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]]> http://www.thefryside.com/blog/2010/07/28/for-you-mom/feed/ 1 http://www.thefryside.com/blog/2010/07/16/mark-twain-on-local-food/ http://www.thefryside.com/blog/2010/07/16/mark-twain-on-local-food/#comments Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:13:09 +0000 Fry http://www.thefryside.com/?p=2550 A great article about Mark Twain and his love of region specific food:

Whether he was in San Francisco savoring Olympia oysters, rafting down Germany’s Neckar River with a cold beer, or in Hawaii tasting flying fish for the first time, Mark Twain had a love of food that was inseparable from his love of life. Remembering the fried chicken, cornbread, and fresh garden vegetables served on his Uncle John Quarles’s prairie farm, he wrote, brought him nearly to tears. Whenever he recorded in his journal that he’d enjoyed a trout supper, it was certain that he’d ended the day content. And when he recalled stage coaching through the Rockies, he reflected that nothing helps scenery like “ham and eggs … ham and eggs and scenery, a ‘down grade,’ a flying coach, a fragrant pipe and a contented heart—these make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for.”

But the joy Twain took from food was most vivid in a long fantasy menu of favorite American dishes he composed towards the end of his 1879 European tour . Having suffered through more than a year of dismal hotel cooking, he wrote down the 85 dishes he said he wanted waiting for him the moment he arrived home. The menu ranged from fresh American produce like butter beans, asparagus, pumpkins, and “green corn, on the ear” to meats like porterhouse steak and broiled chicken to regional dishes like Southern-style hoe-cake and “oysters, roasted in the shell, Northern style.” But of all the fresh, local dishes of his imagined feast, the most deeply rooted , the most inherent to specific American places, were wild.

(Found via The Atlantic Food Channel.)

I am in fact still alive and well, my silly California-raised self in the Midwest. Due to magically unforeseen budget shortfalls (wait for it) on behalf of my local school district, we are closing eight (8) schools this summer. One of which is a middle school that is melding with my own. So they hired me and my closed-school counterpart to wipe out and pack up both schools in preparation for next year.

In short, I have been hired on for extra hours through the end of the month. So not only am I working when I previously thought not, I was also fully informed of it a week before I would begin. M and I have been scrambling to figure out where on Earth our children should go. And we, being the impoverished homebody black sheep that we are, have not yet established a strong network for impromptu child support.

At least this week has been very productive, to the point of being over halfway finished with a three-week project in four days. Best to tackle overwhelming projects like a well-trained wolverine, I suppose.

I am not in the process of going into blog-suicide by talking about not writing. I’m just busier lately, and shorter evenings are spent recovering from more intensely laborious work during the day (read: old computers are fucking heavy!) with a cold beer and attempting to remember to breath from the gut instead of the shoulders.

I do want to apologize for the lack of pictures of the local offspring. We’ve been lax for sure, but May into June is simply second only to the Thanksgiving to New Years gauntlet in terms of ‘things going on’. I hope to make it up to you soon.

Through it all, though, I make room to be creative. Here is the email I sent out to my building’s faculty today, warning them of impending doom:

Greetings One and All Summerites!

Starting today and through a fortnight, I shall be declaring war on information by calling forth the demons from the fiery pits of our servers, flinging their evil across the Ether(net) to destroy everything held dear on each and every computer at our institute of learning! MWAHAHA! If you wish to save your precious Data, I will listen to your pleas, whither electronic or vocal, with utter delight and amusement! Rest assured, though, my wrath shall be wrought no matter what you say!

Nutshell:

I’m erasing the computers. Talk to or email me if you need help saving stuff or need use of your computer for a longer time. Don’t call, I won’t be at my room much.

Have a fun summer. Don’t forget to read a book.

A good book. None of that Twilight nonsense.

Best,

Evan

PS, MWAHAHAHA! (Sinister laugh)

Actually, looking back, I’ll probably take some shit about the Twilight thing.

Creativity and smarts ain’t the same thing, is they?

My son is 6. He is very much a six year old, oft found bouncing off the walls pretending to be inside a video game. He is the epitome of a six year old boy.

My son is six and knows what an adjective is.

This is added to the list of nouns, verbs, articles, and prepositions he already knows about.

I explained this to him last week: I didn’t start learning grammar until 8th Grade. Until I was 13. Over twice his age. And I didn’t even fully grasp it until 9th Grade when I had an awesome English teacher who kicked my butt. And I was one of the bright kids. Plenty of people I knew, even while in the midst of coursework, couldn’t point out a noun even if it bit them in the face.

My bouncing boy of six is learning grammar nearly ten years before I did and, as his teacher told me early last week, he just gets it.

Let this wash away any doubts about the self-directing, self-correcting Montessori method of education.

That, and my son is a genius.

That is all.

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

[From 1984 by George Orwell]

There is an easily understandable truth to the phrase, History is written by the victor. The victorious are the ones left after the battle to tell the tale, so it is their story. Even ‘his story’ seems like the etymology of the word, though it is not.

Logically, however, it seems as though it should not be the case. Fact is fact. What happened, happened. Right? The American Revolution went from this, to this, to this.

But we humans are limited, isolated souls. We cannot truly know anything beyond our own experience. So when we look upon the past, we see it through our own eyes and nothing more. Try as we might to keep the past even-handed, it remains clouded by what we believe actually happened.

And that belief as to what happens tempers our current state of mind. We justify our current decisions based on that foggy history, to either follow the path or run counter to it. The hardest to cope with of all is when evidence points to a different conclusion than what is believed to be true.

This is where a new battlefield has opened up, and it follows the words of George Orwell exactly.

In Texas, there is a board of education that controls the content of a huge amount of school textbooks. A single board, in one state, dictates the content they want in most schools.

How this is possible is through textbook manufacturing. Texas publishes a single list of approved textbooks for all of its schools. Texas is a huge state. So, if a publishing company wants guaranteed millions in sales, they cater to Texas. And since they’ve catered to Texas, those books become the books for much of the whole country.

As one would expect, Texas, as a whole, has stronger religious leanings than average. And this board has a solid voting bloc of religious conservatives. This fact would normally be balanced out by California’s liberal-secular leanings, but since that state won’t be purchasing textbooks for another half a decade (good planning, that’s what that is), Texas is now wielding far more influence over the market than it previously did.

Up now for their curriculum decisions is social studies. History. Our very past is going to be altered by the present. Alterations to make sure that there are well-mentioned gaps in Darwin’s and Galileo’s advances in our very world. Show Reagan as a hero, followed by the grandeur of Newt Gingrich. And be sure people see that our very founders were espousing Christianity and rule under Biblical law.

It is the last point that is most confounding to my knowledge. I have read our founders, not just read about them. Most of them were Christians, yes, but that was merely the default. The far more reaching fact about them was that they divorced their personal faiths (which were from numerous sects) and knew that their inspirations came from Enlightenment philosophy of reliance on themselves to get through existence.

These people honestly believe they are setting history right. That is what is so tough to fight. And it is a subtle fight over words. What is most impressive is that they are thinking in terms of generations. If they rewrite history now to deceptively emphasize the religions of our Founders over their actual beliefs, then it will be thirty years before the ramifications are fully felt.

As Mr Coates mentioned when I first read about this on his blog (also followed up by Mr Sullivan), it is hard not to leave this subject on a sour, depressing note. The effects of such an intellectual coup are difficult to see as too harmful in a world becoming coated with ubiquitous information. It also requires a vast amount of effort to maintain a campaign such as this over decades.

Still, it is always worth fighting against such willful acts of ignorance and deception.

The speed reading is definitely coming along, I think. My retention is higher. I’m getting closer to my goal of reading about a book a week, plus I’m able to consume more delicious content online. Hopefully that’ll make up for the fact I can’t listen to podcasts any longer since my kids keep getting louder.

So here are a few lines from The Art of War that struck me. From Chapter 2, Waging War:

3. If the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.

6. There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.

Chapter 3, Attack by Strategem:

18. If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the outcome of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

Chapter 13, The Use of Spies:

4. What enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.

5. Now, this foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by any deductive calculation.

5.1 If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.*

6. Knowledge of the enemy’s dispositions can only be obtained from other men.

27. Hence it is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying and thereby they achieve great results. Spies are the most important element of warfare, because on them depends an army’s ability to move.

That all spoke quite a bit about what has happened in the world in the past decade, and even so about the Cold War as well. Who would have thought that actual, evidential knowledge would be useful in conducting war?

*Not actual quote from Sun Tzu.

That’s how it happens: little pings of thoughts. Rarely are they fully formed. Mostly they are just half-thoughts, waiting for a rational mind to talk to them and see if they are fleshy or hollow.

But I didn’t write it down. My little black notebook sat in my bag. I can’t even remember the topic of conversation that led to the tidbit of thought. And I’m not yet in the habit of writing something down while in the midst of talking to someone. I need to be, because things get lost.

All day long, at least hourly, half-thoughts ping through my mind. And they never reach paper. I need to put them on paper, because, for some reason, they stick better in my mind. Typing it out doesn’t have the same kinetic, tangible connection to the saving function of ink for the thought.

So, after dealing with this dilemma of lost thought today, I can’t help but recalling a bit from an episode of Mad Men this season. One character, Paul, had a brilliant idea in the middle of the night, one that was perfect for the product they were going to sell. But he promptly passed out and never wrote it down.

Paul’s frustration with himself is met with sympathy, as I think he deserves. But he sums it up with a Chinese proverb: “The faintest ink is better than the best memory.”

Now my lost memory only recalls that proverb. Hopefully it will keep repeating itself to make sure I that when I hear a ping, I write it down.

In English class we finished reading ‘A Christmas Carol’ and were supposed to create a little joke about how mean Scrooge was. My friend said ‘Scrooge is so mean, for Christmas he got tiny Tim a 3 legged dog. IMMD

But my free time for reading, for pleasure or knowledge, is lacking. So I started learning a bit about speed reading. There are a number of different approaches that make a difference for me. And between Lifehacker and The Art of Manliness, I think I’m off to a good start.

First, I have started trying to stop subvocalizing as I read. Subvocalization is when you pronounce the words you read in your head, even though you’re not reading aloud. It’s a natural consequence of learning to read, since we learn to read out loud so we can correlate the larger vocabulary we speak as children with the little scribbles in Harold and the Purple Crayon.

The trick I use is to whisper A-E-I-O-U as I’m reading. You can count to four or five to accomplish the same thing. Basically, you’re forcing a divorce between what your vocal chords are doing and the words your eyes are bringing in.

Second, I am learning to fight against backtracking. I know that so often I would be reading along and suddenly I’d have to bounce back to previous statements or even paragraphs. For some reason, I would zone out or not retain what I had just read (again, often it is a distracting environment) and I would have to go back and re-read. To fight this, I have started using a bookmark as a way of forcing myself to focus on single lines.

I put the bookmark atop the line I am reading and keep it moving downward, so it forces me to stay ahead of it. This has proven to be one of the most useful tricks so far. It works in line with other advice to track with a finger to keep one’s eyes focused. However, there is also advice to use more of your peripheral vision, so the bookmark line aids in learning to take in a whole line as a chunk.

Third, for some of the lengthier things I have been reading online, I use bookmarklets (a program linked via a bookmark in your browser) called Readability and Spreeder.

Readability converts the main text of a webpage, say a news article, into a straight simple column with none of the other sidebars or ads to distract you from reading the information. Readability is also nice to print webpages from, again because of the clutter elimination. (I use the novel format, the medium text size, and the extra-wide margin so I can keep all the text within my single field of view and don’t have to move my eyes to go through the text.)

Spreeder is a program that you put text into, and it flashes chunks of words at you fast enough to let you read them, but not long enough to let you subvocalize them. The latest bookmarklet they added lets you highlight text from anything you’re reading, and it automatically loads it up into Spreeder so you can hit play and get to speed reading (ideally anyway). The downside to this is that if you are interrupted, then you miss some of what you read. But going back and re-reading something faster than normal won’t hurt you.

A friend of mine years ago mentioned that he went under hypnosis and learned to speed read that way. I was skeptical at the time, but now I have a feeling he may have just had the subvocalization shut off right then and there. Being an academic already gave him a head start on being able to read swiftly and well before that, but he did say he jumped from 250 to 500 words per minute shortly after being hypnotized.

I’m still working on this, but I think it’s going to come along soon. The big thing is finding a quiet place to do it. One big bummer for me is that I can’t just put on some music and read. Because of my training in music, it may as well be someone talking in plain English to me.

I’d like to create a good reading space in my home. The couch is for television and kids. The kitchen is for everything else (including a lot of my general computing). The bathroom, well, that one’s not a bad place to get some reading done. I’m thinking I want to find an old lounge chair, perhaps with an ottoman, and a side table to set up in the den. That will be where I can knock out some solid, solitary reading time.

Now, I keep hearing about insurance companies vs people due to ‘pre-existing conditions’, and I always hear the above clip in my head. Pre-existing means conditions you had before you existed? What about post-existing conditions? Worm rot? Composting? Demons with pitchforks?

It’s an existing condition; let’s all quit being stupid.

Since dropping graduate school from my life for the time being, I have been reading. After the beginning of college eight years ago, I haven’t read much for myself. Apart from Harry Potter audiobooks while driving across the country (and Deathly Hallows the moment it came out), and the Twilight series at my wife’s insistence (my man card was duly handed in), my reading has for school and only school.

Now I’m halfway through the third book of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. It is definitely a great series, but now I was thinking of lining up some non-fiction to follow it up with. I was originally planning to slip in some other reading between the Dark Materials books, but by halfway through The Golden Compass that plan was nixed.

Still, what to follow these books with? I’m going to read The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a favorite blogger of mine at The Atlantic. After that, I was thinking of reading up on writing. Here are a couple of ideas:

• Writing Down the Bones – Natalie Goldberg
• On Writing – Stephen King
• Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing – Mignon Fogarty (this is more for personal reference.)

Any other suggestions out there?

When I first got my cell phone about two years ago, I downloaded a bunch of ringtones.  Mostly songs.

When the phone would ring, the cell phone would somehow assign different songs to different callers.  If it was from someone I knew, it was one song.  If it was from someone with no caller ID, it was another.  And certain people seemed to have their own specific songs.  Maybe it’s something I did when downloading the songs.  I don’t know.  But it seems very random.

Long story short, I have gotten tired of these songs.  So last week I downloaded some new songs by U2, Coldplay and B.B. King.  The new songs are great.

But last night, I lost my cell phone.

I suspected it was somewhere in the house, but I couldn’t find it.  So I asked my wife Staci if she would call my phone, so I could hear it ring and find it.

So she called it.  And she heard the ring my cell phone decided to assign to my wife’s calls:

“The Thrill is Gone.”

It was a long night.

But none have cut me so deep as to learn this news from my dearly beloved Grammar Girl:

Although how many spaces you use is ultimately a style choice, using one space is by far the most widely accepted and logical style. The Chicago Manual of Style (1), the AP Stylebook (2), and the Modern Language Association (3) all recommend using one space after a period at the end of a sentence. Furthermore, page designers have written in begging me to encourage people to use one space because if you send them a document with two spaces after the periods, they have to go in and take all the extra spaces out.

I know it’s a hard habit to break if you were trained to use two spaces, but if you can, give one space a try.

Now, I’ve Twittered about this before:

I double-space my sentences on Twitter. It’s what I learned, and I’m proud of it.

This usage went unquestioned my entire life. I must have been right on the cusp of the shift away from typewriters. I learned to type on ancient Apple IIe computers in elementary school. I don’t recall having many font selections on those computers that lacked hard drives.

The worst part about this news? It makes complete sense. (Son of a bitch, I’ve been double-spacing this whole blog to this point!) There really is no reason to add a second space after a period. I certainly don’t try when texting. Plus it works better stylistically for phrases such as this:

Worst. Episode. Ever.

It will definitely be a tough habit to break. Two spaces after a full stop is practically a nervous tic. And frankly, I really enjoy being ornery when it comes to the advancement of humankind. I still refuse to fax. It’s a sin brought unto man by Lucifer himself.

(Found via The FAIL Blog.)

Irony defined: if the truck hit another truck carrying a load of plan-b pills.

First I had to figure out the new default password convention. Then I had to figure out the numeric portion of the password.

I tested it. I got in. I logged off and passed the information to her. Success!

She comes back later. Something’s not right. She has had no success.

Oh, well this morning the mail servers were down for a bit. I logged into her email on my machine. Success for me again. We double-checked the password and I wrote it down again on a new sticky note and passed it along.

She hops over to another computer station in the room and logs into her email. Almost.

I look over her shoulder. Username was correct. What are you typing in for your password? This, this, 2…

Two? Uh, that’s an ampersand. I don’t know what that is. (Like a grammarian checking the price of a car: stickler shock!) It’s the & right here, just press shift-7.

Oh. Shift on this and this? No, just the &, shift-7. Okay, thank you. No problem.

My chest hurts.

Addendum:

I know writing an ampersand can be difficult. It’s not a commonly used symbol anymore. But I write a good one. Why? I actually spent the time practicing it and intentionally using it in my notes. It is clear and unmistakable, unlike the rest of my handwriting.

My colleague teaches a course involving video production and editing. At the beginning of the term, he takes his students through the ins and outs of the equipment. Going through how to use the video camera, a students would record their clip, switch the camera to playback mode, and hit play.

It is there they would run into trouble: blank space. Why would this happen? Any of us who have a memory that recalls years that begin with the number 1 can explain.

The cameras being used are digital, but still use tapes. For those unfamiliar, tapes are wound up magnetic strips that have information encoded on them as they move. So in order to get back to a previous recording, one must physically rewind the tape to the spot containing the desired information.

But beyond this exercise, when would these people born around 1996 use anything on a tape? You don’t have to rewind a CD or DVD (a fact I was slow to learn about DVDs). And there is nothing to rewind on a computer. In fact, computers will soon no longer need any moving parts at all thanks to solid state hard drives.

This idea left me wondering: what will become of this word? There is nothing left to rewind. Time will forever remain still. There will no longer be a continuum. I will say to my children, ‘Woah there; let’s rewind a bit and start over.’ and they look at me and wonder if I’m talking about that stone wheel that was constructed when I was a kid or if I remember where I was when I heard Man discovered fire.

I read recently an article about a woman who averages more than a book a day. She consumes things differently, almost taking a page in as a whole, rather than line by line. Granted, this is an extreme, and she is a professional reader and reviewer. I still envy it.

I very much wish to learn how to speed read. When reading, I hear the words and phrasing in my mind. This leaves me getting caught up on more complex or awkward lines.

Other issues come from my lack of retention. Of course with reading, same as listening, some things stick and some done. However with me, as my dear wife will attest, I seem to have a much greater amount of anti-adhesive than the average person. It’s not really through lack of trying, I don’t think. A big part of it has to come from environment and especially sound.

I am no multitasker. Frankly, I’m of the camp that believes multitasking is a misnomer. It’s more like fraction-tasking. Either way, I cannot pull it off; I have a bad filter for concentrating.

If there is noise in the background, particularly voices, it blocks my reading. Writing not as much, but definitely reading. Maybe it’s because I read with a voice in my mind. I cannot read with the television on or with someone talking to me. One will definitely get filtered out, or if I’m trying to split my attention, neither get retained.

Back to the original point: I wish I could speed read. Maybe somewhere I’ll find a program that works for that. The big trick is to take away the inner voice that translates the reading and allow the words to just go straight into the brain.

If I could do that, I think I would have more confidence as a writer. I don’t consume enough writing to know if what I do is good or not. For blogging, I feel like I don’t read through and retain enough material to make use of it. And in the blogosphere, he who hesitates is definitely lost.

Anyone with a recommendation to a speed reading program, or at least tricks to read faster and better, please do let me know.

I’m really happy with the move and glad to get more control over what I can do. I can tweak themes, add many more pages, as well as use tons of cool plugins, most of which will be behind the scenes. Don’t worry, I won’t clutter up my site. I think most of you know that I am not a fan of clogged up spaces.

I do need to give be thanks to my friend Josh for lending me the actual space on the web to put all my nonsense. He’s my go-to higher-echelon tech man and good friend to boot. With his help, this place shouldn’t run into too many outages. Though on that note, we are on some brand spanking new servers and service, so there may be occasional downtimes that are beyond either of our controls. Not to fret (or give too much hope), I am not going anywhere.

Sounds like fodder for a blog post to me!

So when I had a chance, I went a-Googlin’. Actually, first I hit up my handy-dandy dictionary dashboard widget. It took me a few tries to get the spelling right. My natural inclination was something more akin to ‘rearing’ or ‘roaring’, as in the verb ‘to rear’ like raising a child.

It turned out to be ‘raring’, the present participle of the verb ‘to rare’. The definition according to the New Oxford American Dictionary built into my Mac is thus:

raring |ˈre(ə)ri ng |
adjective [with infinitive ] informal
very enthusiastic and eager to do something : she was raring to get back to her work | I’ll be ready and raring to go.
ORIGIN 1920s: present participle of rare, dialect variant of roar or rear.

The definition matched my understanding of the phrase, ‘raring to go’. But the origin was still eluding me. What the heck did someone mean by using a verb form of rare? The origin given in the dictionary definition was leaving me short.

This is where the internet and Google can be argued to make people smarter. With a little bit of searching using the terms ‘etymology’ and ‘raring’, I found a forum discussing this very topic. In parts of Britain and Ireland, ‘rear’ is pronounced the same as ‘rare’, affecting the spelling. Now looking back on the original definition I found, things were making more sense.

So by all reason in American English, one should say ‘rearing to go’. But since the term originated out of a different dialect entirely, its spelling is duly altered.

I have always dug this sort of stuff. Etymology fascinates me, because it is history on the tips of our tongues. And while I know nothing of other languages, really, I find that English is so wonderfully full of idioms and influences and bastardizations and localizations that it is ceaselessly entertaining. It has so many synonyms available and varying definitions, my native language lives up to what I have always deemed it: best suited for law and humor.

Also, the term ‘gawk’ comes from a shortened form of ‘Goddamn, that’s a big fucking auk!’

This is a tough loss for me to take. I never knew the man, never even saw him perform live. Yet through illegally downloaded mp3 files, he touched my life.

I listened to Carlin’s wit with our often ridiculous language and culture with my friends as we went through our teen years. I recall ten solid minutes of laughing with Warren the first time we listened to Carlin’s “Airline Announcements” bit. The way he toyed with the expressions and phrases of our English language was masterful and insightful. It always had an appeal for me and my stickler ways.

I remember telling my mom about how funny this Carlin guy was, and she replied, “Oh, that was the stuff my friends and I would listen to.” My mum’s coolness factor jumped up a notch just then. It did the same when going through my parents’ old record collection and I found out she was a Beatles fan.

George Carlin was definitely one of those influences out there in the world that warped me just right. I shudder to think of what my life and the rest of the world would be like had he not been around.

There will be many obituaries and tributes commenting on the achievements of one of our history’s greatest comedians. This is my small homage to George Carlin. I will always remember the way he made my own life brighter, the tears of mirth, the endless quoting language with my friends. And I am excited to see my children discover him in my own music collection.

It is from him I learned the differences between Baseball and Football, that dogs cannot perceive time, the seven words I can’t say on television, and that ‘preheated’ is a meaningless fucking term. And best of all, I learned that my own brain droppings could someday be of value. I am most grateful for that.

I will miss you, George Carlin.

I really like the quality of the radar and mapping at Weather.com. It’s very detailed. You can pinpoint your own house and see the green radar hover over it.

What threw me, though, was seeing this line as a link on the page:

2008 hurricane season kicks off

My immediate thought was, what is this, the NFL draft? I guarantee you the first round pick will start the letter A. Perhaps I am just too much of a language nut to handle this, but it bothers me that storms that can tear entire communities to shreds are at the same linguistic level as a sporting event. If nothing else, they should at least be in disparate categories. The last thing I need to be able to conceive of is my fantasy hurricane league with a tight end F4 twister from Oklahoma State.