 | Last login: 23 hours agoJoseph is a single guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA. Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and probably best viewed in Firefox. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.
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- Dec 14, 2008 8:58am
 Continuing from above ...
With an obviously much different image in mind, a happily soused couple late on Sunday that same week decided that it would be the perfect place to hold their wedding party with their equally drunk friends, and it was all good. Draka, as it travelled through "Black Rock City", the collective encampment that was everybody and everything at Burning Man 2001, became a natural meeting place. "So did and does Center Camp", somebody is likely to say. In a sense, perhaps, but more toward the beginning of the week, I found, and in a very low key kind of way.
People brought their fatigue and mild disorientation in Center Camp, sat down and exchanged a few niceties with strangers, but for the most part, the company they enjoyed was the company they brought into the wide side offered by the Camp and as simple a thing as bringing one's own refreshments has reportedly been enough to get one thrown out of this central meeting place, which seems to function more as a very large coffeehouse than anything else. Draka represented raw spontaneity. It was there when it chose to be there, you were never quite sure when that would be, and so you had to break out of your routine to experience it; you couldn't work it into that routine. That made for a higher energy experience and a qualitatively different kind of meeting place, one that perhaps invited the short term traveler to ask himself why such wandering meeting places don't exist at home. "Aside from the fact that we really wouldn't want people doing this on the front of a CTA bus, Joe?", you ask.
Yes, aside from that. Life is not an all or nothing affair. Other places can have people ride public transportation in less than a fearful churchlike silence without arrests following and public spaces look less than utterly corporate without the body count rising; the eternal unasked question is why so many places in America (the alleged home of the supposedly free and occasionally brave) can't bring themselves to do the same.
By reminding what had been absent in his daily commute, and that there was nothing inevitable about that absence, maybe this experience could get him to question that a little bit more of that blankness and blandness of contemporary American life to which he had become accustomed in the long run, if he were to drop the postmodernist blinders and accept the notion that the status quo was a thing that the individual could legitimately question. More immediately, by pleasantly jarring the unexpected traveler out of his comfort zone, the experience knocked him out of the ingrained patterns of behavior that promoted his self-reinforcing isolation, to leave him pleasantly foundering around in the company of his equally pleasantly disordered fellow travelers, to whom he would reach out before he regained his composure and realised what he was doing, leaving spontaneity to ensue and take hold as the new reality, however briefly.
[ continued ]
- Dec 14, 2008 8:58am
Continuing from above ...
That's what Burning Man was about for a lot of us - that spontaneity, and spontaneity is a difficult thing to show, one of those pleasant things that I spoke of at the beginning that is so difficult to bring alive through any noninteractive medium. The written word is what it is, yielding in no way to the reader's actions, leaving him to wander a conceptual landscape defined by an absolute determinism; the world of a story, true or fictional, is set in stone, a reality that the author will try to mask through a series of artfully conceived illusions - or perhaps not so artfully conceived - as he tries to get the reader to imagine that he has lived through choices he hasn't been able to make, bringing us to one point on which I am dissatisfied with this site.
While we are offered some nice photographs, the eye candy on this site is static. No footage, no recordings, no real time exposure to the social experience of the dragon. Not even stories from those who were in it. Just stills, and business oriented pages like this one about future plans on something that, while certainly an attractive and well layed out site, seems more a scrapbook of memories for those who were there than an explanation for those who weren't, and the memories reserved are wholly visual ones. The experience was so much more than just that; Ms.Nigro and her associates should give themselves more credit, and maybe if those who rode the Dragon would send in a few accounts for them to publish, they would? But for now, they haven't.
[ continued ]
- Dec 14, 2008 8:57am
Continuing from above ...
Having not been a rider on the new, post-reconstruction Draka, I'm not sure whether or not it offers the same possibilities as a mobile gathering place, but judging from the more open look, my guess is that it couldn't. Even given the 5 mph speed limit at Burning Man, wheels and the clanging of metal in a vehicle that traverses an increasingly bumpy dirt road will make noise, and there doesn't seem to be as much to muffle that noise as before. Not that any criticism of Ms.Nigro or her efforts should be read into this. One can easily picture her taking a look at how suddenly and dramatically her original effort caught fire after a welding accident, thinking "thank G-d nobody was in there at the time", and then picturing a high wind turning a little of Draka's "breath" back upon a highly flammable vehicle. I certainly would not fault her for being concerned with the safety of her guests and passengers, and before anybody says "why couldn't she just replace the wood with metal" - remember that metal is neither lightweight nor cheap. Think about how much even a small automobile costs, scale that up to something the size of a large house, and see how much compromise becomes necessary. When you see those membership costs quoted on her page, this is not gouging on Ms.Nigro's part, this is simple economic reality.
The old Draka offered a magical experience while it lasted, albeit probably a more dangerous one than most of us probably suspected at the time, but nobody got hurt. Let those of us who were there find pleasure in that, and in the memories we have of our trip, and if one of us should be able to come up with a good, inexpensive, nonflammable wood substitute? I wouldn't presume to speak for Ms.Nigro, but perhaps it might open up interesting possibilities to be explored?
- Dec 14, 2008 8:57am
Older (unrelated) Posts: 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60
Note: Usually, I'll insert an image I created specifically for this blog when the time comes to put these continuity links in place, but this time I've used a picture I've posted elsewhere. Why? Because it's the latest picture of mine to have been disabled by ImageShack. See anything offensive in it?
- Steak Porn / Cooking-RibEye Steak with Gordon Ramsey in 1 Min · Dec 14, 2008 8:56am
I immediately liked this video ... briefly ... before I took a closer look at it, and found it to be more showmanship than cooking. Consider the fact that the man puts the artichokes on a stovetop grill pan, which presumably will be raised to a high enough temperature for something akin to grilling to occur, and he has coated the pan with olive oil.
Olive oil, as a cooking fat, isn't even recommended for anything resembling a stirfry because its smoking point is too low; those artichokes end up with an attractive deep brown color because they're coated in carbon from the broken down oil. More or less the same thing that happens when you season a cast iron pan, right? Would you really want to eat some of that seasoning? Which seems to be a recurring problem on this video. Consider the beginning, when he heats the olive oil the steak is cooked in until it is sizzling hot, producing this admittedly promisingly appetizingly dark initial searing of the meat
Not bad for the one minute mark, but not where one wants to be, yet, which isn't a surprise; one has to work a little more to get meat to get brown and crisp surfaced in oil than one does with butter, a point which does not seem lost on Ramsay, who soon introduces a small stick of butter into the pan with the steak. Very soon, and that's where trouble arises with this concept.
What sort of pan are we to use to make this? The pan Ramsay uses looks a little too bright to be cast iron, not quite bright enough to be stainless steel, so I'm going to guess that it's aluminum. Not bad for making rice or cooking vegetables, in fact quite excellent for either purpose, but is it really the thing to use for steak? For steak (and many other things as well), one wants something that will hold and distribute the heat evenly, hence the strange fascination many of us have with something as heavy, brittle and rustprone as cast iron. It's a pain to work with, but it gets the job done. It also has the virtue of being easily found and relatively inexpensive. The answer to our question is to be found in the thickness of the pan he uses - it's a nice, heavy professional use restaurant skillet, which is why he is able to get away with doing that step, and why you probably can't do the same in your own kitchen, if you try to follow what he has been doing.
[ continued ]
- Dec 14, 2008 8:56am
Continuing my review of the "Steak Porn" video ...
Aluminum releases its heat quickly, but the kind of aluminum cookware you're probably going to be able to buy on the budget most of use have to work with will not closely resemble the kind of professional quality kitchenware Ramsay is using. The aluminum one sees in a home kitchen are those thin walled utensils that are, as I said, good for cooking rice or vegetables, but will tend to toughen red meat when used for dry cooking heats (sautes as opposed to braises). On the other hand, if one is using cast iron and tries to slip the butter in as quickly as he did, one gets a quick reminder of why clarified butter is so popular as a cooking fat as one watches the milk solids in the butter burn.
Did you notice the little burst of flame in the griddle at 0:53 as you watched the video? Notice that no brandy was present; that wasn't flambeeing, that was little brief burst of grease fire, because the cook oiled the grill instead of the artichokes, leaving the oil to overheat in a place where the evaporative cooling from the water released by the artichokes would not be able keep the oil's temperature down below the smoking point. What is interesting is not that we see the flame - one can see that beside any number of overvigorously shaken skillets (go to Little Joe's on Broadway in San Francisco at night, and you'll see that a lot), but that the burst took place inside the skillet, where food is taking on flavor, not outside, as a little pan juice and oil escaped into the flame.
This video seems designed to send the message to the home cook "look at this beautiful thing you can do at home" (yes, Gordon, we all get to cut up our own meat) leaving the home cook to wonder what he did wrong when he can't get the results he hoped for, when the answer to that question is the use of special, professional grade equipment (seen but not mentioned in the video) is essential to getting the results, which probably look far better than they taste. Whether this ommission was due to Ramsey or the Youtube user who uploaded the segment, we can only guess, but one needn't guess as to why Ramsey is cutting his cooked meat diagonally across the grain at the end of the piece. It's a cheat.
[ continued ]
- Dec 14, 2008 8:55am
Continuing my review of the "Steak Porn" video ...
It's a way of making tough meat seem more tender than it actually is, and impressing the gullible along the way. The problem with cooking beef over heat that intense is that the fibers inside the meat don't really have enough time to break down, one of the reasons why I may have seemed less than completely enthusiastic about that idea of using a vegetable pan to cook one's meat a few paragraphs back. Ramsay cuts through the fibers his much too brief and rapid cooking failed to break, hoping that the resting he gives his cut of meat will reduce the loss of juice such a cutting will inevitably produce. Properly prepared, good (or even average) quality meat neither requires nor benefits from such a pretentious presentation - it need simply be brought to the table intact, with appropriate garnitures and sauces. The West abstained from adopting the chopstick for a reason. The diners have knives. One might break down and decide to let them be used.
Or, one might do as Ramsey does, ending up with something that looks spectacular and at best tastes tolerable (if one doesn't notice the faint flavor of burnt olive oil), something which will go cold on the plate rapidly if not wolfed down. That the diner will do so might well be Ramsey's hope, since the finer nuances of what he carbonized are likelier to be overlooked when food is passed too quickly over the tounge for those nuances to be detected and the blame for them properly affixed. Which, given Ramsey's own fondness for boorishly mistreating others without provocation, one should do without hesitation or any undue feelings of regret.
Typical of the commentary found on Youtube on that last video I linked to was this bit of wisdom, and I wonder how much it explains of this Gordon Ramsay phenomenon I was lucky enough to have not heard of prior to my appearance on StumbleUpon.
Gordan KNOWS his (expletitive deleted).
So less about "oh he's so arragant/rude/cocky"
HE KNOWS how to run a restaurant. He makes like £500MILLION A YEAR.
I guess high school never ends for some of us. Such a comment as the one above puts on display the same depth of reasoning one sees out of a herd as it begins to stampede, or in a group of yuppies who huddle in long lines during a midwinter night outside of a tacqueria no different from the many on the same street, merely because so many others are waiting as well.
[ continued ]
- Dec 14, 2008 8:54am
Continuing my review of the "Steak Porn" video ...
"Everybody else is spending their money here, so this must be a good place to spend one's money", the person who advances this argument never stopping to think that the "everybody" who came before him might have had the exact same non-thought, and the success he bases his purchasing decision on is a reflection of that kind of snowballing, self-creating consensus than any sort of merit on the part of the lucky establishment and owner so favored. The impression left by this video is that Gordon most assuredly does not know his [excrement], not even on a level that would be fitting in a five year old newcomer to the kitchen, and has been getting by on his own overconfidence and the desire of others to follow the herd for years.
Which, I suppose, might raise the question of whether or not that overconfidence worked on me as I gave this video an initial thumbs up. Answer: Not to any serious extent. I'll race through the process of stumbling, giving very hasty ratings so that I won't lose track of a site that looks like it might be interesting in a good or a bad way, and then come back for a better look later. When you see that positive rating without a review on this blog, take it for what it is - bookmarking without any serious recommendation implied.
- PTs Coffee Roasting Co. Blog
- Dec 14, 2008 8:54am
 (4 reviews) coffee http://ptscoffeetravels.blogspot.com/
My love of the concept of this site can be measured by the fact that it is 5:18 am Chicago time and I'm still up posting. Much more than this, later.
- A Jazz Anthology MP3 Choose listen download 25137 tunes jazz artists
 Dec 14, 2008 8:54am  (82 reviews) jazz http://www.jazz-on-line.com/
So I'm listening to Miles Davis on RealMedia, and Annabelle is dancing her tuchas off to the music, as I wonder where that disco ball is hanging from. No matter. She's having a good time and so am I.
Reportedly very large collection of classic jazz with a very nice and impressively sizable assortment of free .mp3s - not being a subscriber, I can't vouch for how many more recordings are available for those who are, but there is plenty there for those of us who aren't. Sampling a few files, I found myself impressed with the sound quality, thinking that the main limitation on my experience was the quality of the speakers on the computer I was using at the time. As for the quality of the artists, who has not heard of Louie Armstrong? At least a few of these names will speak well for themselves, many decades later.
Well worth bookmarking, especially since this site isn't as likely to run into copyright issues as Napster was, so much time having passed since much of this music was made. As always, check with an attorney before taking such advice, but I suspect that one might be able to use much of this as background music on one's sites without having to worry about legal issues arising, something to think about in a time when so many sysops are so quick on the trigger, and in a strange way, more fashionable a choice than one might expect in an era in which the very concept of fashion may end up going out of fashion.
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