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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "allonymist" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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05:06 pm
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The best chili I can make.
So first off, I eat dead things. If you don't, then forget about this recipe and go get a copy of the Veganomicon by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero and make their Manzana Chile Verde recipe, which is the best vegan chili you'll ever eat, and if you find a better one please let me know. It's for, um, a friend. But anyway, this recipe isn't for you.
Similarly, if you come from insert chili region here and you think that my use of insert ingredient here is anathema, then before you tell me so, please realize that as a Massachusetts resident I will only listen intently and learn from your lecture until I think I've gleaned all the chili lore from you that I can, at which point I will start extolling the virtues of chili diversity and gushing about what a wonderful world we'll live in once we all learn to celebrate our chili differences, and nobody wants that. Ok? Ok.
Here's what you will need for ingredients:
- About 2 pounds of beef. Anywhere from 1.5 to 2.5 will do. You could use ground beef if you want, but what I usually do is go to the store and get the cheapest steak or roast or whatever that they have.
- 2-4 peppers. Bell peppers of different colors will do, as will poblano chiles if you want a more balanced heat.
- 2-3 onions. 3 little ones or 2 big ones. Use your judgment.
- Beer. If you have no taste, I guess you could use a cheap beer, but lately I like using a domestic Belgian-style ale, like Ommegang.
- 4 medium cloves or so of garlic. You can even use garlic powder if you're feeling lame or lazy.
- 1 tablespoon or so of cumin seeds. Get them in bulk; they seem to keep forever.
- Half a teaspoon of fennel seeds. Skip this if you don't want to invest in fennel seeds. Do not skip the cumin seeds.
- 1/8 teaspoon of cinnamon, optionally.
- 1 1/2 teaspoon or so oregano
- 1 teaspoon or so basil.
- 1-2 teaspoons of chocolate.
- 2 teaspoons of corn flour. This is (for the purposes of this recipe) the same as masa harina, but not the same as polenta (which is more coarse).
- A bay leaf.
- A 28-oz can (give or take) of whole tomatoes
- 2 16-oz cans of beans. These would be optional, but I hear I can irritate Texans [†] by saying they're required, so there you go.
- Salt and pepper to taste
- Chiles. It's chile con carne, right? You will need at least:
- One dried big mild chile, like an ancho or a new mexico chile.
- More chiles for heat. They can be fresh or dried. I like to use 2 fresh jalapeños, 1 dried chipotle, and 1 dried habanero, but do whatever you want, ok? If you don't like spicy stuff, just use 2 mild chiles instead of 1, and forget the hot ones.
Here's what you'll need for pots:
- A big dutch oven (a.k.a. a cast iron pot, a.k.a. a pot with really big thermal mass and even heating)
- A small pan of any kind but nonstick.
Here's what you do:
- Prepare the fresh ingredients. To do this:
- Chop the mild peppers into pieces about 1-2 cm square.
- Chop the fresh chiles into pieces about 5-10 mm square, first discarding seeds and ribs. (Be careful, okay?)
- Cut the onions into pieces about 5 mm square if you hate big onion pieces, or about 2 cm square if you love big onion pieces.
- If you're using fresh garlic, mince it or put it through a garlic press.
- If you're using not-ground beef, then trim it and grind it, or (as I prefer) trim it and cut it into cubes about 1.5 cm on a side. (You know the drill, right? Stick the meat in your freezer for about 20 minutes so it firms up, then cut off the big pieces of fat[*], then slice what's left along the longest dimension. Then slice each of those pieces, so you wind up with a bunch of long thin strips. Then bunch them all up and slice them into cubes.)
- Make some chili powder. To do this:
- You start by getting your little pan out and toast the cumin seeds, the fennel seeds, the mild chiles, and the hot chiles. I recommend that you toast each of these separately, since none of them takes more than 20-60 seconds, and they all seem to go at their own speed. For big stuff (like chiles), chop or crunch them up a little before you toast them, and discard the seeds if you don't want super-spicy. You'll know something is toasted when you just start to smell it or it just starts to change color, whatever comes first... but be careful about inhaling stuff from chiles, for obvious reasons, ok?
- Take all that stuff you just toasted and grind it. You do this by taking your backup spices-only coffee grinder and grinding them for a 10-20 seconds or so until they make a coarse flaky powder. (What, you don't have an extra coffee grinder for spices? Get one. They cost what, $5? $10? You can afford that. It costs less than a pizza.)
- Put the chili powder in a cup. Add other dry spices, including cinnamon (if you're using that), garlic powder (if you're using that), basil, oregano, and pepper. Cover with beer and stir gently. It will want to overflow, so add the beer slowly and don't fill the cup all the way at first.
- Start heating up your big pot over medium-high heat. Brown[**] the beef in batches[***], and put it all in a bowl or something as it gets finished.
- Put a little oil[****] in the pot, and add the onions, and stir a bit for a minute or two so they don't burn. Then add the mild fresh peppers and keep stirring. Once the onions and peppers start to soften (like, 6-10 minutes) add the fresh chiles and stir some more. Cook them till they're a little softened, like 2-3 minutes.
- Dump the beef back in. Stir it in, and let it heat back up for a minute or two.
- Give the beer-spice mixture another stir, and dump it in. Stir the pot again, scraping the bottom well, and then turn the heat down to medium.
- Open up your canned tomatoes and crush them. It might help to use your hands. It might help to use a bowl. Maybe you should have used diced tomatoes if you didn't know how to crush tomatoes. I hope you weren't wearing a white shirt! Anyway, dump the newly crushed tomatoes and their juice into the pot. Stir again. Add the bay leaf. Add more liquid (water or beer) if stuff isn't pretty much covered by liquid.
- At this point, check your refrigerator. If you have any mostly-empty jars of salsa that you need to get rid of, and they haven't gone bad yet (taste them to be sure!) then dump them into the chili.
- Turn heat down to a simmer and cover. Cook. How long? At least an hour; 2 or 3 hours would be better. If liquid levels gets low, add more water or beer. Stir periodically, so it doesn't stick.
- Uncover and turn heat back up a little so it simmers again. Add beans, if you're using beans.[*****]
- Keep stirring. After 30-60 minutes, when the stuff still seems a little soupier than you'd like, add the chocolate and the corn flour. At this point you'll need to stir more than you did before: the corn flour will thicken it, but it will also want to burn more than it did before.
- Stir for another 15-20 minutes. Take out the bay leaf. Taste for seasoning, and season as appropriate. Now it's chili. Serve with whatever you want: i like rice and cheese. If you like tortilla chips, that's good too, but you should've used ground beef. If you want it over spaghetti, then congratulations: you've won the weird contest.[††]
- Refrigerate or freeze your leftovers. If anybody tells you you made chili wrong, then act real apologetic and ask them to bring you some of their chili so you can understand what real chili is supposed to taste like. Score! Now you have two kinds of chili!
[†] I've got nothing against Texans per se... it's just that those "Don't mess with Texas" bumper stickers have made me want to mess with Texas for years. I hope you understand.
[*] If you're totally crazy, then brown up the big pieces of fat along with the beef, and throw them into the stew while it's cooking. You'll wind up with a fattier chili, but there'll be more beefy goodness.[‡]
[**] To brown stuff, throw it in the pot in an even layer then leave it alone. When it's brown on the bottom (and "brown" doesn't mean "gray"), turn it over.
[***] If you throw all the beef into the pot at once, it'll release too much liquid, and that liquid will steam the beef. You don't want steamed beef. You want browned beef.
[****] How much oil? You know, enough. Enough so the onions and peppers won't stick, but not too much more than that. Maybe like a tablespoon, tops? You should know: you're cooking things off LJ!
[*****] Pintos or kidneys are good.
[††] Not to say that "weird" is bad. "Weird" sometimes is another word for "yummy." I hear this is how people have chili in parts of Ohio.
[‡] Yes, "beefy goodness" is indeed another term for fat. It can also mean fond, but in this case it doesn't. Thanks for asking!
Tags: chili, passive-aggressive, recipe
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01:26 pm
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Recently Read
I'm going to try to write about every book I read. Let's see how long this lasts.
The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
So, John Carter goes back to Mars. It's never really clear why he keeps getting warped back there. The first time (in A Princess of Mars), it was a magic Indian cave. This time, he just warps to Mars by warning to go badly enough. As usual, he's beset by an endless series of insanely dangerous threats (plant men, carnivorous white apes, etc). By authorial fiat, he arrives just in time to save his big four-armed green buddy, the deadly Tars Tarkas from a bunch of the aforementioned plant men. The first third of the book has a one-damn-thing-after-another quality, as the protagonists escape an ever-escalating set of frying pans only to fall into an increasingly weird set of fires. With time, though, a theme begins to emerge.
Coming soon: a music post!
Current Mood:  sick
Current Music: Squeeze—The Singles
Tags: books
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12:16 pm
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improve and repost
This is the song that replicates
If you can hear it, it's too late!
Some people weaponized a meme, not knowing it was wrong,
Then it escaped and reproduced and turned into this song,
{repeats}
Tags: meme, self-describing, song
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11:11 pm
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I'll be in the San Francisco area from January 22 through January 27.
Hi, west coast folks!
I'm going to be attending the Technology in Wartime conference in Stanford on 26 January. I've decided it would be groovy to take a few extra days on either side of it to catch up with folks and events in the general area. My flight gets into SFO around 3pm on Tuesday, 22 January; I leave around 9:30pm on Sunday, 27 January.
Would you like to hang out? If so, let's plan something!
(Also, I have a hotel only for 25 Jan and 26 Jan; I'll need somewhere to stay for the nights of 22Jan, 23Jan, and 24Jan. I can get a hotel if I need to, but I thought I should see who had free couches.)
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02:44 pm
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Early childhood development: actual exchange
A: me.
G: my brother-in-law
N: my niece.
G: "Once we're done swinging, should we go inside and read a story?"
N: "Reading story."
A: "Is she agreeing, or just repeating whatever you say?"
G: "I dunno." [pause] "Or instead, would you like to go inside and anneal some copper?"
N: "Copper!"
A: "Or we could go in and boil turnips until they turn into monkeys."
N: [pause] "Dotdot monkeys." ["dotdot" = drawing.]
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11:27 pm
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Ancient History, part 1.
Tonight I cleaned the hall closet and found some old scratch notebooks. Mostly, they're all old shopping lists and bad poetry, but there are some good parts. I'll be posting the more amusing bits as I go through them.
Today: The Bathing Suit Example (c. 2003)
Public Policy: "Don't look at me while I'm putting on my bathing suit, or you're in trouble."
Computer Security: Build a giant impenetrable sand castle to change in so nobody sees you naked.
Cryptography: Put the bathing suit on under your clothes, then remove your clothes.
Theoretical crypto: Wear all your clothes at once, and remove layers as appropriate.
Trusted computing: Wear special pants that can only be removed if everybody present is wearing sunglasses that go dark if anybody with the special pants removes them. As a side effect, you can never see yourself naked.
Steganography: Wear camouflage body paints under your clothes.
Watermarking: Put a different temporary tattoo on your ass every morning, so you can tell who's talking about your butt.
Cryptography II: Grow lots of body hair.
P2P: Have a million friends to strip at the same time, so nobody will notice you.
Tags: crypto, humor
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09:15 pm
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Voting in Cambridge (MA, USA)?
If you're a registered voter in Cambridge Massachusetts, please check out ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) seborn's writeup of election info. It has links to good general-interest sites, as well as a suggestion of whom you might like to vote for if you do not want the police to be shocking people with electrodes.
Tags: cambridge, election, politics
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09:25 pm
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Books unread reread and unreadable (meme)
From laura47 .
These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but didn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.
(I corrected some of the capitalization. why why why did the capitalization get messed up? and i changed "couldn't finish" to "didn't finish" above, because they have different meanings and didn't is more inclusive)
(9:57: edited for correctness.)
(10:16: added books 107...300.)
(10:29: edited for more correctness.)
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05:04 pm
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Dear cops, re l'affaire Simpson
Dear cops and policymakers,
So, you're worried about terror and stuff, so you've decided that you're going to be extra vigilant. Go you. Now, you might not have studied statistics, but there are two kinds of mistakes you can make when you're trying to do this kind of thing: false negatives and false positives. False negatives (not reacting to actual criminals) can result in loss of life, or even cost a police officer his job. When policymakers tell the police, "be really careful and react to everything suspicious," they're saying "Minimize false negatives."
But low false-negative rates don't come free: when false negatives fall, false positives rise (all other things being equal). When err on the side of suspicion, sometimes you will be wrong and you will wind up coming down like a ton of bricks on some peaceful protester, some harmless guys with an art project, an innocuous running club, or, today, some kid with a breadboard and a battery.
So, what are your options when you get a false positive? You could say, "Heck, it looked dangerous to us. We're trying to be real careful, and that means we're going to react to non-threats sometimes. Sorry for the inconvenience, but for future reference: the kind of thing you were doing flips us out like crazy." Or on the other hand, you could arrest and pursue charges against the false positive, on the theory that if you did something that made the cops flip out, you must have been doing something wrong.
Too many locales have been doing the latter. It's a bad idea, though: when your first reaction to your own inevitable mistakes is to place the blame on others, you look petty. The average police officer isn't an expert in electrical engineering, demolitions, or germ warfare. There's no shame in admitting that somebody confused you: you don't need to go track down the people who did it and arrest them for "confusing an officer of the law" so that it won't happen again.
Now of course, they don't call it "confusing the police". In Boston, it seems to be "possessing/producing a hoax device". As far as I can tell, in Boston a "hoax device" is "anything that a cop mistakes for a bomb." It's possible that in Joe Previtera's case (see link above), a "hoax device" was "whatever a cop deliberately mistakes for a bomb in order to haul your ass to jail." If that doesn't stick, they also seem to charge the cop-confuser with "disturbing the peace" on the theory that it's your fault the cops freaked out and shut down the area. This is the only legal theory they tried on the poor New Haven hashers, but it seems to be what they're charging Star with as well. Of course, this might just be an attempt to intimidate everybody out of reacting to police and airports with anything other than complete predictable normality. In which case, oops, joke's on me.
Angrily,
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12:42 am
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Suppose that you made Earth into a prayer wheel.
So, you're going to put a set of big stone letters around the equator in order to turn Earth into an enormous prayer wheel. What will you have them say?
Current leading entries are:
- "Kallisti!"
- "One ring to rule them all."
- "Forty-two."
- "SIX TIMES NINE."
- "ROFLMAO."
- "OMFG."
- The complete lyrics to "baby got back".
And really, how hard would this be to do? Why don't we do it all the time?
And what should we write there instead?
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12:29 pm
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I has a bard!
Again with the amuzingly captioned kittens.
Here is hamletcat:
There are 7 more over here on the cat_macros community.
Tags: cat macros, shakespeare
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04:55 pm
[Link] | Hi! There are some books I'm trying to get rid of. I'll donate them to a library or goodwill or something if nobody wants them within the next week or so. Yes, I realize that some of these are mildly embarassing. The books are:
Fiction:
Sundiver by David Brin
The Elfin Ship by James Blaylock
Dune: House Harkonnen
I'll cross them off as they go away. Please take them off my hands!
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11:42 pm
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commit message of the day.
For reasons which make sense to somebody, I'm sure, mingw gcc wants the libraries to appear at the end of the command line. This is done by specifying them with LDADD in Makefile.am, not LDFLAGS.
If anybody can explain to me why mingw thinks "gcc -o foo foo.o -lbar" is fine, whereas "gcc -lbar -o foo foo.o" is Doubleplusbad UnMingwThink, I'd quite appreciate it. Until then, 'll just do what seems to work, and hope we don't blunder across any other great slumbering cthonian deities of arbitrary syntax.
Man. I should re-do that in the form of Xanadu or something:
In min-g-win did automake a messy linker line decree
Where "-l" the romping option ran
Through lines that seemed unchanged to man
Down to a sundered C.
So twice five hours of wasted time
With a-c-include were frittered down...
Tags: coding, frustration, mingw
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10:35 pm
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A summoning tonight!
So, this Tuesday, I got an email from a friend with the subject: "a cthulhu tonight!" Never mind why. This led me to think of "A Comedy Tonight" from A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. An hour or so later:
Something unpleasant
Something incessant
Something for everyone, a summoning tonight!
Something that gibbers,
Something with flippers
Something for everyone, a summoning tonight!
Tags: a funny thing happened on the way to the, cthulhu, musical, parody
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11:29 pm
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Don't make me bored. You couldn't handle me when I'm bored.
John Dennis said that a pun is the lowest form of wit. But that was 300 years ago. The cat macro is far, far lower.
And apparently I have no taste, since tonight I got a touch of physics, and dabbled in the form.
Hm. Am I posting random crap like this? I suppose next I should start posting my occasional verse.
(btw, I secretly love cat macros. they are better then cheezeburgrerz and harblz, put together.)
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04:15 pm
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Charity case
So, the IRS is notoriously backlogged with resolving applications for charity status: when my $PROJECT filed for nonprofit status back in December, we didn't really expect to hear anything back for 8-12 months at least.
But today, our lawyers got a letter from the IRS. We have 501(c)3 status, after a mere 74 days. Everybody is pretty surprised, but we're not about to question it.
Woot! Now I'm finally a charity case! I should do something to celebrate.
Edit: To celebrate, I'm baking cookies.
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10:59 pm
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An exchange
"I think my girlfriend is smoking. What should I do?"
Tags: geek
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10:28 pm
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Berklee improves my life with Zappa music
So the Berklee College o' Music has regular cheap musical performances. Tonight, for a mere $5, I got to see a groovy jazz combo and a 10-piece Zappa cover band made of Berklee students.
Yes, I was there for the Zappa cover band. How could you tell? They were pretty darned tight, and the individual musicians were really good. The percussion guy played a mean set of vibes, and managed to play all the "Ruth Only" bits. The guitarist really had a feel for the material, and managed to make Zappa's solos his own. They even managed to find a woman with a great voice who could do the high, fast parts of "Montana," and belt out the rockin' parts of "Zomby Woof." (Goosebump material there.) I thought they got a little sloppy in some of the verses of "Cosmik Debris," but they really nailed the harder pieces like "The Black Page": I guess they probably practiced those more.
Man, I lack musical vocabulary.
I gotta go to more of these student shows.
[Edited to add: Ah, clever. I didn't mention the name of the band before, because I suspected that the website had gotten it wrong. Looking around a bit confirms that the band was called the Brain Police, not the "Brian Police."]
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03:46 pm
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More Lovecraft
So, some person who will go nameless (no, not Hastur: less eldritch) decides to advertise a roleplaying dating thing to the MIT Campus Crusade for Cthulhu list because ... well, it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Others flamed, justly. The High Priestess responded, "Anybody want to play Hastur to my Shub-Niggurath?"
So with apologies to Christopher Malowe and Robert Chambers:
The Passionate Hastur to His Love
Come live with me and be my god
And we with every pseudopod
And tentacle, and squamous thing
Shall make Lake of Hali ring.
Thy foetid brood can romp and play
On some quaint planet far away
Until there's only you and I
In lost Carcosa, dim and dry.
And I will make thee beds of slime
From kelp and glue and mesenchyme,
A frock of skin, a skirt of hands,
And garlands of pineal glands.
Crazed celebrants will shriek and bellow
"A consort for the King In Yellow!"
We'll stroke their minds until they break
As twin suns sink beneath the lake,
And when we meld and interlace,
Man's sanity, and time, and space
Shall twist and melt where we have trod
So live with me and be my god!
The Hyades shall melodize
For thy delight where black stars rise,
If these delights thy mind may prod,
Then live with me and be my god.
{I worry I may have messed up some of the thee and thous. Also, sorry, no footnotes this time. The main sources are "Cassilda's Song" from The King in Yellow and "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" by Christopher Marlowe. The Hyades are stars, Carcosa is (probably) a city, and mesenchyme is a kind of embryonic connective tissue.}
[Edited for spelling, and to note that the other inspiration was the origin of the name "Hastur" in the Bierce story "Haita the Shepherd."]
[Edited again to add a missing "with".]
Tags: bierce, cthulhu, hastur, lovecraft, parody, poem
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02:06 am
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Please answer my questions for me. Oh... and bring me a sherbet.
I'm looking for the origin of a quote that runs, approximately:
With real theories, some things count as evidence for the theory and some things count as evidence against. With conspiracy theories, some things count as evidence for the theory, and some things count as evidence for how pervasive and insidious the conspiracy really is.
Anybody?
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