How Does It Know?

In high school, my friend James was in Japanese Club. It made sense for him, as he took Japanese as his language (I took Spanish) and had an interest in all things Japanese. I went because I just wanted to hang out and occasionally watch a Japanese movie. I had a position in the club — Ninja Poet. This position entailed me coming up with a haiku before the meetings started and reciting it in front of the small group of members. I only remember one (and I may have only done it once or a couple times), a little ditty about a guy who you think is a dentist, but turns out, he’s not really a dentist:

He’s not a dentist
Dirty guy in a white coat
Open wide for him

But all of that is irrelevant; what’s important here is that YOU can randomly generate great haikus about McCain and Palin by clicking here. Here’s one just generated that I kinda like:

Lipstick on a pig
Meeting new foreign leaders
White House foreclosure

http://politicalirony.com/2008/09/28/mccain-palin-haiku-generator/

My wife and I went to the Detroit Public Library today for the Obama/Biden rally. We got there around 8:15am and stood continuously until about 3:30pm. The rally didn’t begin until 1:30pm, but getting there early allowed us to see stuff being set up, and also (and most importantly), getting a good spot to watch from. We were incredibly close to the stage, perhaps 15 feet away. My lovely wife took some excellent photos, some of which I’ve posted here. The rest of them can be found here.

[sidenote: I will say that the continuous standing in cramped crowded areas for over 7 hours has really worn us out. It was worth it to do it once, but I don’t think we’ll be going to any more political rallies anytime soon.]

Detroit’s new mayor spoke a bit

Joe Biden (who was very energetic and overall a very exciting speaker to watch)

Obama listening to Biden, waiting his turn (and looking sort of like he’s posing for our camera)

Obama himself got off to sort of a slow start, but ended up giving a good speech.

Yesterday, having purchased a half gallon of whole milk for the express purpose of making paneer, I figured that I should actually do so, and so I did.

I had been a little intimidated by it at first, seeing as how you’re basically making a really simple cheese, and making cheese is supposed to be difficult, right? But in fact, it turned out being incredibly easy, and actually tasted like it was supposed to.

Basically, you bring the whole milk to a boil in a big pot, then take it off the heat and start adding vinegar (you can also use lemon juice or lime juice, or EVEN, I read somewhere, the whey (liquid) part of the milk from making your LAST batch of paneer, which seems kind of weird to me, but ok) a tablespoon at a time and stir the milk until it separates into solid and liquid. Then you line a colander with several layers of cheesecloth and pour your solid and liquid milk through it. The solids left behind in the cloth, squeeze it and get as much liquid out of it as you can. Then set something heavy like a bowl of water on top of it for a couple hours. Congratulations, the paneer is ready.

At this point, I refrigerated mine, as I didn’t feel like doing anything with it that night. But tonight, after a bike ride (which gave me a boost of energy, as well as made me hungry), I cut the whole paneer into “blocks” (the shapes are actually more odd, because the whole paneer isn’t exactly square in any way, but that gives it some of its charm, I think) and pan fried them. The horrible photo below illustrates:

Having tasted the paneer pan-fried, I deemed my paneer making a success. I almost don’t know how you could do it wrong though, because I was SURE I hadn’t gotten enough water out of it (i.e. it was still too damp), but it fried up very well and crispy. I ate it with spinach, rice and a bit of Patak’s rogan josh sauce I had. Totally worth the effort, and I still have two meals’ worth left that I’ve frozen.

I love maps. This blog has all kinds of crazy/bizarre/interesting maps that people send in. I love this blog.

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com

So I’ve been missing for a little while over here. Not a whole lot to talk about… I went on a vacation to Washington, D.C. a couple weeks back, and that was really really fun, educational, delicious, and somewhat debauched. I helped a friend move while there, spoke to another friend on the phone who I had expected to see, but ended up running out of time, and totally forgot a third friend even lived in the area (so I did not contact them). Then we came home and went back to work.

Last Sunday I went up to Lansing to record some vocals for the How Does It Know? EP… My ears were opened up to the possibilities of some vocal harmonies (something I haven’t played around with too much, since I’ve found it difficult to sing along to myself and not fall back into the original melody instead of singing the harmony). But I got some tips from John (i.e. recording the harmony with a keyboard, and singing along to that, without the original vocal playing back), and some random takes turned out some great ideas for harmonies on a couple songs. I hope to develop those ideas a little further this weekend when I have some time.

Outside of that, just working a lot, paying attention to the elections, trying to have some fun, and wishing summer wasn’t over yet. But now that the weather is crisper, I’m feeling more motivation to spend time doing some critical listening and work on the recording; we’ll see how that goes.

Wordscraper* (the game the two guys from Calcutta put out once Scrabulous had to be taken down) is insane. My opponent scored the majority of those points on the word “DORKS”.

* It’s pretty much like Scrabulous (and Scrabble) except the boards are random, there are 5x word and letter spots, sometimes the letter values are randomly different and you can design your own boards. In order to get around the fact that Scrabulous was taken down, many people “design” a board that is just like a regular Scrabble board, thus playing Scrabble, Scrabulous-style, within Wordscraper.

(photo from obamawill.com)

Most of you that know me well will know that I am a fairly left-leaning Democratic Party voting guy. I like the notion of a safety net for society. I like smart thoughtful decision making and inclusion of all sorts of different people. However, people who lean my way politically have a sometimes fatal flaw — they are far, far too idealistic in what they require from a candidate.

One example is the angry people who are still angry that the primary was “stolen” from Hillary Clinton (and who vow to vote for John McCain as a result*). Obama has made some moves that haven’t sat well with me since he all but clinched his party’s nomination, that’s for certain. But the way I see it, for liberals, the Democratic Party is a workaround.

They are one of the big parties that can actually win and they also happen to share a lot of your beliefs and values! Well, they may not be as good on some things you care about as Ralph Nader, or one of the other minor liberal parties. Sure you’d be sending a small message by voting for one of these small party candidates. And yes, you do have some sway. You do have the ability to take away maybe 1 or 2% of the vote and sway the results of an election. But for who’s benefit? What good does it do to cause the guy who’s even less like you and shares less of your beliefs and values to win?

In an ideal world, all those parties would have a larger voice and we’d be more like Canada or European countries… But I suppose this is the way politics is done in America, and we have to go with the workaround. We can’t even completely control our computers, which are (normally) governed by the laws of physics and logic. We use workarounds in code all the time. If we can’t wrangle predictable 1s and 0s with 100% confidence, what chance is there of wrangling millions of intelligent independent humans? None.

Go with the workaround. Put a comment in that says
// ss 8/26/08: this is not ideal, but it works pretty well. think about ways to fix in future.
and move on. Incremental change, with progress made at each step, is what we need. It’s what I’ve come to know from coding, from songwriting and from thinking about politics.

Incidentally, I’m leaving for Washington, D.C. fairly soon, mainly to visit my sister, but also to take in some sights and sounds and smells. See you later.

* There is so much that is wrong with doing that that it’d be too hard to get into, but some major ones would be he’s pro-life and she’s pro-choice, he wants to perhaps stay in Iraq for a 100 years, she wants to get out of Iraq, whereas Obama and Clinton share a good majority of their platforms.

Looks like King Filament (my musical moniker from 1995 to 2000) is making a comeback…

Have you checked out Sunil Sawani’s semi-fake record label, Part Time Songs? Here is a song by King Filament… “Killer” (part time mp3)

(from Gimme Tinnitus)

My wife got this Etch-A-Sketch at work, and gave it to me last night as a gift.

I attempted to write “Thank you” on it, as an expression of my gratitude, before I realized that Etch-A-Sketch is hard and not that much fun.

She replied, “You’re welc”.

I inadvertently work on making software for Henry Ford Health System. My wife inadvertently has a part in making advertising websites for Ford Motor Company.

Henry Ford is all up in our grill.