The Story of "Baby Got Back"

My anaconda don't want none unless you got buns, hon.

Giant pants

http://giantpantsofthe30s.tumblr.com/

Curated

I don't really get the word "curated" when applied to people's homes.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb "to curate" as "to select, organize, and look after the items in (a collection or exhibition)."  So... doesn't everyone select, organize, and look after the items in their home?  What is a "curated" home, then?

Paper Tigers

Interesting (long) article about the Asian American experience.

While he was still an electrical-­engineering student at Berkeley in the nineties, James Hong visited the IBM campus for a series of interviews. An older Asian researcher looked over Hong’s résumé and asked him some standard questions. Then he got up without saying a word and closed the door to his office.
“Listen,” he told Hong, “I’m going to be honest with you. My generation came to this country because we wanted better for you kids. We did the best we could, leaving our homes and going to graduate school not speaking much English. If you take this job, you are just going to hit the same ceiling we did. They just see me as an Asian Ph.D., never management potential. You are going to get a job offer, but don’t take it. Your generation has to go farther than we did, otherwise we did everything for nothing.”

Drawing lessons

YOU'RE WELCOME.

Penis fencing

The truest form of gender equality.

Google Earth

A pretty amazing story about it.

Things organized neatly

Thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com

Stoat returns

S: "... you know, that girl in 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'  Stoat.  Stoat Finch."

Me: "???"

S: "Or was her name Scout?  Maybe it was Scout."

Two-timing Kithaka

From an article about Christie Brinkley:
I would like to introduce you to my new baby Kithaka! He was born on Oct 2011.. found in Imenti Forest Meru District at a week old! The wonderful heros at the Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage who rescued him think he was a victim of wildlife conflict.

Driving in a Toyota at night

As captured by French cartoonist Boulet.

Arranged marriage

Several Indian friends and family members have linked to this 12-minute video about two people deciding to enter into an arranged marriage.   Evidently, it resonates with them in some way.

I feel like I don't get it.  The video doesn't give me a particularly positive impression of arranged marriage.  The dialogue between the man and the woman seems forced and unpleasant, and I don't buy that they would be happy together.  Maybe if the two main characters were more likable, the video would be more successful at conveying its message...

Emergent Task Planner

David Seah's Emergent Task Planner -- a fancy to-do list. I may try it at the new job.

New snack concept

Here.

Beautiful mixed kids

I found this article interesting, especially the comments.  As someone guilty of saying/thinking that mixed kids are (often) attractive, I now know to be more sensitive about the issue.

On some level, though, I do wonder if the author is over-reading into people's comments.

Pet display clothing

Why can't I work on patents like this?

Paint by number

I came across this painting online and considered buying it. The one I saw was around $200.

Today I was looking at paint by number kits... same painting!

Two fingers up

Today I heard someone (a British someone) refer to giving the "proverbial two fingers up," which sounded to my American ears like a slightly more polite middle finger.

A little research reveals that (1) it's a "V" sign but with the palm of your hand facing you; and (2) it is exactly as polite as a middle finger.

Letters of Note

"Correspondence deserving of a wider audience."

Living Meat!

"It is close to meat."

Goat

Goat!

Cosby Sweaters

I love this sweater tournament.  And that Bill Cosby himself unveiled the winning sweater.

And speaking of that winning sweater, doesn't it totally remind you of this?

Savory oatmeal

Remember how I spent years eating just plain yogurt and fruit for lunch?  Yeah, I got tired of that.  My new thing is making a big container of savory baked oatmeal on Sunday and eating it for lunch all week.  I started out making a healthy variation of this sweet baked oatmeal, but there's something unsatisfying about a sweet lunch.  So I made a savory version, and am very pleased with the results.  It's (relatively) healthy.  It tastes more decadent than it is, and keeps you full for a long time.  It's a versatile platform that has worked well with any milk/milk variants I have in the fridge and any vegetables I need to use up.  It has restored my joy in lunch.  I wanted to record the recipe somewhere in case I ever need to look it up, so here it is:

2 C rolled oats
1 tsp baking powder (replace with baking soda in proportion to buttermilk, if using)
1/2 tsp sea salt
2 C dairy liquid of some kind (I like half milk, half buttermilk, but all milk has been fine too)
1 large egg
1-2 T butter, melted
1/2 C sharp cheese (sharp cheddar or parmesan)
2 C cooked vegetables (favorite combo so far: zucchini, spinach, and onion)

Preheat oven to 375 F.  In an 8" square baking dish, mix oats, baking powder/soda, and salt.  I've been adding a few gratings of fresh nutmeg, too, but that's mainly because I have a zillion whole nutmegs to use up.  Mix the milk, egg, and melted butter until well blended.  Cook the vegetables -- I like to caramelize some onions or shallots with chicken broth and a splash of sherry, then saute with the other vegetables -- and drain well.  Toss the oat mixture with the cheese and the vegetables, then stir in the milk mixture.  Bake for about 45 minutes, or until the oatmeal forms a nice crunchy golden crust.  We get about 8 servings out of this.  Reheats well with a splash of milk.

When B.O. goes, popularity comes

Lifebuoy ad from the 1934 issue of Movie Classic, via a Slate article about Katherine Hepburn.

Spontaneous generation

The scientific contributions of Jan Baptist van Helmont (1580-1644) include "a recipe for mice (a piece of soiled cloth plus wheat for 21 days) and scorpions (basil, placed between two bricks and left in sunlight)." 

You know, in case you were wondering what to do with a bunch of leftover basil.

Mango = bell pepper

In some parts of the Midwest, bell peppers are still called mangoes.

Adult swim

Skeptical about Tim Ferriss in general, but maybe I'll check out his learn-to-swim resources.

I want to taste you like yogurt

Is this a yogurt commercial?  I hope not.

Wedding Gift Etiquette

This bride sent the following text to a wedding guest who had given the couple a hamper full of food:

"I'm not sure if it's the first wedding you have been to, but for your next wedding … people give envelopes. I lost out on $200 covering you and your dates plate . … and got fluffy whip and sour patch kids in return. Just a heads-up for the future."

And the text exchange deteriorated from there.  Arguably the most insulting part was where she accused her guest of eating the "beautiful venue."

Villain hitting

A new career option.

Doesn't this whole Wikipedia article sound like something a kid would make up?

Herbivore men

A bizarre collection of traits: these men are frugal, interested in personal grooming, fond of cosmetics and candy, and indifferent to sex.

Anti-vaccination

The origins of the anti-vaccination movement explained by comic artist Daryl Cunningham.

Learned Hand sings

This is awesome, if you're a law geek.

Sensory deprivation tank

Intriguing.

I wonder whether a fear of water would make a difference?

Choose Your Choose Your Own Adventure

This list ranks all 185 Choose Your Own Adventure books from most to least awesome-sounding.  I have to agree that "Ninja Cyborg" sounds infinitely more tempting than "Statue of Liberty Adventure."

And I think I have #1 on the list: "Prisoner of the Ant People."  Thanks CM!

Does Bangladesh have a Jerry Springer Show?

"Among the Mandi, a remote hill tribe in Bangladesh and India, widows who wish to remarry must choose a man from the same clan as their dead husband. The only single males, however, are often much younger. So the custom evolved that a widow would offer one of her daughters as a second bride to take over her duties — including sex — when the daughter came of age."

This article is interesting and creepy in equal measure.

American Regional Accents, Mapified

These accent maps are pretty fun.  My accent is apparently all over the place, which I guess makes sense since I spent so many years in schools with people from all over the U.S.

I remember having an argument with someone from Long Island about the differences between merry, marry, and Mary.  I assumed then that he was right and I was wrong.  BUT I WAS RIGHT FOR MY REGION.  We had a similar argument about whether "Aaron" and "Erin" are pronounced the same way.  Thanks to these maps, I'm now going to assume that I am regionally justified in pronouncing them the same.

What to read next

WhatShouldIReadNext.com is a very simple recommendation engine, and the books it recommends look pretty good.

Forcemeat

Take half a pound of veal, and half a pound of suet cut fine, and beat in a marble mortar or wooden bowl; add a few sweet herbs shredded fine, a little mace pounded fine, a small nutmeg grated, a little lemon peel, some pepper and salt, and the yolks of two eggs; mix them well together and make them into balls and long pieces -- then roll them in flour, and fry them brown.

But no explanation of why this is called "forcemeat."

Kitchen Cleaning

This post purports to set a schedule for deep-cleaning your kitchen in twenty minutes a day over thirty days. Seems like a good idea in theory, but if you add it up over the thirty days, this is ten hours of cleaning.  Surely a kitchen can be cleaned -- even deep cleaned -- in a fraction of that time?  I'd rather set aside two or three hours on a weekend to do it all than parcel out twenty minutes every day to clean one room of my home.  Also, does it really take twenty minutes to, say, clean a trash can?

Bad advice

Here's that bad advice you were hoping for.

You know I can't resist this.

Panorama

Garibaldi Panorama... at Brown!

Ice cream

Had a dream that I went to an ice cream shop where they offered two or three homemade flavors each day. I wanted strawberry, but JW insisted on Bitter Odor.

Words

Lately I've been having trouble thinking of certain words. When I was trying to come up with the word catechism, first I went through cataract, catharsis, concatenation. When I was trying to remember the name of that YA series I've been meaning to read ("Diverged"), I thought, what is that, diligent, leverage, levitation...? On one hand, it's interesting to see how my brain groups words together. On the other... aren't I too young for this? Should I be eating fish oil or something?

Yellow Fever

This made me laugh and feel gross, all at the same time.

Gosloving

The Internet is a strange, strange place.

Hyperbole and a Half's take on depression

As someone who has had a number of depressed friends, but finds it difficult to imagine what clinical depression feels like, this was eye-opening.  Especially the idea that depression may not feel like sadness as much as like loneliness and boredom.

Gift Idea

For that impossible-to-shop-for person on your list.

How not to do patent prosecution

This has been making the rounds at the office today.

MIT shooting

Shooting at MIT, right outside of my old lab.  They haven't caught the shooter yet.  Campus is on lockdown.  What is going on this week??

Parents take worse care of ugly children

This study seems highly suspect to me.

Why Thai Girls Are Better

I'm glad that most of these men (the author of the article and the commenters) live far, far away in Thailand.

Pink and blue projects

JeongMee Yoon photographs kids with their pink and blue possessions.

Help the wealthy

This comic is awesome. (Scroll down a little.)

Reasons My Son Is Crying

Maybe I only find this hilarious because I am not a parent.

Get your M.R.S.

I love both this letter to the editor of the Daily Princetonian and this hilarious response from Above the Law.

Jane Austen

Article on the novels of Jane Austen. The part I found most interesting was the suggestion at the beginning that the reason Persuasion has a different tone and less subtle characterization than her other books is that she didn't have time to finish it before she died. There' s a quote from Virginia Woolf (on a different, unfinished work of Austen's): '"the stiffness and bareness of the first chapters" suggest that "she was one of those writers who lay their facts out rather baldly in the first version and then go back and back and back and cover them with flesh and atmosphere."'

In Support of Creativity

Rainy cafe machine.

Men and cats.

Buttermilk pancakes from The Kitchn

Made these pancakes over the weekend. They were very good. The recipe made a ton -- we came out with 27 pancakes, and managed to eat half of them between the four of us. We often make pancakes on the weekend, and I usually try different recipes. Last weekend I made Marion Cunningham's recipe from The Breakfast Book -- first time I've had a recipe fail from that book, but they were flat and greasy. Maybe I did something wrong. They were edible and the kids ate them up, but they were probably the worst I've made. One of my favorites is actually the TJ's pumpkin pancake and waffle mix. That's the only mix I've tried.

Do you have a go-to pancake recipe? I haven't found one yet.

Why Emma Watson Really Left Brown

I was somewhat amused and somewhat annoyed by this: Why Emma Watson Really Left Brown. Then it turns out the author didn't go to Brown and was just making stuff up! AHA!
Strange what stereotypes people have... all the stuff about how everyone was so rich and fashionable didn't square with my Brown experience at all.

Hyperallergic

I found this art blog... it's not showing you art, it's news and thoughts about art.

Giant sea cucumbers eat with their butts

I thought a certain six year-old might enjoy that marine fact...

Sir Penguin

This penguin has been knighted.

This literally kills me

I am annoyed that major dictionaries are now acknowledging the use of the word "literally" for emphasis.  It's one thing for a word to take on a new meaning.  It is irritating beyond belief when the new meaning totally reverses the useful distinction made by the old meaning.  Literally, as in it didn't actually happen.  And we already have so many words we can use for the new meaning ("totally," "virtually," etc.), but only one word for the old meaning.  So now what term can we use to replace "literally"?  I submit "for reals."

Dream Song 14

I like this poem by John Berryman.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

Fittstim

"Many of the most taboo words, in addition to generally being Anglo-Saxon in origin, are monosyllables with short vowels, such as shit, piss, fuck, and cock. These are considered more offensive than words of the same meaning, like poopy, pee, screw, and willy."

I kept giggling while reading this.
Also, be prepared for unsavory people to find this blog now.

100 best teen novels, according to NPR

NPR's list of the 100 Best Teen Novels! I think we need to read every single one of these.

Valentine's Day!

A collection of valentines made by kids.  I like #1 and #3.

I've Got These Things to Keep Me Warm

In honor of today's East Coast snowstorm, allow me to present the three best purchases I ever made for staying warm.  I highly recommend them all.

1. A heated mattress pad.  We bought this one winter when our heat wasn't working for several weeks, and have brought it out with great delight every winter since.  There is NOTHING so wonderful as sinking your chilly self into a toasty warm bed.

2. A big fluffy bathrobe.  So great for when you step out of the shower into the cold air.

3. These socks.  S and I each have two pairs and call them our "magic socks" because they are so instantly warming.

Do you have any winter must-haves?

3 year-olds

Saw this on Facebook and had a good laugh.  I remember when my brother and sister were three.

Lost in the Taiga

Incredible story about a family of six that lived in the wilds of Siberia, cut off from all other human contact, for 40 years.

Beef soup ice cream redux

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2359

Panda-monium

We have all become obsessed with this live Panda Cam.  It does a surprisingly good job at keeping the camera zoomed in on cuddly panda action for most of the daylight hours.  And there's a panda baby!

Hampers in laundry rooms

I keep seeing photos of organized laundry rooms. Apartment Therapy had a feature about them today. And they all contain something we don't have in our laundry room, except for a few minutes at a time: hampers.
Our hampers are in the rooms where we actually take off our clothes. When we want to wash the clothes, we put them in a laundry basket and bring them down to the basement, where we immediately put them in the washing machine. We keep the laundry baskets upstairs so we don't have to make an extra trip downstairs to get them. Do most people store dirty clothes in their laundry room before washing them?

Oishii!

A series of videos of a Japanese mother cooking international dishes, then her toddler eating them.  I am impressed by (1) how neatly the mother cooks, and (2) how neatly the child eats.

Aging cookie dough

After reading a bunch of articles about how aging chocolate chip cookie dough dramatically improves the flavor of cookies, I decided to give it a try (using my own recipe instead of the more finicky New York Times recipe).  I mixed up a batch and put it in a big tupperware container to age for three days.

I baked up about six cookies each day to get a sense of how the flavors changed over time.  S and I both loved the Day 0 cookies, as usual, which were tender with intense salted butter flavors.  The Day 1 cookies tasted less buttery and significantly nuttier (S remarked that they made him think of peanut butter cookies).  The Day 2 and Day 3 cookies had a subtly darker, more molasses-y flavor. As far as texture was concerned, the dough became more crumbly and harder to scoop with each subsequent day, and the cookies seemed correspondingly drier.

I also froze six unbaked cookies each day so that at the end I could bake "flights" of cookies from all four days and directly compare their flavors.  Here is a crappy picture of the unbaked cookies from one of those batches:

Left to right: Day 0, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3

It's hard to tell from the picture, but the dough got a little darker with each passing day (maybe because of the leaching of oils from the chocolate chips?).  The Day 0 dough was smoothest, whereas the dough from Days 1-3 was drier and crumblier.

Left to right: Day 0, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3

The difference in color and texture is more obvious in the baked cookies.

The verdict?  Surprisingly, S and I both liked the Day 0 cookies best for flavor, texture, and appearance, all of which were clearly different from the more aged cookies.  The differences between the cookies from Days 1-3 were much more subtle -- I probably wouldn't be able to pick out which was which in a lineup.  The Day 1-3 cookies were still good, and did have an interesting depth of flavor, but we missed the butteriness of Day 0.  We also prefer our cookies more tender than crumbly.

So I guess we'll be sticking with our usual make-and-immediately-bake routine.  Although, I may try the experiment again without chocolate chips, or with far fewer chocolate chips -- I felt like my palate would have been able to pick up any differences between the cookies more easily if it hadn't been overwhelmed by chocolate.

Goats in Trees calendar

2013 edition.

A Better Use for Pantyhose

I am surprised this game is not more popular.

Books 2012

For posterity: a list of the books I read in 2012.

1. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

2. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

3. Island of Lost Girls - Jennifer McMahon

4. Mockingbird - Kathryn Erskine

5. The Buddha in the Attic - Julie Otsuka

6. The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown

7. Break the Skin - Lee Martin

8. The Peach Keeper - Sarah Addison Allen

9. The Poison Tree - Erin Kelly

10. Private Life - Jane Smiley

11. Winter Sea - Susanna Kearsley

12. Ashes - Ilsa Bick

13. Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer

14. I Think I Love You - Allison Pearson

15. The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss (REREAD)

16. The Wise Man's Fear - Patrick Rothfuss

17. Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan

18. The Knife of Never Letting Go - Patrick Ness

19. The Ask and the Answer - Patrick Ness

20. Monsters of Men - Patrick Ness

21. Second Nature: A Love Story - Jacquelyn Mitchard

22. The False Friend - Myla Goldberg

23. Please Look After Mom - Kyung-sook Shin

24. The Year of the Flood: Margaret Atwood

25. The Magician King - Lev Grossman

26. At Risk - Alice Hoffman

27. Swim to Me - Ann Packer

28. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua

29. Galore - Michael Crummey

30. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (REREAD)

31. My Name Is Memory - Ann Brashares

32. Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood (REREAD)

33. Zone One - Colson Whitehead

34. The Space Between Us - Thrity Umrigar

35. The World We Found - Thrity Umrigar

36. A Small Furry Prayer - Steven Kotler

37. The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides

38. Fifty Shades of Grey - EL James

39. The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern

40. Delirium - Lauren Oliver

41. The Kid: A Novel - Sapphire

42. Stiltsville: A Novel - Susanna Daniel

43. Breathing Lessons - Anne Tyler

44. The Good Thief - Hannah Tinti

45. Gossip - Beth Gutcheon

46. The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields (REREAD?)

47. The Accidental Billionaires - Ben Mezrich

48. Ape House - Sara Gruen

49. The Senator's Wife - Sue Miller

50. Sacred Hearts - Sarah Dunant

51. Unfinished Desires - Gail Godwin

52. The Stuff that Never Happened - Maddie Dawson

53. The Bright Forever - Lee Martin

54. Ready Player One - Ernest Cline

55. Pandemonium - Lauren Oliver

56. Nightwoods: A Novel - Charles Frazier

57. We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver (REREAD)

58. An Available Man: A Novel - Hilma Wolitzer

59. Leeway Cottage - Beth Gutcheon

60. Testimony: A Novel - Anita Shreve

62. The Descendants: A Novel - Kaui Hart Hemmings

63. More Than You Know - Beth Gutcheon

64. The Passage - Justin Cronin

65. Good-bye and Amen (P.S.) - Beth Gutcheon

66. Girls in White Dresses - Jennifer Close

67. The Cottage at Glass Beach - Heather Barbieri

68. A Gate at the Stairs - Lorrie Moore

69. The Road - Cormac McCarthy

70. Wool Omnibus - Hugh Howey

71. First Shift - Legacy - Hugh Howey

72. Cloud Atlas: A Novel - David Mitchell

73. Olive Kitteridge: Fiction - Elizabeth Strout

74. The Tiger's Wife: A Novel - Tea Obreht

75. Everyone's Reading Bastard - Nick Hornby

76. To Marry an English Lord - Gail MacColl, Carol McD. Wallace

77. Mariana - Susanna Kearsley

78. August is a Wicked Month - Edna O'Brien

79. The Flight of Gemma Hardy - Margot Livesey

80. Breakdown - Katherine Amt Hanna

81. The Hurricane - Hugh Howey

82. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver

83. The Twelve - Justin Cronin

84. How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway

85. Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward

86. This is How Your Lose Her - Junot Diaz

87. All Woman and Springtime - Brandon W. Jones

88. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark

89. And Laughter Fell From the Sky - Jyotsna Sreenivasan

90. We Only Know So Much - Elizabeth Crane

91. The Healing - Jonathan Odell

92. The Cranes Dance - Meg Howrey

93. The Virgin Cure: A Novel - Ami McKay

94. Coraline - Neil Gaiman

95. Before I Go To Sleep - S. J. Watson

96. The Dog Stars - Peter Heller

97. Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart

98. The Coldest Night - Robert Olmstead

99. The Soldier's Wife - Margaret Leroy

100. Gone Girl: A Novel - Gillian Flynn

101. Swamplandia! - Karen Russell