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The kinds of sentences worth reading before morning coffee
"Alfege is an unusual saint, in that he wasn't really martyred for his religion. As Archbishop of Canterbury he was captured in 1011 by the marauding Danes, and carried off to Greenwich, where they demanded a ransom for him. Alfege refused to allow any ransom to be paid, at which the furious Danes pelted him to death with ox bones. Thorkell the Tall, the one Dane who took pity on him, got an axe in the head for his pains."
Humphreys, R., (2003) London, 5th ed., p. 381.
Posted by David Sloo
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When the turkeys and the llamas got together
on that very first Thanksgiving, they exchanged cutlery. They sang rousing songs over a bowl of potato-and-maize punch. And they surely ate a roast long pig, stuffed with almonds, olives, and horseshoes.
Posted by David Sloo
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sambar
I admit to an undue affection for sambar . I had sambar for breakfast three times last week, since we had leftovers from a carry-out dinner. One day, I stretched the sambar by stirring in some bitter gourd curry. (It sounds like a ridiculous amalgam of flavors, but I wasn't making it for anyone else, so I only had my palate to please, and I did.)
It was only today that I learned that a principal element in sambar is ground roasted coriander seeds. The body of sambar comprises ground lentils and ground coriander seeds -- no wonder it has such a rich, slightly orangey flavor.
The best sambar I've had locally is from Dosa Place , a small family chain of restaurants in the South Bay. Dosa Place's sambar involves lots of drumstick, which is part of its goodness. This drumsticky, non-mushy-vegetable sambar will lend additional weight in my campaign to demonstrate that small chains of restaurants are worthy of consideration. I am convinced that when a successful restaurateur makes good and decides to open a second restaurant -- whether the theme is the same or a variation on the first -- the patrons of the second are more likely to enjoy their food than at a randomly chosen, independently owned restaurant. Towit hereabouts: Dosa Place, Taqueria El Grullense, Spice Hut, the cluster Tomi Sushi / Hana. Liked Po when you were in Manhattan in the 90s? You might like Otto now.
Posted by David Sloo
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You see what you eat
I was talking this morning to an essayist who writes on Buddhism. In an all-too-usual burst of mindless smalltalk, I commented on his clothes:
"That's a striking salmon shirt you're wearing."
"Salmon? I'm not sure. I'm not very good at colors. I thought that it might be peach."
I looked at the shirt and said it didn't look peach to me. To my eye, there just was not enough yellow; too much of the light pink that a salmon fillet gets as it poaches. Then I realized that his hesitation was natural, since he is a vegetarian.
This kind of linguistic deficit must be rampant. Besides salmon, unfamiliar to vegetarians are peacock, teal, purple, and sepia. No blood-red sunsets, faces the color of bile, or puce bed-linens. The poor vegans have it worse: they live in a world without eggshell, cream, or milky white.
Can teetotalers never enjoy a gin-clear pool or an afternoon dappled in chartreuse? Do tree-huggers eschew mahogany and charcoal?
Fortunately, most color names are accessible to all -- plants like madder, periwinkle (it's the flower, not the snail), lemon and orange, goldenrod, pea green, and violet; or earths like ocher, steel, burnt umber, and raw sienna. Then there are the colors of grand things: cerulean, aqua, and ultramarine. And a few colors whose names refer back only to themselves: blue and yellow and green.
I wondered, finally, what people had in mind when they looked at the shade of the Crayola crayon called flesh. We had these when I was young. I assumed it was the color of raw meat -- though looking at it now, if it was raw meat it must have been veal. Crayola probably didn't expect first-graders to spend a lot of time drawing pictures of raw cuts of veal.
In the early 1960s, Crayola stopped labeling these crayons flesh. The story that I've heard, and it sounds true, is that people were thinking of the catachresis where people say "you can certainly see a lot of flesh" about a scanty garment or a titillating movie. Of course, they mean that you can see a lot of skin. And the natural conclusion, if you think flesh and skin are the same thing, was to ask Crayola, "Well, whose flesh?" meaning, of course "Whose skin? Doesn't look like my skin!"
Crayola did the very sensible thing and avoided mincing words. They renamed the crayon peach.
Maybe it should have been salmon.
(Attribution: I copied the historical crayon picture from Nathan Gibbs's on-line collection.)
Posted by David Sloo
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Why were the 1970s so very, very unappealing?
Below is a part of the spectacular fountain in front of Seattle's relatively recent city hall. The building holds its own with the fountain - lots of glass, visible but understated structural steel, and a few swoops. It wouldn't be a building of this decade without a swoop.
But it brings to mind the simply awful structures of my childhood. How could the entire 1960s and 1970s go by and leave us with unworkable monstrosity after brutalist affront? Can you think of a single building in the U.S. from the period that you'd like to work in? It took showpieces like I.M. Pei's National Gallery wing before the world had actually recovered any sense of human aesthetics.
But what actually happened? Were the Greatest Generation playing some kind of cruel experiment so that their children had something mind-bogglingly bad to react against, as they did with Ronald Reagan? And why didn't crowds take up pitchforks and muskets when Boston's Government Center was perpetrated upon them?
Thankfully, the children of Felix's day will see this period gradually fade into the crumbling urban fabric. And meanwhile we get good new things even in projects approved by bureaucrats, like Seattle's city hall and San Francisco's federal building.
Posted by David Sloo
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Lola in October
When Felix and I were visiting Central Park earlier this fall, we watched a red-tailed hawk for a little bit. It turns out that she has a name, Lola. She and another hawk, called Pale Male (not much to his embarrassment, I'm sure -- after all, he's a hawk), are famous residents of the park.
Later in the day, we found no fewer than 3 children's books about Pale Male in a very good bookstore on 6 Av.
Posted by David Sloo
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What shape should a dumpling be?
This kind of fried dumpling, in the pot sticker genus in the non-raised family, is among the most popular in Taipei. These happened to be particularly good - I looked for a long line in the student-filled night market in Shida.
I think that in this case, the shape is not critical. As long as the dumpling is relatively even so that the insides cook evenly, these steamed-then-fried dumplings work well. These were long enough to take 3 dainty bites each. (No explosive soup inside, like in a the eastern Chinese specialty 小笼馒头, called xiaolongbao in English. Soup insides don't conduce dantiness.)
Posted by David Sloo
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Taiwan slide shows
Here are three collections of pictures from Taiwan: signs, fountains
and waterfalls, and scooter names.
The scooter names I collected during one half-hour walk along and
around Nanjing East Rd, a thoroughfare that is having its stuffing
removed so that the city can install another east-west metro line, the
Songshan line. Taipei has a lot of scooters and a surprising number of
them have cheery slogans for names.
Posted by David Sloo
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Free at last
I spent the last presidential election among friends in Florence, getting more and more morose as it became clear that American voters had been swooed into re-electing a sanctimonious brute. It was a tearful night -- and the warmonger's regime went on to trash my retirement account, make foreign visitors tentative to visit my beautiful country, and send back less than 90 cents for every dollar that we in California dispatched to Washington. Was George W. Bush a worse president than James Buchanan? That's about all there is left to debate.
I'm once again overseas -- this time in Taiwan, where the knowledge of genuine autocracy is both palpable and powerful. Back at home, there is more than spilled milk to clean up. But the world is sighing in relief.
Free at last.
Posted by David Sloo
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