field recordings: wandering ear & freesound

There are people who can listen to music while they work.

I am not one of those people.

I am, however, someone who enjoys listening while I work - just not to music, or at least not music in the traditional sense. Specifically, I like listening to field recordings.

Here are two great sources of field recordings you can access today - if you know of others, let me know.

Visit The Wandering Ear and you'll find "a net.label dedicated to releasing field recordings from around the world. . .all available for free download in 192kpbs MP3 format." The list of their first seven releases can be found here.

Visit The Freesound Project for a searchable database of sounds, including wonderful recordings of my favorite "work sounds": rain storms and nightingales. Note - free registration is required to download any sounds. One neat function they offer is the ability to play and loop multiple sounds from the same screen, so you can enjoy the effect of combining sounds on the fly to see what happens.

Now get back to work.

london tube: a useful announcement

boomp3.com


Any of you who have spent time in the London Tube will recognize her voice - she's the lady you hear making announcements. Ha.

research: the history of matchboxes

Ben Jones writes:

As part of my Typography and Graphic Communication degree course I was required to write a 20,000 word dissertation. The subject I chose to write about was the history and evolution of the matchbox cover/label from its beginnings in 1827 to the present day.

You can access Ben's terrific paper here.  Of special interest are the first two sections of the paper covering the history of the match industry and matchbox production.

bob hope: on politics

(source: Eamon Fitzgerald's Rainy Day)

piatus: patron saint of pie

Thank you for your emails regarding my use of the term "piatus" from Thanksgiving eve.   For those of you who missed it, here is the definition:

Piatus (pie-AY-tus) n.

A made-up word combining "pie" and "hiatus" that describes the period of time occurring between the end of the main Thanksgiving meal and the serving of pie.   

Exampli gratia: "I'm going to lay down on the floor and be fat during the piatus, how about you join me."

Thanks are due to one enterprising ack/nak reader for informing me of the two notable historical figures named Piatus:

1. Piatus of Mons, 19th century French theologian, Capuchin and early zine publisher.

2. Saint Piatus of Tournai, 3rd century Belgian, evangelist and martyr, he scores high points for suffering one of the nastier martyrdoms on record and for having assorted remains parceled out as relics, most notably an especially well-preserved leg bone at Chartres. 

I wonder what it would take to have Saint Piatus named the patron saint of pie.  There must be an application form somewhere.   Honest, I think he'd be happy about it.  Pie brings happiness and joy to everyone, and is a whole lot more fun than having the top of your head cut off and handed to you (see picture above).

schrodinger: warning sign

(source)

thanksgiving: the menu of doom

One of our family stories speaks of my sainted grandfather Buster at his in-laws for Thanksgiving dinner in the early 20th century. The table was literally groaning under the weight of uncounted dishes, the story goes, when Buster reportedly said, "no stewed tomatoes?" My great grandmother Nellie allegedly went and opened a can of stewed tomatoes for her son-in-law. Family apocrypha does not report what she had to say.

So every year, someone in my family gets to ask for the stewed tomatoes.

Cooking for a big family is an exercise in excess. Here in the Great Middle of America, we don't have a lot of family around so we invite neighbors to simulate the "cooking for a big family" experience. Fact is, we don't know how to scale down.

This year I've made one of my favorite dishes: Magie Mahoney's Turnips


6 lbs (2 big ones) turnips, peeled and uniformly cubed
1 large onion, diced
1/4 lb butter (1 stick)
1/2 lb bacon, chopped
1/4 cup table cream (a.k.a. heavy cream)
1/4 cup maple syrup
salt
fresh ground pepper
1 garlic clove, crushed and chopped
1/2 tablespoon sugar
1 slice bacon, for the top

1. Heat oven to 300 degrees.
2. Place turnips in stock pot, cover with water and bring to a boil, adding the sugar once it comes to a boil.
3. Saute onions in 2 Tablespoons butter till translucent.
4. In another pan saute bacon till crisp.
5. Using a ricer, rice turnips into another pot. Or just mash them. Your call.
6. Add onions, bacon, rest of butter, cream, maple syrup, garlic, salt and pepper.
7. Stir to combine.
8. Put in a casserole dish with 2-4 strips of uncooked bacon across the top.
9. Bake for 1 hour - the dish is done when the bacon is crisped

We're doing my wife's family stuffing recipe (sausage), brussels sprouts in brown butter, traditional mashed praties, whole cranberry sauce.

The bird was brined for a day in some evil-looking concoction, then stuffed with a cheesecloth bag filled with stuffing (that had been microwaved for a minute prior to stuffing it in the bird) and laid on a baking pan on top of some carrots, parsnips, onions and celery. 30 minutes at 400 then 3 hours or so at 350. I've already made my sacrifices to the dark gods of turkey cooking that it comes out OK.

We took the plunge and made pies: apple and lemon mirangue.

More to follow. Happy Thanksgiving.

UPDATE 1 - It's halftime. Also known as "piatus", the hiatus between "dinner" and "pie". Dishes have been cleaned, coffee is being made, kids are off somewhere watching a movie. And I'm enjoying a few scant minutes of quiet. Stay tuned.

list: last 10 bookmarks

Clear Creek Williams Pear Brandy (Eau-de-Vie) - unadulterated essence of pear in a bottle. Most eaux-de-vie are two steps short of paint thinner; this stuff is heavenly. Enjoy wisely.

Original Iron Chef episodes at DivX Stage6 - these are the Food Network dubbed episodes, as opposed to the "current" Iron Chef America shows. I recommend Natto Battle featuring Iron Chef Michiba-sensei vs Kuniyuki Ishikawa.

Mister Nice Hands - next time you have a dinner party, turn up the volume on your computer, bring up this website, maximize the screen, and walk away. Sooner or later hilarity will ensue. Almost as much fun as filling up your medicine cabinet with marbles.

Dupont Cider - the traditional way to enjoy Norman cider is in a ceramic cup roughly the same shape as a teacup but larger. The nice people from Etienne Dupont are well-known for their calvados, but they also make a terrific traditional country-style cider. If you are so inclined you can buy so-called "traditional" cider mugs here.

Fortune for Mac OS X - there are a few distributions of fortune for the Mac OS X. This one includes strfile, which you'll need if you want to make your own quote files. Oh, and you'll also have to save text files in something other than Mac or DOS format - Text Wrangler works like a charm for me. And you'll want to load GeekTool 2.1.2 so you can display a fortune every 60 seconds on your screen background. When the time comes to move files around on your machine, expose your hidden folders. Open Terminal and enter:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

When it's time to re-hide all of your hidden folders, enter the first line with the argument FALSE, then type killall Finder again.

Valley Games Titan - the old Avalon Hill version of Titan is not just hard to find - when you do find it you can expect to shell out $100 or more for a good copy. Somehow I doubt the folks at Valley Games will manage to reproduce Dave "Wormy" Trampier's cool art.

The Freesound Project - because sometimes you just need a really nice copy of the Wilhelm Scream (registration required) for your next ringtone.

Kyotaku - where you can "find out all you always wanted to know about the kyotaku or long shakuhachi", groove on a cool picture of Koku Nishimura, and learn about the artist Tilopa.

Madame Patate - Klimperei's C. Petchanatz played in concert with her in Lyon back in October; it's magical. If you've never heard of Klimperei, go find Tout Seul Sur la Plage en Hiver. Or just enjoy the first track on the album, Les pinces à linge, here. Two especially interesting tracks on this album are Les Rubans (track 21) and La Ronde Des Coccinelles (track 22).

Kung Fu Cinema - Shaw Brothers FTW.

mu: the paper that explains everything. . .

. . . opens with the following abstract:

All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection. A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2 and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2) x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics of these 1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are described by the curvature and action over a four dimensional base manifold.

I much prefer his introduction:

We exist in a universe described by mathematics. But which math? Although it is interesting to consider that the universe may be the physical instantiation of all mathematics, there is a classic principle for restricting the possibilities: The mathematics of the universe should be beautiful. A successful description of nature should be a concise, elegant, unified mathematical structure consistent with experience.

When you are ready to marvel one man's take on the beautiful mathematics of creation, go read the full paper. Or perhaps you might enjoy reading about the multi-dimensional object that inspired it first, your call.

Or perhaps you might wish to read about the so-called "surfer dude" who wrote this gangbuster paper.

In any event, bring booze. It's a long, complicated ride. When you're done, you'll appreciate (as one commentator in the above article did) that 'the universe (E8) is a doily. Does this theory explain where the missing 98% of the universe is hiding?'

The answer is, of course, mu.

UPDATE - Ready for some fun? Read an article by an angry Czech in which he opens an n-dimensional can of whoop-ass hatin' on our (newly) beloved Surfer Dude^TM and other untermenschen.

An example:

The author is not constrained by any old "conventions" and simply adds Grassmann fields together with ordinary numbers i.e. bosons with fermions, one-forms with spinors and scalars. He is just so skillful that he can add up not only apples and oranges but also fields of all kinds you could ever think of. Every high school senior excited about physics should be able to see that the paper is just pure junk. I understood these things when I was 14.

Boom! Take that, Surfer Dude!

Of course, I am unequipped to assess either the quality of the original paper or the rebuttal cited above.  So I asked my best friend, a physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, who definitely is.  

"So, what do you think of this paper?" 

"It calls out specific particles that we can go look for, and it's generating interest among non-scientists."

Then he started talking about guys named Heisenberg and Planck and dark energy, at which point the barking in my head started and I just smiled. 

I can confirm that there is an awful lot of interest on this topic.  Even my own humble article on the topic has been heavily viewed.  And a scan of the comments below will also show a note referencing a website dedicated to promoting the Lisi paper. 

Inevitably we'll all be looking for the number 42 to show up; if it does, we'll need to check to see if Douglas Adams is rotating rapidly on his horizontal axis.

And a confession - after originally coming out as a non-fan of Luboš Motl, I have to admit I've gained a new respect for a) the blistering rate at which he posts and b) the eclectic nature of his writing.

victory: iron chef michael symon

I've been watching Iron Chef for 10 years, dating back to the days before it was picked up (and dubbed) by The Food Network. In its first incarnation, it was a Pure Good.

Iron Chef America didn't start out quite as well - but it has slowly gathered steam, borrowing a bit of the camp that made the dubbed Iron Chef so much fun and combining it with some genuinely good cooking and drama.

Admit it, too - you have to love the goofy expressions 'the Chairman' brings to the secret ingredient reveal each week.

So it was with some curiosity that we began to watch "The Next Iron Chef" show back in September, mostly because a chef I admire was part of the show.

Cleveland's own Michael Symon, chef at Lola and Lolita (read the Zagat review), is a mensch. His food is as distinctive and ebullient as he is; if you caught a sight of him on the No Reservations show, you've heard his maniacal laugh, seen his tattoos, and watched jaded Tony Bourdain gush over his food. Read this interview with him and you'll get a feel for what it is that makes him tick.

When 'the Chairman' revealed Symon's portrait on the finale last night, I hooted and did a little dance. Even my wife, a fan of pretty-boy John Besh, was forced to admit that on that night, for those five dishes, Symon showed what it took to win.

Iron Chef is about personalities and alchemy; you expect your Iron Chefs to be a little bigger than life. Michael Symon will do very, very well.

Sometimes the good guy does win.

Now I want to see Michiba sensei float in for some Rosanjin school cooking, just for contrast.

Omedeto, Michael-san!

jam: william and timmy

There are some things that just go well together.

Like, say, William Shatner and Timmy from South Park.

boomp3.com

(The slight frisson of echo at the very end is a homage to Shatner's performance in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan when he looks up and hollers... Khan. Yes, I am that much of a geek.)

faq: inn-fighting

Wizards of the Coast recently shipped a clever little beer & pretzel game called Inn-Fighting. It's about. . . people who fight in bars.

References: Boardgame Geek Review, Funagain Games

Inn-Fighting features a lot of dice rolling, token swapping, card reading, and unfortunately, rule puzzling. For alas, the rules for this game qualify as some of the most obfuscatory and incomplete that I've read in a long time. And I read a lot of rules.

As I work to puzzle out some of the finer points of how it works, I thought I'd put a FAQ together based on questions and answers I've discovered out there on the Intrawebs.

I'll be happy to add to this if anyone is interested. For now, it's here for my convenience and that of my "gaming friends". You know who you are.


Inn-Fighting Q&A
Answers care of WotC Staffers (source)

re: Rulebook page 18
Heading: Hit Points and Victory Points
Sub-Headings: Damage and VP, Bystander Knockout & Adventurer Knockout

Q1. Does all damage that you do to opponent's Bystanders go into your Victory Point pile? Does all damage done by Bystanders go into your Victory Point pile?

A1: You do gain Victory Points directly from Hit Points when damaging Bystanders. In fact, all damage that your characters (Adventurers and Bystanders alike) do to other characters (Adventurers and Bystanders) goes into your Victory Points pile.


Q2. What if you only damaged a Bystander but did not knock the Bystander out, where do those
Hit Points go?

A2. You gain the HP in VP even if you do not knock out the Bystander.


Q3. If you knock out an Adventurer, but the knocked out Adventurer's player does not have enough Victory Points to pay the Knockout Bonus listed on the character's card, does the player scoring the knockout supplement the difference from the bank or just get what is available, possibly nothing?

A3. If your Adventurer is knocked out and you do not have enough VP to pay the knockout bonus, you pay as much as you can, possibly zero.

re: Xxyzzt Card Questions

Adventurer Card for Xxyzzt, Beholder Barfly
Power attack: Eye Ray Extravaganza
(3 or 5 damage. High: Make another identical attack against any other target.)

Q4. Does Xxyzzt's player continue making Power attacks as long as he continues to roll High damage or does he only get one extra Power attack each turn?

A4. The Eye Ray will continue to attack as long as high results are rolled. (comment - wow)


Q5. Where the card says any other target, does this mean of any player or merely any character of the initial valid target (namely the player with the most Victory Points)?

A5. The secondary Eye Ray attacks can be directed any any target, not just the one with the highest VPs.


Q6. Does identical attack mean that each time Xxyzzt's player rolls his extra Power attack he includes the same bonus from dice showing the Power attack symbol?

A6. These secondary attacks will use the same bonus as the first.


re: Rulebook page 17
Sub-heading: Ale Action

Q7. If your Adventurer is at full Hit Points and you roll an Ale action can you take one?

Q8. If so, do you just remove Victory Points from the player with the most in an amount equal to the number of dice showing Ale and put them in the bank?

A7,8. You can take an Ale action at full hit points, you opponent still loses VP equal to the number of mugs showing, but you do not gain any hit points.


Q9. If so, and you are the player with the most Victory Points and your adventurer is unhurt can you take the Ale action to prevent the next player from getting a certain Ale action?

A9. If you are the player with the highest VPs when an ale action come up, you can take it, but any VP's not used to heal you will go to the bank.


re: Rulebook page 14
Power attack options

Q10. If you are the player with the most Victory Points can you ever make a Power attack?

Q11. If so, is it against the opponent with the most Victory Points?

A10,11. Since you cannot attack yourself, you can still make a power attack against the opponent with the next highest VP total, choosing in case of ties.


Question re: Red Die

Q: I roll the dice to attack and say I get 4 punches and 1 mug on the gold dice and 1 luck roll on the red dice. I have no bystanders to worry about as the opponent to my left has none, and I roll above my skill doing 4 points of damage to the Adventurer. So what happens with the red die? I think the defense roll action has me a bit stymied, in respect for what's kept for passing the dice.

A: You always roll the red die for defense, no matter what it's showing.


Question on Damage from Defense Action

Q: When you cause damage from your defense action (like the wizards fireball or the barkeeps crossbow) do you get those lost HP as VP? Or do they simply go back to the bank?

A: When you damage an opponent's Adventurer, remove that many Hit Point tokens from the character and place them in your Victory Point pile."

KNOWN TYPOS

The action card Second Swing has a typo. It shouldn’t be talking about re-rolling the Brawl Dice you used for the attack; it should say “Reroll the d20 you used to make the attack.” In other words, you play Second Swing when you’ve rolled a 1 on your attack roll, or rolled low damage when what you need is to roll high. (source [requires registration])

am sans: a digital version of intertype vogue

In a comment to my request for news of a digital version of Intertype Vogue, Bill has graciously pointed me to Volker Busse's Am Sans, available free in both Windows and Mac formats from dafont.com (link).

Bill writes:

Yea! After searching for Vogue for several years, I happened upon “Am Sans” at daFont yesterday. Volker Busse digitized the font (using a few characters from Futura). I’m really pleased since I was beginning to think this font had been lost forever. Volker’s font used a few of the special no. 2 characters and, unfortunately, a Futura question mark. I’m really pleased to find this gem!

On closer inspection, Volker did do a really fine job overall. My one serious "beef" is that he elected to go with the more conventional slanted descender 'Q' as opposed to the super-distinctive Vogue 'Q' with the vertical descender.


He's also opted to go with a different 'B' that is less symmetrical than its Vogue equivalent and a slightly less angular curve on the 'g' descender than Vogue; his 'J' and 'e' are also a bit off from Vogue. I'm sure the longer I look the more of these nits I'll see, but in general, it's a very good facsimile of the Vogue I've come to love.

When I get some stick time (literally) composing some text and comparing it to the results I get from Adobe Futura, I'll let you know. In the meantime, visit Dafont.com and get yourself a copy today.

Another sample for you traditionalists:

recipe: gratin savoyard UPDATED

(Update - we tried this recipe a little differently, read about the tweaks here)

With the turning of the seasons there is nothing quite so satisfying as a nice gratin. There are a lot of recipes out there but this one worked like a charm for me. What makes it different from the other gratin savoyard recipes you'll find on the intrawebs?

1. It is not written in French (and is generally more descriptive)
2. It does not call for crème fraîche
3. It is optimized for 4 people, not 6.
4. It calls for onion - not a lot, but some. If you object to onions, leave them out.

Gratin Savoyard

(Note - this is a slight riff on the Savoie classic. Take the cheese out and you get a gratin dauphinois, whaddyaknow.)

Serves 4 - Total time 70 minutes in the oven with 5-10 minutes rest time

Ingredients:

Eight (8) Yukon Gold potatoes, each one a little smaller than your fist
One (1) medium yellow onion
1/3 pound Comté cheese (Gruyere works too)
A small carton (half pint) of heavy cream
1 cup of milk (2% is OK)
1 egg
Salt and pepper
2 garlic cloves
Butter (salted or unsalted, doesn't matter)
An 8"x13" pyrex baking dish or equivalent

Prep Time:

0. Pre-heat your oven to 390F with a rack right smack in the middle of the oven.
1. Butter the pyrex baking dish well - don't be shy and rub that stick all over the place.
2. Peel the potatoes and cut them into thin slices about 1/8" (an eighth of an inch) thick and drop them into some water. The goal is to rinse as much starch off as possible.
3. Slice the onion into very thin rounds.
4. Grate the cheese onto a flat surface - make sure you don't compress the cheese together after you've grated it, because that will make it difficult to spread it later.
5. Split the garlic cloves and carve out any bitter greens from the inside; mince finely and distribute evenly on the bottom of the pyrex dish.
6. Dry the potato slices.

Show time:

7. Create a layer of potato in the pyrex dish - no overlapping.
8. Sprinkle the potato layer with salt and ground pepper (don't be shy).
9. Splash with some heavy cream - think "dollops" and make sure they're distributed evenly. Save a few tablespoons of cream for later.
10. Sprinkle some cheese, not too thickly, over the entire layer.
11. Spread a few circles of onion, not as densely as the potatoes, but evenly across the surface of the layer.
12. Repeat steps 7-11 until you've run out of potatoes. You should be able to do about four layers, ending with the cheese.
13. Pour the cup of milk in gently. No sense making more of a mess.

Cook time:

14. Bake for 55 minutes (really).
15. Remove from oven.
16. Beat the egg with what's left of the heavy cream, then pour evenly over the still-bubbling surface of the potatoes.
17. Return to oven and cook for another 15 minutes or until your resolve gives out.
18. Remove from oven and let sit for 5-10 minutes.

Eat time:

19. Serve with salad and vinaigrette, and a sturdy Rhone wine. This is a nice dish to serve "family style" right at the table, because it looks so terrific out of the oven. That and you and your guests will want to pick at what's left in the dish at the end of the meal as you all make happy noises.

Notes:

I was too light on the salt between each layer - my recommendation to not be shy came from this.

When you put the gratin in the oven you may worry that the third and fourth layers are not covered with liquid. Don't worry. Everything settles during cooking, and none of the gratin was dry when I served it.

If you like onions, add more. If you don't like onions, don't add any. Funny how that works out.

Let me know what you think.