How is it that we can so easily and frequently become furious with the people we are most certain would never intentionally do anything to hurt us, but we bend over backwards to ingraciate ourselves with total strangers?
Monthly Archive for May, 2004
While snack-hunting earlier tonight, the jar of salsa called out to me from the fridge, “Erik, you must make tortilla chips so you can drink down my spicy goodness on a toasty crisp chip!” Being 1:00am, I was hungry and slightly delirious, and no match for the salsa’s charms. “Tonight, salsa, we quest for the perfect tortilla chip.”
You see, I have been working off and on for six months to perfect my tortilla and tortilla chip recipes. There is nothing like a hot fresh tortilla or a fresh, toastly and delicious tortilla chip. Yet the recipe for the tortilla is a paradox: seemingly simple in its composition and preparation, yet maddeningly elusive in its proper execution.
The basic recipe for a corn torilla is one cup of corn meal or corn flour for every 2/3 of a cup of water. You form the dough, and let it sit for a half an hour. Then roll the dough into one-inch balls and (preferably with a tortilla press) flatten them into 6-8″ tortillas. Cook them on one side for about 30 seconds on a griddle on medium-low heat, then flip them onto a medium-high griddle and cook for another 20-25 seconds. Store them in a folded kitchen towel to keep them warm and steamy. And tortilla chips, it follows, are just deep fried bits of tortillas. What could be simpler?
Well, a lot, as it turns out. In a batch of about 30 chips tonight (about 8 tortillas,) perhaps three were truly excellent. The rest were too soggy, to brown, to hard or too tough. Now I’m not saying they weren’t edible–even delicious. And as tortillas, they were excellent. But they just weren’t up to the standard of excellence homemade tortilla chips ought to live up to.
So how do we meet that standard? Here are a few rough guidelines:
- I find using half cornmeal, half cooked corn flour works better than either one alone. You get a workable dough that has some texture to it.
- For tortilla chips, you must have *extremely* uniformly thin tortillas. If they are too thick, they just won’t crisp. If they are too thin, they will fall apart before you can get them onto the griddle. The margin of error here is extremely small.
- Practically the only way to get tortillas just the right thickness is a tortilla press. That said, I’ve found you can get close using a big heavy cutting board as a press.
- You really need to flatten the tortilla between sheets of plastic to have any hope of getting them onto the griddle.
- You really do want to cook the second side hotter than the first. You can do this either with two griddles/skillets or with one griddle spanning two burners. This gives the first side a little more time to cook before it starts to toast, and allows the second side to toast before the whole thing dries out.
Like I said–I got several excellent chips out of this batch, so I’m getting close. But I still have a ways to go. Hopefully I will have it down by August, so we can have some great mexican dinner parties in Bloomington!
I just want to say that UNIX is beautiful. This probably looks like a geek entry, and every non-geek who reads this weblog is probably thinking “oh well, this is just a geek entry. I better get back to work”, but THIS IS NOT A GEEK ENTRY.
See, UNIX is beatiful because it means never doing repetitive tasks on your computer. Do you want to erase all of the emails on your computer from people at the job you just quit? Do you want to delete all of the duplicate photos from your computer? Do you want to do something that requires clicking, scrolling, clicking, scrolling, clicking, scrolling until your hand is numb? There is no need with UNIX, you simply type a fun command, like:
find . -iname “*.cs” | xargs grep -ch ‘[A-Za-z]‘ | awk “{sum += \$1} END {print sum }”
Of course, that’s gibberish to you, and this is why I study human computer interaction. I am making it my goal to liberate you from click-scroll-click-scroll-click-scroll without forcing you to understand klingon. I’m Erik Pukinskis, and that’s my promise.
So a week ago I finished my job at the library and rode the bus down to Penn State to help Niamh pack up her apartment. Now she is in Connecticut (more or less) which is totally wierd. And awesome, though I’m not really sure how much I’ll get to see of her.
There’s a possibility I might get some more work at the library doing web development, which would be an excellent way to make some more money over the summer, provided the price is right. And my work with the Daily Jolt is coming along reasonably. The last month has been kind of slow and difficult for me, mostly because of working at the library, but also because we didn’t really plan very well for the project I am working on now. We just sort of jumped in, and as a result we’ve had to make a lot of changes late in the game, which is no fun. Recently things have been improving though, and I’m starting to feel better about the project, so: yay.
I am currently trying to find someone/some people to live with in Indiana in the fall. I dropped an email to a fellow from San Diego who will be in the same program as me, but he hasn’t responded yet. I should really be planning a little more aggressively at this point, so tomorrow when it’s business hours I figure I will start making some calls and romancing my todo list.
There’s a Ben Folds/Guster/Rufus Wainwright tour this summer, which I should absolutely go to, but I’m finding it difficult to commit to. I think I’m nervous about Niamh. I’m also nervous about the money, and nervous about various other things, but it’s probably just something I have to get over. Hopefully there will still be tickets available when I do.
Oh, and I don’t given Bush as much credit as my previous entry leads on. Bush’s moral influence is stronger than most, given his position, but America is America and he’s not exactly turning saints into sinners here.
“Hooding a detainee with a bag, sometimes in conjunction with beatings thus increasing anxiety as to when blows would come.”
“Handcuffing so tight that they caused skin lesions and nerve damage; beating with pistols and rifles; threats of reprisals against family members; and stripping detainees naked for several days in solitary confinement in a completely dark cell.”
… And of course forcing groups of prisoners to pose nude in humiliating scenarios. Now, I’m not sure if Rumsfeld and Bush are really responsible for this. I don’t know how much they knew or what they tried to cover up. But I do know this: young people look up to Bush. Soldiers look up to Bush. They see his example, of kicking ass and taking names, and dehumanizing and alienating enemies, and the take it to heart. Every time Bush talks about “evioldoers” and how they “hate freedom,” he is reinforcing young Americans’ inherant distrust of foreigners. And the behavior of this country is being reflected in the behavior of its people.
This is why I think Bush is a failure as a moral leader. I’ve said it before, but the proof is in the pudding. I’m embarrased about what my country has become.
Joining the club, because I’m at work, bored, trying to stay awake:
Ten Bands/Artists I’ve Seen Live:
1. Dave Brubeck
2. Phish
3. Guster
4. Ladysmith Black Mambazo
5. Bela Fleck
6. The King’s Singers
7. The Swingle Singers
8. The Dave Matthews Band
9. Lauryn Hill
10. Ben Folds
Nine Things I’m Looking Forward To:
1. Seeing Niamh
2. Kissing Niamh
3. Grocery shopping with Niamh
4. Cooking for Niamh
5. Lying on the beach with Niamh
6. Going to Indiana in the fall
7. Taking classes again
8. Starting doing research again, without inhibition
9. Knocking some items off my todo list
Eight Things I Wear Daily:
1. My birks
2. The hole in the crotch of my jeans
3. Old spice
4-8. ?
Seven Things That Annoy Me:
1. Making bad web design comprimises for clients
2. Links that open in a new window
3. Atheism
4. Weak language in scholarly writing
5. The ticket price at the movie theater
6. Recurring costs
7. When things go poorly in my life because of my failure to plan
Six Things I Touch Every Day:
1. My lovely IBM Thinkpad keyboard
2. My dad’s cell phone, when I call Niamh
3. My alarm clock
4. The light switch which is attached to my newly ensconced lights (I made wall sconces out of waxed paper)
5. The dog (she deserves a little attention every day)
6. The hearts and minds of… no, nevermind.
Five Things I Do Every Day:
1. Check planet.gnome.org (but not slashdot!)
2. Step outside the house, if only for a few minutes to get some sunshine
3. Call Niamh
4. Worry about things I should’ve already done
5. Oversleep
Four Of My Favorite Musicians or Bands (subject to change daily):
1. Radiohead
2. Nick Drake
3. Ben Folds
4. Dar Williams
Three Movies I Could Watch Over and Over:
1. Amelie
2. Spirited Away
3. The Big Lebowski
Two Of My Favorite Songs At This Moment:
1. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Maps
2. Rufus Wainwright – Oh what a world (I know, Ni and I are joined at the hip)
One Person I Could Spend the Rest of My Life With:
1. Pending the passage of the Defense Of Marriage Act I intend to marry Hank Azaria and move to Texas.
So was sitting at work, bored, reading The symbol grounding problem, when I thought I ought to
check my email. Before I could type in the address, I had an idea for a fun game: let’s see if I can get there through the web! Here’s the path I followed to navigate the 19
degrees of separation:
- The symbol grounding problem
- Steven Harnad
- Correlation Generator
- citebase Search
- citebase Search help
- Open citation project
- OpCit News
- Google translation of: The spirit, which came from the bottle
- Google Search: More, more, more
- Google Directory
- Internet
- Access Providers
- Directories
- Internet Access Providers Meta-List
- Nationwide Internet Access Provider Lists for the United States of America
- The List: The Definitive Internet Services Buyer’s Guide
- Earthlink offer
- Learn more about EarthLink Internet Service
- Web Mail
I wonder if there’s a faster way, or better yet, a route that didn’t “cheat” by going through
the google directory. What are the two most distant points on the internet? Surely someone has
researched this.
I don’t claim to be an excellent writer and I rarely write anything that demands to be edited to a fine luster. That said, I do think I have a good critical eye for theoretical argument and this fragment jumped out at me:
“…the involvement of thought with plans is manifestly obvious.” (from here)
It’s not important what the context of the frament is, whether or not you know what the author is talking about, or whether it’s true. I have a problem with the word “involvement” and with the phrase “manifestly obvious”.
First of all, when you say “a is involved with b” you are saying almost nothing at all, especially when you are talking about a biological system like the brain. Practically everything in the brain is involved with everything else, it’s just a stupidly weak statement.
Second, “manifestly obvious” is manifestly redunant. Manifest means obvious, but carries some semantic baggage. It implies something seen, something real. It calls to mind sailors logs. Either he means manifest, or he means obvious.
And any use of the word “obvious” in academic writing is likely dubious anyway. If something is in fact obvious, it needn’t be said. If it needs to be said, it’s likely not obvious. And if you are feeling the urge to label something obvious, it’s likely you are just lamely trying to get away without substantiating something which should be substantiated. It’s a red flag, and you ought to be damn sure you have a reason for raising it.
So that’s my bitching for the moment. Of course, if you poke through my ideas I’m sure you’ll find many examples of equally poor usage. What can I say, I am a pot.