For the first time in my life, I have been on the winning side of a major election. Everyone around me is jubilant. It’s not just for President-Elect Obama, either - my choices for Governor and Congressman both made it in. I even got 2 out of 3 on my county judicial picks.
Last night was also a great one for public transit. The Puget Sound’s Proposition 1 passed, bringing expanded bus and rail service to the Seattle area, while the car-addled Washington Initiative 985 (aka you will pry our single-occupancy vehicle commutes from our cold dead hands) was soundly walloped. A new high-speed rail line will go from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Citizens in Sacramento, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and northern New Mexico voted to raise their own taxes to improve transit services. I take it as a sign that high gas prices are finally sinking in and prompting real change.
Yet I have not felt such anger and bitterness towards my fellow citizens since they re-elected Bush.
While our first African-American president asked us to embrace a politics of hope and unity, voters in California, Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas embraced the politics of fear and lies, singling out a different group of Americans for second-class citizenship. Each of those measures stung, but California’s Proposition 8 made me absolutely heartsick. California was my home for 9 years, and is the bluest of blue states, the sort of state one expects to be accepting - but that’s not why I’m so upset. Continue Reading »
I haven’t been eating many sandwiches lately, so yesterday, when I reached into the refrigerator to cut a few slices off of my “sandwich cucumber”, it was… no longer suitable for sandwiches. It wasn’t rotten, just decidedly un-crispy, and definitely in need of quick rescue. I immediately combined it with the wealth of heirloom cucumbers that came in my CSA box this week to make a light and green-tasting soup.
The cucumber plays more of a supporting role here than in most cucumber soups, but it is still definitely present, and unites the flavors of the other vegetables behind the fennel. I filled the flavor out with some smoky bacon; if you are going to make this a vegetarian soup, you really do need to find a substitute. Try some black cardamom pods, or a few handfuls of pre-cooked kasha.
Ingredients
- 1 giant cucumber and 2 medium ones, plus the 1/3 of the medium cucumber that prompted this exercise, peeled and de-seeded
- 1 medium onion, more or less caramelized
- 1 strip bacon, including all the fat from the pan
- small handful spinach
- small handful arugula
- half a dozen ice cubes of stock or broth (I save bones and veggie butts in the freezer, and make stock whenever the bag fills up - this week’s batch was mostly onions, carrots and carrot tops, and summer squash)
- one ice cube of rose hip stock
- 6″ or so of fennel stem
- 1/4 cup buttermilk
- 2 spoonfuls of sugar
- small dollop garlic-lemon aioli left over from the wedding - if for some reason you don’t have my wedding leftovers in your fridge, a clove of garlic and squirt of lemon juice should do, but the soup does benefit from the extra fat
Put everything in a pot. Boil it for 10 min. or so, just enough to soften the veggies, then purée. You may wish to remove the fennel stem before blending; it’s very fibrous, and will wrap itself around your blender blades, which is very annoying to clean. If you do, then while you caramelize the onions you should also simmer the fennel in the stock, to extract more of the flavor.
Add salt, pepper, and MSG to taste. Garnish the soup with a sprig of fennel.
Cucumber soup is traditionally served cold, but it’s good warm, too. It’d be more satisfying served with a dollop of sour cream, but it’s healthier without - and besides, we were out of sour cream. And it would probably also be better if you let the flavors get to know each other for a day or so, but we were hungry.
I currently live in a Craftsman house, and I love it. I would love to move to another one, so I appreciate your attempts to target my demographic with your Craigslist ad. However. The architectural wing of the Arts and Crafts movement produced a particular, recognizable style.
- Does your roof have a low pitch? Gables? Hips? Luxurious eaves? No.
- Are there exposed rafters and/or decorative brackets? No.
- Square pillars? No.
- What about carefully handcrafted stone or woodwork? Or anything that displays attention to detail and respect for the skill of the artisans who built the home? Goodness no.
- Is it small? Yes.
- Does it have wainscoting or some shit? Eh, a couple of the walls change color halfway up.
- Was it built before the sucker grad students you are trying to rent to were born? Yes? Then what the fuck, call it a Craftsman!
- “Unit has wonderful craftsman touches including dishwasher, washer and dryer, and microwave”
This one’s making the rounds again: Put your music library on shuffle. Post the first lines of the first 25 songs that come up. The game: Guess which songs the first lines are from! Google = cheating.
(NB: I’ve skipped over songs where the first line contains the title, songs in languages I can’t order beer in, and exceptionally mumbledy singer-songwriters.)
Continue Reading »
I was recently convinced that there are three possible fates for the universe. Sci-fi narrative fates, not bona fide cosmological ones:
- Nothingness
- Trick question! The universe never ends
- God
Mr. McMoots added a fourth:
- Trick question! The universe never existed at all
Lazyweb, has that last one ever been done? For values of “universe” and “exist” that require an impressive degree of ontological contortion?
Just in case there’s someone reading this on LiveJournal who isn’t on my flist… you can add the new blog to your friendslist as green_gabbro_sb. Thanks, Dalryaug!
Non-LJ users, please ignore this message.
As several of you have already guessed, I’ve been assimilated into the ScienceBorg.
Please update your bookmarks, links and feed subscriptions! My new URL is http://scienceblogs.com/greengabbro, and the new feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/scienceblogs/GreenGabbro.
Greengabbro.net isn’t going anywhere - I like having it as a repository for personal projects, and besides, I just renewed the domain for 2 more years. I’ll keep blogging here, too, whenever inspiration strikes for a post that wouldn’t be of interest to the audience at ScienceBlogs - it won’t be often, but it’ll be more often than “never”. So if you’re interested in my intense hatred of particular food products or updates to my WordPress plugins, by all means keep checking in here now and then.
If you’re interested in my thoughts on geology, the culture of science, or pie, though, you’ll need to follow me on over to ScienceBlogs. See y’all there!
I held a small pie potluck today, in honor of National Pie Day. Everyone who brought a pie, brought a blueberry pie, so it was three blueberries against my lone durian. The durian, of course, lost by a landslide.
Below the fold: I’ve been tagged! This meme is about writing. Also, it only requires you to list three things, which I think is probably the maximum number of things that should be in a meme. Otherwise it’s almost as much work as writing something original.
Continue Reading »
Happy National Pie Day, and welcome to the fifth edition of the Accretionary Wedge, the Internet’s premier blog carnival for the earth sciences! First, I have some news for you. Make sure you’re sitting down before you read this:
- Diamonds are not made from coal -
With either [melt catalyst belt or chemical vapor deposition], nitrogen from organic compounds in the coal would impart a yellow-green color in the diamond due to the absorption of the single N defect.
I assume this also holds for the Superman method.
- Axial tilt is the reason for the season.
- Santa Claus is, at best, a metaphor.
- Dinosaurs aren’t dead -
In fact there are some rather bewildered-looking avian dinosaurs outside my kitchen window wondering how Bubba the Fat Squirrel managed to steal the fat balls from 1.5m high up on our dispenser.
- Earth’s mantle isn’t molten. No, really, it isn’t. Mantle flow doesn’t drive plate tectonics, either. But the mantle is 3D. In fact, most things are 3D… except, of course, gorgeous illustrations by William Smith.
- Small earthquakes don’t do anything to prevent bigger earthquakes. You see, each magnitude 4 earthquake releases about 30 times as much energy as a magnitude 3… but an odd fact of seismology is that the ratio of M3:M4 earthquakes is constant over time, at about 10:1. This leaves us with a factor of 20 lurking ominously in the shadows.
- California is not going to fall into the sea. No, really, it isn’t.
- The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is neither relevant nor funny at the macro scale.
- Crustal folding doesn’t always mean a thickened crust - though the crust in that counterexample can still be fairly described as “thickening”.
- Lava is not a swimming pool. Oh, and the mantle isn’t liquid.
- The mantle is the most annoyingly least-understood part of this planet.
In other news, Mel discusses a test designed to expose students’ geological misconceptions - and why it might not always work. Saxifraga talks about what glaciers actually do - “The moraine five kilometers in front of the modern glacier margin is not a sad sign of the ice retreat, but a sign of a not climate related natural phenomenon called glacier surge and the retreat from the Little Ice Age moraine is partly an adaptation to warming over the past 100 years.”
In honor of National Pie Day, Callan Bentley shares his favorite baked-goods teaching analogies - but he hasn’t thought of any pielike concepts in geology, maybe you can help? Brian objects to the “layer cake” analogy, suggesting that perhaps we should use lentils instead. Lentils? I guess I’ve seen recipes for lentil shepherd’s pie…
Finally, Lab Lemming has a delicious rocky planet pie chart, and by “delicious” I mean “my dentist told me only to eat gas giant pie charts”.
