Slick, Willie

So Bubba rolls into North Korea and just straight resolves the latest diplomatic minicrisis Lil' Kim has petulantly caused to drum up attention. Everybody's cracking wise about Bill going in "on his own" to pick up some ladies. But I feel the real question is this: as just about the only thing Kids My Age still remember almost universally fondly from our childhoods, when will Michael Bay get his shit together and make a terrible action movie about the guy?

Too Far, Iron Chef

[Scene: Me, in my room, futzing around on my piano, about 8 minutes into the escargot episode episode of the Japanese version of Iron Chef]

Chairman Kaga's Voiceover: ...Aristocrats of Medieval Europe described the best portion of these snails as "The Lady's Sweat"
Me: WHAT? EW!
CKV: 'Lady,' of course, referring to the snail itself, and sap points to the juicy broth that collect at the bottom of the shell when cooking escargot. It is not the meat of escargot that is best, it is in fact the juices left in the shells. So, don't waste a drop of "The Lady's Sweat." [This is accompanied by softcore-pornographic shots of vaguely viscous green liquid being poured from a snail shell]
Me: EW! WHAT?

It's rare to encounter something in the culinary world that sounds as unappetizing as "The Lady's Sweat;" who would've thought it'd turn out to be EVEN LESS APPETIZING THAN IT SOUNDS?

GROSS, Iron Chef. I know you're all Japanese and stuff but COME ON. Suckling pig, abalone, those eels whose heads you have to nail to the cutting board so they won't wiggle away while you're trying to DISSECT THEM ALIVE, natto; all of this stuff is ok. But seriously. "The Lady's Sweat"? Snail spooge? Gross.


Relatedly, I volunteer "waugh!" as the interjection for situations of mingled bafflement and disgust. As in:
"Yo dude, I just shotgunned a beer that'd been sitting out open since Saturday!"
"Waugh! Why would you fucking do that?"

BREAD!

I thought I'd share a bread recipe. It's adapted from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, which is a totally rad (and totally aptly-named) cookbook. I tweak a little, here and there, obvi, but it's all for the best, I think.


1 3/4 cups bread flour
1 3/4 cups whole wheat flour
1 pkg instant ("rapid rise") yeast
2 tsp salt (kosher if you've got it and are using a food processor; regular otherwise, see why below)
1 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp "neutral oil" (i.e. veg oil)
~1 1/2 cups rice milk (or other "milk," dairy or non-)

*I recommend doing this in a food processor, if you've got one; otherwise, you're really gonna have to mix the crap out of it in a big bowl with a big wooden spoon.*

Integrate flour and yeast (i.e. don't just dump them in, mix them up a bit.) Add the sugar and the oil and keep mixing (I recommend pulses on the food processor, or, as mentioned above, mixing the crap out of it if you're doing it manually.) Add the "milk" slooowly, until a firm, sticky ball forms (the whole wheat means it's gonna be both firmer and stickier than white dough [plus I usually make my doughs a little wetter than some, it seems.]) If you add too much milk, just add more flour, a small pinch at a time, until you get the right consistency.

Let this hang out (in the bowl of the food processor with the top on, or covered with paper towels or something in the mixing bowl) for about 10 minutes. Go get a snack, brush your teeth, have a smoke, whatever (it could be longer than 10 minutes, whatever.) Congratulations! This is called an autolyse (or an autolysis, from the Gk. auto "self" + lysis "liberating, loosening"), and I read about it somewhere on the internet I can't find right now, but basically it's just giving the yeastlings a head start ("loosening themselves up," as it were) before the salt comes in and starts to regulate like Nate Dogg. Come back, and mix in the salt (this is why I actually recommend against kosher salt if you're mixing this bread by hand: the big crystals of kosher salt dissolve REALLY SLOWLY into the dough, so you really have to knead them in like hell in order to avoid pockets of über-salty dough.)

Pour a VERY small amount of veg or olive oil on a piece of paper towel, and rub it all over the inside of a pretty big wood or plastic bowl (not metal.) Put your newly-salted dough in said newly-greased bowl and cover (with plastic wrap, paper towels, or a clean kitchen or tea towel if you got one [ours are sketchy.]) Let this rize for about 2 hours, or until doubled in volume.

Get some flour (it doesn't matter what kind, AP is fine here), and sprinkle some out on your cutting board or a clean counter. Take your dough out of the bowl and just work it, folding it in half over itself, pushing the bubbles out and around. Think deep-tissue massage. When it's more-or-less back to the size it was, and there aren't any visible seams in the dough (i.e., try to smooth it out into one coherent thing, plz), shape it into a "loaf" or a round or whatever you want, really (you could at this point, theoretically, cut it into 3 pieces, roll those pieces into long strands, and braid this sucker like challah, but that'd be a little weird.)

And now...Let this hang out (woo!) for like an hour. This is called benchproofing, and the longer you benchproof your bread, the bigger and airier it's gonna be. (I once wound up benchproofing a loaf for 3 hours, and when I came home, it was like twice the size of my copy of Bittman. I baked it as-was, and the result was an absolutely gorgeouus, gigantic loaf that completely collapsed when you tried to cut or tear a piece off. Still delicious, though.)

And now, for some roleplaying:
YOU have made a delicious BREAD DOUGH. You are in your KITCHEN. You have pre-heated your OVEN to 350 degrees. To your LEFT, there is a spray-bottle containing 1/3 cup water and a tablespoon of cornstarch. To your RIGHT, there is a small saucepan (or kettle) being heated to boiling, as well as a baking pan. Do you want to:
SPRAY the water-cornstarch mixture on your DOUGH
Put the near-boiling WATER into the baking pan and put it in the OVEN
Do BOTH
Do NEITHER
(Here's the deal: the cornstarch-water mix, which you can also just brush on with a pastry brush or whatever, makes the outside of the bread all brown and sexy and 'artisanal.' The boiling-water rig helps to regulate the temperature in the oven, and leads to a crunchier, thicker crust. Obviously, you could do neither. But if you're someone who passes on the opportunity to improve their crust, I'm not sure you're so welcome around these parts...)

BAKE for like 45 minutes, or until it smells and looks amazing and sounds hollow when you flick the bottom (not too hard, please.)

REALLY IMPORTANT: YOU MUST LET IT REST! Please. For my sake. For like, half an hour, 45 minutes. It's worth it! Believe me!

Woo bread!

I'm Sorry, But

This post, by a seemingly well-meaning woman I have never met, nor probably will ever meet, found by some light surfing after following a link from someone I "know" on twitter, really pissed me off.

For those of you who aren't link-clickers, it's a post about "raising a non-rapist." The Moirae have given this woman the grim onus of raising (gasp!) a (probably-)Straight White Male. So, naturally, in order to save society from her son, she has to specifically, explicitly mold him into a non-rapist:

It starts with teaching him that no means no, and that only yes means yes. It means that even though his best friend is almost a year older than he is (just-3, to his over-2), and taller, and larger, and more energetic, and arguably more aggressive -- even though she is all that, he is male, and she is not, and while I don't encourage her to walk all over him either, I do insist that he really listen to her noes, or make sure he gets yeses, when he wants to hug and kiss and touch and play with her.

This all very well could be fine. It could be! Boundaries! Consent! &c! But kids are exercises in unintended consequences, and I can't help but fear for this little boy-child, taught that what's between his legs is a dangerous, potentially uncontrollable thing that he needs to be conscious of all the time, lest he hurt someone around him.

I understand that this is a tricky subject. I understand that the vast majority of rapists are men. But "raising a non-rapist" makes two big assumptions: first, that all, or at least most, rapes, are entirely the result of rational processes; and second, that "rapeyness" is something that needs to be specifically quashed in boys, separately from other character-improving efforts. I (surprise!) disagree with both of those premises, although were someone to show me a study or two proving the first one, I'd be willing to change my tune.

I guess, ultimately, the point is this: my own parents' marriage was basically a total disaster. My mother drank heavily, and my father was verbally abusive a LOT. But they were both, in their own ways, completely committed to my sister, my brother, and me. They wanted to be good parents; they wanted us to become good people. They were both (and still are) totally crazy, basically, but they put their backs into it, and we came out OK. And that's the thing: neither my brother nor I were ever "raised not to rape," my sister was never explicitly educated to fight against the constant barrage of misogyny &c. "Don't hit girls" was as close as we got, but even that was worked into the greater anti-violence agenda. My brother and I are both generally very nice to women, and my sister doesn't take shit from nobody, regardless of their gender. So, I guess really what I'm saying is that raising good people should be the goal, regardless of gender, or gender norms, or your feelings about gender norms, or your feelings about other people's feelings about gender norms, or your parents. ESPECIALLY your parents.

Maine is So Gay

SO I'm 'friends' with the Maine Freedom to Marry Coalition¹ on the Prosopobiblion, and earlier today they sent me a message that started like this:

Women in Harmony, a 55-voice women’s chorus based in Southern Maine, will present its spring concert, “Seasons of Love,” in celebration of the recent passage of LD 1020, the new law giving same sex couples the right to marry in Maine.

It's a shame that when people think of the fair state I grew up in, they only think of lobsters and pine trees, and not about a phalanx of Smith Wellesley Barnard grads singing chorally-adapted folk songs and 'adapted' Passamaquoddy ritual chants in celebration of finally being able to marry their acupuncturists.

It's also another reason why I'm not too worried about any sort of Prop 8-type shenanigans, although, obviously, efforts are already underway. Maine's just too gay. Think about it:

1)Assuming native Mainers are conservative enough to want to repeal the gay-marriage law³, their numbers have been dwindling as young people leave the state to go do anything else, any other place.

2)Who CHOOSES to move up to the cold, ill-lit woods of Maine? Hippies, that's who. Hippies, many of whom are lesbians/have lesbian friends/had a lesbian phase. And especially since Rummy closed the state's military bases, honest red-state sentiment is bleeding away.

That's not to say there aren't fundies and homophobes aplenty in the Great State O', but I'm pretty sure they're completely outweighed by the little-l libertarians and the hippies/yuppies/yippies/&c. I hope.



¹Yes, the website is actually mainelymarriage.org, because why would ANYONE EVER pass up such a GREAT pun like that?!^2
2People from Massachussets, that's who.
³And I have reason to believe that Maine conservativism is of a distinctly Yankee libertarian quality. A lot of the folks up in the woods don't seem to care what you do, as long as you don't try and infringe on their guns/lobsters/logging/&c.

Ha-ha

“In 1972, the Clean Water Act, which called for ’swimmable, fishable waters,’ prompted a Potomac purging,” wrote Time. “But last fall, the appearance of intersex fish — which have male and female organs — renewed concerns about swimming, fishing and drinking the water.”

("Volvo Ends Up in the Gowanus Canal", New York Times)

[Insert joke about Republicans here]

Password Plus Is Growing On Me

Host: The clues are 'boots' and 'hairdo.'
Betty White: 'Boots' and 'hairdo'...that could be anybody. Dolly Parton?
Host: It's not Dolly Parton, though that's what I was thinking...
Betty: Oh! 'BOOTS' and 'hairdo'!
[Everybody cracks up]
Host: See what I have to live with?