in the mood to buy some books, it’s off to Borders with me.

5. Barnes & Noble or Borders?

(I suppose that Canadians answering this quiz should do Chapters or Indigo.)

Borders, although the margin is fairly small. The main reason that I don’t shop at B&N more is that at this point in time, the Buffalo region only has two B&Ns, and they’re both at least fifteen minutes of driving farther away from my apartment than Borders. Apparently two new B&Ns are due to open this year, both much closer; but then, a new Borders is also opening, close enough that if doing so didn’t involve crossing one of the busiest intersections in the entire region, I’d walk there.

One time I went to Borders when The Daughter was only one or so, and I bought a copy of the collected stories of HP Lovecraft. The sales clerk, who looked eerily like Otto the busdriver from The Simpsons, gives me this maniacal grin and says, “Oooooh, bedtime stories!”

As for B&N, there’s the guy eight years or so ago who once noted that I was buying some book or other about King Arthur, whereupon he got this sullen look on his face. This look remained on his visage until the transaction was complete, whereupon he says, “I see you’re interested in King Arthur. Well, I am too, and I just watched First Knight last night [the crappy 1995 movie with Richard Gere as Lancelot], and it sucked. When will we ever get a good Arthur movie?” I offered Excalibur, but he shook his head: “It tried to do too much, and all that Wagner on the soundtrack was distracting.” Me: “Camelot?” Him: “Vanessa Redgrave can’t sing, Franco Nero can’t act. Ugh. Someday somebody will make a good Arthur movie.”

But then, I bought a copy of Christopher Moore’s Bloodsucking Fiends as a Christmas gift for a friend last month at Borders, and that clerk fell over himself telling me how good the book was. As I’d read it, we then compared notes on the rest of Moore’s output.

So yeah, I like bookstores.

6. Hitchhiker or Discworld?

Haven’t read either. Should read both. Could someone familiar with Discworld suggest a good starting point? Ditto for Niven’s Ringworld, which I haven’t read, either.

7. Bookmark or dog-ear?

Bookmark! I own some nice ones, too. Dog-earing sucks.

8. Magazine: Asimov’s Science Fiction or Fantasy & Science Fiction?

Between these two, Asimov’s; F&SF’s stories tend to not excite me as much. But as for magazines, I prefer Realms of Fantasy to both, and I really need to start getting Black Gate again. Now that is a magazine. (For horror, Cemetery Dance is pretty good.)

9. Alphabetize by author, by title, or random?

I don’t alphabetize. I try to group books by author, but that’s it. Mostly, I’m all over the map, although my Space Opera collection is all on one set of shelves.

10. Keep, throw away, or sell?

I keep for an amazingly long time, after which period I maybe sell on eBay, but in most cases I give to the library for use in their quarterly used book sales. This brings up a conundrum: I have a lot of philosophy texts from my college years which I seriously doubt I shall ever read again, and which are simply taking up space. Stuff like this would go to the library, except for the fact that many of these books are filled with my various marginalia. I’m a little hesitant to have my marginalia in someone else’s library, at least while I’m alive! Hmmmmm.

(I do throw out books that are clearly outdated, like WordPerfect 6.0 for Dummies and the like, and I likewise toss if they become damaged in any way.)

11. Year’s Best Science Fiction series (edited by Gardner Dozois) or Years Best SF series (edited by David G. Hartwell)

I get both. The fiction in the Hartwell series tends to be more my speed, but the Dozois always includes longer fiction that the Hartwell series cannot accomodate, as well as the essays at the front of the book on the state of SF today (although Dozois maintains a pretty pessimistic tone, from what I’ve seen).

I also get both Year’s Best fantasy collections. The Datlow-Link series is essential reading, year in and year out, just for its introductory essays alone.

12. Keep dustjacket or toss it?

I always keep dustjackets, although I remove them and set them aside when I’m actually reading the book.

13. Read with dustjacket or remove it?

Oh. Didn’t see this question when I answered the previous one.

14. Short story or novel?

Both, but I’ve never read enough short fiction. There’s something uniquely pleasurable about reading a tale from the beginning, knowing that you’ll finish it the same evening.

15. Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket?

Haven’t read Snicket, so it’s Potter all the way.

16. Stop reading when tired or at chapter breaks?

Depends on the book, of course. Some books have short chapters which therefore makes it easy to read that way, while others have quite lengthy chapters which make me rely on scene breaks (indicated by double-carriage returns in the books). At night, though, I’ll read until I’m tired, and then I go to the next available break.

17. “It was a dark and stormy night” or “Once upon a time”?

Both! Why can’t we have, “Once upon a time, on a dark and stormy night”?

(Of course, we all know that my true allegiance lies with, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….”)

18. Buy or borrow?

Both, with more emphasis these days on borrowing from the library. Like I’ve said before, limiting my reading to only those books I can afford to buy is a crazy notion up with which I shall not put.

19. Buying choice: book reviews, recommendation, or browse?

Browsing and recommendation, really. I read book reviews with some regularity, but I don’t often get the hankering to read something based on what a review says.

20. Lewis or Tolkien?

Tolkien. Duh.

(Well, I’ve never read the other six books in the Narnia sequence. I tried a number of times in my youth, and could never get into them.)

21. Hard SF or space opera?

Duh!

(But I do like the hard stuff now and again. One of my favorite books of all time, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, is pure hard-SF.

22. Collection (short stories by the same author) or anthology (short stories by different authors)?

Anthologies, mostly.

23. Hugo or Nebula?

I pay little attention to these awards, to be honest.

24. Golden Age SF or New Wave SF?

I don’t know much about the New Wave stuff, so Golden Age, I suppose.

25. Tidy ending or cliffhanger?

I don’t know. Cliffhangers that feel like tidy endings? Like the film version of The Two Towers, which ends on a satisfying note with very little resolved.

26. Morning, afternoon, or nighttime reading?

For fiction, mostly night-time. I’ve never been able to read fiction in short doses, which is what it has to be in the morning and afternoon (unless I’m off from work). Nonfiction I can read in short bursts just fine, but with fiction, I need to be able to immerse myself in the fictional world.

27. Standalone or series?

Standalones usually; with series, I like things shorter or comprised of standalones that still manage to collectively tell a story. I tend to be so all-over-the-map in my reading that I’ll rarely read two books of the same series back to back, and thus by the time I get round to reading more in a series, I’ve forgotten what happened before.

28. Urban fantasy or high fantasy?

Honestly, both. (Although “urban” is a bad descriptor, in my opinion — Gaiman’s American Gods isn’t really urban, but it’s not high fantasy, either.

29. New or used?

I don’t really care, as long as the book’s in pretty good shape.

30. Favorite book of which nobody else has heard?

The Complete Book of Marvels by Richard Halliburton

31. Top X favorite genre books read last year? (Where X is 5 or less)

Ensign Flandry, Poul Anderson
The Stupidest Angel, Christopher Moore
Galactic Patrol, E.E. “Doc” Smith
Old Man’s War, John Scalzi
Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds, Brian Daley

32. Top X favorite genre books of all time? (Where X is 5 or less)

The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
The Lions of Al-Rassan, Guy Gavriel Kay
Fluke, Christopher Moore
Red/Green/Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke

33. X favorite genre series? (Where X is 5 or less)

The Prydain Chronicles, Lloyd Alexander
The Lewis Barnavelt novels, John Bellairs
The Lensmen sequence, E.E. “Doc” Smith

34. Top X favorite genre short stories? (Where X is 5 or less)

“The Nine Billion Names of God”, Arthur C. Clarke
“Nightfall”, Isaac Asimov
“The Secret Shih-Tan”, Graham Masterton
“That Feeling You Get, You Can Only Say What It Is In French”, Stephen King
“Lamb to the Slaughter”, Roald Dahl (not really a “genre” tale, actually)

That’s it, folks! Tag yourself if you like the skiffy, move along if you don’t.

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When direct marketing goes awry

Over the years I’ve been, at various times, a member of the Book of the Month Club, the Quality Paperback Book Club, the History Book Club, and currently I’m in the Science Fiction Book Club. A consequence of joining all these clubs — or even one such club, really — is that one soon begins receiving all kinds of mailings from Camp Hill, PA, where all such clubs are headquartered. (I’m assuming they’re all part of one umbrella outfit.) I get lots of offers to join various other clubs, very few of which pique my interest. Today brought an amusing one to my attention: the American Compass club, which is where you go for cheap book-club editions of your favorite conservative books. Great! Now I can get the new Ann Coulter volume, SPIT SPIT LIBERAL SPIT HISS BOOGA BOOGA!!, simply by not returning the handy reply card! Yippee!

Browsing through their search engine a bit, I see that, as with all of these clubs, there’s quite a bit of overlap on titles. Some of these books are doubtless offered by more than one club (which makes sense). I did a search under “evolution”, and found a book by Daniel Dennett listed alongside some Creationist tract. (Also, the search engine seems pretty dumb, trapping as it did books that have nothing to do with “evolution” but which mention revolution.)

Anyway, I’ll stick with the SFBC. I like my books about made-up fantasy lands to be written by people who know they’re writing books about made-up fantasy lands.

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Roaming the Buffalo Prefecture

Some quick hits on stuff I’m reading about the Buffalo Prefecture of Blogistan today:

:: According to Random Thoughts 101, there’s still some lingering bitterness in Baltimore over the way the Colts were moved from that city to Indianapolis. Well, I used to feel for the poor folks of Baltimore, until they found another NFL owner who was perfectly willing to do to his city what the Colts owner did to theirs.

That Art Modell has a Super Bowl ring and Ralph Wilson does not is one of the greatest miscarriages of Karma in sports history.

:: Jennifer points out a t-shirt with an obnoxious message. She also liked 2006.

:: Bill Altreuter speculates on the ending of empires.

:: Want to know where the Sabres stand as the NHL season reaches the halfway mark? BFLOBlog breaks it down for you.

:: Red swears in front of his kids, something for which I’m totally qualified to judge him because I’ve never used salty language in front of The Daughter. (You can take my word for it. No need to ask her for confirmation. Nope, just take my word for it.)

:: Kevin hates a particular metaphor that’s all over the place in Buffalo right now. I agree. (Oh, and “oogy” is, indeed a word. It’s defined as “the state of health that is between ‘meh’ and ‘bleeccchhh'”.)

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