The Definitive Spinach Quiche Recipe

A mixture of Cook's Illustrated, Martha Stewart, and trial & error.

Crust:

1 1/4 cups flour
4 tbsp butter, cubed (frozen or very cold)
3 tbsp shortening, cubed (frozen or very cold)
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
Ice water

Preheat oven to 375. Process dry ingredients to blend, then add shortening and process for ten one-second pulses. Add butter and repeat. Turn into a mixing bowl and fold in ice water with a spatula, 1-2 tbsp at a time, until the dough coheres into a slightly tacky ball. Turn out onto plastic wrap and squish into a 4 inch disk, then freeze for 30 minutes. Roll out with a little extra flour, rotating after each couple of rolls. Fold in quarters and unfold in a deep quiche pan, turning in any overhang and pressing against the sides. Lightly fork the bottom several times and freeze for 30 minutes. Bake for 25 minutes (pie weights may be used). Remove pie weights if necessary and bake for 5 more minutes. Remove from oven and let cool. (Do not add cheese later if the crust is still hot enough to melt it.)

Filling:

10 oz. raw spinach, chopped and large stems removed (no frozen spinach)
2 shallots
1 tbsp butter
4 oz Gruyere cheese
1 cup heavy whipping cream (do not substitute!)
1 cup milk
2 eggs and 2 egg yolks
1 tsp salt
1 tsp white pepper
1 dash ground nutmeg

While crust is baking, saute shallots in butter in a large, deep pan until translucent. Add spinach, a little at a time, until it is uniformly wilted. Remove, place in strainer, and allow to drain liquids, pressing firmly to encourage this. While the spinach drains further, grate the cheese finely. Beat spices with eggs, then add milk and cream and whisk together.

Alternate layers of the drained and pressed spinach (the spinach should not dribble even a little) and the finely grated cheese in the cooled pie shell, spinach first. Place the quiche pan on a rimmed cookie sheet, pull out the oven rack, and put the whole thing on the rack. Then gently pour the filling liquid into the pan, making sure not to pour all in one spot. Gingerly slide the rack back into the oven.

Bake at 375 for 35-50 minutes, or until top has golden brown spots and the center jiggles only slightly. (Check at 35 and 45 minutes.) Allow to cool at least 10-15 minutes before removing the quiche from the pan.

Follow all directions exactly and happiness will be yours. This filling also works with 4-5 slices of roughly crumbled or chopped bacon in place of the spinach and shallots. Note: Do not add the spices to the milk and then the eggs. Do not grate the cheese too early or with the coarse side of the grater. Do not use half and half in place of the milk and cream. Do not skimp the draining of the spinach. Do not use vodka in the crust---I don't care what you heard. Do not touch the dough directly with your hands except when flipping it to roll and when folding and unfolding it and patting it into the pan. Touch the butter and shortening as little as possible. Do not use all butter; shortening will not kill you. If you use a shallow quiche pan, the baking time will be shorter and you will not have a huge, thick, beautiful slab of quiche. If you don't put the pan on a cookie sheet and your crust develops an invisible crack and leaks egg all over the oven, don't come crying to me.

By request: What kind of exercise can you stand?

I have never liked sweating. Growing up in Houston, sweating was a gross and omnipresent burden on existence. The humidity hangs over you like a damp towel at all times, making all the sweating completely ineffectual, as if further insult was required. I was eighteen before I realized that people could wear the same clothing item twice without laundering. To minimize perspiration, you ambled from air-conditioned car to air-conditioned building and back again as quickly as you could without breaking a sweat. Not sweating, for a girl from the south, can be raised to a fine art.

Thus my hatred of exercise. People sweat on purpose? Not to win a game, even, or do something arguably artistic, but just ... for its own sake? Disgusting. But at a certain point, one's lifestyle and metabolism conspire to make the strategies perfected as a teen on the Gulf Coast maladaptive. One must exercise, lest you blimp out.

With that preface and qualification, I have managed to stomach the following exercise methods and activities:

- Walking to and from places which one is required to go (work, grocery store, etc.)
- Weightlifting, very occasionally.
- Elliptical machines, even less frequently, and only when completely distracted by a very specific type of audiobook, namely an airplane read/plot crack page-turner.
- Day-to-day activities from which a certain amount of exertion is integral.

I am sure that spinning yarn with my foot-powered wheel burns some tiny percentage of the calories expended in the more famous "spinning" exercises, but that hardly counts.

That's the internet for you.

Funniest line from the new Bleeding-Heart Libertarians blog:

I didn't realize that this blog was going to be read by so many non-philosophers.

Same here.

This is where I'm at, too. Inspiration, please?

Jezebel + io9 - pointless assholery = ?

This looks promising.

On being a girl in a boys' club

You will never actually be part of the boys' club, because you are a woman. You are Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. You are not Italian, therefore you are never going to get made.

50 Book Challenge No. 4: The Scarlet Contessa

Not to unfairly bash The Scarlet Contessa, but I tire of historical novels in which we are lent glimpses into the lives of famous personages from the viewpoint of limpet-like fictional companions with conveniently anachronistic attitudes. Fails as education and as smut. Not recommended.

50 Book Challenge No. 3: Slammerkin

I went into Slammerkin knowing essentially nothing about it, other than that it was a historical novel set in 18th century England and had a female protagonist. I endorse this method of encounter, and will endeavor to not spoil the book for you.

It purports, in the afterword, to be based on a true story, but the details of the events referenced are largely unknown, and the motivations of the persons involved still less so. The canvas thus prepared for Emma Donoghue's perceptive reimagining, we are drawn into the achingly common story of Mary Saunders's "fall": A mere girl, tarnished forever by sexual impurity, embraces the relative freedom offered by a life of prostitution. After some years of hard and fast living, her options and friends dwindling, Mary makes a daring choice: To impersonate herself, as the girl she would have been, and return to her mother's village on the Welsh border to make a living as a seamstress. A happy ending for Mary is almost within reach, but her emotional ties to the independence of her former life, coupled with the greed and malice of a former client, make clear that Mary is not destined to live a simple life of sewing and children. The strongest aspect of the novel is in Donoghue's characterization of Mary, who does not just have weaknesses, but demonstrates them in organic and believable ways. The ending, though, comes abruptly and does not follow as smoothly from Mary's motivations as her prior conduct. Nevertheless, recommended for historical fiction readers.

50 Book Challenge Nos. 1 & 2: Catching Fire & Mockingjay

I started off the new year with a little YA fiction: Catching Fire, the second book of the Hunger Games, and the closing volume of the trilogy, Mockingjay. Neither is as good as its predecessor, which required the protagonist to be constantly active and making choices with ethical and plot implications; here, Katniss is strangely reactive, and the reader is dragged into a morass of guerrilla warfare just as she is. The centrality of Katniss to the resistance movement (even as a mere symbol) seems shoehorned and awkward, and too much of the books' suspense revolves around which boy Katniss will pick. Recommended for completists and YA speculative fiction fanboys and -girls.

"To enter into a marriage the bar of intelligence and understanding is set low."

Since there has been some blog discussion of this instance in which a disabled man was ordered not to have sex, I thought people might appreciate reading the actual legal decision.

1. In this case [the testifying psychiatrist] ... proposed the following criteria by way of particularisation:

For capacity to consent to sex to be present the following factors must be understood:

1. The mechanics of the act

2. That only adults over the age of 16 should do it (and therefore participants need to be able to distinguish accurately between adults and children)

3. That both (or all) parties to the act need to consent to it

4. That there are health risks involved, particularly the acquisition of sexually transmitted and sexually transmissible infections

5. That sex between a man and a woman may result in the woman becoming pregnant

6. That sex is part of having relationships with people and may have emotional consequences

1. The next question is to decide whether the six criteria of Dr Hall do indeed accurately particularise the simple test of Munby J. It is fair to say that neither counsel supports the inclusion of the sixth criterion as an essential ingredient of capacity to consent to sex (viz "an awareness that sex is part of having relationships with people and may have emotional consequences"). I agree. This criterion is much too sophisticated to be included in the low level of understanding and intelligence needed to be able to consent to sex. Apart from anything else, I would have thought that a deal of sex takes place where one or other party is wholly oblivious to this supposed necessity.
2. Counsel are agreed that an awareness and understanding of the first, fourth and fifth criteria are indeed essential ingredients of the capacity to consent to sex. They are divided as to the inclusion of the second (age) and third (consent). Mr O'Brien strongly argues that the law requires their inclusion; Mr Sachdeva states that "they go beyond the factors which have been expressly stated as being necessary elements of capacity to consent to sex in previous case law".
3. So the question that I have to answer is this: in order to be able to consent to sex does a person need to have a proper and full(ish) awareness and understanding that sex should only be done by people over 16, and that it should be consensual? It is not an answer to the question to observe that sex with minors, and non-consensual sex, are horrible perversions. There are plenty of paedophiles out there who through warped ideology actually believe that it is morally acceptable to have sex with children. Equally, the prisons have numerous rapists within their walls. But paedophiles and rapists have the capacity to consent to sex.
4. Mr O'Brien says that this argument is over-intellectual. We are dealing here, he says, with mentally incapacitated people, who in the terms of s2(1) of the Act are suffering impairment of, or a disturbance in the functioning of, the mind or brain. We are not talking about perverts who obviously have the capacity to consent to sex. This is true enough, but I believe that to import these knowledge requirements into the capacity test elevates it to a level considerably above the very simple and low level test propounded by Munby J namely "sufficient rudimentary knowledge of what the act comprises and of its sexual character".
5. In his evidence Dr Hall emphasised that the need for consent is one of the very first messages that is conveyed to people with learning disabilities who are being taught about sex. Nothing I say is intended to diminish that obviously vital message. There is a difference, however, between the teaching of what is right and wrong in the pursuit of sex, and what level of understanding and intelligence is needed to be capable of consenting to it.
6. I therefore conclude that the capacity to consent to sex remains act-specific and requires an understanding and awareness of:

The mechanics of the act

That there are health risks involved, particularly the acquisition of sexually transmitted and sexually transmissible infections

That sex between a man and a woman may result in the woman becoming pregnant

After considering "Alan"'s knowledge of various sexual acts and related issues, the judge elected to enter only a temporary order stating that the subject lacked capacity to consent, with the caveat that "the local authority [] provide Alan with sex education in the hope that he thereby gains that capacity."

Incidentally, I passionately hate reading English legal opinions due to the formatting and citation conventions, but the decision to number paragraphs is a very elegant way to circumvent dependence on pay sites for pagination information. Is there some reason why this could not be adopted by judges in the United States?

PSA re bookblogging

A friend remarked the other day that I have fallen behind on my book blogging, which has the side effect of making it harder for him to find new books to read. Sorry, folks! I have been reading quite a lot, but I only blog books that am reading for the first time and finish, and quite a few have been discarded partway through or were comfort book rereads. Will catch up with some reviews this week!

Poem of the Night

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number —
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you —
Ye are many — they are few.

Lt. Mary Sue Frey, who singlehandedly talked Hitler to a standstill

I was chatting yesterday about the backlash against The King's Speech, which is a very enjoyable film but is historically inaccurate in several respects. The tweaks to the narrative didn't bother me, as in most cases (such as the Churchill bit), the changes are not really relevant to the focus of the film, which is the relationship between Logue and Bertie and Bertie's struggle to overcome his disability.

My interlocutor then pressed me: How can one despise mendacious memoirists (as I do) but not care about historically inaccurate film narratives? And then I realized that this is all about fan fiction.

Fans love fanfic, and the British monarchy has a lot of fans: history buffs, royalty-obsessed weirdos, pretentious Anglophiles, etc. So we get The King's Speech, which appeals to Windsor worshipers AND people who own the DVD of Pride & Prejudice with Colin Firth. There is a sense in which the viewer joyfully collaborates with the filmmaker to celebrate their mutual appreciation of these historical characters. It is not that the appropriation of extant historical or fictional characters for purposes of short-cutting world-building or characterization is illegitimate; on the contrary, the whole point is that the degree of attention to the desired focus is made possible by invoking our preexisting knowledge and emotional associations. Where the story (here, the story of a friendship between two men of very different backgrounds and of a privileged person being forced to ask a "lesser" man for help) is facilitated by certain facts being elided or altered, it is perfectly reasonable for such changes to be made---the tale is not about Churchill, or Edward's fascist sympathies, or the precise timeline under which Bertie underwent therapy. Adherence to the facts in all instances would distract and detract from our focus, and from our appreciation of the setting and characters for which we already feel such affection.

The James Freys of the world take advantage of this affection for self-aggrandizement. The creation of the narrative is no longer about the world or characters that the writer and reader both love, but about gratifying the ego of the author. Instead of being immersed in a world from the inside, from the perspective of one of its natives, we are shoehorned into a deceitful incarnation that cannot provide the satisfying interactions with our characters and setting we desire as fans or readers: cannot, because each interaction must center around the Sue, not organically grow from what we know about who and what surrounds it.

Nobody likes a Mary Sue. But The King's Speech doesn't have one, and so it didn't bother me.

Complicity

So I just finished watching Spartacus: Blood and Sand and the first two episodes of its prequel series and am feeling very, very dirty.

It's not that I have a problem with nudity and sex (as Constant Readers are aware) and it's not that I find blood and guts on screen a serious problem, although I did turn off Ichi the Killer ten minutes in. But the basic concept of the Spartacus series is to combine the sex of The Tudors with the classical setting of Rome. And there is a LOT of sex, in many instances presented as entertainment for Roman citizens (their enjoyment of which is then presented for our entertainment). The problem is that at least half of the sex acts on screen, which are nearly always shot in the most salacious manner possible, are acts of rape.

Citizens raping slaves. Slaves raping other slaves at their master's behest. Slaves raping other slaves on their own initiative and without sanction by a master. Slaves being given as sexual playthings to both free citizens and other slaves as incentives in various plots. Perhaps the most remarkable part is that it probably contains more acts of sexual assault against men (by both male and female perpetrators) than any show since Oz. I don't know what the reaction of a male viewer would be, but I'd venture to guess that any inclination to perceive the sexual acts as more than "ooh hot people doing it" would rouse substantial discomfort.*

The part that unsettles me is that although the cumulative effect of viewing the series was to very effectively underline exactly how many ways people can have their sexual autonomy violated,** I still managed to plow right through to the end, where, as promised, Spartacus goes all "Spartacus!!!" and kills everybody. But I absolutely refuse to watch Boys Don't Cry or Irreversible, on the grounds that I just can't handle the rape scenes, no matter how terrific they may be as pieces of cinematic art and virtuoso acting. Spartacus is, to put it kindly, not destined for greatness in those regards. And yet here I am, checking for the air date of episode three.*** Somehow I doubt my reaction would be the same to a miniseries documenting, say, the St. Domingue slave revolt. 

* It's all very well to think that being Lucy Lawless's private stud wouldn't be so bad, but even this glossy film portrayal of it makes you think twice.

** Along with the banal monstrosity of the citizen class, which is done well enough that one ends up cheering on the brutal murder of a callow teenage boy.

*** For now I'm going to blame John Hannah and his character's manifold schemes,**** which make it sort of plot crack even when you know how the characters are going to end up. The dude had a lot of built-up capital from my love of The Mummy***** and Sliding Doors.

**** Also Asher, who basically lives by the motto "What Would Iago Do?"

 ***** Which, relatedly: Arnold Vosloo on Bones! But with hair! Do not want!

The Naked and the Nude

Tom Ford on nudity:

I’m very comfortable with naked bodies. Someone asked me recently about male nudity, and I brought up the subject that, in our culture, we use female nudity to sell everything. We’re very comfortable objectifying women. Women go out and they are basically wearing nothing. Their feet and toes are exposed, their legs are exposed, their breasts are exposed. Everything is exposed—the neck, the arms. You have to be really physically perfect, as a woman, in our culture to be considered beautiful. But full frontal male nudity challenges us. It makes men nervous. It makes women nervous. Other times in history, male nudes have been regarded in a different way. The Olympics were originally held nude. The reporter I was explaining this to said, “This would make a great story.” I explained how when I come home I actually
take off all my clothes, and I wear no clothes until I leave. I eat naked. I do everything completely naked. He said, “That would make a great interview.” I said, “Fine, we have to do it nude.”

CURRIN: How old was the interviewer?

FORD: Oh, 55 or 56. [Currin laughs] He was in very good shape. Anyway, we did the interview. The interviewer was straight, and I made it a point to desexualize the interview even though I was sitting with my legs wide open, completely naked. At the end of the interview, I put on a dressing gown and he put on his clothes, and I sat next to him on the sofa and said, “Was that sexual?” He said, “Absolutely not.” And I said, “That’s because I didn’t make it sexual.

There is nothing like a trip to Spa World to desexualize nudity. (via)

Scary fact: Paris Hilton and I are basically the same age.

Hugo Schwyzer contends that modern girls are trapped in a "Paris paradox," in which they feel pressured to be sexy without being authentically sexual. I'm not sure that this is a new phenomenon, or even new in the 2000s. When I was in high school (fifteen years ago! wowsers), a clique of the high achieving girls started some club called the Temptresses, which apparently involved sexy Temptress names, sleepovers with videos of them eating strawberries and whipped cream, and public recounting of said exploits, but no actual sexual activity. A friend and I quipped that we ought to start a parallel Seductresses society, the motto being "we get results," and oriented toward, you know, hooking up with boys we liked, not homosocial performance art.*

It never occurred to me before now to connect the high academic achievement level of the Temptresses with their embrace of the sexy-but-not-sexual, but in retrospect it seems obvious that most of them probably felt familial and internalized pressure to devote their time and energy toward Amy-Chua-approved pursuits instead of teenage romance, but still wanted a social stamp of approval on their femininity and desirability.

Or maybe they just really liked whipped cream. Shrug.


* Bonus: I already had the trashy Seductress name.

Phallic Swords of Damocles

My friend Alyssa Rosenberg highlights one respect in which historical fiction, written and filmed, almost always fails:

I think one thing that most movies set in the semi-Medieval through Victorian eras don't really get at is the absolute horror of arranged marriages. Sure, sometimes they worked out, and you ended up with someone you'd come to love, or at least live companionably with. But can you imagine being married off to someone forty or fifty years older than you? Someone who had absolutely no interest in you except for raping you? Who ignored you altogether? Who physically abused you? And all in a world where there were no resources [for] you, much less any concept of choice in the matter?

I can't, really, and I imagine most contemporary writers can't either.

Even if you were not forcibly wed or if your forced marriage turned out relatively well, the fact of being married to someone meant that he could demand sex at any time and you were obligated to acquiesce---sex that could lead to a life-threatening premodern pregnancy and childbirth. That these circumstances did not result in a subjective experience of constant terror for their victims makes them no less morally horrifying.

Law school a scam?

Somebody asked me the other day why I hadn't posted about this NYT article about whether law schools are scams. I didn't because I've said my piece on law school generally and don't like coming off as Bitter Lawyer Girl when, really, I went to a very good law school and am glad that I did and became a lawyer and not, say, a consultant or an i-banker. But other people have snarked on the article and they are funny:

Supply and demand should have caused these lower tier schools to lower their costs to entice students away from the better but more expensive schools.  But they don't need to, because all law schools are free.  Read it again.  All law schools are free.

Not after you graduate, of course, but right now.  Law schools can charge anything they want because everyone has enough money to pay for it- today.  As long as there are guaranteed government loans available for this, there is no economic incentive to lower the costs.  And as long as the price is zero, demand will always be infinity.

If it was true supply and demand, #1 ranked Harvard and #100 ranked Hofstra wouldn't have the same tuition.  But they do, the same as stupid Washington University, which is so stupid it's in Missouri.  "It's underrated."  Bite me.  Are we saying that Hofstra's worth the same money as Harvard?  That people would pay anything to go to Hofstra?  No, they don't have to pay anything to go to Hofstra.  That's the point. 

What I found particularly amusing about the NYT piece is that the profiled graduate went to law school in San Diego but didn't want to work there. When I was interviewing for newbie lawyer jobs, scuttlebutt was to not even bother trying to get a job in San Diego without some preexisting connection, because so many people just try to get jobs there for the weather that they don't take out-of-towners very seriously. Likewise, when I talked to people about New York jobs, people noted that graduates of lower-tier schools located in NYC have a leg up over graduates of similarly ranked institutions elsewhere. But here's this guy, who obviously had to pay full freight at a low-ranked school, doing the exact opposite of what might have helped him. Of course, it's not like I knew that stuff until after making a law school choice either, but might it not have occurred to him? Oh well.

The Art of Travel, continued

This post at Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog on the ethics of slumming (and Coates's subsequent admission that he would stay at an all-inclusive resort, which, hello, of course you would---who among us is too self righteous to appreciate the ultimate lazy vacation, in which no financial decisions or coordination problems interfere with your pina colada consumption and complete sloth? but I digress) made me reflect on my philosophy of travel. I've not taken a vacation in a while and am contemplating a solo trip to Namibia or Cambodia (although a friend went to Sao Tome some time ago and it looked awesome).

However, in the course of a recent conversation I reiterated my position on travel, which is that I don't interact with people while I'm there. I see things, and places, and art, and history. I travel to rationalize the sense of alienation and dislocation I feel on a day-to-day basis and throw it into sharp relief, not to make friends. But is this somehow even more insulting than poverty tourism (although it's equal-opportunity; I am just as aloof in rich countries as in poorer ones)? It's not that I look down on people I meet; it's that the stress of trying to connect with them interferes with my engagement of whatever relaxing and cool thing I came there to do. Trouble is, I am running out of destinations where there is stuff that I already am interested in. Future destinations are going to involve me learning to appreciate new stuff, and that's hard to do with minimal social interaction.

Brilliant.

So, those stand-alone turkey roaster countertop ovens? Just about the perfect appliance for yarn dyeing. And here I was thinking I needed stockpots and outdoor gas burners.

Does Not Compute

Busty women, chill with the persecution fantasies.

If you're feeling like a freak, you're not alone. Bra sizes have risen from an average of 36C to 36DD in the past decade. And it's not just America: in the same decade, British women went from 34B to 36C. A lot of this is attributable to the overall fattening of both nations, but pound gain doesn't always equal cup gain — and many women aren't overweight, but are still obscenely top-heavy. Other potential causes: implants; the Pill; hormones in factory-farmed food; hormones secreted into water supplies by contraceptives.


2. Vicky is dead to you. This is the oft-questioned "secret": V. (um, duh, she's an alien) advertises with models who wear your cup size, but doesn't actually sell bras that fit them. In all matters relating to your top half, scorch her from the earth. (Her undies are cute, though.) This also goes for your old pals Gap, Target, et al. They are mass-market and your tits are not. At least you can still get socks pretty cheap? (emphasis added)

Mass-market stores don't carry items that fit the average woman? I can believe this for trendy stores that don't want to be seen as where the chubby ladies shop, but since when is Target that cool?

Price points

I was all set to read this book Yglesias mentioned, but the Kindle edition is $41.73. Forty-one seventy-three. WHY.

That Tiger Mother

Like everyone else, I read the infamous WSJ excerpt from Amy Chua's book. And like most people on the internet, I was repulsed. Why (aside from the crazy emotional abuse)? Because Amy Chua's goal is to raise little Amy Chuas. And Amy Chua is nobody to emulate.

From Metafilter:

i'm having trouble reading Chau's article as anything other than a passive-aggressive push in a deeply troubled marriage. She's revealed only tense moments between them in just a 2,000 word article. Jed Rubenfeld, her husband, in addition to his law accomplishments, published a novel and once studied theater at Julliard. That seems to put her "no school plays" comment into context.

I cannot imagine having children with someone and then communicating to them with your every fiber of being that you wouldn't want those children to be anything like them. Why marry him at all? Why not a Chinese guy?

Chua explicitly states that her goal is to sideline "Western" parenting strategies and use the techniques with which she was raised. They were (and will probably be) very efficacious:

If you're trying to figure out if her method works or if it is harmful some other way, you're missing the real disease in her thinking. She's not unique. the disease is powerful and prevalent, it is American, but a disease nonetheless. (No, this time it's not narcissism.)

I'll explain what's wrong with her thinking by asking you one simple question, and when I ask it you will know the answer immediately. Then, if you are a parent, in the very next instant your mind will rebel against this answer, it will defend itself against it-- "well, no, it's not so simple--" but I want to you to ignore this counterattack and focus on how readily, reflexively, instinctively you knew the answer to my question. Are you ready to test your soul? Here's the question: what is the point of all this? Making the kids play violin, of being an A student, all the discipline, all of this? Why is she working her kids so hard? You know the answer: college.

She is raising future college students.

And what do you get?

She confesses in her book that she is “not good at enjoying life,” and that she wasn’t naturally curious or skeptical like other law students. “I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it.”

You can be a Yale Law professor and still a failure as a human being.

Happening Friday Night

Twins aren't delicious!

Despite not believing in the slightest in astrology, I am discomfited by the idea that I am no longer a Cancer. Then again, I hate random changes most of the time.

Witchy Nose = My Beauty Secret

I wonder how these research results mesh with the phenomenon of the pretty-ugly runway model.

Singing to the cat

You're the cutest Snape and that is that/
You're the cutest Snape and nobody's cuter/
Nobody, not even Hans Gruber

...

Actually, exceptions have to be made/
for Die Hard 1, I take that back.

Weekend Bake: Sausage Kolaches?

I went back to Houston for the holidays (squeaked out just before the snow caused mass cancellations) and had some sausage kolaches from the local bakery. Doughnut shops are one of the things I miss the most about Texas. In the DC area, just finding a doughnut shop that isn't Dunkin can be a challenge, and nowhere seems to make the deliciously light, airy yeast doughnuts that are par for the course in Texas bakeries. But worse yet, you will never, ever find in a DC doughnut shop that lovely and ambrosial breakfast item, the sausage kolache.

Some people claim that this isn't a kolache, it's a klobasnek. To which I reply: Maybe if you're in Europe. If it's here, and it's Tex-Czech, it's a kolache, damn it. There are no klobasneks with jalapenos.

Although one of my favorite Texan food blogs has a recipe for kolache dough, I had held back on attempting to replicate this foodstuff because the central ingredient, namely the sausage, posed a problem. If you go to a grocery store in Texas, you are likely to be confronted by a wall of sausage options (seriously, I wish I had snapped a photo when I was in H.E.B.---it was literally 10-15 feet of nothing but sausage). Here in DC, you are lucky to find decent kielbasa, much less something appropriately sized and worthy of encasement in sweet yeast dough. But then I saw someone mention New Braunfels Smokehouse, and I realized that mail order sausage might just be the ticket. Maybe not from there, but somewhere.

I will keep you up to date with the results of this experiment.

50 Book Challenge 2011

I have been reading a LOT lately. The 50 Book Challenge format (previously; even previouser) at least gives me a framework for keeping track of things. I'll be writing short reviews of the books I read throughout the year and add them to the list below.

1. Catching Fire
2. Mockingjay
3. Slammerkin 
4. The Scarlet Contessa
5. Ghost Map 
6. Hater
7. The Broken Kingdoms
8. Tooth and Claw
9. The Drowning City
10. Medicus
11. Persona Non Grata
12. After the Prophet
13. The Forsaken
14. The Hangman's Daughter
15. Beat the Reaper 
16. Medicus, 
17. Terra Incognita
18. Persona Non Grata
19. Mao's Great Famine
20. The Bone Palace
21. Troubled Waters
22. The Heroes

Some things never change

The world turns, the year is new, but Ross Douthat is still an idiot. While it's true that the availability of safe, legal abortion has accounted for some of the modern scarcity of adoptable infants, and the acceptability of single parenting (or unwed co-parenting) for some of the rest, widely available birth control has probably accounted for a huge percentage of the "missing" adoptable infants.

I'm fascinated by his description of the waiting list for adoptive parents as "lengthened beyond reason." What would be "reasonable"? Forcing some "working-class and undereducated" woman through pregnancy and childbirth and then pressuring her with 1950s tactics to hand over her baby? Pushing other nations to repeal the laws they've enacted to protect children within their borders from being stolen and passed off as orphans? I look forward to proposed solutions from the Very Thoughtful Beard.*

Douthat is opposed, IIRC, to widespread use of the sort of reproductive outsourcing that Melanie Thernstrom used to get her two infants. (Contra IOZ,** I don't think his failure to comment accordingly is evidence of his lack of opinions on the subject; Douthat knows that any moral condemnation of reproductive technologies embraced by the NYT readership and advertising audience is likely to be left on the cutting room floor.) But if we can't divorce the experience of pregnancy from the contribution of genetic material, how can we make more unwanted babies, when women, exercising sovereignty over their persons/means of production, have made it manifestly clear that unwanted babies are not a desired good?

* Who may still believe that we are somehow morally obligated to create as many unwanted babies as possible.

**IOZ is correct to note, however, that Douthat's description of the American entertainment industry's alleged discomfort with abortion is off the mark: "It's worth noting that the entertainment industry is not so much uncomfortable with abortion as it is viciously opposed to women, which is why it spends so very much of its time kidnapping, raping, murdering, molesting, humiliating, and hating on them"

Guilt, Shame, the Internet, and You

Very interesting post on the function of the internet in displacing guilt and undermining internal controls on behavior. As a full-throated supporter of the capacity for the internet to swallow and incorporate evidence of past behavior as a method of developing more accurate and widely encompassing reputational data, this was an unsettling read.

Winding You Up

As I do more and more dyeing and spinning, I realize that it would be useful to have a skein winder. However, they are rather expensive, especially considering they consist of a spinny thing with pins sticking up to hold the yarn and a crank to turn the spinny thing. I do have a spinning wheel, but cannot figure out how best to attach something to the flyer to harness the wheel's motion to allow for foot-powered skein winding. Ideas?

My Right to Travel: Impeded.

Ah, DC. Which other jurisdictions so obsessively track you and force you to show papers proving you don't live there?

While parked legally on a street in DC this weekend, I received a warning notice for failure to register for DC tags. Since I already pay car tax as a resident of Virginia, DC can go jump in a lake. However, telling them to do so is going to be something of a pain. In order to not incur a $100 ticket, you must report to the DC DMV and prove you live elsewhere with your original lease, a recent utility bill, and your car registration. (In return, they will give you a six-month exemption, at the end of which the entire process repeats itself.) You can also mail this information to them, but the ticket also helpfully notes that the processing period associated with doing so may exceed the fifteen day grace period before which a ticket for failure to register is issued.

In contradiction to both this blog post on the problem and the DMV's own website, which make it sound like you only get these for parking twice within thirty days, the warning notice clearly states that "[y]our vehicle has been observed for the second time within a 180 day period parking without DC tags." So if you've parked in DC while shopping, visiting a friend, or doing business within the last six months, beware of that second trip. And heaven help you if you don't have a lease or mortgage or have your name on the utilities.

All the female libertarians

On the question of where they are, and the cause of their low numbers: I was discussing this at my last gaming session, in which an Objectivist-ish dude and I played War of the Ring (which is awesome, by the way). The following points seemed relevant to the persistent failure of libertarianism to attract female proponents:

1) To start out with, most libertarians are male. Whether this is because men or male brains are innately attracted to libertarian ideas or because libertarian ideas are more commonly found, and thus disseminated, in male-dominated social groups or tribes (SF fans, CS types, high school nerd clusters, etc.) is a separate question.

2) In opposition to traditional statist positions regarding the need for coercive intervention to prevent discrimination against women by governmental entities, corporations, and individuals, male libertarians often go so far as to deride the general goal of social norms of gender equality.

3) Women see this and recoil. The male domination of libertarianism continues.

If libertarianism is about free human flourishing, then why wouldn't you, a libertarian male, push civil society to allow for the self-actualization of half the population? Wouldn't you be concerned about the extent to which female* children are inescapably victim to the coercive inculcation of beliefs about gender that are destructive to their full personhood? Wouldn't you want to admit, for the sake of your female listeners, that even if you disagree with government intervention to remedy sex discrimination, you still think sexism is wrong? (If you want to say people have a right to be bigoted, it's prudent to condemn bigotry; cf. Rand Paul.) If libertarianism is to attract women and be viewed as more than "f*** you, I got mine," then a little empathy would go a long way.

* And male [PHMT genuflection].

UPDATE: Phoebe gets at what I was going for. If a libertarian man's default stance is to scorn attempts to control behavior and conventional wisdom, then you're going to throw out some feminist baby out with the bathwater. Oddly, IIRC this sort of juvenile oppositional posturing is one reason why Ayn Rand thought libertarians were not potential allies.

What do Italian women want to be?

When I ask him how he understands the Presidente's political vision, he says, "He loves the idea of having fun. Fun is the mantra of Berlusconi. The politicians before him, they were just the brain. Just the head and mouth was moving, and the body didn't exist. Berlusconi is very physical. Just like Mussolini. Very virile. The smile. The body. The idea of having fun is so, so crucial. And he could make people dream. That's the typical side of the narcissist: Where I am, there is paradise."

If there's a distillation of that fun, an image that, along with the proud, bleeding face, explains why the Presidente survives, it is the famous old-man penis from the Summer of Love, the penis belonging to the former Czech prime minister. It is a normal penis, white, either semitumescent or caught in an upswing so that, captured there in the air, it looks semitumescent, perched above a pair of legs that are not the legs of a young man—a little skinny, a little short. But here in the world provided by the Presidente, this penis is allowed to swing in the bright Mediterranean sunlight, for once freed from the suit pants of respectable early old age, happy and carefree and unashamed, surrounded by friendly women in thong bikinis who love and accept this penis for what it is. You can be that penis, Italy. You don't have to pretend to be young or virile or world-beating; you can just be you, an aging, graying, stagnating nation, and still thrive in the world of fun.

Whenever I read an article about Berlusconi, I wonder: What is it like to be a woman in Italy these days? And how do women who support Berlusconi justify their decision? Regardless of whether one agrees with his policies, there is no particular reason why they have to be implemented by someone who actively undermines the significance of female political participation.

So much worse than "ma'am."

On the advice of AskMe, I put Lily and Snape on an all-wet-food diet so Snape would drop a few pounds. This means I go through a lot of canned cat food. It apparently means that I look like a Crazy Cat Lady at the grocery store.

Me: (attempting to be helpful) There are 36 cans of cat food. They're all the same.

Cashier: ... So, do you feed ferals?

Cool Stuff Watch

23 and Me extended their holiday sale through Christmas ... genetic testing only $99.

Nothing "Bamber"

If I were a yarn company, what would I be called?

Problem: "[T]here’s not a ton of great art that completely refuses to communicate vulnerability (the oeuvre of Leni Riefenstahl notwithstanding)."

The 1585 guy is back. He's been trying something new lately:

So that was the project before me: never say anything insecure, ever. At least not in front of a girl, although I figured it would be good practice to avoid saying insecure stuff in front of guys too. This didn’t seem like it would be too hard. After all, we’re not talking about something subjective here, like comedy, where what one person finds hilarious another person might find offputting and vice versa. Everyone basically knows the difference between insecure and non-insecure, even me.

And with that kind of setup, you’re probably expecting an essay about how it turned out to be harder than it looks. But it didn’t. It turned out to be every bit as easy as I thought it would. Seriously, all I had to do was not say insecure things, duh. How easy or hard it was isn’t the problem.

Now you’re probably thinking that it didn’t work. You’re expecting me to say that I refrained from saying insecure stuff, but girls didn’t like me any better—either because they could still magically tell I was insecure somehow, or because it turns out that girls look deeper than that and aren’t really as shallow as I was making them out to be. But that’s not it either. Girls—and, to be fair, people in general—really are as shallow as I was making them out to be, and the simple practice of never saying insecure things worked amazingly well. To be perfectly honest, I had sex with more women this past September and October than during any year-long stretch of my life before, or all four years of college. And I didn’t even go out that much. So without becoming boorish here, let it be established that never saying insecure things really does work, and is incredibly easy. Those things are not the problem.

The problem is that, as far as I can tell, I no longer have a personality.

Threat or Menace?

Fresh Wood Ear Mushrooms: The most disgusting "edible" fungus known to man?

What (Not?) To Wear, TSA Edition

This sex worker (link NSFW; text only version here) decided to push the boundaries of the new TSA screening standards by donning a sheer camisole and panties for her trip through the security line. Of course, there's video. She explicitly sought to turn the tables on the workers who'd be searching her.

As a teenager, I had a conversation with an older activist who had been arrested many times over the years.  He told me his secret to staving off despair and stress during the whole process.  He said something like, "When you're in jail, and the police strip search you, their goal is to humiliate you into obedience, so it's your job to turn the tables on them.  I do a sexy striptease, spin around like a fucking ballerina, and tell them how hot the whole thing makes me.  It takes away their power and makes them the uncomfortable ones."

She didn't get arrested, unlike the San Diego guy who stripped down to his boxer briefs,* but there must be some point at which clothing is both sufficiently revealing to render patdowns superfluous and legal for street wear. Perhaps hot pants and a tight crop top? A dashing spandex superhero-style bodysuit? How about a snug Star Fleet uniform?

Relatedly: Now you have to get a backscatter scan or enhanced patdown if you're coming off an international flight---EVEN IF YOU'RE NOT CONNECTING?

* Who was instructed, according to his attorney "to put his clothes back on 'so he could be properly patted down,'" indicating precisely how security theater is about compliance with authority, not actual safety.

Twitter tag: #fauxho

Wow, this is like an R-rated issue-spotter for a law school exam.

ISO Certified Stupid Pork

If eating pigs is wrong because they are intelligent enough to anticipate their own demise, shouldn't we assuage our moral objections by breeding pigs selectively for dumbness? (If you'd eat a chicken but not a pig, would you eat a pig with the mental state of a chicken?)

Recipe: Peanut Fried Chicken

I don't know why I don't fry things more, except that it's time-consuming and messy and bad for you.

Batter:
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 large egg
1/4 cup peanut butter
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Salt and black pepper

4 boneless chicken thighs or 2 breasts
Vegetable oil for frying
1 cups all-purpose flour
Honey

Food-process the batter ingredients until well blended. Cut chicken into 2-3" pieces and stab all over with a skewer. Soak in marinade in the fridge for at least an hour, preferably longer. Heat oil in a pot or skillet until a little flour sizzles when dropped in. Dredge chicken pieces in flour and place in oil, cooking 6-8 minutes on each side, or until cooked through. Drain on a paper-towel-lined plate. While still hot, drizzle very lightly with honey and sprinkle with salt and additional cayenne to taste. Eat. Eat some more. Figure you should just finish it off and eat the rest.

Protip: There will be lumps of the dripped-off batter in your flour. Fry these too.

We're from the government and we're here to judge your art.

Does anyone else have a problem with the idea that a secretive and unaccountable government entity gets to decide who is an artist and prevent people from purchasing homes if they don't make the grade?

The judges rejected a jewelry maker for producing work that was too commercial and a photographer whose pieces did not show enough “focus, quality and commitment.” Others were turned down for being a student, a “hobbyist” or an “interpretive artist.”

I'll never reconcile myself to Hermione/Ron.

An excellent question:

"[W]hy [is it] that so few of the intellectual female characters prominent in pop culture wind up with equally intellectual guys[?] ... It's true also that stable relationships make for uninteresting television or plot interest in a series of novels. But I can't think of many more examples in which intellectual heroines *end up* with intellectual guys either."

Is the perceived alternative for an intellectual female not the hot smarty but the "too brilliant to bathe" fellow? Are we unwilling to match up persons gifted along both axes out of some unconscious feeling that it would be implausible or even socially undesirable?

Perhaps relatedly: I was at a party recently where two women, upon hearing that my significant other exceeded me in height by a foot, commenced to rant about short women hogging tall men instead of leaving them for more statuesque ladies. (One asked in a peevish tone whether there was a word for that. I suggested "greed.") Of course, this crowding-out only occurs because women of height X typically want a man of height X+Y. Is it perhaps also the case that women of IQ X want men of IQ X+Y (or that men of IQ X+Y want women with IQ X)?

Wolverine + Fiennes = DO THIS.

This one's for Phoebe:

Are we as guys lucky not to be evaluated as stringently based on physical attributes as girls are? Sure, I guess. But the downside is, this can make us complacent about how we look. The best strategy is, even if we’re not being judged as harshly as women, imagine that we are. It’s this complacency that makes some guys think stupid shit like “Well, I am a sensitive writer, so not only do I not need to have a nice body, but I should actually avoid having one, because having one would mean that I am not a sensitive writer anymore.”

Look at it this way: when you see a chick who is wearing glasses and a pencil skirt because she is going for a Sexy Librarian thing, do you want her to not have an amazing body just because that is the look she is going for, or do you want her to be going for that look and have an amazing body? Obviously, you want her to also have an amazing body. There is no possible aesthetic for which the equation [given aesthetic] + [amazing body] = [even better] does not hold. So why would girls think of us any differently?

Read the whole thing. It's good, except the wrong Fiennes is pictured in the model equation. (via)

UPDATE: Phoebe's thoughts available here, with a focus on the idea that some men attract women specifically by being "too brilliant to bathe," which is less an aesthetic than a more abstracted mode of self-presentation or -conception---or perhaps an identity for which the idea that "physicality is stupid" is integral, not an auxiliary rationalization for being flabby.

Period Details

Is it really wise to invoke this particular quotation to rebut B.R. Myers's dismissal of Freedom as a  wannabe-Zeitgeist piece that "uses facile tricks to tart up the story as a total account of American life"?

Myers has little to tell us about beauty. For Flaubert’s contemporary Baudelaire, beauty was

made up of an eternal, invariable element . . . and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be. . . the age – its fashions, its morals, its emotions. Without this second element, which might be described as the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on the divine cake, the first element would be beyond our powers of digestion.

Does anyone really buy the idea that we cannot comprehend beauty without its being clothed in the fashions, morals, and emotions of our time? Does it make sense to embrace Franzen at the cost of ceding thousands of years' worth of literature? Modern trappings and language can ease understanding---or they can distract the reader from any underlying beauty by annoying the crap out of her. Some of us prefer our eternal themes without an exterior of contemporary Cheez Whiz. It's a little patronizing, actually, this notion that we can't digest your Deep Meaningful Literary Thoughts without the "icing." If any aid is required, I prefer trappings that invoke centuries of cultural development and history over instantly dated attempts to capture the details of How We Live Now.

On a related note, there's a nice little exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and photography at the National Gallery. Recommended.

Bechdel Test for Statues

How many statues in D.C. include depictions of women who are not nude and/or metaphorical?

I always preferred Tom Petty

Via Tyler Cowen, a Russian's opinion of Springsteen:

My general take on Bruce Springsteen could always be briefly expressed as follows: Bruce is a very local phenomenon. I could actually stop right here, because everything that'll follow, both good and bad, will eventually come back to this first sentence, but I suppose I'll have to explain. Frankly speaking, I don't know anything about how much Bruce Springsteen is popular outside of the good old United States. To some extent, probably, mainly due to his grandiose career-supporting events and all kinds of propaganda campaigns and beneficial organisations he takes part in. In any case, in my home country people hardly ever know anything about him but his name, and it's one of those rare cases when I feel such an attitude is completely justified. I suppose I'll have to explain again? Should I?

Size Disadvantage?

According to a BU professor, the general public is nauseated by ... this figure?

In her new documentary, Picture Me, Columbia University student Sara Ziff chronicles her 4-year rise and exit through the fashion modeling industry, zooming her personal camcorder onto supposedly systemic abuses—sexual, economic, and emotional—suffered by fashion models. Among the many complaints launched in the film is an aesthetic that prizes uniformly young, white, and extremely thin bodies measuring 34-24-34” (bust-waist-hips) .... What’s the appeal of an aesthetic so skinny it’s widely described by the lay public as revolting?

Uh huh. Turns out the professor is also a former model. Does she actually think that the average person finds her body "revolting"? If so, how sad. But if not, why gratuitously insult women like herself? Does she think to gain points somehow?

Recipe: Homemade Spinach Pasta

I started out using this recipe, then lost faith and winged it. It came out quite tasty and toothsome. There would be a photo, but I ate it all already.

• 1 large bunch spinach
• 2 eggs
• salt
• 300 or so grams flour

Wash, trim, and blanch spinach. It should be bright green and just wilted. Toss in food processor and puree. Follow the above linked recipe, placing

• 250 grams of all-purpose flour
• one egg
• an eggshell-full of spinach puree, and 
• salt sufficient to cover the egg yolk twice 

in the classic volcano setup inside a large bowl. Realize that 1) there's a bunch more spinach you could add, and 2) the recipe is from an alternate dimension in which flour has unusual absorption properties. Add another egg, another 1/4-ish cup of flour, and the remaining spinach. Mix in food processor until horrible grinding sounds begin to emerge from the motor. Remove the dough back to the floury bowl and knead the remaining flour in by hand until the dough is smooth and elastic. Divide into three balls. (You should really cover it and let it rest for at least half an hour here.) During downtime, saute two cloves of garlic in olive oil until just golden. Roll out dough to maximum achievable thinness using rolling pin and cut into noodles of desired width. Cook in boiling water for 2-3 minutes. Serve with garlic and olive oil.

Quote of the Day

I'm against restoring sanity. My comparative advantage at dealing with insanity is too great. I want to continue to extract rents from it, please.

Size Advantage

This honestly never occurred to me:

Having someone stand too close to us can feel like a form of intimidation, no matter what the person’s size. I can remember three occasions in which short, petite women made me uncomfortable by standing too close to me during casual conversations. In one case it was a colleague’s wife, and it was impossible to look down at her without being distracted by the cleavage being displayed by her provocatively low-cut dress. A petite woman once confessed to me that she sometimes liked to intimidate large women by standing very close to them. She was aware that being close to her tiny, svelte figure sometimes made larger women feel awkward and huge.

I wish I liked pupusas.

Tyler & Co. went to El Salvador. Although it has the highest murder rate of any nation, the economists felt quite safe. Then again, reference to this chart reveals that Belize is up there, murder-rate-wise, but it also did not feel particularly dangerous. It's worth digging into the data to see who's getting murdered, I suppose; traveling to a country with a high murder rate that chiefly applies to, say, members of drug gangs, seems like a better option than a place with a lower overall rate that includes more tourist victims.

How Elite Are You?

There's a test to see how elite (per Charles Murray) you are.

1. Can you talk about "Mad Men?" Yes.
2. Can you talk about the "The Sopranos?" No.
3. Do you know who replaced Bob Barker on "The Price Is Right?" Drew Carey? Yep.
4. Have you watched an Oprah show from beginning to end? Yes, in high school.
5. Can you hold forth animatedly about yoga? Not really.
5. How about pilates? Nope.
5. How about skiing? Nope.
6. Mountain biking? I can't ride a bike. I can ride a horse. Western-style, so not elite. 
7. Do you know who Jimmie Johnson is? Nope.
8. Does the acronym MMA mean nothing to you? I know what it means and have (HLS grad) friends who like it.
9. Can you talk about books endlessly? For the non-elite definition of "books."
10. Have you ever read a "Left Behind" novel? No, I prefer more believable subgenres of fantasy.
11. How about a Harlequin romance? Harlequin, no. Other generic Fabio-cover stuff, yes.
12. Do you take interesting vacations? Yes, although of late I have switched to less "elite" (N. American) destinations.
13. Do you know a great backpacking spot in the Sierra Nevada? No.
14. What about an exquisite B&B overlooking Boothbay Harbor? Where's that?
15. Would you be caught dead in an RV? I've been to Disney World in an RV.
16. Would you be caught dead on a cruise ship? Only if it's got sails.
17. Have you ever heard of of Branson, Mo? Yes, it's Vegas for religious conservatives.
18. Have you ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club? Do they even accept women? Oh, since the 19-fracking-80s? Bless their hearts.
19. How about the Rotary Club? See No. 18.
20. Have you lived for at least a year in a small town? My town turned from a small town to a suburb during the eight years I was living in it.
21. Have you lived for a year in an urban neighborhood in which most of your neighbors did not have college degrees? Probably not. Cumulatively, several months.
22. Have you spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line? Somehow I think "family" doesn't mean me on my own.
23. Do you have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian? I did. 
24. Have you ever visited a factory floor? Yes.
25. Have you worked on one? Yes.

Murray should know that only when like marries like can there be any happiness, but he's apparently distracted by the lament that elite men no longer have an easy and socially acceptable way of keeping in touch with what poorer, less educated people think and like. In any case, Murray's own observation that "few [elites] grew up in the small cities, towns or rural areas where more than a third of all Americans still live" carries its own rebuttal: most Americans (nearly two-thirds, by his account) don't live in small cities, towns, or rural areas. And nearly three-fourths of Americans are not evangelical Christians. Most Americans don't take any real vacations at all. The safe money says that a majority of Americans have not voluntarily watched a full episode of Oprah, either. I could go on. It's not even possible for some Americans to have certain of the traits he lists: older women were shut out of the clubs, for example, and the chance of non-Christian Americans (15-20% of the total) reading a Left Behind book except by mistake or ironically is practically nonexistent---for good reason.

Pig Inflation

Wealth streams into a developing country, but social norms don't change:

Hamon Matipe, the septuagenarian chief of Kili, confirmed that he had received [USD 120,000] four months earlier. In details corroborated by the local authorities, Mr. Matipe explained that the provincial government had paid him for village land alongside the Southern Highlands’ one major road, where the government planned to build a police barracks. ... Mr. Matipe said he had given most of the money to his 10 wives. But he had used about $20,000 to buy 48 pigs, which he used as a dowry to obtain a 15-year-old bride from a faraway village, paying well above the going rate of 30 pigs. He and some 30 village men then celebrated by buying 15 cases of beer, costing about $800.

“All the money is now gone,” Mr. Matipe said. “But I’m very happy about the company, ExxonMobil. Before, I had nothing. But because of the money, I was able to buy pigs and get married again.”

Although some land in PNG is customarily held via matrilineal descent, even in those instances, men make the decisions about its use. I'm sure that there are better things that could have been done with proceeds from a sale of village land than for a seventy-something to purchase marry a teenage eleventh wife. I wonder: what did his ten existing wives do with the unspecified share(s) they received? Did the reporter ask?

Weekend Bake: Chocolate Buttermilk Doughnuts with Chocolate Glaze

I am pleased to report that one can make doughnut holes using this recipe and a mini-muffin pan if one lacks a dedicated and specialized doughnut pan. (Who has a doughnut pan???)

U.S. Const. amend. XXVIII: Valarin as Official Language

Terrific discussion on Ta-Nehesi Coates's blog on how inability to code-shift nearly smothered a burgeoning career:

[A] person who I'd written about (not an employee of Atlantic Media) came into the tent and aggressively challenged me on something I'd written about him.

We spent ten frankly embarrassing minutes jawing back and forth. That's fine. People should aggressively challenge you. Toward the end, Carr, wondering where I was, came in and saw me in mid-argument, which by this point had gotten heated. He gave me that "you damn fool" look and said "I'm going to be there, [whatever the restaurant was] either you're coming or not. But this is stupid." He left, and shortly thereafter I started walking away with Alyssa and few of the other bloggers who were hanging out. The gentleman kept after me, even following me out the tent, and by this point, taunting.

At the door of the tent, and I looked at him and said, "You really need to back off."

He looked back and said, "Or what."

I closed in on him, and quietly but seriously, responded, "You really want to find out?"

He walked back inside.

I think as a younger man, I would have been proud of that moment. For surely, I had adhered to Article 2 of the Code Of The Streets--"Thou Shalt Not Be Found A Punk." Had the gentleman stepped outside, I had already made the decision that I was going to swing. I didn't believe in threatening people and then not following through. Perhaps as 14 year old, on the streets of West Baltimore, back at Mondawmin Mall, the response would have been correct. In fact, I was a 33-year old contributing editor at a well-regarded magazine who'd just implicitly threatened someone on the property of my brand new employer.

Coates uses this embarrassing moment as fuel for a more general observation on the effect of a "culture of poverty":

I think one can safely call that an element of a kind of street culture. It's also an element which--once one leaves the streets--is a great impediment. "I ain't no punk" may shield you from neighborhood violence. But it can not shield you from algebra, when your teacher tries to correct you. It can not shield you from losing hours, when your supervisor corrects your work. And it would not have shielded me from unemployment, after I cold-cocked a guy over a blog post.

I suspect that a large part of the problem, when we talk about culture, is an inability to code-switch, to understand that the language of Rohan is not the language of Mordor. I don't say this to minimize culture, to the contrary, I say it to point how difficult it is to get people to discard practices which were essential to them in one world, but hinder their advancement into another. And then there's the fear of that other world, that sense that if you discard those practices, you have discarded some of yourself, and done it in pursuit of a world, that you may not master.

Some of the commenters, though, pushed back, asking

[W]hat about the other fellow? That is, what is it in his personality, upbringing, and so on that convinced him haranguing, provoking, and so on was a way to exact some sort of justice for whatever he had perceived as an insult worthy of rebuke.

With that reframing in mind, I read this comment with a different perspective:

I feel this ties back into "the ignorance of what's possible" thread in a couple of different ways. Most obviously there's the realization that the rules of the street aren't the bedrock of reality, that there are worlds of people where the threat of violence doesn't underpin the hierarchy.

The ignorance goes both ways. It's quite easy to muddle along in our WEIRD bubbles, but sometimes ignorance of what is possible---namely, that wrongdoing on your part may be met with more than just bluster---can be dangerous or even deadly.

I need a book like this.

It has everything I want in a novel, such as sex, drugs, ultraviolence, and depravity, and it has very few of the things I hate, such as lyrical evocations, penetrating insights, families, wistful epiphanies, or spiritual descriptions of landscapes that name-check plant species.

Weekend Bake: Lemon Raspberry Muffins

These are pretty great, especially in the mini-muffin version. The raspberry center forms a delicious little puffed pocket of pure fruit.

Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves

I am interested in educating myself about the Roma. Any suggestions for Kindle books?

Recipe: Ricotta Gnocchi with Tomato Cream Sauce

I'm not a huge gnocchi fan, as a rule (potato often makes them unpleasantly heavy) but these are dreamy.

Ricotta Gnocchi

2 cups whole-milk ricotta
1/2 cup bread crumbs
1 large egg
2 tablespoons minced fresh basil leaves
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Drain ricotta through paper-towel-lined strainer in refrigerator for one hour. Then food-process ricotta for ten seconds, add egg, basil, salt, and pepper, and process to blend. Turn into a bowl and mix in bread crumbs, flour, and Parmesan. Chill mixture for one hour, then divide into eight pieces and roll each by hand on a floured surface into a 2 cm cylinder. Cut cylinder into 2 cm pieces, spread gnocchi out on board, and put in freezer for fifteen minutes.

Tomato Cream Sauce:

1 clove garlic, pressed
1 small can diced tomatoes
1 pinch sugar
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp chopped basil
2 tbsp cream

Saute garlic in a little olive oil until just beginning to color, then add tomatoes, sugar, and salt and cook down until thickened. Add basil and cream and stir to blend.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a low boil, spoon in chilled gnocchi with a slotted spoon, and cook until all pieces float, then for 2 minutes more. Toss gently in sauce and serve right away.

Sick Systems

Egyptian millionaire politician woos Lebanese pop singer, spending over $7 million on her. His mother refuses to consent to their marriage, so the pop star leaves him. He pays $2 million for a contract hit and has his ex murdered. Hometown reaction?

“She made him kill her, and she deserves it,” said Sherine Moustafa, a 39-year-old Egyptian corporate lawyer, an opinion that was echoed by every woman of dozens interviewed. “If he killed her, this means she’s done something outrageous to drive him to it,” reasoned Ms. Moustafa, who has no relation to the convicted businessman. Both her sister and mother, who sat next to her, agreed.
...
“We don’t want our daughters, sisters or mothers to be or look like her,” said one such woman, Soha Hassouna, a 38-year-old Egyptian banker. “I’m glad this happened so she can be an example to our children.”

I honestly don't know what to say. What is the lesson here? Don't become a Westernized pop star? That's not what got her killed. Refusing to be this guy's mistress after he wouldn't buck his mother and marry her is what got her killed.

Adventures in Contract Law

Couple contracts with surrogate to carry fetus. Fetus turns out to have Down Syndrome. Couple invokes contractual provision allowing them to request abortion (failure to abort would mean the surrogate, not the couple, was on the hook for raising the resulting child). Surrogate balks (then has an abortion anyway).

Testing the Harm Principle

So popular is the woodsy field below the ridge as a spot for gay sex (mostly during the day) and heterosexual sex (mostly at night) that the police have designated it a “public sex environment.”
Public sex is a popular — and quasi-legal — activity in Britain, according to the authorities and to the large number of Web sites that promote it. (It is treated as a crime only if someone witnesses it, is offended and is willing to make a formal complaint.) And the police tend to tread lightly in public sex environments, in part because of the bitter legacy of the time when gay sex was illegal and closeted men having anonymous sex in places like public bathrooms were routinely arrested and humiliated.

I wonder how this interacts with England's many footpaths (legal rights of way, dating back many centuries, that often take one through private land).

Writing what you know

Sometimes you can't arraign them all:

I will admit, however, to feeling irritated by Ted Hughes poems that are about Sylvia Plath. One reason for this is that I already have a whole lot of very good poems about Sylvia Plath to read, and they are by Sylvia Plath. The other reason is the same reason I occasionally refer to The Birthday Letters as You Guys, What About MY Feelings: The Point-Missing Chronicles. Which is where we actually do get into the Feminist Anger At Ted Hughes Thing. Which, as with much feminist anger, and many cultural phenomena, is not so much about a terribly sad thing that happened to one family as it is about the terribly sad things that happened to the people who heard about it. ... And it went like this:

You’re talented. You’re really talented. You might even be a genius. And your gentleman, he’s talented too, though not to the degree that you are. But you type his manuscripts. But you go to his lectures, you nurture his stardom, you play the part of his loving support and fan club. But you are responsible for his domestic comfort. Oh, you have your own successes. He even encourages those. But he’s the talent; he’s the big man; he’s the star. And then you get tossed over, for someone who is nowhere near as talented and spectacular as you, because it turns out that the talented, spectacular part of you, the part that you thought made you a couple in the first place (“we kept writing poems to each other,” was how Plath described their courtship, “then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on”) was never enough to keep him interested. Was never essential to him, the way it was to you. Was never a part of the purpose of you — because he doesn’t need talent or spectacular qualities in girls, apparently. Because he prefers his girls to lack those. So you wind up with all the responsibilities — the kids, the house, the cleaning, the cooking — while he goes off to be a genius for some other girl who’s way more suited to play a supporting part in his life story. Who doesn’t have within herself the potential to eclipse him, to be the one that the story is actually about; who’s safer, that way. You wind up writing all your work — your work, your amazing work, your genius — at four in the morning before the kids wake up. Because that’s the only time you can write it. Because that’s what women do.

If The Fountainhead had been a story about Nick Francon and Holly Roark, I'd have been a happier and better adjusted teen.

Hair!

My hair is longer than it's been in ten years. I can almost do the Tymoshenko braid again---last time that was true was senior prom. If it was good enough for a Prime Minister, it's good enough for me. Do you feel pressured to adopt a more conservative hairstyle as you get older?

Serial Viewing

Am enjoying Dexter a lot more than anticipated, probably because I was expecting Rita to be more of a Lisa-from-Six-Feet-Under.

This country was not founded as a Nestorian nation!

I'd like to administer something like this to various religious figures in public life. For entertainment purposes only, of course.

Made of Wien

The Secession Museum in Vienna is, indeed, the best museum.

Realtime Rape Crisis Tweets

Once you've established the fact that a rape has occurred (which getting a tongue bitten off does pretty clearly), how much more context do you need?

The immediacy of tweets really makes the woman's circumstances resonate viscerally. People may not be willing to work for change unless the recognize the seriousness of the problem.

Mail Mad

I currently have two packages in limbo, both USPS. Not sure whether this is sufficient to inspire a new feud with the mailman or not.

Unrelatedly: Bloglines is dying! Google Reader prevails! Is there some kind of widget to replace my "Subscribe with Bloglines" toolbar button to look up RSS feeds for sites and sign me up for them?

Color Lines

Check out this map of DC by race and ethnicity. Red = white, blue = black, orange = Hispanic, green = Asian.

Scent of a Bookworm

Interested in smelling like a bookstore? How about a library?

When I was but a wee Bamber, I always wore Escape, which boys seemed to like. Later I switched to Allure or Light Blue, but the last time I wore any it made me woozy and sneezy. Perhaps I should begin scenting myself again, though, with something more unusual this time.

Where's a 13th Amendment claim when you need it?

To me, the creepiest thing about this indictment is not the conduct alleged (although that is appalling) or the idea that it's somehow inappropriate to conduct a real inquiry into consent for such acts, but rather that the charged counts are as follows:

Conspiracy
Sex Trafficking by Force, Fraud, or Coercion
Forced Labor Trafficking
Use of an Interstate Facility for Enticement
Document Servitude
Enticement to Travel for Sexual Activity
Transportation for Sexual Activity

Now obviously this is in federal court (even though all the defendants are residents of Missouri and the vast majority of the conduct allegedly occurred there), but the conspicuous absence of any charge that really cuts to the heart of the crime is almost shocking. If these guys are asked in the future what they were convicted of, will anyone really be able to make an informed decision about whether they deserve to be hired/shivved/given a first date, if these are the answers? Wouldn't some nice state law counts have been better? It's not like they'd get a light sentence if properly charged with those.

Caracality

So am I required to buy this for Halloween, or what?

It was my favorite part.

If you couldn't get through The Part About the Crimes in 2666, you probably shouldn't read this either.

Contrast and Compare

Today, I stopped at a 7-Eleven for a soda. Previously, I have purchased the 32-oz. Big Gulp. However, I realized that for less than 33% more, I could get 100% more soda by purchasing the Double Big Gulp. This drink is outrageous. It requires a special extra-long straw. A random man who witnessed me sipping it pronounced "That is too big for you." And yet because the marginal cost of the additional 32 ounces was minimal, I bought (and drank) the whole damn thing.

I have also been to Frozen Yo, where they charge by weight for whatever mix of yogurt(s) and topping(s) you desire. The containers are, in fact, large. But because you pay only for what you want, and larger sizes are not artificially cheaper, I was perfectly capable of getting just enough birthday-cake-flavored froyo to satisfy my jones without feeling embittered that I had to shell out some fixed amount for a portion size not based upon my appetite. Anyone disparaging this utterly logical method of dispensing yogurty goodness is 1) un-American and 2) a tool of the Vast Fattening Conspiracy.

Why women like "flamboyant dancers"

Aren't bold dance moves just a proxy for confidence? If some guy is dancing flamboyantly, you can immediately assess the following:

1) Is this guy confident and assertive?(Yes)

2) Is this guy hot?

3) Does this guy know what he's doing or is he some awkward dork thrashing about?

With a guy doing some barely obvious rocking back and forth, you can really only assess #2. He could be a self-effacing milquetoast or a clueless schmuck. Which is a more efficient choice for targeted flirting, him or the Travolta wannabe?

Love Matches Kill Everything

And thus the storied firm of Montague & Montague folded.

Counternarrative

Honorific Killing

On being ma'am'ed:

The argument that ma'am is a term of respect, and that women should be proud rather than ashamed of having reached a certain age, also falls flat. It's not that we're self-hating old people. It's that our non-nubility isn't something we feel needs to be acknowledged in a greeting, especially, as Angier points out, when men who are no longer fit 19-year-olds don't get a special term of address. I could think of any number of descriptive terms that would bring up other visible-at-first-glance qualities I'm not ashamed of but don't need announced: 'here, short person with very pale skin and very thick if frizz-prone hair, here's your iced coffee.'

Recipe: Corn Chowder

A great use for summer corn.

10 ears fresh corn
4 tbsp butter
1 medium onion, minced finely
3 cloves garlic, pressed or minced
3 tbsp flour
3 cups chicken broth
2 red potatoes, cut into 1/4 inch dice
1 bay leaf
1 tsp dried thyme
2 cups whole milk
1 cup cream
3 tbsp fresh parsley, minced
1 1/2 tsp salt
black pepper to taste

Cut 4 ears of corn in half and then slice straight down to cut off kernels. Put kernels aside. Grate 6 ears of corn on coarse side of a box grater into a bowl. Melt butter in large dutch oven and saute onion in it for ten minutes. Add garlic, saute one minute. Add flour and stir constantly for two minutes. Whisk in broth, then add potatoes, bay leaf, thyme, milk, and grated corn pulp and bring to a boil. Simmer 10 minutes or until potatoes are just soft. Then add cream and corn kernels and simmer 5 minutes or until corn kernels are cooked. Stir in parsley, salt, and pepper. Serve.

Born on third and think you hit a triple?

The amount of cultural capital East Coast UMC kids have over and above even UMC kids in other parts of the country is really amazing. It's the little things you're unaware of, despite thinking yourself well-informed. Even with two college-educated parents and attending one of the better high schools in the district, I had no idea how National Merit Scholarships worked and took the PSAT as a freshman and the SAT as a sophomore. Because the P stands for practice, right? :-/ (Yes, yes, I took them both again.)

Whatever I Like

This does nothing for me, but this is deliciously female gaze-y.

AA XXX

Women with small breasts are buying sexy lingerie and aren't ashamed of their bodies? Trend story!