Four years ago today, I posted my first blog entry.  Four years.  Huh.  Wasn't really sure it was going to last the remainder of 2003, but what do you know.  While I never got too ranty, or, at least, not too consistently ranty, I've had fun with it.  Be it Carol Channing, memes, random linkage, or food porn, if you're still reading, hey, thanks!

I think I posted a while back about the scare smear the GOP was trying to paintbrush Nancy Pelosi with.  The scary gay-tastic "San Francisco values."  Although I'm sure I contributed a bit more to the cloud of smug when I heard that, I have to say that it was a pretty dumbass attack line that pandered so transparently to some artificial dyed-in-the-wool-conservative panic, given that the state compares to France in terms of GDP.  Hm, France, eh? Probably another reason to be loathed by American conservatives.

But, guess what? Other cities with "San Francisco values" tend to be richer as well.  And so now the gay agenda has been exposed:  economic prosperity for all!

Picked up an old Henry James book I've yet to exhaust, and read one of his shorts called, "The Altar of the Dead" that I'd not read before.  I actually quite like James (and his poetry can be pretty rockin').  He's often cited in terms of possessing unusual insight into people's thought processes and psychology.  "Altar" was very much in the James model, with the protagonist portrayed as some kind of proto-goth who lost a loved one and became fixated in almost an Edgar-Allen-Poe-esque way with the deaths of her (Mary Antrim, she is named) and others in his life.  The whole work has a feel of shadow and darkness about it, with the only thing giving any light is the candle-lit altar of remembrance of the dead.  It is in this place and around this light that the protagonist befriends -- slowly, carefully, seeming to take years -- a woman who, herself, begins to use his altar in the Church chapel, and the relationship they slowly develop leave much unspoken, but they both sense a kindred spirit.  Unfortuntately, that shared spirit is the memory of Acton Hague, one time friend of the protagonist who done him a great wrong (never explicated), and this widowed lady's dead husband.  Hague's is the one candle of the dead the protagonist would never light on the altar, though he tends one for each of the others in his life who passed.  And here, he discoveres that all candles were, for the suddenly-revealed Mrs. Hague, to be "one candle," for her only -- and most poignant -- loss.

James probes the mind of his protagonist and shines this graveyard candlelight into the dark recesses of his grief, stubbornness, pride, and mourning.  He shows us these things without much mercy, but definitely with some pity.  Death-in-life is a big theme in the story, specifically the kind of death that's self-imposed when some earthly bond of love is severed and the remaining partner is left with what comes after.  But he also shows us the death that is self-imposed when we allow things like grief and pride to dominate our interaction with the world around us.  There's a great scene early on where he meets a friend of his on the street.  The friend is with a woman whom the protagonist does not recognize, and certainly not the friend's wife, who died six months previous to the commencement of the story; it is his friend's new wife, and the protagonist is appalled.  When the protagonist looks at his friend's face, it is temporarily superimposed with the memory he had of his friend's face as it was looking down into his dead wife's casket at the funeral, full of mourning, sorrow, and grief.  It makes it pretty clear to the reader that, for the protagonist, life is over and should contain nothing more than loss and sadness -- and that no joy is right to exist in a world that he lives in, even for others.

Having the acquaintance of a few young widowers recently, I don't think I'd feel the same way about that interaction prior to my awareness of their experiences.  James does such a good job at illustrating this grief and renunciation of happiness in this life, while at the same time backlighting the protagonist in such a way that does not shy away from calling out his judgementality and his stubborn (and for a reader like me, frustrating) refusal to let the past go to remain alive in the present.  For such a short story, it's surprisingly dense and compelling.

Next story I'm revisiting is "The Turn of the Screw." 

From Superdickery, a funny site.

Caption from the website:  "Taking bets here: How long until the gay pride community finds this page and makes Rainbow Boy their new mascot?"

Yes, she is.

So's this mom.  Both mother and daughter were bitten by a rabid fox.  Are rabies treatments still super painful these days? Yeesh.  I'm not sure I'd be as strong as some five-year-old girls when faced with those shots.

Andrew Sullivan has a link to a smile test:  can you tell the real smiles from the fake ones?

In fact, just a couple of months ago when my dear friends Salina and Doug were here with their children, Simini and Xander, we went to the San Francisco Exploratorium, where they had a series of photographs of people, photographed twice, one depicting a genuine smile and one depicting a fake smile. You could lift the pictures and it'd tell you which was which.  At the end of the exhibit, it explained that a genuine smile causes certain muscles to activate that fake smiles don't, apparently activating muscles that are otherwise not something we learn to control at a conscious level. 

About a year or so ago, I read a book by Malcom Gladwell (he of The Tipping Point) called Blink, which I think I mentioned here on the blog at some point in the past.  Among other things he turns up in Blink's exploration of snap-judgement, "gut" reactions, he talks to a professor at UCSF who specializes in reading facial expressions, and not merely reading them, but serious empirical evaluation on facial expressions of people from around the world and different cultures, from cannibals in Africa, to Noh actors, to just plain-Janes on the street in America.  In fact, much to my delight, this professor is actually mentioned at the end of the test on the BBC site!

Scientists distinguish between genuine and fake smiles by using a coding system called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which was devised by Professor Paul Ekman of the University of California and Dr Wallace V. Friesen of the University of Kentucky.

Professor Ekman's ability to make certain pronouncements based on faces alone is astonishing.  He's developed a whole numeric system of muscle groups and facial muscle activations (the aforementioned FACS) and has himself practiced activating muscles consciously that most people don't or can't.  He demonstrates them to the author with great descriptions (e.g. "This is a number three and seven, usually used by western people to express pleasant surprise." "This is a number five and two, which isn't really used by anybody except Japanese actors in certain Kyōgen plays."), and explains how they discovered whole facial muscle groups that they couldn't, even with practice, control consciously without artificial electronic stimulation.

I was suprisingly good at figuring out the fake smiles from the real ones, even without the hint the exhibit provided. So, the test Sullivan linked to wasn't a new concept for me, but the format was.  At the Exploratorium exhibit, you could study still shots of the smiles side by side.  Most of the time, it was pretty easy for me to tell, with the exception of that one guy, who barely had any affect whatsoever, or at least nearly no discernable difference between fake and genuine and, probably, neutral.  The test Sullivan links to is a video test, with short videos of actual people smiling.  You can only play the videos once, though -- the control to play it deactivates after it plays once, so you get only the one impression.

I remain surprisingly good, even with this sample.  Out of 20 smiles, I identified 19 correctly.  The one I didn't was a hard call (his face is kind of lopsided and he's got tiny eyes), and I erred on the side of generosity.  I thought most of them were pretty easy.  The trick really is in the eyes, although I'm still not entirely sure what little flap of skin is supposed to be activated by a real smile.  But apparently, I still "get" it on some level when asked to make the distinction.

Terry Pratchett often will effectively use this awareness of the role of the eyes in a real smile to good effect in his writing, where he talks about grins "that don't touch his eyes," or "It was a smile, in that the corners of her mouth turned up at the ends," and similar observations that are both funny and accurate depictions of a fake smile, or a smile that has nothing to do with mirth, but possibly grim satisfaction at seeing someone get their comeuppance.

So, check out the test if you get a chance and see how you do.

"I unequivocally reject the attempt to focus a state-sponsored campaign on a delusional minority that suffers from a normative defect."
      - Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai responding to a tourism campaigned for Israel aimed at 'mos (as reported in Towleroad)

"What, like Judaism?"
     - Me, immediately after reading that line

Just goes to show you, mankind will go out of its way to find -- or create -- something on a lower rung to loathe, no matter what his religious affiliation.  His wonderfully parsed words, a "normative defect" so strongly reflect the Pope's "objectively disordered" language, it's striking to me in both its polysyllabic distancing from the human reality, as well as its distance from any shred of modernity.  It's obfuscatory nonsense (see, I can do that too) that is determined to utilize labels to remove himself from the actual denigration he's doing to people.

I don't think I'm entirely persuaded by the atheist argument yet, but it seems the biggest counterargument believers use is the refutation that the universe could not have arisen by chance.  I'm not sure why that couldn't be so.  I don't have a hard time accepting that possibility; it doesn't scare me in the least.  But I'm not sure that's any less of a leap of faith than to believe that than to believe some entity set everything in motion.  I think that alone keeps me this side of agnostic.

The other argument that gets to me is the insistence that without religious belief, morality is meaningless, everything is permitted, everything is absurd.  That every concept of justice and nobility and rightness can only come from accepting the existence of a deity.  While it would be dishonest to say that most of these concepts as they are today were not in some way coaxed out of the human spirit by the concept of the divine, and it's equally dishonest to say that religion (when it hasn't been persecuting non-believers for their non-belief in ways that would seem to radically undercut what believers say their very religion is about) has been a force of good in the world, what's to say that the concept of divinity itself wasn't a human construction?

That these things could be a human construction doesn't make it any less worthwhile a pursuit, but it doesn't either make it true.  And the other argument believers argue is that if you remove one of these things, divinity, the whole thing must be false? Whether or not justice, truth, love make the world a better place isn't at all in contention between the disputants.  But to say that without the actual existence of divinity, this renders all of these other concepts null or pointless seems to me a gross baby-with-the-bathwater scenario.

We are very much a tool-using race.  Ideas themselves are tools.  What's so hard to accept that divinity is a tool that permitted other worthwhile things to take root?

Kind of depressing to post two obituaries back to back.  I shall start callling this "The Blog of Death."

Anyways, farewell to the game show denizen and "Tonight Show" frequenter with the really butt ugly glasses.  He was, of course, more capable then that, but felt the "pink ceiling" of  Hollywood like every other out performer.  The L.A. Times obit is good, read it.  There may be a few surprises for you, not the least of might be that he was good friends with Burt Reynolds and taught acting at said actor's school.  He's also coached a few other well-known actors and performers, and knew Shakespeare pretty well.

New song over in the sidebar.  YouTube reminds me a lot of what it used to be like in the early days of the commercial/popular internet.  So many links that can take you unexpected places, and it's hard not to click on them, especially if it's material you're not familiar with.  I didn't even know there was a video for "The Dreaming," and it's properly weird.

"Ding, Dong, The Witch Is Dead"
-a sign on a placard carried by a guy standing on "Hibernia Beach" in the Castro

"Since I can think of nothing good to say about him, I'll say nothing."
-Sullivan, who then respectfully wished the dead guy's soul well

"[Westboro Baptist Church] will preach at the memorial service of the corpulent false prophet Jerry Falwell, who spent his entire life prophesying lies and false doctrines like 'God loves everyone'. There is little doubt that Falwell split Hell wide open the instant he died. The evidence is compelling, overwhelming, and irrefragable ['irrefragable?' *looks it up* Oh.  Sheesh. -S7]."
-Fred Phelps, lover of mankind, by way of Towelroad.

"Let us recall the words of Miss Bette Davis in these trying times.
'Mother told me only to say only the good about the dead. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.'"
-Matty Boy, commenter on Princess Sparkle Pony's site

Speaking of The Pink Pony, the last couple of days have had fitting tributes to this . . . giant of a man.  Click here for musical stylings of that hep cat, Jerry, telling us that, indeed, monkeys are no kin of his.  Possibly because his closest genetic relative would be king oyster mushrooms or, perhaps, the dirigible.

Even better, an imagined, and wholly plausible photograph from Jerry's funeral.  PSP's leet photoshop skills are no stranger to this blog, but this made me smile and swing my red purse around.

I realize that this is oddly timed with Brad's recent thoughts on food.  But I've mentioned the Hungry Planet photo exhibition several times now, and it still very striking to me.  Jennconspiracy found a good link to a magazine spread on the work at the artist's website.  We can, in fact, feed the world even at its current size, and that any failure to do so is strictly manmade and political in origin.

I thought of the rationing books under the Cuban family's picture.  I thought of the Mongolian family who lost their business and home.  I thought of the family from Chad who fled the Sudanese violence and were also on rationed food.  Without even knowing it, it seems, Mr. Menzel if not proved this thesis, but at least illustrated it in action.  Here is the family, with what they've been given to last a week for food (all photos copyrighted © 2005 by Peter Menzel Photography used here noncommercially, not for profit, and without permission, courtesy the Marie Claire spread)

The magazine spread Mr. Menzel used in his website (from the French edition of Marie Claire) has only the family from Chad, conspicuously absent the father.  I'll have to see if I can find the article and see what they talked about.  In any case, the exhibit is definitely provocative and memorable. Check out the links when you get a chance.

Here's Bhutan.

Germany:

Check the site for the rest.

So, I love risotto.  I love starch.  I love carbs (who doesn't?).  I am not of the opinion that they are the devils work.  At Copia, in Napa, there is a wonderful exhibit -- "Hungry Planet:  What the World Eats" -- of photographs of families around the world and what they eat in a week -- literally, everything they consume, from fresh grains and vegetables, to pre-packaged edibles, even the alcohol that they may consume (advantage:  Germans, who average two beers a day per parent (2), except on the weekend, where it looks like they have a third).  Life-size pictures of families and their groceries from Guatemala, rural China, Cuba, Chad, Malawi, Mongolia, India, the USA, the UK, France, and others.  I mention this because, by far, the slimmest white people were the Italian family, and their table was covered in bread, more than any other family shown.  Bread bread bread.  Pasta.  Bread.  More bread.  There were definitely vegetables and fish (the father/husband is a fishmonger), but the beautiful sight of all that bread.  And the super-skinny, attractive, healthy-looking family.

The oldest family there was the Japanese family.  It consisted just of the sixty year old husband, his fiftysomething wife, and the husband's centegenarian mother.  The plumpest, I'm sorry to say, were the Indian family (damn you, palak paneer!).  The English family had more pre-packaged foods than any other, and it mildly horrified Jennconspiracy.  Not so much me, though.  England is an island with amazing agricutlure and was a Roman breadbasket for years.  Anything not grown there, though, must be imported.  But I think, also (and correct my if I'm wrong, English readers), that packaged food isn't always the same as processed food, at least in terms of the food's preparation/crafting.  Granted any amount of time between, say, a chicken squirting out an egg and that egg becoming an omelette on my plate is technically processing.  When we think of packaged food in the USA, we often think of highly processed food, like nitrate-rich luncheon meats.  But I'm under the impression that industry standards are different there.  Agribusiness exists, but on a different scale.  And of course, there's the dairy.  English dairy is amazingly good. And highly consumed in the country, and by nature, must be packaged, as the days of the milkman coming to your house are gone pretty much everywhere in the west.

All of this is by way of getting to my unashamed love of risotto.  I recently purchased a used book with over a hundred recipes worth of risotto, cheese, veggie (broken, strangely, down into "Green" (i.e. leafy) and "All Colors"), meat, and fruit and alcohol.  The book is very well done, and was probably super easy to compile, since the process for making risotto is nearly identical no matter which kind you make. 

Every recipe contains the four groups of ingredients: brodo (the broth or liquid), soffrito (the diced aromatics and fat/oil), condimenti (the variational flavors and ingredients, such as the cheese, meat, what have you), and the riso (the arborio rice).  With minimal variation, the sequence is nearly always the same: 

heat the brodo to a simmer
mince the aromatics (soffrito) and soften in oil
coat the riso in the soffrito
add some wine (usually)
add the brodo a 1/4 to 1/5 cup at a time, letting it mostly absorb before the next ladlefull
add the final condimenti (almost always some parmagiana reggiano and whatever else goes in)

People will often remark about all the stirring time, but the book mentioned that it averaged out to no more than about 18 minutes, and you know what? I happen to time it last night, and that was spot on.  So here's a recipe from the book, slightly altered.  It sounded unusual and tasty, and I happen to see that blood oranges were back in Rainbow Grocery, so what the hell.

Brodo
 4.5 cups vegetable broth

Soffrito
 1/3 cup minced onion
 2 tbsp minced capers (you can mince the two together in a mince chopper jar)
 2 tbsp unsalted butter
 2 tbsp olive oil

Riso
 1.5 cups arborio rice (Don't rinse! Arborio rice should be used with full starchiness)

Condimenti
 1 cup blood orange juice (about 5 of the smaller blood oranges)
 2 tbsp Campari (or brandy, or Hangar One Mandarin Blossom, or Absolut Mandarin)
 2 tbsp light cream (or half-and-half)
 1/3 cup grated reggiano parmesan

1) Heat up the brodo to a steady simmer.  Don't boil it.  The idea is to keep it hot but at a comparable temperature to the riso as it's cooking

2) Heat up the oil and butter in a large saucepan at moderate heat.  Add the onion and caper and sautée for about 2 minutes, taking care to let the onion soften, but not brown

3) Add the riso to the soffrito, stirring with a wooden spoon and thoroughly coating the rice

4) Add the blood orange juice and let it absorb completely, stirring frequently to prevent sticking

5) Add 1/4 to 1/2 a cup of the brodo to the rice at a time, letting it almost completely absorb before adding the next ladlefull.  The rice will slowly absorb and cook in the broth.  You'll want to stir frequently to prevent sticking.  It doesn't need 100% of your time, but don't let it sit unattended for longer than 3-5 mintues depending on how hot your burner is.  You may want to lower the heat slightly.  The hot broth will still work its magic at lower temperature.

Continue adding broth until you get to the last 1/4 cup of it.  Reserve that last bit for the end.

6) You should now have averaged about 18 minutes of adding broth and stirring.  Let all the liquid absorb at this point, taking care not to let it stick to the bottom of the saucepan.  A spoon dragged through the rice to the bottom of the saucepan should leave a furrow in which the rice doesn't immediately slide back into the space left by the spoons passage.

7) Now, add the remaining brodo, the remaining condimenti (the booze, cream, and cheese), and stir thoroughly, turning off the heat.  Serve immediately!

First the pets, now the children.  (Thanks, Brad)