To invoke memoir’s native line spacing controls, use the Spacing environment:

\begin{Spacing}{2}
blah, blah, blah
\end{Spacing}


To use the setspace package, you need an extra line in your document preamble:

\DisemulatePackage{setspace}
\usepackage{setspace}


This was giving me a nasty headache, until I found this thread. There is probably more useful documentation of spacing commands in the memoir manual, but that is a huge friggin’ book; using the Spacing environment has solved my problem for now.

Not all the links - there’s no sense inundating readers of my geology blog with a bunch of recipes and quilting patterns. Just the links with a particular tag. And not every day, either - I don’t do enough bookmarking, or enough blogging, to justify that. Maybe some people like blogs where two out of every three posts are entitled “Links for [today's date]“, but I don’t.

So I wrote a little perl script to use with the offline blogging client Ecto. When you run the script, it pulls the 20 most recently posted links from your del.icio.us account that have been tagged with a special “blogthis” tag, formats them nicely, and dumps them into your currently open draft.

It’s only semi-automatic - you still have to manually delete any links you’ve already posted, and add titles, extra formatting, etc. - but it gets the job done.

Installation

1. If necessary, download and install Net::Delicious (try typing cpan -i Net::Delicious from the command line).
2. Download the script: delicious.txt
3. Edit the script so it has your del.icio.us username/password and the del.icio.us tag that you’re using to mean “post this to my blog”.
4. Save your edited script as “delicious.pl” in Ecto’s script folder (~/Library/Application Support/ecto3/scripts). The .pl extension is important.
5. Open Ecto. You should be able to run the script from Tools > Scripts.

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.So far, wherever court-ordered same-sex marriages or domestic partnerships have actually been put into effect, rather than immediately pre-empted by panicked legislative efforts, they have not been overturned. In Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, the much-ballyhooed “will of the people” looked at the sky, saw that it was not falling, and elected to preserve those civil rights.

All those other states writing laws and ratifying constitutional amendments to redefine marriage as something that affirms the straight person’s pinnacle in the social hierarchy? Sure, it’s an injustice and a political setback, but it’s easy to see how people can be afraid of the unknown. Once they have a chance to get used to the change, they’ll come ’round.

This summer, Californians looked around them and saw thousands of beaming newlyweds, ecstatic that their relationships were finally recognized as equal under the law. On Tuesday, Californians voted to annihilate that joy.

The vote on Proposition 8 was motivated by ignorance - for example, many supporters were genuinely worried that their churches would be forced to perform same-sex marriages - but not by fear of the unknown. It’s hard to read this as anything other than hatred.

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.

• 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”

(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.)

1. She went upstairs to make her bed
2. Fare thee well little lady
3. Allez bien, je t’emmene au vent
4. If there is a troubadour washing
5. Kan nogen tro de ved hvordan
6. There’s a rumor spreading all around
7. Strange how my heart beats
8. Cold wind on the water and rain on the road
9. In this land of strangers
10. Erasers impress me every day
11. Jeg sidder lige her og gifter mig med dig
12. What about my philosophy, MY philosophy
13. This was a lovely place
14. It’s a pleasure to finally meet
15. I saw a man fall through the street at Leavenworth and Eddy
16. Where in the hell is big blue eyes
17. Cannot be bound
18. Night has drawn the curtain
19. Remember the good times that we had
20. One day upon a Sunday morning
21. I’m up and I can take what you give
22. Hey little girl why you wear that dress
23. A kid I know got frozen
24. I went out last night to get me a bite
25. His eyes they closed

1. Nothingness
2. Trick question! The universe never ends
3. God
   Mr. McMoots added a fourth:

4. 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?

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