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DJ Groutmaster

Derek arrived on Saturday at an hour he called "early in the morning" and the rest of us call 10 AM.  By that time, I had installed the backerboard in a part of the entryway.  Der did an outstanding job scoring and breaking odd pieces of the backerboard to fit the weirdly-shaped entryway while I spread the mud.  At some point we switched as I figured the wrist exercise would be good for his already superb guitar playing, and besides I was tired.  We finished the backerboard installation, Der headed off for a Boulder encounter and I started looking for a wine bottle.  This morning I began laying the slate 12x12's in the entryway.  The first step was mixing the thinset, for which I need a paddle that affixes to one my power drills.  I found the same Nice Young Man who had sold me everything else and asked him how to score the slate.  He said, "you don't, you need a wet saw".  Two hundred dollars later, I had a wet saw with a nifty angle guide and a laser line drawing gizmo.  I asked the Nice Young Man if the next palette of slate was on its way, as I didn't think I had enough.  He checked and found out that it was currently in New Delhi, so I may have a bit of wait on my hands.  Der made it into work even earlier and we commenced with laying down the slate.  It's strange stuff, colored variously between black and gold rust, and ranging in thickness from 1/4" to 3/8ths so we threw out the book on using the level and decided the entryway would be an adventure.  When we had 60% of the entryway done, we suspended that operation and attacked the kitchen.  These were conventional ceramic tiles, each a perfect twin of the next.  For this job, we used the little rubber crucifixes for spacing and mudded large swaths at a time.  Odd pieces were easily created with a tile cutter, though a couple of times I had to wander out to the garage and make a cut with the wet saw.  We got 80% of the kitchen done when the big Belgian grandfather clock bonged 5 PM, and I decided that a glass of wine sounded better than mixing another batch of mud.  And dinner?  Grilled flank steak and microwaved red potatoes.  Who needs a range, anyway?

Cook's Illustrated must be recycling their back covers because this month is Asian Fruit again (pomegranate, Coconut, lychees, kumquats, et cetera).  I was once told that the word pomegranate is derived from the French for "apple of Granada", though I haven't actually checked.  But I digress.  Editor Kimball never seems to tire telling us stories of his childhood, all poignant and reproduced in sepia tint.  The rest of the issue is, as usual, excellent.  Quick Tips advises that a half eggshell will act as a magnet to attract stray shell bits in a bowl of egg innards.  Another tip addresses the plaguing problem of having your hands smell like anchovies after mincing, something that I admit I never worried about.  Recipes include Enchiladas Verdes using tomatillos and broiled chiles, Great Grilled Bone-In Chicken Breasts (requiring that your grill have a hot side and a less-hot side), Reviving the Original Drive-In Burger (buy boneless short ribs and sirloin steak tips, use the food processor to create the ground beef, make your own hamburger buns, use classic burger sauce), Rescuing Summer Vegetable Gratin (don't squeeze the seeds from the tomatoes as they contain two-thirds of the tomato flavor, use caramelized onions, zucchini, squash, and garlic-thyme olive oil), Better Grilled Sausages with Onions (render the sausages on a bed of onions, then grill them), Perfecting Caponata (salt the eggplant, dice and dry out in microwave on coffee filters, make sure to use pine nuts), Improving Pasta with Olives, Garlic, and Herbs (Kalamata olives, sun-dried tomatoes, fresh basil), Fool-Proof Peach Shortcake (I don't care, I don't bake), Best Blueberry Pie (use tapioca for stiffener, mash half the berries).

The latest Poetry is pretty star-studded.  Contributors include Peter Cole, A.E. Stallings, Charles Bernstein, W. S. Di Piero, D. A. Powell, Tom Sleigh, Geoffrey Brock, Charles Simic, Ange Mlinko, Nance Van Winkel, Rae Armantrout and many others.  This issue has a moderate amount of formal verse (spearheaded by A.E).  Here's a collage of the poetry: "Birdsong, face it, some male machine / The lumber's astringency.  Fuck guacamole. / We also had a queen, / whetted by the moon. / An inch from the curse and pearled / Violet ocean only nothing / The rich men, they know about suffering / Do me my elegy now, or I'll scrawl the thing / engloving the scene.  Why is it the slipper the bitch clutches? / like a wily Anne Bonny / What's a person to us? / this no-way-to-resist seeing / Staring up into the tank's belly lit / The inlet will come first.  It always does."  The letters to the editor are full of court and spark as usual.  This from Marilyn Chin responding to a letter from Joseph Bednarik:  "Perhaps Joseph Bednarik is not conscious that noodling around the margins is an appalling and problematic expression, fraught with demeaning sexist, racist, imperialist overtones, and born out of the hateful stuff that Ho Xuan Huong so pointedly and whole-heartedly fought against in her poetry and in her life." 

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