Whimsy Speaks Again

This must be culinary week.  The only serious mail I received was Cook's Illustrated.  It starts out with Christopher Kimball's usual long, drawn-out reminiscences of the pastoral life: tripping over mooses and bobcats; hunting turkey; getting lost in the mountains near Andorra.  Notes from the Readers includes:  moisten cookies before applying sprinkles if you want them to stay on; store unpasteurized soy sauce in the fridge to avoid off flavors after 3-4 months; store unused anchovies in the freezer or covered in olive oil in a small container;  frozen pizza dough tastes almost as good as fresh when defrosted;  it's not necessary to boil potatoes in a bath that starts out cold ; you can refresh limp herbs (parsley, mint, basil, et al.) by trimming the stems and soaking in cold tap water.  Quick Tips includes:  Rejuvenate limp celery by (again) cutting off the bottoms and sitting in a glass of water for 6 to 12 hours (you can add some Viagra, but there is no evidence that it helps); metal bench scrapers make the best butter cutters; mince fresh chiles with your hand in a Baggie; clean mushrooms by running under water and then using a salad spinner;  olives can be pitted by forcing them through an upside-down funnel.  Skillet-Barbecued Pork Chops looked pretty good.  It's the usual drill:  choose a smaller package where you can actually see all the chops, then brine them.  This recipe calls for a dry spice rub and a Liquid Smoke lathering about mid-cooking.  Quicker Beef Vegetable Soup suggests you use cheaper cuts (duh) like sirloin tips that cook up fast, but have a loose structure.  The four flavor-enhancing additives were:  sautéed cremini mushrooms, tomato paste, soy sauce, and red wine (yeah, red wine).  Grilled Stuffed Pork Loin looked good too, particularly the one with apple-cranberry stuffing.  Introducing Ricotta Gnocchi (remember it's pronounced like Pinocchio), substitutes ricotta cheese for potato, resulting in a lighter version.  Chicken Tikka Masala has apparently replaced fish and chips as the U.K. national dish.  It's a dish made with broiled chicken breasts (or the output of a Tandoori oven, if you're so lucky), then chopped into chunks and infused with Wonderful Stuff, like garam masala, yogurt, tomatoes and other spices (cumin, coriander, cayenne, garlic, fresh ginger).  This one definitely sounded yummy.  The Best Way to Cook Vegetables sounds like one of those Harry Potter titles that Hermione keeps referring to.  Here's the poop:  Boil green beans and snap peas; steam asparagus, broccoli, and cauliflower; sauté peas and zucchini;  try pan-roasting asparagus and broccoli (absolutely, they're both wonderful caramelized); roast or broil asparagus, carrots, cauliflower, zucchini (again for the caramelizing).  How much asparagus to trim?  Bend it halfway down the stalk until it snaps.  Always salt zucchini after shredding then drain (it's not unlike eggplant).  Don't bother with anything but the flowerettes of cauliflower.  Always buy medium-sized carrots without cracks and other signs of age.  When cooking, slice on the bias (one of my favorite recipes is sliced carrots, cooked in butter, then fresh dill, and crème fraîche).  Peas?  Frozen are almost always better than anything you can buy, including those at Whole Foods.  Zucchini?  Don't grow them, you'll have enough to fill your basement, just buy them, they're just as good.  On to Improving Glazed Chicken Breasts:  Nice recipe reminiscent of Duckling a la Orange.  Secrets to Apple Galette?  You want the "buttery flakiness of croissant, but infused with soldierly layers of caramelized apples.  The secret is Granny Smith or Empire apples and some apricot preserve.  Perfecting Pear Crisp seems almost like a fruity dessert overload, but good article, and a simple recipe.  Surprisingly, good old 'Merican Bartlett pears do the best, topped with a mélange of chopped nuts, flour, brown sugar, and spices.  Lots of new sauces for your chicken.  Reconsidering Cast Iron spells out the reason you might consider cast-iron over non-stick:  it costs less.  It cures and then is almost as non-stick.  It will last a lifetime, and then you can feel righteous deeding it to your young'uns.  The winner, BTW, was the Lodge Logic 12-inch Skillet at $29.95.  Is Wisconsin (home to Sweet Junie) Parmesan a Player?  Well, the best in the lot were imported from Italy, costing more than $15 a pound.  But, Belgioioso and Sarvecchio did well at half that.  Avoid DiGiorno, Stella and Kraft.  Equipment Corner tells us the Oxo makes the best apple-corer, Forschner makes the best knife holder, and don't bother with banana hangers.

Kinda busy.  More tomorrow.

Posted by jbahr at 07:39 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I fell asleep on the couch watching The Godfather and woke up and there was Godfather II and drifted off and then more Godfather and then went to bed and got up and did my morning treadmill routine in front of Godfather <some Roman Numeral>.  I don't even remember how many there were, but they are apparently running nonstop on this channel and I'm too lazy to change it to SpongeBob SquarePants.

While I have been . . . well, agonizing is too strong a verb . . . experimenting with potato-leek soup, I've run across a dozen recipes, all at odds with one another.  The classic recipe is for Vichyssoise, which is normally served cold, perhaps garnished with cucumber slices.  The basic recipe is in Joy of Cooking, one of my Bibles, and it's actually a recipe as simple as that in Cook's Illustrated:  potatoes, leeks, chicken stock, and in the case of Vichyssoise, cream.  A number of recipes include either cream and/or milk, but I'm trying to avoid dairy products in this recipe (which makes them lower-cal and edible by the lactose-intolerant).  I made a basic soup of potatoes, leek, and low-fat chicken stock to begin with.  Most recipes have you sautéing the leeks in butter, but any light oil will do (though, you will miss the notes of butter in the final product).  Anyway, I took various portions of the basic recipe and experimented.  My aim was to get close to the wonderful concoction Junie and I had in Breckinridge, but I failed in that attempt.  The results were still quite acceptable, and I give you this particular version:

Potato-Leek Soup Colorado

There's a certain bit of wordplay in the title, as anything Colorado is also red (which is what it means in Spanish;  my state got its name for its red rocks).

8 leeks
8 largish red potatoes
Either 4 Big T of butter or an equivalent amount of olive oil
2 to 4 garlic cloves depending upon how many werewolves you want to repel
Two medium sized carrots
One medium onion
1 quart chicken stock (low-call, free-range, whatever)
Quarter cup of chives or green onions
One to two cups of roasted red peppers
Optional:  3-5 shakes of Tabasco sauce
Expensive and optional:  5-10 thread of saffron
Optional: half-cup of cream or half-and-half

First wash the leeks, then cut off the bottom 1/4 inch of hairy stub, then trim off the green tops just where it goes from light green to dark green.  Peel the potatoes, or just give them a good scrub it you're adventuresome.  Quarter the potatoes and cut the leek cylinders in half lengthwise.  Soak the leeks, and if they're a bit dirty, fan out the leek layers like playing cards.  Shake off the water and cut the leeks across the grain into half-moon shaped strips as small as you can manage.  If you have a food processor, just reduce the carrots to as fine as they'll go.  If you don't, do the same manually, but be careful with the knife, carrots are devilishly hard to handle. Slice the garlic into thin slivers.  Dice the onion.  All of this is much easier with a food processor, so nag your significant other to give you one for your birthday.  Sauté the leeks, garlic, onions and carrots in either the butter or olive oil over medium heat.  I don't know, maybe 5 minutes.  You want everything limp and submissive.  When the onions, leeks and garlic are pretty much translucent,  add the chicken stock and the quartered potatoes.  Simmer on low-to-medium for maybe 15 minutes, or until the potatoes are soft enough to get shmushed in a food processor.  Add the green onions or chives to the pot, after you've sliced them up thinly (you don't want these to cook).  Open a jar of roasted red peppers, not the ones with vinegar and garlic and whatever added, just peppers, and throw it in the pot, too.  Now, you really have to blenderize it all, but you don't really want to use a blender which will turn the potato starches into glue.  An immersion blender works well, or a food processor.  Do it in batches if you must, but get it all smooth and even silky if you can without invoking the Potato Glue Curse.  Transfer it all back to the pot and reheat on low.  Now, you have a few choices.  One thing that this soup needs is salt, so throw as much in as your sodium-challenged diet allows.  I suggest a little salt, a taste, a little more.  Then, you need some pepper:  black, white, pink, whatever.  If you still don't think it's to your taste, you can add either saffron threads and/or 3-5 shakes from the Tabasco bottle (I did both).  This is pretty damned good soup at this point.  If you would like it smoother and can afford the calories you can add a half-cup of either cream or half-and-half.  I actually tried that on a small portion and it was very nice.  One thing about this soup is that it's wonderful but doesn't rock your world like the soup I had in Breckenridge.  It's a great deal more subtle and all you sensitive poets out there might prefer it.  It will persist in the fridge for a week and is dynamite cold.

Posted by jbahr at 03:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So I'm making potato-leek soup listening to Jackson Browne's The Pretender which, in part, could serve as the soundtrack for An Inconvenient Truth, but 30 years earlier on the job. 

Junie and I had potato-leek soup at a small, excellent and reasonable restaurant in Breckenridge called Relish and I'm trying to replicate it, including the roasted red peppers that were mentioned in the waitperson's spiel.

But, I digress.  I was living in LA when I first heard it and connected with:

I'm going to rent myself a house
In the shade of the freeway
I'm going to pack my lunch in the morning
And go to work each day
And when the evening rolls around
I'll go on home and lay my body down
And when the morning light comes streaming in
I'll get up and do it again

Cath makes excellent potato-leek soup, so I have a call into her.  I've also combed through my Cook's Illustrated back issues and googled up another dozen recipes.  Curious, as Ollivander intoned to Harry.  Cook's illustrated calls for 5 pounds of leeks to meld with a mere pound plus of potatoes.  Surely, that can't be right, unless they mean 5 pounds before cutting off the green stalks.  One recipe has you getting the leeks and potatoes in chicken broth, and brewing up.  Another has you doing something similar, but Cuisinarting it all into chunkless sustenance.  I know that the recipe from Relish was saltier and smooth.  Also, I'm thinking that a few thread of saffron would do wonders.  I'll tell you how it turns out.

Oh, my.  NPR reports that World Weekly News will soon issue its last printed edition, and then be Internet-only.  As Scott Simon noticed, WWN is not a parody like The Onion, it is pure comedy:  Aliens serve in the Senate.  BatBoy fights in Iraq.  A man finds 120 pounds of lint in his bellybutton.  That kind of thing.  I stopped at Safeway to get my hands on the last issue.  Here's the highlights:  France is producing edible comic books!  The US government has funded two men to actually dig a tunnel to China!  Researchers in Java have discovered an amazing new breed of Merpeople!  The International Library of Poetry says you could win $10,000 for your poem!  Spacemen are abducting bathing beauties!  Lester the Typing Horse tells us why fiber is necessary!  When I used to drive Der to New Vista, a charter high school in Boulder, I would first pick up a WWN and we would do the Bigfoot crossword puzzle together.  I'll miss seeing WWN in the supermarket checkout aisle.

~~~

OK, I admit it's a difficult segue to the Colorado Review, but I did receive one today.  Mainly because Stephanie G'schwind always writes this nice note on the re-up notice, and how are you going to ignore that?  This month has fiction and essays I actually want to read (including the ubiquitous Floyd Scoot, whom I once included by name in a poem), and poetry that seems, strangely, more balanced and interesting as time goes on.  This time the poetry editor is Donald Revell, and I don't know what happened to Jorie and it's probably impolite to ask.  There was very little work that I didn't like, but the most interesting included:

Molly Bendall, A Home Never Tried:  "If I listened to the truant weather, then I'd know / what to pull from your head"

Joseph Capista:  History of the Inevitable:  "Fire wants to be ash ... // The bucket wants to be the moon ... // The trees envy the slow moving cow".

A.E. Clark, One-Sided Conversation:  "i say, on a tough ocean an archipelago can't help // but yearn // for the continent before"

James Cushing, The Scar Giver:  "I tried each pen, and found I wrote truth with not one of them."

Jessica Fisher, Looking For You In The OED:  "More like an angel than architecture now,"

James Galvin, Stop Whimpering and Speak:  "..// My love is the death of kisses, I live / with her apart in the wind of constancy".

Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson, From Figures For A Darkroom:  "A swallow fits across the painting, gets tangled, breaks like a / key in the lock".

MC Hyland, Propaganda Suite (selected by GC Waldrep for the AWP Intro Journals Project):  "Look out, Chairman!  There's a tiger everywhere!"

Craig Morgan Teicher, Eye Contact:  "As if bees are known for their pride, / But what's so great about horses? ..."

~~~

I've been watching a lot of The Fairly Oddparents on my morning treadmill routine.  Very funny, and a lot of camp allusions.  See you tomorrow.

~~~

Post Scriptum:  I've realized that the longer you post on your blog, the less it is entertainment and the more it is confession.

Posted by jbahr at 06:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been following the political prediction markets for a while.  The most interesting of these are the ones where the trades are in real money:  Iowa Electronic Markets (which has a better track record of prediction), and the Ireland-based Intrade.com.  Both organizations are bourses that let you buy futures contracts on political events.  For example, at Intrade, you can bet that Barack Obama will win the Democratic Party nomination for president.  Right now, one contract will cost you $29.10 and if he succeeds, you will cash in $100.  The cost of a contract goes up and down and you can trade every day if you like, buying and selling contracts as you would soybeans, light crude or pork bellies.  So who is actually going to pay you?  Someone who has sold a contract.  If you sell a contract for Hillary winning the presidency, for example, you will receive $29.  If she actually does win the presidency, you will be out $100.  Like any futures contract, you can track the price day to day, as it changes in response to events.  Bad weather in the Midwest?  Corn futures go up.  Obama takes flack for recent statements?  Obama futures go down.  Right now, Clinton's Democratic nominee for president contract is at $47.60 (if you buy a contract and she wins, you will be given $100).  Obama is at $37.10, Edwards at $6.20 and John Kerry at 10 cents.  Curiously, Al Gore's contract is at a respectable $4.90, which is pretty interesting considering he has vowed not to run.  Analysts follow the real-money contract action and assume, as they do on Wall Street, that Everybody is smarter than Anybody.  Rudy Giuliani's Republican presidential nominee capture will cost you $39.50, followed closely by Fred Thompson at $28.20, and Mitt Romney at $18.50.  The odds change a bit when you look at the contracts for actual presidential winners:  Clinton sits at $29, followed by Giuliani at $21 and Obama at $19 and change.  Curiously, the despicable fork-tongued Fred Thomson resides in fourth position at $15. What's interesting about these markets is that (certainly, in the case of the Iowa Electronic Markets) they serve as predictors of the actual outcomes of political events, and have had considerable predictive power in the past.

As you can tell, I am finally between projects.  I'm trying to sort out the curious history of Herr Wittgenstein in odd moments when I'm not cleaning up the 1,000 square feet that is Set Software Services.  We just got a smallish job from a good customer to test Linux drivers, which led Dima to conclude that we needed a new badass PC with an Athlon 6000, tons of memory and removable drive drawers so that we could install and test against Fedora Core, Mandrake, Ubuntu, SuSE, and all the other possible Linux distributions.  Dima loves having a half-dozen machines within the reach of his rolling ergonomic desk-chair.  I figure we have something like 25 PCs at this point, not counting the dozen or so other platforms (PPC, MIPS, and miscellaneous) that sit on desktops waiting for progress on some project or other.  That's not counting the 6 servers, uninterruptible power supplies, dozens of monitors (LCD, CRT and touchscreen), lab gear (oscilloscopes, flash burners, Dremel tools, soldering stations), or the bazillion cables for every possible application (audio/video, USB, Ethernet).  We've got this Really Big Project starting in a couple of weeks, and I'm trying to figure out which projects I can mothball (by which, I mean packaging up everything in a big plastic under-the-bed Tupperware-like container and stack it up in the storage area).  The problem is the moment you pull the DuctTape off the table holding the USB hub and put away all the touch-sensitive frames, and stack everything into a plastic container, the client calls and asks for just one more test and you have to drag everything out again.  Of course, it could be worse, clients could not be calling, so who am I to complain? 

I think I missed reporting on the recent Time.  More on that when I finish building Dima's new PC tomorrow.  UPS just showed up with a motherboard, DVD drive, SATA hard disk, video adapter, memory and enclosure.  Looks like my early morning is spoken for. 

Posted by jbahr at 06:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As well as not reading my snail mail, I haven't been reading my comments.  Joshua, for example, makes some good arguments in response to my feelings that Marxist economics was largely anachronistic:  "So even if some owners decide they doesn't need their workers, they sure as shootin' still need there to be a laboring class that consumes without taking a significant share of capital profit beyond their wages. Unless of course we just start printing money freely. I hear that has downstream flaws."  Let me say from the get-go that I am not a fan of capitalism because it's difficult to know just what it means anymore.  I suppose it may mean unfettered free-market exchange, but there's actually never been such a thing, and what passes for the free market today is a laughable example of the government picking winners (particularly in defense matters), when it's not providing outright corporate welfare.  People who strongly support Capitalism also tend to support Small Government, except that they invariably also support Strong Defense, which chews up a monstrous slice of our tax dollars and sometimes kills us.  So, sue me if I'm a little confused.  In any event, my comments weren't meant to heap ashes solely on Mr. Marx – Adam Smith (AKA God to all capitalists) and David Ricardo held similar views of value.  My principal complaint with the standard labor theory of value (LVT) is that the exchange value of a good or service is tied to its labor content.  Now, that content can be busting up rocks, or dancing on stage, or analyzing a spreadsheet, but the idea is that the labor value is whatever labor gets paid (or in the case of the downtrodden masses, what they fail to get paid).  Well, CEOs are laborers, too, and even when they're capitalists, they seldom putting up good money when they can just wait until the board gives them more back-dated options.  Are CEOs worth a salary 400 times what their average employee makes?  Economists would say yes, because that's what the market is paying (in fact, CEO advocacy groups make this argument all the time).  Isn't it just as possible that going to the right school, making the right friends, and putting them on your board at some point was a more likely determinant of CEO salaries?  But, I digress.  One tenet of LTV (at least as I read it) is that labor is ultimately the determinant of all value.  Even capital is the bottled and distilled essence of past labor.  It makes more sense to me that there is intrinsic value to many of the world's things (teak wood, yew bark, gold ore) because, as humans, we desire them for their properties.  It doesn't make sense to say that the value of the gold is the labor expended to pan it out of the river.  Equally, it makes no sense to me that the nuggets should be valued at the capital required to acquire rights to it.  Both seem like accounting tricks (and if you think statisticians are liars, you've haven't taken enough accounting) to make two sides of an equation balance.  Is the profit difference between the cost of extraction and the price at sale a difference attributable to capital and labor (by which I may mean both management and worker-bees)?  Isn't it just as likely we computed the initial value too low?  In the final analysis, I agree with Joshua that people without power are getting screwed.  It's not worth arguing with such a honorable and intelligent advocate what the philosophical underpinnings are.

Speaking of things I haven't been reading:  I finally read this month's Harper's.  The lead extract is The Idols of Environmentalism by Curtis White, a fascinating essay that suggests that we stop using capitalist/scientific language in defending the environment.  It's a great deal more nuanced than standard tree-hugger-speak, but ultimately it calls upon us to Just Stop Acquiring, Dammit, which seems like a recipe for disaster in anything like this real world.  Don't get me wrong, I'm solidly left of center, but I like my Rioja and air conditioning and Ricki Lee Jones vinyl, so isn't it OK that I just buy some carbon credits to compensate?  Some gems from Harper's Index:  Number of White House officials authorized to discuss cases with the Justice Department:  711.  Number during the Clinton administration?  4;  Percentage of the No Child Left Behind program directors who had financial ties to the curricula they developed? 80%;  Portion of states that projected climate changes says will leave them unable to sustain their State Flower or Tree?  60%;  Barrels of oil used to produce bottled water containers:  16 million;  Ratio of water used to produce that provided in bottled water? 2:1;  Number of words of oral argument spoken by Justice Samuel Alito since February 2006:  14,404;  Number spoken by Clarence Thomas:  132.

I'm also reading How To Read Wittgenstein, that sweet Junie gave me.  Now I know why I have heard his name countless times, but have never run across his work in a lifetime of casual study:  He's Not One Of Us.  By which I mean, rationalists with a grounding in math and other horrors.  Except, of course, that he was.  More on that later.

I'm apparently a finalist in a chapbook competition.  It's called Junie & Barker, so you can guess what it's about.  More on that later, too.

Posted by jbahr at 06:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It's been an interesting 3 weeks.  Junie's been here and gone.  My Movable Type keeps going on the fritz.  I've had this project that has kept me buried in Visual Studio when I wasn't sleeping, eating, or reading The Deathly Hallows (twice, actually).  I didn't stay up last Friday and wait in line with all the other crazies, though I did consider marking a small lightning scar on my forehead and running over to Borders at midnight.  Junie and I ran into Harry, Hermione and a dementor at a restaurant in Dillon, but I missed the main mob of Potterites who congregated in front of Boulder Bookstore at the witching hour.  Anyway, Deathly Hallows is a great conclusion to a wonderful series:  wide-ranging, filled with every major prior character, terrific plotline and dénouement. 

I also got an email from Vladimir, an old Russian buddy.  About 15 years ago, Dave, Kevin, Mike and I were trying to keep our engineering workstation startup going.  The Japanese weren't throwing money at new ventures like they had in the past, so we were constantly looking for ways to survive.  One part of the plan was the design of PC-based visualization workstations. We took the highest-end PC we could build, bundled our visualization software, and headed to the Siggraph Conference in hopes of competing against Sun, IBM, and Silicon Graphics.  Our software was based upon a nice rendering package from a little outfit called Pixar (they weren't making movies yet), and our major marketing ploy was to hand out flashing buttons that read AVS.  For some reason that may have involved libations and his Irish heritage, Kevin had decided to paint the entire system green the night before and anyone who got near the system ended up with green smudges on their person.  But, I digress.  Meanwhile, I was trying to find some additional programming talent offshore, and so I ended up working with Tim, a crazy Englishman whom I had met at Hannover Messe.  After a couple of trips to Moscow, we hooked up with Vladimir, who managed a stable of software engineers in Perm.  As Perm was a thousand miles away by train, I never ended up talking to the programmers, just Vladimir and a small cast of characters who met regularly at Tim's small apartment.  The exchange rate was 100 rubles to the dollar, which meant that the average Russian doctor made $4-5 dollar a month.  Needless to say, I was flush with rubles, though they were difficult to spend.  Tim and I would wander down to the open-air market and shop for dinners I would make for that night's guest.  Knowing exactly 10 words in Russian, the best I could do was point.  We avoided the giant sturgeon (half of whose weight were heavy metals) and usually ended up getting bread, fresh vegetables, and pork.  One morning before Tim got up, I tried shopping by myself in a State Store.  The store had 10 checkout lanes where you paid for everything you were going to buy and received a receipt (which was an insane system, but the Soviet influence hadn't abated yet).  Then, you could take the receipt to the various counters and stalls and pick up your food items, one at a time.  I waited behind a woman and when my time came up, I managed to communicate with the cashier that I wanted exactly what that woman wanted.  Then, I would follow the woman around and pick up whatever it was that she was buying.  After doing this half a dozen times, I ended up with bread, eggs, cabbage and some kind of bacon – plus countless items that I didn't need, which I ended up gifting to some babushkas outside the store.  But, I digress.  Vladimir told me that the programmers were ready and able to program anything I wanted, but they needed computers.  I went back home and worked with Warren and Cowboy Bob to purchase small lots of last-generation computers we found by combing the trade press (there was no Internet, per se).  Vladimir was so impressed with the shipment that he suggested we make a business of selling cheap computers in Russia, so we ended up shipping larger and larger quantities until we were shipping hundreds of machines at a time, all palletized and shrink-wrapped and sent via ship to wend their way to Moscow.  After the first couple of shipments, Vladimir suggested that there was way to much air in the computers and couldn't we pack some more saleable goods in the cavities of the PCs.  I asked what would do well and he suggested chocolates and condoms.  The next year, Vladimir took some of the Russian programmers to Spain to bid on fingerprint recognition software, with Alejandro acting as our local agent.  They enjoyed many fabulous meals and gallons of outstanding Rioja, but I don't remember if we ever got a contract.  Anyway, at some point, Dima and Gera left Russia and came to work with us in the U.S.  Vladimir is somehow mysteriously showing up in Boulder this week, so I'm hoping to have dinner with him and the guys.  Too bad that Junie will miss it, as Vladimir is a literary buff, among his many other talents.

I was just reading a copy of Poetry while waiting for FedEx to show up and noticed that it was from January 2006.  Hmm, must have missed that one.  There's an ad for Poetry-At-Sea 2006, which would put you on the same Caribbean Princess ship with Denise Duhamel, Nick Carbo, David Trinidad, David Lehman, and Gabe Gudding.  That must have been a hell of a lot of fun, and it would have been great to finally meet Gabe.  I never noticed how much Lehman looks like Harold Ramis before.

Posted by jbahr at 09:22 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I am reminded of that old joke:  What keeps a dyslexic, agnostic insomniac awake at night:  Wondering if there really is a dog.

When we last left our struggling cosmologist (that would be me), I had questions about the recession of galaxies.  Most of my confusion was straightened out by reading Expanding Confusions (actually reading it half a dozen times) and going through the tutorials and other resources provided by noted cosmologist, Ned Wright.  The first Aha Moment was recognizing how the universe is expanding (as an example, see the different ways that Ned Wright's face can stretch).  The easiest way to think of it is considering a smattering of ants on the outside of a balloon.  The analogy is imperfect, but it works for a while.  If we are one of the ants, then we may see that one ant (Ant A) is over there about a foot from us, and another ant (Ant B) is even farther from us, say 2 feet.  Assume that the balloon is seriously blown up, like the size of Yankee Stadium, so the horizon is quite a bit of a way from where we are.  Expansion of the universe works in a way, as God or Whomever continues blowing up the balloon, that when Ant A recedes from one foot to two feet (doubling the distance between us), Ant B recedes from us from 2 feet to 4 feet (also doubling the distance).  Now, Ant A has traveled one foot in the time that Ant B has traveled two feet, so clearly Ant B appears to be traveling away from us at twice the speed of Ant A.  That's the simple reason why Hubble's Constant (actually Hubble's Parameter, but that's another story) says that galaxies farther away from us are receding from us faster, thus the greater red-shift of the light they are so graciously sending us. 

The more you read of this stuff, the more amazing it gets.  Of course, it helps if you involve yourself in a quick review of Special Relativity (SR) and General Relativity (GR).  I had a bit of the former when I was a physics major (heck, I was a major in almost everything except The Arts).  My calculus skills barely held up in reading the papers indicated above, but I at least came away with a little better kenning of worldlines, spacetime, boundaries and horizons.

Of course, this stuff is hard to do if you get caught up in the actual scale of the phenomena you're thinking about.  For example, if you take all the travel done in the U.S. on planes, it comes to about a trillion miles a year.  If you add the air miles by everyone else on Earth, let's say it's 10 trillion miles.  A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, and the nearest star in our galaxy is about 4 light years.  So, if we stopped taking United to Cleveland, and instead used all that traveling to get to Alpha Centauri, it would still take everyone on Earth four years of traveling to get there.  Of course, everyone is traveling at the same time on Earth, and we'd have to do the travel back-to-back as it were, which would take 100 generations at any speed that we could conceivably reach with current technology.  So we would have to plan for food and sex and child-raising and an intra-Ship government and the possibility of revolutions and mass hysteria due to claustrophobia. And at the point of disembarkation we would be at the closest star in our modest galaxy.  We are currently mapping galaxies that are a billion times farther away than that.  To get to them (and we probably couldn't as they are receding too fast), we would have to spend more time than the history of the earth, thousands of times more than the history of the human race.

I also chatted with a couple of Noted Poets this week, which was wonderful.  And read a large part of Tracy Smith's Duende, the James Laughlin Award for best second book from the Academy of American Poets, of whom I am a card-carrying member (she also won the 2002 Cave Canem Prize, went to Harvard, was a Stegner Fellow, teaches at Princeton).   I'm sad to report that I was seriously underwhelmed, and I've probably read 100 second books that I thought were better, but then I'm not handing out the prizes.  One noted poet whose opinion I respect says that Bob Hicok's This Clumsy Living is killerbee, so I ordered that.  Otherwise, no poetry news, except I keep scanning P&W and Jendi and Adam's Winning Writer's site for contests, but it's slow in the summer.  I think Junie's got the blues, and everyone in the Midwest is suffering from heat and humidity.

Whacha gonna do?  See you tomorrow.

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This is one of the funniest things I've seen all week:  a series of ads run by Toto, the Japanese manufacturer of "porcelain conveniences".  The S400, their top-of-the-line model has "automatic and remote control open-and-close lid and flush, five cleansing modes, adjustable wand, warm air dry, automatic air purifier, heated seat and wireless remote control".  God, I don't even want to know what you do with the wand.

~~~

I was thinking about metaphor this morning.  Specifically, I was thinking about how we come to use words as tokens, moving them around, obeying rules of syntax, grammar and logic.  Often, however, we never get much beyond that.  Take, for example, the crop of NeoCons who spend decades in universities and think tanks dreaming up military schemes of domination.  Not one of the current batch had ever been in the military (by avoiding the draft, mainly), and most had no military education whatsoever. It's not unlikely that many had never even seen a dead person.  This did not keep them from planning adventures about which they knew nothing.

Junie gave me a book on astronomy and cosmology on the last trip out.  It was wonderful to read, and I quickly found out that my one course in Astro 35 years ago was even more out of date than I had realized (I should have called the only poet-cosmologist I know to explain it all).  Still, I thought I already knew most of what I was reading:  the Hubble Constant, the Big Bang, red shift, the age of the universe, standard candles, black holes.  Then I got to actually thinking about it.  Question:  If the most distant galaxies are, say, 15 billion years away then the light took 15 billion years to get here.  But, wait.  15 billion years ago was close to the time of the Big Bang and the universe was a lot smaller.  In fact, that galaxy must have been right next door, cosmologically speaking, so didn't they take some time to get out there and weren't they emitting light all the time?  OK, the universe used to be the size of a tennis ball, and now it's unthinkably large.  The space between everything and everything else has been expanding like that fabled example where the universe is an expanding raisin cake and the raisins are galaxies.  Pondering that, I switched into Google mode and started thinking about the Hubble Constant, which says that a distant object is moving away from us (and everything else) at a speed that is proportional to how far away it is.  That made sense in a sort of "la la la, I'm not going to think about it very hard" NeoCon way.  But, then I started thinking:  wait, why would that be?  Well, suppose the galaxies were all race cars arranged like the petals of a daisy at the Big Bang, pointed out with you standing in the middle of the daisy.  If they all took off at different speeds, then sometime later, we would see that the ones the furthest away were also traveling faster.  I looked hard at the Hubble Constant, which I had just let my eyes blur over at:  20 kilometers/second per mega-light year.  So a galaxy a million light years from us would be traveling away from us at 20 kilometers per second, and one two million light years from us at 40 kilometers per second, and so on.  So M106, the (not terribly distant) galaxy shown on the left that is about 25 million light years from us, would be traveling about 500 kilometers per second from us.  Back to Googling.  Hah.  Einstein never said that space couldn't expand faster than the speed of light – only energy and mass has that restriction.  OK, another question:  if everything is that rushed out at the Big Bang, and they were all close enough that you would think (sharing a common Hubble's Constant) they shared the same velocity, when why aren't all the galaxies (racecars) at the edge of the universe?  Well, I suppose, again, it's because it's the space between galaxies that is expanding – not galaxies that are running like crazy away from Ground Zero of the Big Bang.  And besides, there's probably nothing like an "edge" to the universe anyway.  So, I'm back to my original question.  If there is no center to the universe, and everything is moving away from everything, and (no matter where you are) more distant things are moving away faster, then  . . .  how did that happen?  Are they accelerating at different rates?  No, because, wherever you are you can look out a million light years and find something moving away from you at the same seeming velocity.  More Googling.  Oh, the Hubbard Constant isn't really constant, it has changed over time.  Goodness, there are lot of things I don't know, and I haven't even read enough to understand Einstein's cosmological constant, Friedman equations and dozens of other things. I guess that just goes to show you that you should actually think and research and work on something before coming to conclusions.  And get some observational results before jumping to conclusions.  Otherwise, you're just moving the words around, which only works for ideologues.

~~~

A noted poet and friend of mine recently mentioned that if I keep reviewing Poetry, he might actually have to read a copy.  I have to admit that a lot of the poetry in there isn't to my taste, but a decent amount is, and besides, I get the thing 10 times a year and literary journals are a bit thin on the ground in the summer.  The current issue is called Summer Break, and is filled with summery stuff.  It's a big issue chock-a-block with poets, editorialist, and reviewers including Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, Bruce Smith, W.S. Merwin, Rick Moody, John Updike, David Orr, Al Goldbarth, Campbell McGrath, Dean Young and others.  There's a really funny/poignant section called Poets I Have Known where, for example, Bill Yankee relates some memories about training James Merrill at his gym. The back cover has a excerpt from Naeem Murr describing his relationship with his Poet-Significant Other:  "The reason poets are able to read so much is because they spend more time waiting than writing. . . . What a bizarre concept.  Reading, taking walks, debating whether an autumnal oak leaf is really red ochre  . . . all the time twisting their miserable wire coat hanger of their souls ..."  Here's a few poems I liked:  Patricia Smith, Hip-Hop Ghazal:  "Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips, / decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bring them woo hips".  Dean Young, Flamenco: "The sexual gasps coming from the garden shed / of my friends turning twenty, tipsy / droll joke of my friends turning thirty, lost / ..."  Joanie Mackowski, One Afternoon:  "A woman stepped outside, crumbled / into a loose particulate, and, as the breeze / blew up from the east, she scattered:  her handful of heard, volcanic ash, spiraled the highway, / ..."  Alice Friman, Arts & Science:  "In chemistry, what's severed / looks to latch on to any other / severed thing:  orphaned electrons / zizzing in your wires race to embrace"  There was a short Q&A session after some of the poems, here's a response by Dean Young:  "Duende is an animating spirit of everything I write, particularly in the spirit of of Lorca's definition of knowing that any moment one could be devoured by ants".  All in all, a lot of fun.  Don't turn in your post-AG credentials though, just go to the library and read it when no one is looking.

~~~

Zelda Update:  I'm fighting the Boss in Sky City.  My cheat-sheet walkthrough says that All I Have To Do is grapple a tower with the hookshot, then grapple adjacent ones to get to the top, then grapple around a set of floating pods until the dragon gets tired of spitting fire at me, then grapple the heart on his back and give it a few good whacks with my Master Sword.  THEN, I have only have to do that two more times.  Sheesh.  I really need one of my boys.  I just want to walk around the next dungeon and trip over stuff.

~~~

I'm beginning to understand why Einstein was the Time Man of the Century.  When he cooked up his view of the universe and the laws that governed it, everyone thought that the the universe was the size of the Milky Way, ignoring the hundred-plus billion other galaxies that we now know exist.  He derived his formulae from pure mathematics, and in some cases, didn't live to see them verified.  He was wrong about some things.  He threw tantrums at times, and was occasionally pig-headed and had mistresses.  Good for him, I wish I had the opportunity to shake his hand.  Lest your eyes glazed over in the Science Part of this post, I leave you with words from Albert:

A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty… The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. … We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive. (Einstein, 1954)

 

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