Zombie Lapdance

I was making some Norwegian potato flatbread (lefse) over the holidays, and my coworker Jeremiah just requested the recipe. Now, I could just hand him the recipe on paper tomorrow, or I could fluff out my blog with it.

5 large potatoes
1/3 cup sweet cream
3T butter
1t salt
1/2 cup flour for each cup mashed potatoes.

So you make mashed potatoes with the top four ingredients, and when it’s reasonably cool, you mix flour into it until it looks like a dough. This part could use some experimentation, but I think that kneading it to give it some spring wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Then you form it into "egg-sized" balls, roll thin, and cook on an ungreased griddle. Cast-iron would probably work best, but i’ve been using my teflon omelete pan without too much trouble.

Serve hot or cold, with butter and cinnamon, or use as you would a tortilla.

Let me know if it works!

Last night I was watching "Danger: Diabolik", a Mario Bava film about a suave international thief who steals things while wearing a creepy latex bondage mask.

One of the plot points is that the government has to pour the world’s largest gold ingot with the logic that it would be so heavy that "it would be impossible for anyone to steal it."

Of course it gets stolen.

Then today I saw this article that Japan has poured the world’s largest gold bar.

Tragically, it’s only the size of a shoebox. However, it is a not too shabby 600 pounds.

The big buzz in the podcast world is the new series from the BBC A History of the World in a Hundred Objects.

Every episode, the host takes an object from the British Museum and talks about its importance for fifteen minutes. The podcast itself is immensely fascinating, but the website that accompanies the series is a marvel. There you can look at the objects such as this Sumerian clay tablet:

and the impressively user-friendly web interface allows you to zoom in to see astonishing detail.

Some of the objects have interesting backstories, and then prove to be even more interesting when you can see them, like this four-thousand year old cape that was hammered from a single ingot of gold.

I know that I’ve been neglecting the primary purpose of a blog, passing along interesting links I’ve run across.

So here’s an eHow article about how to find ethnic groceries in Austin, something that I’m an expert in. I would like to say that all the ideas the article lists are pretty dumb, and the only grocery mentioned by name has been closed for months and was pretty sketchy when it was open.

Texas has the primary elections coming up. The early voting starts this week. Because this is such a partisan state (in a particularly partisan city) depending on the race the primary vote can be either extremely vital or totally irrelevant.

Julia (my food-frakking deputy) sent me this NYTimes link that talks about the religious and political intrigue surrounding the Texas educational board. The primaries for these are approaching, and this election could determine if Christian fundamentalists from Texas can mandate the textbook curriculum not just for this state, but for schools across the country.

I’m only four pages into this article because I was getting a panic attack that made it hard to sit still and read.

As I’m sure you know (because you’ve been listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast)about the Kepler Mission. It’s is a space-based telescope that is searching for extra-solar planets.

It’s already found several mysterious objects, like super-hot planet-sized objects and super-light planets.

The odds are that it’s only a matter of time before it finds an Earth-like planet outside our solar system. Kepler needs to catch one in the process of transiting the face of a distant star (which makes the star dim minutely), and then it needs to catch it doing that again, which for a planet like the earth would obviously take a year or more.

It would be amazing to find more planets like our own, but what I haven’t heard anyone talk about is the likelihood of finding planetary-scale engineering.

I’m guessing that something like a series of planet-sized solar power satellites would show up right away. They would make the star’s light intensity vary at a high frequency without causing much of a gravitational wobble.

But would they recognize a ringworld? As the ribbon of a ringworld oscillated across the face of a star, it would look like the normal fluctuations of a variable star.

Not that there’s much point in me speculating. I’m sure that astronomy grad students around the world are secretly pouring over the data, hoping to be the first to see the evidence of near-godlike aliens.

I had some requests for the recipe for the delicious creamy green taco cart salsa. It could probably use some more tweaking, but this is the basic theory:

-De-seed and chop a half pound of jalepenos. Dump in blender.
-Add the juice of two limes.
-Add two cloves of garlic.
-Add salt, pepper, and chili powder to taste.
-Puree the mixture until it’s as chopped as it’s likely to get.
-Drizzle in oil while the blender is running until the desired creamy consistency is reached.

Your tacos will thank you for it.

After the tapioca chip incident I had a lot of fry oil left over. So I’ve been doing some deep-frying which is not a normal part of my oeuvre. I started with some duros, which are conceptually similar to tapioca chips.

They start off as rock-hard wheels of flour, and then they puff up in the oil to make a greasy, crispy, and light snack

For extra points you can dust them with chili powder and lime, or so Thora tells me.

Next for the deep frying is a codfish fritter mix. It’s sort of in the dessicated cod category of food. Dry cod flakes (and a few bones) mixed in with dumplings.

It turns out gooey on the inside and crisp on the outside.

I won’t deny it, I watched the Super Bowl. The friends who hosted the Super Bowl party made frito pie.

The spicy chili version was easily ten times more exciting than the game.

This is a yogurt-flavored soda.

If coke came in single-swallow containers I would probably drink it more often.

I’ve been reading this book called "Man Eating Bugs", which is all about how different cultures eat insects. The pictures are amazing and mouth watering.

There’s a whole page of warnings about eating bugs at home, including the warning that people who are allergic to shrimp shouldn’t eat insects. I myself am allergic to shrimp (although I don’t like publicly admitting to my kryptonite-esque weakness), and I have long suspected that the allergy is not limited to shrimp and crabs, and that it extends to all arthropods.

However, years of experimentation have shown that I can eat a few tablespoons of arthropod and only suffer a modest uvula swelling. So I decided to eat this chocolate-covered ant candy.

If a couple legs hadn’t got caught in my teeth it could just as easily have been a Krackle Bar.

This is a photo I’ve been sitting on for a while because I was expecting to do an entire entry on the Torta Bus. This is a stand that specializes in tortas that is built into a bright-orange shortbus. It’s on Cameron, right behind Capital Plaza if you’re interested. It’s proper name is Tortas Gueros, which means "Whiteboy Sandwich."

I also wasn’t going to use this because it’s such an ugly picture. It doesn’t do this amazing torta justice. If you look close, you can see that there’s crosscut hotdogs lying on top of the milanesa! Let me say that again. THERE’S HOTDOGS IN THE TORTA!!! The menu of the Torta Bus has to be seen to be believed. They have eight different varieties of milanesa!

Heck, I don’t know why I don’t eat every meal there.

I spent some time this weekend lending a modest amount of labor to the new Yellow Bike Project headquarters.

The old headquarters was on property that became subsumed within the swelling fiasco of the Mueller development. For a number of months now YBP has operated out of a series of cargo shipping containers secreted about town.

The new facility looks like it’ll be pretty nice. It’s far out on the East Side, at 12th and Webberville, but the City of Austin has made a lot of improvements on the bike lane situation in the past few months. There’s now a bike lane on 12th street for almost its entire length.

Supposedly this is a response to the municipal ordinance mandating a 3-foot passing distance. (Apparently the cops haven’t given any tickets for this, even when bicyclists get run over.)

A new feature on roads too narrow for a discrete bike lane is the "sharrow."

The theory is this gives bikes visual permission to appropriate an entire lane. Julia (my food-frakking deputy) is of the opinion that these are superior to bike lanes because it doesn’t give motorists the impression that bikes need to be segregated from traffic.

I like them too, because I believe it gives me the impression that I shouldn’t be segregated from traffic. They put a sharrow lane on 51st, which is the street I took whenever I had to bike out to Home Depot or Target (or the Torta Bus, but more on that later). In the past, I tried biking in one corner of the right lane, and cars were constantly straddling the dotted line and trying to share the lane with me.

Now I go right down the goddamn middle, riding straight over the peaks of the chevrons.

I still look over my shoulder to make sure that I’m not going to get run over by someone too busy texting on their iPad to pay attention to driving their SUV, but so far no one has challenged my lane supremacy.

The publication of Anasazi-35 has stimulated some interesting conversations, so I think that it deserves a little more attention. I’m posting several exegetical articles, covering different aspects of the story. Previously I talked about the technology and about the economy. Today, I’m going to talk about the part that most readers thought was surreal and nonsensical, the cop office.

In the story, Sunset MacClaine has been beat up and left to sit in a holding cell over night. Then they bring her up to the detective floor of the building, where the office is just a walking track.

The design is an offshoot of my thoughts about the sedentary American lifestyle. The model American drives to work in the morning, then sits at a desk for eight hours, then drives home, then sits watching TV. On the weekend it’s a lot of sitting around drinking. There’s occasionally a push to go to the gym, but the twenty minutes at the gym hardly overcomes the bulk of daily routine which involves little or no physical activity.

My own daily habits incorporate a bicycle as my primary transportation and a day-job that requires me to walk up to five miles per shift (I’ve used one of those pedometer things to confirm it — although the downside of working in a bakery is the vast amount of pie in my diet). For people who are lucky enough to not have a blue-collar job, there’s not much to be done.

Unless, and here I put on my speculative fiction hat, what if mobile technology frees people from their desks? Then they can fill out spreadsheets, make calls, take meetings, and surf the web or play minesweeper, all the while ergonomically replicating the physical activity of our first nomadic biped ancestors.

I was feeling pretty cocky about how smart I was, but then it turns out that the bastards at the Mayo clinic (particularly Dr. James Levine) have beat me to it. Their office of the future design incorporates a walking track that’s virtually identical to what I envisioned.

Drat.

Last year, I celebrated by birthday by staying at home and watching movies all day long. It was such a success that I did it again this year, and made the day just a little more gluttonous by EATING TACOS FOR EVERY MEAL.

I discovered the one true recipe for that delicious, creamy taco-cart green salsa, which made this the best birthday ever.

The first movie I watched was Onechanbara: Samurai Bikini Squad

Apparently, during the zombie apocalypse, there’s going to be a woman wearing a bikini and a feather boa, who fights with a samurai sword. They don’t get into why she’s in a bikini, but I think it has something to do with how she projects her ki. I’m sure that Cormac McCarthy was going to have more bikinis in his post-apocalypse story, but he just never got around to it.

Continuing the Japanese school girls with swords genre, I watched Blood: the Last Vampire

I’d seen the anime version, which was half an hour shorter. They expanded this with more emphasis on the American heroine, but it generally worked well in live action.

I was reminded that I hadn’t seen all the works of Stuart Gordon, namely Dolls

This was one of Gordon’s lighter and funnier works, with none of his trademark genitalia abuse. I recently had a long conversation about how much CGI sucks, so it was good to see a movie that makes effective use of puppetry and stop motion to create imagery that’s both creepy and neat to watch.

Tony Jaa is of course awesome. His sequel to the breakaway star-vehicle movie, Ong Bak 2, has almost nothing to do with the original. It also makes little sense.

But it is chock full of action sequences that are wonders of filmmaking.

I regretted missing Singh is Kinng in the theaters. And even more so after I saw it. It’s funny, beautifully shot, relatively fast-paced for Bollywood, and it has a credit sequence that features Snoop Dogg. It also is filled with Bollywood in-jokes.

When I was browsing through my friendly neighborhood art video store (actually it’s pretty surly, but it is in the neighborhood), I noticed a couple of things. First, nearly all the American films in the new releases sucked. The blockbusters sucked, and the independent direct-to-video options looked like they sucked even worse. I think it’s because all the talent in America is busy making TV for the premium cable channels. The other thing I noticed, is that there were a lot of videos available for things that were either just in theaters or were just coming out in the theaters. For instance, House of the Devil was in the theaters just a couple months ago.

It’s a horror film shot in the style of 80s fright night films. I’d forgotten just how worried people in the 80s were about satanic cults. The head satanist in this film is a dead-on impression of one of the local Austin writers with similar religious beliefs.

When I was down at Domy books the other day, I impulsively bought some DVDs. One of them was called Kure Kure Takora, and it appears to be some sort of Japanese Sid and Marty Croft-esque children’s program about an octopus who gets bopped on the head alot.

I don’t particularly feel obligated to watch the whole thing.

Speaking of apparently insane Japanese entertainment, there’s the wrestling film Oh! My Zombie Mermaid

You could watch this trailer, but I honestly think the less you know about the movie the better. You just need to know that it’s a movie about a wrestler struggling against adversity the only way he knows how.

I also saw Our Man Flint, but I didn’t get through it and I don’t know if I ever will.

In summary, I had as many movies and as many tacos as I could possibly fit inside me.

Over a year ago, we elected a man to be president and we were euphoric with hope and happiness.

That’s why I posted this list of predictions on the morning after. I wanted to make everybody miserable and cynical like me.

The post drew a lot of interesting commentary, and I hope that revisiting it will do the same.

Here are my 22 predictions, followed by analysis of how they’ve been coming along.

1.) The president will successfully tax the rich. That would just about balance the budget deficit, except-

*( Yeah, this would happen if Obama could get so much as a resolution condemning midget wrestling through congress.)

2.) -we will never really get out of Iraq. Expect major reductions of troops in Iraq, but they will stay on at some level, probably as a "stability force" or somesuch euphemism for occupiers. The troops that do leave will just trounce over to Afghanistan.

* (True, except for the "major reductions" part. Is anybody really surprised?)

3.) Prediction 1 leads to the conservatives hating Obama like nobody’s business. The invective increases steadily in hatred, until the language from the ministers of conservative churches borders on the treasonous. Bolstered by the hate speech, the extreme right wing mounts-

* (Conservatives don’t need an excuse to hate and say stupid things any more than midget wrestlers need an excuse to pile-drive little people.)

4.) -several serious assassination attempts. But luckily the right wingers with the guns are every bit the screwups as the ones in the Whitehouse these last eight years. Feeling increasingly disempowered, the conservatives turn to-

* (This hasn’t happened. Yet. That we know of.)

5.) – Sarah Palin as a role model and ideological figurehead. Becoming as divisive and polarizing as Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney before her (but without the common sense to shut up and stay out of sight after the country gets sick of her), Palin skirts the accusation that she caused the downfall of the McCain campaign (see my previous post about the trap of identity politics for the right), and instead becomes a righteous martyr. Offensive comments from Palin will make the news every six months. At least once she will be caught saying something truly racist, but America won’t really notice because-

* (I’m giving myself nine points out of ten for this one, but with Palin regularly doing live TV on FOX, we can expect the shockingly racist comment within the next year.)

6.) -investment in the tech sector will skyrocket. Even though investors are politically conservative, they only feel comfortable putting their money in the future when there’s a forward-thinking Democrat in power. Because of Obama, the most stodgy moneybags will think that we can remake the shape of industry, and that people will buy books online if given the chance. With the previous administration, all the investors could think about was oil. Now’s the time to invest in the most goof-ball technologies you can find, but be sure to sell before the conservative backlash government.

* (I have no idea how this is coming along. I’m thinking that the economy is still too sucky for a lot of investment.)

7.) America will completely fail to get over its race problem. The cops in Austin will still use force on black people at a rate seven times that of whites. School funding will still be tied to the property values of the community, giving poor communities the shaft. The president will just be another celebrity, no more tied to the liberation of black people than the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, except that now when the middle class sees someone from the working class, they won’t think, "Let’s fix the disparity in the access to education," they’ll think, "That loser could have been president." And it won’t help that Obama thinks those Mexicans need to learn English (luckily, he will find a way to phrase that so it sounds perfectly reasonable).

* (This is just another way of saying that nothing has changed from last year.)

8.) The energy crisis will continue to be a crisis and too little will be done too late. Luckily the economy won’t hit the post-petroleum brick wall until the first term of the conservative backlash president of 2016, so no one will think to blame Obama.

* (The stagnant economy has given us a temporary reprieve from the energy crisis. Yay!)

9.) There will be no significant health care reform. Nobody in power wants that to happen. There’s too much money in the health racket. All that time that Obama and Hillary spent debating nuanced differences in their health-care packages? Total waste of freaking time.

* (Hahahahahahahahahahahahahah!!! Ten out of ten! Too bad my personal victory means that America is getting the shaft like a midget in a wrestling ring.)

10.) At some point I will find myself protesting a "limited bombing campaign" against a nation’s sovereign territory. There will be five other people there. They will all be incredibly ugly. At least one of the signs will be misspelled and that will be the only thing to make it to the nightly news.

* (Luckily we’re still entangled with limited bombing of the same two nations (or three, depending on who you ask) so I don’t need to make any new protest signs.)

11.) There will be no Great Society-style initiative. Do you remember Obama mentioning poor people? Wrack your brain all you want, he hasn’t brought it up and he never will.

* (Thanks to Obama, the poor people who couldn’t afford health insurance may now have to pay for it or get a fine! But only if he actually gets a Health Care Bill through both houses.)

12.) Obama will continue to look great on television, and people will continue to feel all warm inside when he sounds reassuring and presidential.

* (I haven’t had a television in over a year, so I can’t speak on this. He sounds about the same on NPR at any rate. But I suspect that the charm is wearing off.)

13.) Exciting revelations about the horrible things done by the Bush administration will pop up continually throughout the Obama administration, even if Obama gets two terms.

* (I was expecting more of this. Obama needs to learn that you can only leave the sins of the past behind and have forward-thinking if you actually have some forward momentum.)

14.) The environment will continue to degrade, and people will continue to make token and ineffectual gestures to ameliorate the problem.

* (The raccoons seem to be doing fine in the urban environment. So we will have at least one North American animal for a while.)

15.) The liberalization of international trade will continue in the form of the WTO, World Bank, IMF, NAFTA, etc., without slowing down.

* (You know, I haven’t heard anyone even mention these things in the past year. I guess they won.)

16.) The world will suddenly think America is awesome. Except for Venezuela, which will still hate us.

* (Right after the election the world thought we were awesome. Now they think we’re "meh.")

17.) Conservatives in Congress will do everything possible to dig their feet into the ground. There will be no unity and no consensus building. If Obama asks Congress to breath air, they will hold their breath until they die. There will be lawsuits, special investigators, filibustered appointees, and the minute they get a majority (which will happen mid-term elections second term), they will attempt an impeachment. Lieberman will continue to be a putz.

* (Wow. This gives me shivers. Am I really this psychic? Or is Obama really that dumb to think that there will be bi-partisan cooperation just because he says it will be great?)

18.) Something as weird and improbable as a black guy with a funny name becoming president will happen, but none of us will get close to predicting what that will be.

* (Balloon boy? The underwear bomber? Dinosaurs with stripes? I’m still waiting for something truly weird to happen.)

19.) Nobody from the Bush administration will be held accountable for their crimes.

* (Not only have they not received the slightest slap on the wrist, they’re getting book deals and tenure at Berkeley. Yeah, I’m talking to you, John Yoo, you motherfucking sadistic yes-man scuzzbag.)

20.) George Bush will write his memoirs. In crayon.

* (Apparently he wrote the first couple chapters with a white crayon and couldn’t remember which pages were blank.)

21.) President Obama will repeatedly remind us that the Democratic party is also the party of big business.

* (Corporations are now people. They will flood the Democratic party with yet more bribes-slash-donations. Kiss your democracy goodbye.)

22.) The next version of Firefox will have a spellchecker that includes both "Obama" and "Barack" in its dictionary.

* (Um, Firefox? You’ve had three updates. You read the newspaper? You have Steve, Barclay, Fillmore, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Clinton, and Chavez. I think you’re forgetting someone.)

The take home lesson here, is that when you feel like being cynical, you should ask yourself if you’re really being cynical enough. With the exception of the assassination prediction, it all turned out as bad or far worse than I feared.

Of course no-one tried to assassinate Clinton or Carter, so I guess the conservatives learned from the JFK assassination (and the following Great Society) that it’s easier and more effective to character assassinate.

I feel a little blind-sided by the Obama administration’s failure to conduct the "War on Terror" in a humane method. We still have extraordinary rendition. We still have Gitmo, and there are now prisons in Afghanistan that are likely as bad or worse. I guess our people in uniform have more or less stopped torturing people outright, but that’s up for debate.

I wouldn’t have thought that the Obama administration would be so incompetent at passing legislation and such a failure at establishing ethical foreign policy.

To quote my food-frakking deputy Julia from six-months ago, "I thought it would be at least a year before I would be disappointed with the Obama administration."

Now that it’s been a year, I can’t believe I was so hopeful to begin with.

I’m going to make myself feel better by punching a midget.