Month: January 2006
If I were on The Simpsons….
I have some nail clippings I’ll sell for a song…
… though I’m probably not famous enough. Anyway, when you are a celeb like William Shatner, you can sell your kidney stone to an online casino, the same one that has collected things like cheese sandwiches with the Virgin Mary. Goldenpalace.com has purchased a lot of weird stuff in the past, apparently….
Will the “I-bombs” keep falling?
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here about politics and I have a lot of other stuff to do this morning, but I couldn’t resist: is it possible that, even with a Republican congress, that the piles of scandals might lead to W.’s impeachment?
Crazy a few months ago; and yet, Arlene Specter (of all people!) was one of the first to drop the I-word in an interview on ABC’s This Week. And, as this entry from the daily kos makes clear, he isn’t the only one on the right who is at least saying there needs to be an investigation. When Republicans (albeit moderate ones) start talking impeachment….
Add into that Al Gore’s recent speech where he denounced the administration, a speech that by many accounts was mighty mighty impressive, perhaps the sort of thing that might launch a Gore in 08 campaign. The full transcript of the speech is here (and elsewhere on the ‘net). Here’s a nice passage:
The President has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap individuals on the streets of foreign cities and deliver them for imprisonment and interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes in nations that are infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for torture. Some of our traditional allies have been deeply shocked by these new, and uncharacteristic patterns on the part of Americans. The British Ambassador to Uzbekistan – one of those nations with the worst reputations for torture in its prisons – registered a complaint to his home office about the cruelty and senselessness of the new U.S. practice that he witnessed: “This material we’re getting is useless,â€? he wrote and then he continued with this – “we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful.”
Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is “yes” then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can’t he do?
The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the Executive Branch’s extravagant claims of these previously unrecognized powers: “If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution.”
The fact that our normal American safeguards have thus far failed to contain this unprecedented expansion of executive power is, itself, deeply troubling.
And to top it all off, W. et al may very well get sucked into the whole Jack Abramoff thing too!
Anyway, a couple of interesting months coming up; watch for a raised terror alert.
Restaurant Review: Yotsuba Japanese Restaurant
What and Where:
Yotsuba Japanese Restaurant | 2222 Hogback Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48105 | (734) 971-5168
Ratings (1=terrible, 5=mind-blowingly great)
Comments (as of 1/17/06)
- This review is based largely on the lunch I had there yesterday with Annette and Will, though I’ve been to Yotsuba a couple of times before, both for dinner and for lunch.
- Of course, they’ve got sushi and it’s darn good, probably the best I’ve had around Ann Arbor (though I haven’t had that much sushi around Ann Arbor, to be honest). Interestingly enough, Will loves sushi, which strikes me as odd for an 8 year-old. His favorites include the tuna roll, and also the California roll (Annette likes those, too). Yotsuba’s California rolls are a little different in that they roll the rice on the outside and there is some kind of crab salad sort of filling. Very good, though.
- But there’s a lot more than sushi. I’ve had good luck with various teriyakis (chicken, beef, salmon), the tempora (sweet potatoes are awesome fried up like this), soup and salad (which you get with a meal), etc. The best thing I’ve had there was a stewed tuna Annette and I had one night as part of a bento box we shared.
- Speaking of the bento box: that’s my general pick for lunch, largely because it’s usually a bit of a surprise. Yesterday, for example, it included three or four of these weird little red squid or octupi. They weren’t a whole lot bigger than an inch around and I’m guessing they were pickled or something, but they included the tentacles and everything. This made for much “eww”-ing from Will and even a bit from Annette. They didn’t taste like much, by the way.
- The servers are nice, but our waiter yesterday seemed a little over-worked and his English skills were a little suspect.
- Price and value-wise, it’s kind of a hard call. On the one hand, Japanese food in general is kind of expensive, and this isn’t any different. On the other hand, Yotsuba has ample portions and they include a salad and a cup of miso soup with every entree.
- They don’t bring you silverware– chopsticks. I have never seen anyone in here eating with a fork, though I assume if I asked for one, they’d bring it. But I’ve always been too embarassed to ask, so I muddle through with the chopsticks.
- It’s lovely decor– blonde wood everywhere, a sushi bar up front, a couple of different dining rooms, very clean, etc. I went to lunch there one time with someone from work who was a bit surprised by this because she had been in the place one time years before when it was a kind of skanky bar called the Red Bull or something like that. Fortunately, the walls don’t talk.
A link about penmanship (well, it's interesting to me…)
See this entry on “This Public Address” on penmanship. Now that my textbook is dead (and, given the silence of McGraw-Hill on my questions about publishing this project on the web, I have the feeling that continuing to ask them about this is futile), it’s time for me to start moving a bit on my long-term book project, which explores the history of writing technologies before the computer. This includes pens and paper, of course, so this is right up my alley.
So yeah, penmanship is kind of interesting to me.
It's funny because it's actually true?
I had thought about writing a post about the problems of academic meetings that seem to last too long and that seem to serve absolutely no purpose, but then I decided that writing about something boring would be boring too. In any event, while surfing around, I came across this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Chairman’s Dog” by Michael “obviously has to be a pseduonym” Beardsley. I think it’s fair to say that this is as much a piece of comedy writing as it is a typical CHE “First Person” piece, but while I am sure that many of the important details are made up, it does have a ring of “truthiness” to it.
Beardsley tells the story of how he, as a graduate student, dog and house-sat for a professor of his. When the professor’s husband arrives home and he is introduced to “Rob,” Beardsley realizes what he has gotten himself into: “A minute later I was shaking hands with the man who had warned me that the job market would be my undoing if I didn’t shape up and fly right and cautioned me when my grant was about to be cut off — none other than my department chairman.”
Anyway, it’s a nice piece of comedy. I thought the article was worth reading because it is a simplified (albeit not inaccurate) depiction of the relationships that often exist between graduate students and senior faculty, and also because some of this silly story rings a bit too true. I will spare the stories about dogs (though I know well some true stories of grad students who watched after faculty pets), but it did remind me of my own house-sitting experience way back when. It was about 14 years ago when I was a year or two out of my MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University. I house-sat for a professor for a year while she went off to England. Like Beardsley’s, my family too seem impressed. And I did have a few moments kind of like this:
I took to spending afternoons in the backyard, laying my books aside for sessions in the patio’s built-in Jacuzzi. At ease, I gazed over at the smaller apartment buildings where tenure-seeking assistant profs toiled obediently at their book manuscripts, and farther below at the dingy hovels where grad students, antlike in the distance, came and went. And there I was above it, the chairman of all I surveyed.
Well, kind of. There was no Jacuzzi and I wasn’t actually in school at the time. But I did live far above my means and I had lots of parties. In fact, I met my wife at one of those parties, also an academic (with a different last name, of course).
The Beer Watcher: Shopping (or, “let me tell you about my gout”)
Last weekend, after a dinner with friends, Bill (one of the previously mentioned friends) presented me and Steve B. each with four bottles of his first batch of home-made beer, an amber ale he titled “Taste the Joy.” Bill was quite proud of his beer making achievement, telling us in detail the tale of the brewing process over dinner. To be honest, I was skeptical, but when I tried one of the beers after getting home that night, I have to say I was impressed. Considering it was a first effort and such, I thought it was pretty darn good beer.
This reminded me of my on-again/off-again curiousity about home brewing. I suppose it’s something most beer drinkers have contemplated, especially after drinking a few beers. When we lived out in Oregon, there were a number of people we knew who home brewed, and every once in a while, I’ll see one of these brewing kits in a catalog or something and I’ll say to Annette “hey, I think I’ll start brewing my own beer.” To which she generally responds “yeah, whatever.”
Generally, I guess I would say that I am torn about the whole idea of home brewing. On the one hand, it seems like it might be a kind of fun hobby, and one where you get to enjoy the labor involved more than, for example, collecting snow globes. On the other hand, it seems like it might be kind of a pain in the ass, especially balanced against the ease of just going to the store and buying it from the pros. On the one hand, it is a fairly cheap hobby since you can get the fixings to make a batch of beer (five gallons, which is a shitload of beer) for about $25-30. On the other hand, it is not really cheap enough since you have to spend $80 or so on the equipment (which you can reuse, of course) and it involves several strategic hours spread over time.
Anyway, I wasn’t in the mood to go spend $100+ on beer making equipment and fixings only to decide that the whole thing wasn’t worth it– and, besides that, my wife/head accountant wasn’t crazy about this idea either. So Bill generously offered/was convinced to allow me to observe the process of making the next batch. Brewing-by-proxy. Beer watching.
According to Bill, home brewing is a four part process, five if you count drinking: shopping for the beer fixings, brewing part 1, brewing part 2, and bottling. Had we planned better, we probably could have combined shopping and brewing part 1, but the rest of the steps require two to three weeks of waiting. In any event, we started with the shopping yesterday.
Bill’s beer supply store is “Things Beer,” which strikes me as a gramatically incorrect or problematic name– shouldn’t it be “All Things Beer?” Anyway, it is in the same warehouse complex as the Michigan Brewing Company (we’ll get to that in a moment), both of which were located on the outskirts of Webberville “middle of no where”, Michigan. It’s right off the Interstate, disturbingly within walking distance of a truck stop.
The store was basically three rooms of, well, things beer. There were lots of glasses, posters, lights, and other beer drinking paraphernalia, but most of the store was devoted to the stuff you need to actually make beer: all the tubes and tubs and hoses and pots and stuff, but mostly bags of different grains, and hops, different kinds of malt, refridgerators of different brewing yeasts, flavorings and extracts you might add to beer if you’re inclined, etc. Things Beer conveniently has pre-made recipes for different kinds beers– they measure stuff, give you caps, the whole nine yards– which is definitely a plus for beer novices like Bill and mere watchers like me. We decided on a mix that is called something like “Trout Stream IPA,” which, according to the guy waiting on us, is supposed to kind of like Bell’s Two Hearted Ale.
We learned much more from our overly friendly and chatty home brew salesman. He and Bill exchanged words about some home brewing book, and our new found friend told us again what a fine choice we had made in our pre-made recipe. Alas, our beer master was no longer able to drink much beer himself. “My wife and I are on one of those low-carb diets. I’ve lost a lot of weight, but I can’t drink beer because the sugars in beer go right to the gut. There’s a reason they call it a beer gut. So I can only drink one beer a week. Jeesh, it’s killing me.”
“Too bad you don’t make wine,” I said.
“I do make wine,” the beer/wine master replied. “But I can’t drink too much of that. Makes my gout act up.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, and my gout has been acting up a lot since the holidays. I guess I drank just a bit too much, had a little too much fun. Usually my gout only acts up for a day or so but it’s been going on for a couple weeks now. I guess that’s what happens when you have too much fun.”
In any event, after a little too much “sharing,” Bill and I went over to the brew-pub portion of the Michigan Brewing Company next door to and associated with Things Beer. It isn’t really much of a “brew pub,” at least not in the way that I think of a brew pub, places like Grizzly Peak, which is really pretty nice restaurant that happen to make and sell beer. No, this was a brewery that happened to have a small, hole-in-the-wall styled bar connected to it. There was a meager menu (we both had the Reuben– good and straight-forward food) and a wide selection of Michigan Brewing Co. beers. I had an IPA and I believe the Porter (both of which were really good), and Bill started with some kind of desert beer or something that tasted like some kind of syrup. Icky, IMO. But he followed it up with a “real beer,” and all was well.
So, next week, we brew. By the way, Bill– I don’t have that big pot after all. Let me know if you want me to hunt one down or not.
Paving the way for all kinds of scary sci-fi movies
I don’t really have the time to read this closely right now, but there’s a cool interview with Ray Kurzweil on the ACM Ubiquity web site. He’s talking about his book The Singularity is Near. Here’s a quote from the interview:
There are two key aspects to the concept of singularity — the hardware and software sides of emulating human intelligence. We’ll have sufficient hardware to recreate human intelligence pretty soon. We’ll have it in a supercomputer by 2010. A thousand dollars of computation will equal the 10,000 trillion calculations per second that I estimate is necessary to emulate the human brain by 2020. The software side will take a little longer. In order to achieve the algorithms of human intelligence, we need to actually reverse-engineer the human brain, understand its principles of operation. And there again, not surprisingly, we see exponential growth where we are doubling the spatial resolution of brain scanning every year, and doubling the information that we’re gathering about the brain every year. We’re showing that we can turn this data into working models and simulations. There’s also two dozen regions of the brain, that we have modeled and simulated, including the cerebellum — which is where we do our skill formation and which compromises more than half the neurons in the brain. There’s an effective simulation of that.
And let the stories of humans being enslaved by machines begin….
The Food (W)Hole goes Dog Style; what’s next, Milwaukee’s Beast?!
I was in Whole Foods the other day, and there, right up front, I saw this display of Old Style beer as you come into the store, just in front of the pristine produce section and right next to some fancy Rick Bayless chips. I immediately snickered and I had to take this picture with my cell phone.
Ah, memories. Back in the day in Iowa, every run-0f-the-mill bar worth its salt had Old Style (aka Dog Style) on tap. In fact, you were much more likely to find it than Budweiser or Miller when I was in college 20 years ago. It was everywhere and it was cheap-ass beer, “beer” just a half-notch above “beer” like Milwaukee’s Best (“The Beast”) and Meister Brau (“Mr. Beer”). When we were broke college kids who wanted beer, we used to pool our cans and bottles so we could cash them in (a nickel apiece in Iowa) and buy a six-pack of crappy near-beer beer like Dog Style.
And now it’s on sale at Whole Foods. Actually, I had seen it at Whole Foods before (along with Pabst, believe it or not). But I had never seen it featured quite so promienently. This is usually a spot of the store where they try to sell fancy wines and cheeses, or at least reasonable beer. So, what is the Food (W)hole thinking here? Annette suggested that perhaps it was an effort to tap into some sort of nostalgia; I think that maybe the person who decides on the displays has a sense of humor and/or a sense of the kitch. Or maybe they just have a whole bunch of this they have to get rid of.
Of course, $9.99 for 18 is a pretty good deal.