Þæt wæs gôd hæker!

The best chili I can make.

Thu, 01 May 2008 22:18:05 GMT

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!

Recently Read

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:57:14 GMT

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.

The theme seems to be religion and exploitation. Throughout the book, a succession of Martian societies realize that their long-cherished beliefs of the afterlife are in fact cruel hoaxes perpetrated on them by other societies, by self-serving rulers, or tragic misunderstandings. You'd think that some of them would catch on, and not just go around saying, "How foolish the outsiders are to believe that the Mysterious River Iss leads to paradise, rather than carnivorous plant-men, dreaded white apes, and a lifetime of enslavement! How lucky we are to know that true paradise is available at the end of the Long Ominous Tunnel From Which Nobody Returns!"

The racial obsessions are very 1913 (in that they assume that race is quite important), but not mean-spirited. Mars is peopled by different species and races, and it's assumed that each race will have its own "character" and its own monoculture, and that some kind of competition will exist. Burroughs doesn't seem to buy into the "purity" doctrines of contemporary racists, though: the Red Martians are portrayed as being admirable because they descend from all the other races, not because of any innate superiority. Members of all martian races are portrayed as being heroic and villainous by turns, though admittedly only John Carter is portrayed as having enough brains to know a crock of bs when he sees it. It's stupid, but not quite as ugly as some of the junk Burroughs did in Tarzan.

The best reason to read Burroughs is still IMO the prose style. For example, suppose you've just found out that the object of a recent crush is in an exclusive relationship with someone else. There's taking it gracefully, there's taking it badly, and then there's this:
"Dog," she hissed. "Dog of a blasphemer! [1] Think you that Phaidor, daughter of Matai Shang, supplicates? She commands. What to her is our puny outer world passion for the vile creature you chose in your other life?"
"Phaidor has glorified you with her love, and you have spurned her. Ten thousand unthinkably atrocious deaths could not atone for the affront that you have put upon me. The thing that you call Dejah Thoris will die the most horrible of them all. You have sealed the warning for her doom."
"And you! You shall be the meanest slave in the service of the goddess you have attempted to humiliate. Tortures and ignominies shall be heaped upon you until you grovel at my feet asking the boon of death."
"In my gracious generosity I shall at length grant your prayer, and from the high balcony of the Golden Cliffs I shall watch the great white apes tear you asunder."

[1] On reflection, I can't recall that there are actually any dogs on Mars at all. Perhaps this is meant to be a translator's liberty, and she really called him a "small-contemptible-six-legged-scavenging-pack-animal of a blasphemer."
They sure don't write 'em like that any more.

The Griffin and Sabine Trilogy by Nick Bantock

This is a series of three books about a romance between two artists who become aware of each other through weird supernatural means. The novelty here is mainly the format: the pages hold a series of postcards, intermixed with envelopes holding one-page letters you can remove from the books and read.

I didn't really get into these books. I think that the characters are supposed to be deep and soulful by authorial fiat, but I can't really see deep and soulful people conducting the long-distance romance of their life over so many postcards and one-page letters. Also, the final resolution to the series didn't seem to answer many of the mysteries that had come up over the course of the books, but seemed a little arbitrary.

In the end, I couldn't help feeling I'd missed something, like if I read the whole series again I might find out unequivocally which of the events in the letters really happened, or that all the characters were secretly telepathic goldfish from pluto, or something like that. Still, the artwork and overall design were great.

Evil for Evil by K.J. Parker

This is the second book of Parker's Engineer Trilogy. In the first book, we met a bunch of characters of varying degrees of likeability, all of whom were swept unawares into the complex machiavellian plans of a mild-mannered exiled engineer of uncertain motive. Now, the plans get more complex, and we start to see the overall outline of what the fellow has in mind, and the hero/villain status of many of the characters gets way more ambiguous.

The setting is zero-magic, which makes sense: the plot relies on one city having maintained an industrialization monopoly for generations. I rather liked how this volume started to resolve some of the flaws of the first volume, which IMO relied maybe a bit too much on nobody being quite as smart or the protagonist or catching on that the protagonist wasn't necessarily acting in their best interest in time. Finally, things start to go almost-wrong, somewhat-wrong, or badly-right for the protagonist, and some people start to be wise as to what he's really up to. (Assuming that is what he's really up to.)

So far, the moral of the story seems to be that elaborate machiavellian government-toppling plots might be fun to read about, but they really require you to get lucky if you want them to work, and you wouldn't want to be on the same continent as one anyway what with all the collateral damage.

I'm not sure how I feel about the overall plotting: there aren't really many "idiot plot" elements (i.e., places where the plot would fall apart if any character behaved sensibly), but there are maybe a few too many places where characters are too good at predicting how other characters will react to certain things. People just aren't that predictable: no matter how much you think Duke X is in love with his childhood sweetheart Y, you can't make an empire-toppling plan that absolutely requires that X will choose loyalty to Y over everything else he holds dear, especially when all available evidence says that X is really really good at self-sacrifice.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

Vowell recounts her visits to places associated with the Lincoln, McKinley, and Garfield assassinations and assassins. The prose style is charming, the book full of fun assassin facts, and the narrative really captures the feeling of having a strange hobby that your friends and family don't share.

As a side note, my earlier pop-culture sources on the Garfield assassination were sadly lacking, it seems. I'd realized that Giteau was a bit deluded concerning his chances of getting to be Ambassador to France, but I didn't realize that he had looked for acceptance in the Oneida free-love commune, but couldn't get a date. Nor did I know that he fancied himself a visionary genius, or that claimed at his trial to be speaking for God, to have a great mission of reform for the US, and to be a great hero for the ages. Note to self: stop tweaking delusional narcissists; they aren't all harmless. Note to self #2: See Sondheim's Assassins some time.

Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner

I'd read the sequel to this book, and got halfway into it before I realized that it was a sequel. Usually when this happens, I don't enjoy volume one very much, since I've inadvertently spoiled myself completely. This time, though, the characters and events were disconnected enough that I didn't figure out who some of the recurring characters were until the novel was nearly over.

Again, we're in a zero-magic world, this time in the capital mercantile city, run as an oligarchy by a bunch of noble families who did away with the old king ages ago, and spend all their time hiring swordsmen to amuse themselves and to intimidate their rivals for political advantage, the good of the city, and/or personal benefit. The main character is a paid duelist who's great as a duelist but not too good at much else besides. He and his lover have exciting adventures, sad adventures, and find themselves as pawns in the overall political situation.

Neither the heros nor the villains display terribly good judgment, but the character development and writing are so well defined that I felt like people were doing iffy things because that's who they are, not because the plot needs them to do it. I also like Kushner's fake-outs, where she sets up plot points that wind up getting superseded by other, more pressing plot developments. Still, not for everyone.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John LeCarré.

Why have I not read any LeCarré before? It's obvious why this is classic. I'd say more, but it's really hard to explain what I like about it without massive spoilers. I think I figured out the plot about two chapters before the characters did, which was optimal: too late and I'd feel dumb; too early and I'd feel that the characters were being monumentally stupid.

Coming soon: a music post!

improve and repost

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 17:18:04 GMT

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}

I'll be in the San Francisco area from January 22 through January 27.

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 04:15:02 GMT

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.)

Early childhood development: actual exchange

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:47:44 GMT

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.]

Ancient History, part 1.

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 04:38:07 GMT

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.

Voting in Cambridge (MA, USA)?

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 02:19:27 GMT

If you're a registered voter in Cambridge Massachusetts, please check out 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.

Books unread reread and unreadable (meme)

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 01:57:05 GMT

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)

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi: a novel (94) (TBR)
The name of the rose (91)
Don Quixote (91) [I got somewhere in volume 1 during high school Spanish, and read some other bits of volume 2.]
Moby Dick [Something happens there eventually, right? It's not just all a guy telling you about whaling, right?]
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
The brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79)

Vanity fair (74)
The time traveler's wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The kite runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
~~Great Expectations (70)~~ [Magwitch should have killed Pip on page 20 or so.]
American Gods (68)
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67)
Atlas shrugged (67) (I read about 2 paragraphs of the Really Long Speach, but that shouldn't count as starting it.)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
~~Quicksilver (66)~~ [And the other 2 books in the Baroque Cycle too. Can anybody explain to me what the plot was about?]
Wicked : the ~~life~~ and ~~times~~ of ~~the wicked~~ witch of the ~~West~~ (65) [Disappointing, but not quite enough for a whole strikethrough.]
The Canterbury tales (64) [I keep thinking I'll get through the rest of them some day, but I had a hard time staying interested in the Knight's Tale, and my Middle English isn't very good at all.]
The historian : a novel (63)
A portrait of the artist as a young man (63)
Love in the time of cholera (62)
Brave new world (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A clockwork orange (59)
Anansi boys (58)
The Once and Future King (57) [Actually, I have no idea whether I've read this or not.]
~~The Grapes of Wrath (57)~~ [Couldn't Steinbeck have just arranged for somebody to hit me over the head with a migrant worker till I cried?]
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & Demons (56)
The Inferno (56)
The Satanic Verses (55) (TBR)
Sense and sensibility (55) (I don't honestly remember a thing about it, though.)
The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One flew over the cuckoo's nest (54)
To the lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver's travels (53) (I read the first bit of it, I think...)
Les misérables (53) (Gave up around the chapter where the village priest covers for Valjean.)
The corrections (53)
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (52)
Dune (51)
The prince (51) (also le petit prince. but that's different. is there a mashup?)
The sound and the fury (51)
Angela's ashes : a memoir (51)
The god of small things (51)
~~A people's history of the United States : 1492-present (51)~~ (I wish Zinn had written the book that he'd like to read, rather than the book that he'd like everybody else to read.)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A confederacy of dunces (50) (TBR)
A short history of nearly everything (50) (TBR)
Dubliners (50)
The unbearable lightness of being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-five (49)
The scarlet letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : a novel (47)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
Cloud atlas (47)
~~The confusion (46)~~ [I almost didn't bold this one until I remembered that that's what volume 2 of the Baroque Cycle was called. ]
Lolita (46) (I read the first page, but got distracted.)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger abbey (46)
The catcher in the rye (46)
On the road (46)
The hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (45)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (44)
White Teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The Three Musketeers (44)
***
Cold mountain (43)
Robinson Crusoe (43)
(No title) (43)
The bell jar (43)
The secret life of bees (43)
Beowulf : a new verse translation (43)
The plague (43)
The Master and Margarita (43)
(No title) (42)
Atonement : a novel (42)
The handmaid's tale (42) (TBR)
Lady Chatterley's lover (41)
Underworld (41) (TBR)
(No title) (41)
~~Little Women (41)~~ (Jo marries WHO? WTF.)
A brief history of time : from the big bang to black holes (41)
Stardust (41)
Jude the obscure (41)
The chronicles of Narnia (40)
Possession : a romance (40)
Fast food nation : the dark side of the all-American meal (40)
(No title) (40)
Never let me go (40)
The trial (40) (Actually, did Kafka finish this one? I read the entire volume...)
Kafka on the shore (40)
Bleak House (40)
(No title) (40)
Sons and lovers (40)
Alias Grace (39)
The Arabian nights (39)
Baudolino (39)
Confessions (39) (If they mean Augustine's confessions, sure.)
The great Gatsby (39)
To kill a mockingbird (39)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (39)
The alchemist (39)
Candide, or, Optimism (39)
Snow falling on cedars (39)
Midnight in the garden of good and evil : a Savannah story (39)
Midnight's children (39)
White Oleander (39)
A passage to India (39)
The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and ... (39)
The house of the seven gables (39)
The lovely bones : a novel (38)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (38)
The amber spyglass (38)
The histories (38)
Swann's way (38) (Got about 5 pages in and decided I wasn't up for that kind of commitment at the time.)
The shadow of the wind (38)
Fahrenheit 451 (38)
Good omens (38)
Running with scissors : a memoir (38)
Everything is illuminated : a novel (38)
The divine comedy (38) (Skimmed a lot of Purgatorio and Paradiso)
Paradise lost (38)
The English patient (38)
Uncle Tom's cabin (38)
The Origin of Species (37)
The plot against America (37)
The history of Tom Jones, a foundling (37)
Silas Marner (37)
The hours (37)
Prodigal summer : a novel (37)
The bonesetter's daughter (37)
Doctor Zhivago (37)
~~The shipping news (36)~~ (Does the Canadian health-care system not cover antidepressants for Newfies?)
The phantom of the Opera (36)
The portrait of a lady (36)
Blink : the power of thinking without thinking (36)
Heart of darkness (36)
The Robber Bride (36)
The last of the Mohicans (36)
The age of innocence (36)
~~The system of the world (35)~~ (See above.)
Tropic of cancer (35)
The mayor of Casterbridge (35)
The Gormenghast novels (35) (I read the first one...)
The gunslinger (35)
The golden compass (35)
The Republic of Plato (35)
The remains of the day (35)
Cat's eye (35)
Eragon (35)
A game of thrones (35)
Sophie's world : a novel about the history of philosophy (34)
The island of the day before (34)
The good earth (34)
A prayer for Owen Meany : a novel (34) (My mom wants me to read this one so bad that I'm afraid to mention it.)
The devil in the white city : murder, magic, and madness at ... (34)
A farewell to arms (34)
East of Eden (34)
The book thief (34)
Animal farm : a fairy story (34)
For whom the bell tolls (34)
Pattern recognition (34) (TBR)
Infinite jest : a novel (33)
The Decameron (33)
The mill on the Floss (33)
The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman (33) (Though reading any part of Tristam Shandy should count as reading the whole.)
Me talk pretty one day (33)
The other Boleyn girl (32)
The Eyre affair (32)
Labyrinth (32)
The jungle (32) (TBR)
The complete works (32) (whose?)
Snow crash (32)
The idiot (32) (The first ten pages or so.)
Mark Z. Danielewski's House of leaves (32)
Naked lunch (32)
Ivanhoe (32)
The return of the native (32)
Gödel, Escher, Bach : an eternal golden braid (32)
(No title) (31)
Song of Solomon (31) (Haven't read the Morrison one. Does the "Song of Songs, which is Solomon's" count?)
Far from the madding crowd (31)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (31)
The left hand of darkness (31)
Tender is the night (31)
Moll Flanders (31)
A tree grows in Brooklyn (31)
The witching hour : a novel (31)
The thirteenth tale : a novel (31)
Girl with a pearl earring (31)
Confessions of an ugly stepsister (31)
Invisible man (31) (The lack of definite article means Ellison? Then yes.)
As I lay dying (31)
Eldest (30)
Neuromancer (30)
Empire falls (30)
Villette (30)
The tipping point : how little things can make a big differe... (30)
The moonstone (30)
The known world (30)
The Wind in the Willows (30) (My dad read it to me when I was little. That counts, right?)
Notes from the underground (30)
Twenty thousand leagues under the sea (30)
Night. Foreword by François Mauriac. Translated from the Fr... (30)
The Joy Luck Club (30)
The Martian chronicles (30)
(No title) (30)
The fortress of solitude : a novel (30)
Extremely loud & incredibly close (29)
Siddhartha (29)
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, .... (29)
Lord Jim (29)
The glass bead game : (Magister Ludi) (29)
The princess bride: S. Morgenstern's classic tale of true ... (29) (Alas, I've only read Goldman's abridged "Good Parts" version. ;) )
Their eyes were watching God : a novel (29)
Walden (29)
Gilead (29)
The Jane Austen book club (29)
Of human bondage (29)
The art of war (28)
A million little pieces (28)
Absalom, Absalom! (28)
An instance of the fingerpost (28)
The adventures of Tom Sawyer (28)
The War of the Worlds (28)
Mere Christianity : a revised and amplified edition, with a ... (28)
Son of a witch : a novel (28)
Mirror mirror (28)
Harry Potter and the sorcerer's stone (28)
Stranger in a strange land (28)
The stranger (28)
If on a winter's night a traveler (28)
All quiet on the western front (28)
My Antonia (28)
A room with a view (28)
Light in August (28)
The sun also rises (28)
Dune messiah (28)
The crying of lot 49 (28)
The namesake (28)
The wind-up bird chronicle (27)
The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (27)
The bonfire of the vanities (27)
That hideous strength : a modern fairy-tale for grown-ups (27)
The Dante Club : a novel (27)
The heart is a lonely hunter (27)
On writing : a memoir of the craft (27)
The color purple : a novel (27)
Steppenwolf (27)
The woman in white (27)
Women in love (27)
Mason & Dixon (27)
Gone with the wind (26)
Thursday Next in Lost in a good book : a novel (26)
America (the book) : a citizen's guide to democracy inaction... (26)
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (26)
John Adams (26)
Brideshead revisited : the sacred and profane memories of ... (26)
The red tent (26)
The world is flat : a brief history of the twenty-first century (26)

(9:57: edited for correctness.)
(10:16: added books 107...300.)
(10:29: edited for more correctness.)

Dear cops, re l'affaire Simpson

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 21:33:57 GMT

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,

Suppose that you made Earth into a prayer wheel.

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 05:48:44 GMT

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?

I has a bard!

Fri, 11 May 2007 16:33:48 GMT

Again with the amuzingly captioned kittens.

Here is hamletcat:

There are 7 more over here on the cat_macros community.

Thu, 10 May 2007 20:59:54 GMT

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

Exalted: Relic of the Dawn by David Naill Wilson
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Obsession by Ramsey Campbell

Nonfiction: (except for computers and cooking)

Games:
    Go and Go-Moku by Edward Lasker
    Know your Own IQ by Eysenck

Pets:
    I just got a puppy. What do I do?
        by Mordecai Siegal and "Uncle Matty" Margolis
    The Dog Who Loved Too Much by Dr. Nicholas Dodman
    Animal ER by Vicky Croke

Misc fact-books:
    Imponderables
    Why do Clocks Run Clockwise
    When do Fish Sleep
      by David Feldman
    Did Mohawks wear Mohawks by Bruce Tindall and Mark Watson

Lit-Crit:
    The Seventh of Joyce ed. by Bernard Benstock
    ~~A History of Private Life vol 1:From pagan rome to byzantium, Edited by paul veyne~~

Law:
    The American Tort Process by John G Fleming
    Foundations of Tort Law by Saul Levmore

Business:
    How to Incorporate and start a business in Massachusetts

Travel:
    Todo Puerto Rico

Politics:
    Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky
    How Mumbo Jumbo conquered the world by Francis Wheen

Cartoons and humor and comics

Headlines I, II, III, and IV by Jay Leno
Grudge Match by Wright and Levine
Roadkill of Middle Earth by John Carnell
I really didn't say everything I said by Yogi Berra
free drinks for ladies with nuts by Jayne O'Boyle

Books books books
all you can eat
moms moms moms
      (Edited by S gross)

Computer-related topics:

Published by O'Reilly:
   Building Cocoa Applications by Simson Garfinkel and Michael Mahoney.
   Programming Python by Mark Lutz (covers python 1.3)
   Java Distributed Computing by Jim Farley
   Pthreads Programming by Bradford Nichols, Dick Buttlar & Jacqueline Proulx
      Farrell.
   Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C: Lincoln Stein and Doug MacEachern
   Mac OS X: The Missing Manual by David Pogue
   ~~Ruby in a Nutshell Yukihiro Matsumoto~~
   Java in a Nutshell David Flannigan 2nd edition

Published by Addison Wesley:
   Concurrent Programming in Java 2nd edition by Doug Lea [***]
   Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications by Grady Booch

From others:
   Visual studio 6 manual
   _Oracle 8i: The Complete Reference_ by Kevin Loney and George Koch
   GTK+/Gnome Application Development by Havoc Pennington

Cooking:

"The Italian Cookbook"
oklahoma indian cookbook, 1956
peter hunt's cape cod cookbook
flagstaff cookbook 1976
the scandinavian cookbook 1956
polish-american cookbook by the holy rosary parish hadley mass 1972
naturally chinese by ruth spira
fish cookery by james vilkitis
the talisman italian cookbook by ada boni
picnics collected for mercedes benz 1994
~~japanese country cookbook by ryoichi Kokku 1969 [**]~~
Japanese home cooking
luchow's german cookbook 1952
the "I married an italian cookbook" bette scaloni
fisherman's wharf cookbook barbara lawrence 1971
treasured armenian recipes 1949
the armenian cookbook rachel hargrogian
the great restaurants cookbook usa by campells' soup
The Well-Filled Tortilla cookbook by Victoria Wise and Susana Hoffman
Cucina sprint per quattro stagioni by savina roggero
adventures in sourdough cooking and baking by Charles Wilford

time life "foods of the world" series:
    provincial france
    germany
    russia
    the Viennese empire
    spain and portugal

    several recipe books:
     spain and portugal
     india
     germany
     scandinavia
     russia
     vienna's empire

I'll cross them off as they go away. Please take them off my hands!

commit message of the day.

Tue, 01 May 2007 03:51:01 GMT

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...

A summoning tonight!

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 02:48:55 GMT

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!

       No time to dance! No time for steps!
       Bring on the Dholes and Nyarlathoteps[1]!

    Something colossal
    Glimpsed as a fossil,
    Rises once again to spread its blight!
    Mankind ends tomorrow, summoning tonight!

     Something that's frothy
     Something shoggothy[2]
     Something for everyone, a summoning tonight!

     Something cthulhoid
     Something puruloid[3]
     Something for everyone, a summoning tonight!

      More elder gods, more awful fates!
      Their power grows as mankind's abates!

    Nothing concealing
    Nothing appealing
    Nothing here of comfort or delight!
    Tragedy tomorrow, summoning tonight!

     Something that's squamous
     Something oogamaous[4][5]
     Something for everyone, a summoning tonight!

     Something that dangles
     In too many angles
     Something for everyone, a summoning tonight!

     [COMPANY]
     Something unhinging
     Something brain-singeing
     Something for everybody, summoning tonight!
     Something ungodly
     Done to a body
     [HERBERT WEST] [6]
     Something for every body![7]
     [COMPANY]
                                   Summoning tonight!

     [CHARLES DEXTER WARD]
     Nothing from books, [8]
     [ERICH ZANN]
     Nothing that squeaks, [9]
     [CHARLES DEXTER WARD]
        (He's been rehearsing this number for weeks.)

     [CULTISTS]
     Something misshapen,
     [VICTIMS]
     With mouths a-gapin'
     [ALL]
     Humankind shall perish out of fright!

     [OBOBED MARSH]
     Unnatural matings! [10]
     [THE OUTSIDER]
     Fear unabating! [11]
     [WILBUR WHATELEY]
     De Mysteriis Vermiis! [12]
     [THE FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH]
     Brains in a thermos! [13]

     [RICHARD UPTON PICKMAN]
     Insanity! [14]
     [CHARLES DEXTER WARD]
     Calamity!
     [DR. ARTIMAGE]
     Tentacles! [15]
     [HERBERT WEST]
     Ventricles!
     [PICKMAN]
     Squamosity!
     [MARSH]
     Rugosity!

     [ALL]
     No hope remains, madness begins
     You'll never get out with your skins.
     Goodness and badness,
      Panic in madness-- [16]
     Nothing here will ever turn out right!
     Tragedy tomorrow, summoning (summoning, summoning) tonight!

[1] Two horrible things that go great together!
[2] Weirdly, google hits for "shoggothy" break down into people who use it as an adjective, and people who use it as the Polish plural of "shoggoth".
[3] Puruloid: pus-like.
[4] Yes, this is not a very good rhyme.
[5] Also, oogamousness isn't very scary. But it sounds nasty, doesn't it?
[6] The great reanimator!
[7] Not as good as the pun in the original.
[8] See The Case of Charles Dexter Ward for a discussion of why you shouldn't follow recipes from the Necronomicon.
[9] See "The Music of Erich Zann"
[10] See The Shadow over Innsmouth.
[11] This one is far too obscure.
[12] Robert Bloch's nasty book is actually called De Vermiis Mysteriis, and VermiisI doesn't rhyme with Thermos even a little bit, but please bear with me. It's hard to do a Fungi from Yuggoth joke other than the old obvious fun-guy one.
[13] See "The Whisperer in Darkness", I think.
[14] See "Pickman's Model".
[15] See Shuggoth on the Roof.
[16] It's very weird how little the original lines needed to change for this stanza to work.

Don't make me bored. You couldn't handle me when I'm bored.

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 03:57:08 GMT

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.

(ETA charmcat.)

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.)

Charity case

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 20:23:00 GMT

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.

An exchange

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 04:01:03 GMT

"I think my girlfriend is smoking. What should I do?"

"Unplug her right away, and install some heatsinks. Do you have any thermal paste?"

Berklee improves my life with Zappa music

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 03:50:12 GMT

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."]

More Lovecraft

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 20:46:30 GMT

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".]

Please answer my questions for me. Oh... and bring me a sherbet.

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 07:10:03 GMT

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?

Eldritch Miscellany

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 06:02:24 GMT

So, you're all familiar with the HP Lovecraft Historical Society, yes? Good. Today I went caroling with some fellow-travelers in the MIT Campus Crusade for Cthulhu, and we sang a number of the lovely mythos-themed tunes from their "A Very Scary Solstice" songbook. "Carol of the Old Ones" and "Awake Ye Scary Great Old Ones" in sumptuous four-part harmony: mmm, eldritch!

At practice, I decided I wanted to sing "Demon Sultan Azathoth" (to the tune of "Good King Wenceslas") as a round. But since the songbook only had a single verse, I needed to write some more. Here's what I came up with:

    Manyfaced[1] Nyarlathotep[2]
    Bodes mankind's destruction.
    Calling us to certain doom,
    Voice full of seduction.
       You can't help but dance behind[3]
       Gyrating and turning.
       Tears of joy streak down your face
       As the world dies burning.[4]

    Yog-Sothoth is key and gate[5],
    Binding time to matter[6][7]
    When his gaze falls on the Earth,
    Laws of physics shatter
       Try to bind him with your laws:
       Pitiful equations![8]
       Naught but dust and sand[9] will mark
       Your obliteration!

    Twisted shining Hastur[10] broods
    Over Lost Carcosa.[11]
    Yellow vestments hide within
    Various squamosa.[12]
       Other gods wait for the stars,
       He arrives much faster:
       Just stand up and sing along:
       Hastur, Hastur, Hastur![13]

[1] 999, traditionally.
[2] "The black king of the ancients who shall come in the night from the east and you shall not know him?"
    "Of course that's who I mean." ...
    "You could of meant someone else with the same name."
    "Well, it's not exactly a common name, is it? ... 'Hullo, my Name's Nyarlathotep, what a coincidence meeting you here, funny them bein' two of us,' I don't exactly think so." -- Neil Gaiman, "Shuggoth's Old Peculiar"
[3] See "Nyarlathotep" from the verse cycle Fungi From Yuggoth.[*]
[4] Some say the world will end in water, and some in fire. From what I've dreamed of R'leyh's spires, I really hope it ends in fire. [**]
[5] "Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate." --Necronomicon, Translated by Dee, as quoted in "The Dunwich Horror."
[6] "Past, present, and future are all one in Yog-Sothoth." -- Ibid.
[7] "It was...not merely a thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence's whole unbounded sweep." -- "Through the Gates of the Silver Key."
[8] "The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." -- "The Call of Cthulhu"
[9] "When the awful name of Yog-Sothoth was uttered, the hideous change began...Joseph Curwen now lay scattered on the floor as a thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust." -- The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
[10] Hastur, like many popular deities you may know, is defined mainly through fanfic: Chambers developed him first, but nabbed the name from Lovecraft or possibly Bierce. The "Twisted" and "Shining" are thus conjectural. Of course, if you take Derleth's stuff as canonical, Hastur is an octopoid thingie in a lake, so that would make "twisted" more likely and "shining" less. On the other hand Derleth always did default to "it's got tentacles" when he couldn't think of a cool description, so I wouldn't take him as canon myself. Plus, he was one of the first practitioners of "Mythos Hoedown."[***]
[11] I'm on way firmer ground connecting Hastur to Carcosa, and (later) to the King in Yellow. Chambers never actually says how they're related, though: he does "vague" even better than Lovecraft. Also, he could write female characters, which Lovecraft never seems to have gotten the hang of[†]. Check him out!
[12] Squamosa. n. "Scaly things." Also part of the species name for various fish, clams, and plants: just ask Google!
[13] According to Wikipedia, the tradition you can summon He Who Is For Obvious Reasons Not To Be Named just by mentioning his name (or mentioning it more than once) derives from an early edition of the D&D "Deities and Demigods Cyclopedia." -- the same one that Chaosium's lawyers got revised so as not to include the mythos gods. Because of this tradition, many gamers cringe when somebody says "Hastur Hastur Hastur" -- not because they actually think that "the big H" is likely to appear, but because they're subconsciously worried that the DM is listening, and that he's about to kill their Dwarven Cleric.

[*] Or don't. Really, nothing in Lovecraft's fiction is as sanity-blasting as his verse.
[**] And if Robert Frost doesn't like parody, he can reanimate himself as a flesh-eating zombie and tell me so himself.
[***] A Mythos Hoedown is what happens when a writer says, "Hey, Cthulhu's scary... and Dagon's scary... and Tsathoggua's scary... I know! I'll have them all show up at once!" and then you get a plot straight out of a Godzilla movie.
[†] Unless you count Mother Hydra; or Obed Marsh's "second wife that nobody in the taown never see"; or Shub-Niggurath, Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young... which really tells you a bit more about HPL's issues than you really needed to know.

Thanks to goddess32585 for organizing, photocopying, and cider afterwards, and to seborn for the word "squamosa," and to photonsrain for a lovely WAC T-shirt.

In the bad news department, I'm sick. Feels coldlike. After caroling, my voice was nothing but a whispery croak.

Unca' 'llonymist, where do babies come from?

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 01:51:57 GMT

From a conversation with seborn: fun things to tell your children about human reproduction.

"Well, when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, they build a little person out of dirt, and shape it into a little baby, and write the holy unspeakable name of the Lord on its forehead, and then it snaps right into life!"
"When two people want to have a baby, one of them gets a jar full of horsey poo and the egg of a black chicken, and the other one does a special grownups-only thing with them. Thirty days later, a little tiny baby hatches, no bigger than a chick!"
"Your father and I wanted a little child like you more than aaaanything in the world, so we went to the graveyard to take parts from the most accomplished dead children of your generation. (Your brain came from a sweet little girl named Sally who was always so smart and respectful before she had an accident.) Then, we stitched you together, waited for a lightning storm, and channeled the mighty power of nature herself to bring you to life!"
"Well, we drew a funny star on the floor, and danced around in our birthday suits, and shouted praises to dark powers, and then we put a lamby to sleep with a looong, looong knife. The next thing we knew, there you were!"
"Mommy rammed her ovipositor through the chest of a bad bad man..."

Apparently, I should not be trusted with the education of the next generation. Who knew?

Sleepdep makes me look for connections

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 20:32:56 GMT

I'd like to hear a song formed by the first line or two of the last dozen or so songs that came up on shuffle.

Is anybody going to listen to my story?
Once upon a time...
There's a lot of things in the human head
That I hope I never have to touch:
Most with cones for seeds.
Trouble!
Another day flows by
One of our submarines is missing tonight
I can't stand it, I know you planned it
From Madam Wong's to Starwood
I was his.
I'm gross and perverted,
Bubble, bubble, uh uh uh uh
Catamaran man you're my cousin.

Also, Bob Dylan is preternaturally excellent in concert. But you knew that.

The liberty of appearing

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 04:42:40 GMT

In case anybody hadn't heard, I have resigned from $JOB. I am now on $PROJECT full-time. This is really excellent news for me; everybody at $JOB was great, but I have an opportunity to run stuff and do stuff at $PROJECT to do save-the-world stuff in the public interest, and that's where I belong.

Sorry for the delay in posting this; I was writing a really good sestina to go along with the announcement, but the poem just isn't letting me finish it. Soon, I hope.

Probably, I will soon have a public, $PROJECT-related blog that I'll do under my real name. Hooray!

Last-minuteism

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 20:49:02 GMT

My brother-in-law's awesome Hip-hop/Raggae band plays the Middle East in Cambridge tonight, along with some other good bands. The show starts at 9; they'll go on (I hear) around 11:30.

Sound fun?

Sounds fun.

You should come hear them.