Let's think of other things that starts with "C"! Uh... Uh... Who cares about da other things?!
Cookie Monster
So a couple of weeks ago, I bought this really nice looking ceramic dish at Art In The Park in Long Branch, made by Roz Potz (the first thing that came up when I Googled her was also her Facebook page, but it was in Welsh or something.)
I wanted to cook something in it, but it's summer, and ceramic dishes to me really cry out for stews or beans or other things that you simmer slowly in the over for a long period of time. Then I realized, I don't need to cook in it. I can just use it as a nice serving dish. Since it has a lid, I don't even need to put leftovers away in a different container. So I made couscous with summer vegetables.
Couscous with summer vegetables
Ingredients
1 Red Pepper
1 Summer Squash
1 Onion
3 Cloves of Garlic
2 Tablespoons Olive Oil
Salt and Pepper
1 cup Israeli Couscous
1 1/4 cups vegetable broth
Some grape tomatoes
Note: Israeli couscous is a very large grain cousous. It looks more like pearls or orzo than your traditional couscous. You can substitute just about any grain: regular couscous, rice, quinoa, etc. Just change the amount of broth.
Step 1) Arrange some of the ingredients artistically, so you can take a picture of them and put it in your blog, like this:
Step 2) Cut the onion, pepper and squash into fairly large chunks, about half an inch square.
Step 3) Heat a large saute pan over medium low heat for about two minutes. Add the olive oil. Add the cut up veggies and a pinch of salt, and cook for about 8-10 minutes, stirring occassionally, until the onion turns transluscent.
Step 4) Chop the garlic fairly fine (I just whacked it with the flat of the knife, then sliced that). Add to the veggies and cook about 30 seconds. Add broth and couscous.
Step 5) When the broth has come to a boil (which should be pretty quick), turn the heat down to a simmer and cover the pot. Cook for 7-8 more minutes.
Step 6) Transfer stuff to your pretty dish and add tomatoes as a garnish. It should look like this:rve
Serve warm, room tempertature, or chilled, depending how hot it is outside.
It meant nothing to Tarzan, of course, for he could not tell one language from another, so when he pointed to the word man which he had printed upon a piece of bark he learned from D'Arnot that it was pronounced HOMME, and in the same way he was taught to pronounce ape, SINGE and tree, ARBRE.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
My cable channel is trying out a new channel called Centric. It's a spin off of BET, and most of the shows aren't that interesting to me. But two are: it's showing reruns of Miami Vice and the A-Team. I don't have much to say about Miami Vice, but I'd like to talk about the A-Team. (And I promise to avoid saying anything like "I pity the fool who don't read this" anywhere but this sentence.)
Why am I watching it? I didn't really watch it when it was first on, so it's not nostalgia. And it's not a very good show, though if you're in the right mood it's the sort of bad show that can be fun to watch. If you really care about the plot, look it up on Wikipedia or somewhere. If you don't care about it, there are five main characters:
Mr. T.
Guy who dresses up in funny costumes (if you're idea of funny is thick accents).
Crazy guy.
A Zeppo (i.e., handsome but no personality)
Someone without a Y chromosome.
Theoretically, they also have tactical roles. Crazy guy is an ace pilot; Zeppo guy is an ace negotiator, the girl guy knows how to gather information.
Each week, this supposed group of mercenaries learns of some bad guys who are picking on poor innocents, and has to stop them. For example -- an I am not making this one up -- a bunch of greedy real estate developers want to tear down a youth center where Hulk Hogan helps underprivileged kids. (The show had a lot of awesome 80s era guest stars. I've seen the Hulkster and Pat Sajak, both playing themselves.) The bad guys send in some "enforcer types" to cause trouble. The A-Team intervenes. At some point, the guy in the costume walks into the criminal mastermind's office in a disguise as a helpless little old lady or something, then whips out a machine gun and destroys all the knickknacks on the wall. Then the bad guys send out a big force to take over the center, and there's a great big fight with low budget special effects. I wouldn't say I dislike the plot, so much as I think it could use a bit more diversity.
There are, however, two things I enjoy about the show, which I wish more modern shows would do. First, it's completely episodic. If the first show you see is episode number seven, you'll be caught up on what you need to know by the time the opening credits are finished. Second, I think the idea of an action-comedy is interesting, and I'm a little surprised there aren't more like it. There are action shows which are comedic, but they normally also throw in several other elements, things like police/law/medical procedural and romantic subplots.
* * *
There are a few TV shows out there which I like, but you'd never know it from listening to my description of it. For example, take Fringe. I started watching it for a simple reason: it was on after House, which I find interesting, and Fox was showing it with limited commercial interruptions when I began tuning in. This meant there was no need to change the channel to find something less annoying as background noise while I read.
There are three main characters in Fringe. The only really interesting one is Walter Bishop, because it's the only role with any serious acting required. Walter is an extremely brilliant, but absentminded scientist. His role is to help out his son, Peter Bishop, and FBI agent Olivia Dunham, as they investigate inexplicable phenomena. Olivia's character is, to my mind, most distinguished by the fact she has a different random superpower each week. Sometimes she has superhuman hearing; sometimes she can detect when something is from another dimension. Sometimes she can travel to another dimension. These abilities appear and disappear as the plot calls for them. Peter is there to serve as a love interest for Olivia and someone for Walter to worry over. Apparently he's also supposed to be a brilliant scientist, but he's not quite as smart as Walter, so he never gets to invent cool gizmos unless John Noble is out of town that week working on another project and the writers needed to redo the script.
While not as formulaic as the A-Team, most episodes follow the same plot outline: There's a creepy, inexplicable murder or mass death, which the FBI is called to investigate. Walter spouts some really bad pseudo-science to explain what caused it. (Seriously, I wish they would just call the killers psychic, or magical. This isn't like Star Trek, where they make some effort to keep the science believable.) They track down the bad guy, and stop him. While this is going on, Peter and Olivia do that flirty thing that all male and females partnered together as investigators do. In the end of the episode, it's implied that this bad guy is part of a bigger, more sinister plot. (Unlike the A-Team, there's a bit of variety; some of the episodes were rather different than this.)
If I wasn't treating this as an episodic series, I'd tell you more about the overarching sinister plot. I'd explain why the bald men with the funny accents are so important, or why we're supposed to get scared when we see a typewriter. But I find it much more enjoyable if I don't ask myself about those things, if I treat each episode as a supernatural crime story without an overarching metaplot.
Like I said, it's really enjoyable if you watch it the wrong way.
I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand about the many connections and relations which occur to me, how the matter in question was first thought of or arrived at, etc., etc.
Ada Lovelace
I went to InfoAge without high expectations, but left highly impressed. My family took a trip to this volunteer run museum because it was located in Camp Evans, where my father used to work, and he'd been told that his photo was somewhere in one of the exhibits. I imagined it would have a few kiddie exhibitions and a couple of pictures on a wall. Instead, I found something with a fascinating look at both the history of this camp, the technology it was involved with, and a few other really cool exhibits.
Camp Evans, located in Wall, started out as the station where Marconi did some pioneering work with radio broadcasting. It was later used by Fort Monmouth for numerous projects, such as the world's first portable computer (assuming your definition of portable includes "fits on a 30-foot truck").
What made this place extra enjoyable were the volunteers. They were all deeply knowledgeable, and willing to go into great depth. It's one thing to look at some old china plates and think how nice they look. It's another to look at some old china plates and be told the story of how they lay beneath the sea for over a century, until some spear fishermen realized that what they though were rocks were actually slats from a shipwreck, and while the crates the dishes were stored in had been eaten away, they were still protected by the straw they were packed in.
A few of the many highlights for me:
1) Seeing a picture of Max Adler, the man who gave me Bar Mitzvah lessons, in the Camp Evans hall of fame. (For personal reasons, obviously.)
2) Seeing some of the complex looking radar devices from World War 2. Tracking enemy planes was not just a matter of looking at dots on a screen. There were tons of complex calibrations necessary. For contrast, the exhibit also showed a working modern radar gun simple enough for children, and available in toy stores.
3) The fallout shelter at the camp, which has been turned into an exhibit on fallout shelters. I could probably give this section its own post, but I'll limit myself to pointing out how cool some of the items it showed are. There were posters advertising the shelters, tins of crackers and candies (which were called "carbohydrate supplements" and the volunteer told us were carcinogenic), geiger counters, and other helpful tools for families worried about the a-bomb.
They also showed us the opening credits to this video, prepared to help children in 1951:
4) Hearing about the ship wrecks off the coast of the Jersey Shore. Again, a guided tour of the artifacts uncovered from the deep really brought them to life.
5) A tour of vintage computers by members of MARCH, the MidAtlantic Retro Compuing Hobbyists. MARCH believes that not only should you see old computers, but when possible you should see them in action. They had working classics such as an original Macintosh, a tricked out Commodore 64 with two floppy drives and a 300 baud modem*, and a TRS-80. I used the TRS to write my first BASIC program since about 1994. I kept it very simple:
10 PRINT "HELLO"
I thought about adding 20 GOTO 10, but didn't see where the break key was on the keyboard. (The only hard part about writing this was the keyboard was strange. The quotes were above the number 2, not left of the "enter" key, and the "enter" was where the backspace is.)
* For people who don't know about computers, this is the equivalent of a sports car that's been modified to go from zero to 60 in a tenth of a second and shoot laser beams.
That tour also showed us some older computers, including the refrigerator-sized tape drive of a Univac. (They're planning to expand soon, and will show the entire Univac, which takes up a full wall). Another, smaller, one was literally a typewriter hooked up to a TV:
6) A tour of radio and audio exhibits. Highlights included numerous demonstrations. Like the radar, old fashioned radios were not simple to tune -- there were three or four knobs involved. However, a lot of them were really beautiful. We also saw plenty of recording mediums, from CDs all the way back to phonographs with cylinders. This still works, and they played songs on it for us:
Most of the exhibits sound as though they're only half finished. InfoAge is preparing numerous expansions, and I think I'll check back on this place in a few months and see what progress has been made.
Have you ever founded anything? If so, is it something that went on to become a global superpower? If not, why not?
America (The Book), A Citizens Guide to History, presented by The Daily Show With John Stewart
This is just a test of how Blogspot posting works. I have an actual post I want to put up, but want to put a break in it because it has spoilers and was having trouble doing so.
He's back, the man behind the mask/ and he's out of control.
Alice Cooper
The original Iron Man is not exactly Citizen Kane, but it is perhaps the best summer action movie I've seen. There are two reasons for this. One is where I saw it:
That's the Family Drive In Theatre in Stephens City, Va. It's the only time I've been in a drive-in, and it's a very cool experience.
The other reason was because it kept things moving. About five minutes into the movie, you got your first explosion. Just about every scene was exciting, suspensful, advanced the plot, made you laugh, or a combination of the above.
I saw Iron Man 2 this weekend, and it was good, but lacked something the original had. They still did a fine job of translating the excitement and characters of a comic book onto the big screen, but at times it dragged. And I found it easy to figure out what the problem was. Since the rest of the review involves spoilers, I'm going to put a little break here. Click to continue reading.
ACTORS EAT CAKES WITH THE COOLIDGES; Thirty Enjoy Breakfast at the White House and Then Entertain Their Hosts. PRESIDENT NEARLY LAUGHS Guests Crack 'Dignified' Jokes, Sing Songs and Pledge Support to Coolidge.
New York Times front page headline, Oct. 18, 1924
Super Mario 64 is The Jazz Singer of video games. (I mean the 1927 film with Al Jolson, not the 1980 film with Neil Diamond.) It's incredibly important historically; and it's still pretty enjoyable today, if you can put up with some embarrassing elements by modern standards.
As I said earlier, playing Super Mario Brothers Wii made me nostalgic, so I played Super Mario Brothers 3. And that inspired me to see what else the series had to offer I had missed, so I'm in the middle of Super Mario 64. I plan to play until I get an ending, though not necessarily the ending. (The object of the game is to collect stars. You can, I have learned, defeat the big bad when you get 70 stars. But to get the ultimate prize, you need 120. I've got 49 stars as of this writing, and I'm willing to put up with the game's flaws to get 21 more, but not 71.)
I never had a Nintendo 64. In 1988, I purchased a Nintendo Entertainment System. In 2003 or 2004, I bought a Playstation 2. Because I'm rather proud of my "Jazz Singer" analogy, let me beat it into the ground. That was the equivalent of going to the theaters to see Charlie Chaplin's Gold Rush in 1925, and not seeing another movie until The Wizard of Oz or Gone With The Wind in 1939.
Here is my mini-synopsis of the history of the Nintendo 64, derived from Wikipedia and a few gaming sites. The console premiered in 1996, and helped usher in the era of 3-D gaming. Super Mario 64 was one of the first two games for the system, and reviewers instantly called it the best thing since sliced bread. IGN's review said "it must be stated that SM64 is the greatest videogame to date, and one which all games, regardless of genre, will be judged henceforth."
Despite praise for its games, the N64 was a relative failure. It sold 32 million copies. Its competitor, the Playstation One, sold more than three times that amount. The N64 used cartridges for games, like the Nintendo and Super Nintendo, while the Playstation used CDs. While cartridges had some advantages, they had two major disadvantages. For one, they could only hold 64 megabytes of data; a CD could hold 10 times that, meaning it could create much bigger games. For another, they were more expensive to manufacture. A game that sold for $40 on the Playstation would sell for $60-$70 on the N64. Also, the controller was horrible. Here is a picture of it. For Mario, you were supposed to move around with the joystick in the center, jump with the blue button, punch and throw with the green button, use the red button for some special moves, and use the yellow buttons for adjusting the camera angles. That's an ergonomic nightmare. There are times where you need to move and press the red and green buttons at the same time; that must involve some real finger contortions.
Fortunately, I'm playing it on the Wii, with a controller that resembles the one I got used to playing with a PS2. Everything is in a much more sensible location.
The Jazz Singer was not, technically speaking, the first film with recorded sound. However, it revolutionized the industry. Similarly, while Mario 64 may not have been the world's first 3-D game, it changed the way they were designed, and made them popular on consoles.
Mario's plot is, as usual, elementary. Bowser has kidnapped the Princess in her own castle, and used the power of magical stars to trap the inhabitants of the castle in paintings. Mario must enter these paintings, each of which has a world guarded by his minions, and recover the stars in there.
The Good:
The main reason why I continue to play this is that it's a joy to control Mario. Legend has it that Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the Mario games going all the way back to Donkey Kong, demanded that it be fun to move Mario. Before any levels were designed, they created a garden level, where all testers did was make Mario run, jump and swim. They did this for a month before designing the first world, satisfied it would be a pleasure to move around. (Another legend about Miyamoto is that he records testers' faces while they play, and if they're not smiling enough, he redesigns the section. He's definitely a cult figure among gamers.) The ease of moving him is complemented by his sounds; when he jumps exceptionally high, he makes a little "woo-hoo" of delight.
The graphics are also, to my mind, excellent. They're bright and cartoony, and it doesn't matter that a modern game system could put more polygons onto the screen. It's fun to watch the little mushrooms (Goombas) wander around the screen.
Nintendo has always been a master of music. The background tunes are lively and quickly get stuck in your head. With a few exceptions, I'd say that music in games has actually suffered since the days of the NES. It's richer, of course, since they can have a full symphony instead of just synthesized beeps, but it's also much less memorable. Play a few strains of Kid Icarus, which I haven't played for 20 years, and I'll be humming along. Play the background music to all but two of the games I bought for the PS2, and I'll have no idea what you're playing, even if I put 40 or 50 hours into that game.
The Bad and the Ugly The Jazz Singer has some scenes which are painfully embarrassing today, where Al Jolson puts on blackface. While the movie may have major historic significance, and a touching, classic plot, elements like that make it hard to watch. Also, while there is talking, much of the film is silent, so you need to put up with the extreme gestures and over-emoting actors of the era did to get their points across. Things like that tell you this isn't a modern movie.
Two factors keep Mario 64 from aging perfectly: the camera, and the design philosophy.
Mario games have always rewarded oblique thinking. If you jump on a blank looking location, you might find an invisible box with a mushroom inside. Maybe you can walk on the roof of a level, avoiding all the enemies. But for most Mario games, these are bonuses. You can get through the game without ever figuring it out. In addition, the rules are pretty well defined. Mario can jump, break bricks, and pick some things up. No puzzle in Super Mario Brothers will ever call for Mario to mix a cocktail.
In Mario 64, sometimes you need to guess what the hell the designers were thinking. Each painting has six stars in it, and gives a clue how to get the star. Many present the sort of puzzle you expect from a Mario game: climb to a certain location, find a certain number of coins, or defeat a certain opponent. But a lot of the clues are so oblique as to be useless, and involve tricks that you use only once.
On one level, you have to push two crates as part of finding a star. That would be fine, but this is the only level I've encountered where you can move crates, and these are the only crates in the game that can be moved. In another level, you need to climb a tree, which wakes up a sleeping owl. The friendly owl then offers to fly you around. If you steer him properly, he'll take you to an otherwise inaccessible location where a star is located. Again, this seems to be the only helpful avian in the game; it's not a trend, and it's hardly intuitive. Yet another secret level is found by looking up at the ceiling at a certain point. All other levels are entered by jumping into a painting or hole.
I've given up trying to solve the problems on my own; that's what the Internet is for (particularly gamefaqs.com). But the fact that each puzzle has its own solution, which may have nothing to do with anything else in the game, is driving me crazy.
The other part I can't stand is the camera, which was considered a cutting edge piece of programming in the day. For most of the 3-D games before Mario, the action was shown from either a first person perspective or situated just behind the character. As an example, look at 1982's Pole Position, where you always see the action from just behind the race car.
While that's fine for a race track, it doesn't work for a platformer, where you want to have interesting things above and below, where sometimes you'll want to see the action from Mario's side (e.g., on a flat plain, so you can see enemies approaching from all directions) and sometimes from behind (e.g, while climbing a mountain, so you can see the falling boulders getting closer.) Mario 64's solution was "Lakitu," a cameraman who followed you around in a cloud, and was supposed to film you from the most appropriate angle. If the player wanted to change the angle, he could do so with the camera buttons, or turn Lakitu off and force a "behind the shoulder" perspective.
In theory, it means you'll see the action from an ideal perspective. It doesn't work that well. Too often I've plunged to my death because the camera shifts perspective while I'm walking across a thin plank over a bottomless pit, and suddenly pressing left doesn't move me along the board, but off it. The camera angles also have a nasty habit of omitting important facts. I was stymied on one world because it looked like there was only a bottomless pit in one direction. If you turned the camera to look down -- which it never does by itself -- there was a single step where you had to go to find anything else.
Since it feels wrong to have the only image with this post be from a game I'm not even discussing, here's a clip of someone playing the first world. Notice how sometimes the camera is behind Mario, sometimes to his side, and sometimes it can't quite find where our favorite Italian plumber is. You only need to watch about a minute or so to see all of that.
I don't mind failing in a game because I made a mistake. I hate failing because the game is making things artificially more difficult by warping my perspective in the middle of a delicate maneuver.
Most modern games are better about the camera, but still not good, and I really prefer my games with a fixed, intelligently positioned camera at every scene. Mario 64 set an unfortunate precedent.
He cannot write English, said the critics. No matter, said the public; we can read what he does write, and that without yawning. And so Dr Pessimist Anticant became popular.
Anthony Trollope, The Warden
I finished Damon Knight's The Man in the Tree earlier this week. The more I think about it, the more I like it.
Knight, as I mentioned in the post where I said I'd picked this up at a used book store, is best known for the story "To Serve Man," though he was well known in the science fiction world. While The Man In The Tree isn't perfect, it does some things I find very interesting and enjoyable.(I believe the rest of this is relatively spoiler free. Good luck tracking down a copy if you want to read it, though.)
The story focuses on a man named Gene Anderson, tracing his life from when he was born in the mid-1940s until the mid-1980s (when the book was published). Gene always had two things that separated him from other people: he was exceptionally tall, and he had the power to feel other worlds, grabbing duplicates of items from another universe and doing other strange tricks. Interestingly, the oddities affect his life about equally.
When Gene is nine, three older boys begin picking on him. In the struggle, he accidentally kicks one of them -- the son of the small town's police chief -- out a window and to his death. Gene realizes that there will be serious repercussions and runs away. The police chief, Tom Cooley, spends the rest of the novel trying to find and kill him. Because of Gene's special powers, he can survive by himself. He raids a scout camp ground, and duplicates all the food and supplies he needs to survive in an abandoned cabin by the woods, by trees he finds unusual. But Cooley catches up with him and he escapes, leaving Cooley's accomplice dead, though again that's not what Gene intended.
While the pursuit is always a factor for Anderson, it's not always the main factor. With no home or anchor in life, he tries to figure out what to do. He goes to an art school in Los Angeles, hangs out with bohemians in New York, becomes a circus giant, and much more..
My largest complaint with the book is with what I guess I should call the climax. It might, if you go by that basic "intro, rising action, climax, falling action, conclusion" formula actually be the falling action. I think the end structure got somewhat muddled. But it's when the Big Things happen; when Statements are made. It didn't work for me; the scope and tone were too different from the rest of the book.
Though the plot didn't completely satisfy, there were many things I liked.
Knight was not afraid to keep things understated. Throughout the book, I kept expecting someone to bring up the Norse myth of Odin and the tree, an obvious parallel for the title and a someone who is more than a man growing up and looking for purpose. (It does, however reference other relevant legends.) In another example, at one point a woman tells Gene his fortune with Tarot Cards. After that, Knight doesn't feel the need to hit us over the head with Gene's destiny. Perhaps that's why the ending fails for me; it goes from understated to putting all the cards on the table.
Everyone acts intelligently. Have you noticed when reading a novel, people talk about literature and poetry? In real life, television, movies, or contemporary culture are more likely to be discussed. I understand why; in real conversation, you don't want to lose your audience. Suppose I want to talk about satire. People watching Tina Fey know she's satirizing Sarah Palin. If I start talking about Anthony Trollope's character Dr. Pessimist Anticant, most people will not know that I'm talking about a play on Thomas Carlyle. Since "The Man In The Tree" is literature, the characters discuss lots of arts and literature. It makes me feel cultured to read that. Even characters who aren't well read don't behave stupidly. The sheriff of a hick county doesn't buy Cooley's story that Gene "just happened" to shoot Cooley's friend in the heart, though he can't prove otherwise. Cooley uses some clever techniques to track down Gene over the years.
There are a few passages that I just find great, some for reasons I can't identify. One example:
They went to Notre Dame de Paris, in whose vast shadowy vault the rose windows stared down like celestial mandalas. Gene was moved beyond speech. A woman near them was talking loudly and angrily in German.
"Everyone hates the Germans," Claudina remarked afterward, when they were sitting in the sunlight at a brasserie across the street from the cathedral."
"Because they invaded France?"
"No, just because they are German."
In short, I like The Man in the Tree because Knight respects my intelligence as a reader. He's willing to assume I'll figure things out, rather than whacking me over the head with it.
