Susanne and I ventured a few blocks from our apartment last night to take part in a cooking class on Indian cuisine with HipCooks.com. Our rationale was that 1) we love Indian food in all of its permutations, and 2) Walla Walla has nothing close to an Indian restaurant, so learning a few techniques and recipes is a critical life skill once we return to the desert side of the state. Read More…
Latest from the Blog
Cooking from the hip
Wednesday link love
My latest post is up at Bitch Magazine, on two election campaigns notable for the racist ads on one side and responses using women’s issues on the other. It’s so good to see such inventive uses of media in such glaring examples of fail.
Everyone who’s anyone is talking about the gay vs. straight preferences that people filled out over at OKCupid. Using their own server and love connection data, OKCupid looked at how straight and gay users behaved on the site, and what they say their interests are. It’s pretty interesting, at least for the first half of the post.
How to tackle poverty and family planning at once? The TED site has a talk from Mechai Veravaidya, who works on these issues for southeast Asia. He’s had notable success in Thailand.
An article in Salon tries to reorient blame for the foreclosure crisis on the free market, not the government. Hey, I thought we didn’t have an actual free market.
Unpacking bullying
In the early aughts I had occasion to explore the offices of the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington, DC. By law, these folks must investigate every plane accident that happens in the country, even the very minor ones. It’s up to their discretion if they examine a railroad incident, car accident, metro train derailing, and so on, but of course they have all of the equipment they need to deconstruct the physical remnants of these human tragedies if they opt to take on a case. It comes down to the seriousness of the event and the staff resources at that moment. Read More…
The long tentacles of the law
In Walla Walla, people have a habit of parking opposite to traffic when they leave their cars curbside. In Walla Walla, a resident fond of chainsaw sculpture has set something like 20-odd statues around his Alder Street lawn. In Walla Walla, people construct chicken coops in their back yards, or leave crumbing old cars on the street while they take years to get around to restoring them, and nobody bats an eye. One of the effects, perhaps, of living in the land of the libertarian is a stubborn inattentiveness to city code. So when the owner of the Inland Octopus, an old-fashioned toy store, moved a few blocks west on Main Street and commissioned a mural be painted on his store front, I would hazard a guess that he never thought anyone would come after him over anything as esoteric as ordinances. Read More…
Hanging with Theobroma
While we’re living in a city again, we thought we should try to explore not just city life, but life particular to Seattle. There are the touristy attractions, to be sure, like the 7-block long Monorail and the iconic Space Needle, which has its own Web cam, by the way. But around the corner from a lesser known peculiarity of town, the Fremont Troll, is a chocolate factory. There was no way I would miss a chance to play in Wonka’s workplace. Read More…
Mobile Chowdown V recap
Susanne and I had ourselves a blast at the Mobile Chowdown V last Friday, in the parking lot of Qwest Field. Romantic setting, I know, but we were there to explore the engine-inclusive side of cuisine, not make out in public. We lucked out and found a parking spot 1.5 blocks away, albeit only after accidentally making our way to the garage for the last home game of the Mariners. Fifteen dollars for parking is $15 less we’d have had for all of the fare at the event! Read More…
Why I’m not gaga over “It Gets Better”
Photo courtesy of See-ming Lee
I wrote last week about the sudden newsworthiness of LGBT youth suicide. Certainly it’s been around for decades, and there have been and are people who study these people and these moments, but collectively, their work, analysis, and recommendations haven’t made it to center stage. So it frustrates me to see personalities emerge from the woodwork to tout their initiatives, as if we’re seeing a meteoric rise in suicide, or as if the world merely needed their guidance to avert the tide of anguish. Read More…
Writing back story
Everyone loves a good character. The converse is also true. Weak, two-dimensional characters kill a story because what hooks most of us is our interest in the personalities depicted by the writer. After all, we’re writing, usually, about conflict between people, and most stories end by showing how someone changed from the start of the tale. Thus readers are looking for people who feel real, with whom we can identify or about whom we can feel superior, especially in the case of comedy. Read More…
On deck for this week: link love
My newest guest blogging stint with Bitch Magazine resumes this week. I’ll be looking at the 2010 midterm elections: the good, the bad, and the loopy.
Snarky’s Machine posted a fun and wildly addictive game called Movie Equations, over on I Fry Mine in Butter. Take a stab at your own cinematic arithmetic.
This afternoon I’ll post a recap of last week’s Dexter season premiere. Spoilers from that episode will be all over the place.
Midweek, expect a new short story, and this time, it sticks like a glob of maple syrup to reality. I hope everyone enjoys it.
Supreme Court Justice Elana Kagan begins presiding with the other 8 justices tomorrow. She took her seat for the first time Friday in a formal ceremony during which no court cases transpired. But let’s get real, she’s going to have to recuse herself for a few of these cases.
Tomorrow I’ll post my review of the Mobile Chowdown V that Susanne and I attended last Friday night! In short, it was great!
Some things just aren’t funny
There’s an entertaining show about cancer on Showtime, The Big C. This is out of alphabetical order with The L Word, an entirely different, and now completed, series about lesbian life in LA—and which shock of shocks, looks nothing like any actual lesbian’s life I’ve ever known. HBO has its pluralist wives show, Big Love, which hasn’t worked so well for a reality series, Sister Wives, over on TLC. Apparently The Learning Channel wants to learn us some polygamy? I’m not sure. But in this television is a window into our culture thang, there are some obvious disconnects, and not just having to do with the preponderance of overly made up, coiffed women near Rodeo Drive.
Four boys made headlines in the news in these last three weeks, four boys—one of whom was 18 but for all intents and purposes still had the thinking processes and responses of an adolescent—who took their own lives because of bullying, more specifically, anti-gay bullying. You’d think this sort of situation had never happened before. But that’s just because we’ve turned away from admitting we have a long-standing problem with youth suicide. Read More…
Trans/plant/portation 