Bread dough climbing up the hook on your fancy mixer instead of kneading gracefully? Hit that hook with a little non-stick spray before you start. I’ve been making bread in this machine for years and got the best result ever today with this little nugget of information.
They ought to put that in the manual. Thank you Alton Brown!
Now my only problem is that I ate like 6 pieces of it.
Secondary tip: Montreal Steak spice mix is a grand substitution in a green bean sautee when you are too busy stuffing your face with delicious bread to mince your own garlic.
Went to see Sarah Vowell last night. It was great. If you like her audiobooks you would like her live as well. She said she’d looked over her writing of the past few years and discovered that she was accidentally producing a history of America, but jumbly and out of order. So this reading was an experiment in presenting a selection of her historical material in chronological order.
She told us we were the guinea pigs for this particular set of readings, but I be that’s what she says to all the girls, and by girls I mean overeducated college-town weenies whose idea of a wild night out is paying to listen to an essayist speak (guilty!)
Anyway, 30 minutes before the performance we were walking toward the theater and we passed her (Sarah Vowell) on the sidewalk, walking the other way with a couple of companions.
I pretended not to notice. I could have said something to Holly, or jostled her, or whatever, but not without embarrassing myself in front of Sarah Vowell, who was after all 3 feet ahead of me and closing. After we passed I checked with Holly to see if she had seen.
“No, seen what?”
Luckily, Holly was not as heartbroken by this as by the time I pulled her out of the way when she was about to be accidentally bumped by Michael Moore.
I’ve seen it before, but this time the accompanying article claims that the direction you perceive the figure to be spinning indicates whether you are “left-brained” or “right-brained”. On first glance, then, I’m right-brained, because the figure is spinning clockwise.
The article notes that most people can trick themselves into seeing it spin the other way (that’s why it’s an optical illusion, after all). Kottke suggests looking at a point below the figure’s feet.
I noticed a stranger effect… if I read the list of characteristics associated with left-brained people (”uses logic”, “math and science”, etc.) then look back at the figure, it’s rotating counter-clockwise. If I then read the list of characteristics of right-brained people, the figure is spinning clockwise again. I did this several times.
Apparently my brain just wants to soak up and replay the last thing it was exposed to.
Another interesting one is this bubbly talk about dictionaries:
She makes a lot of interesting points, but I couldn’t help noticing she also makes a common blunder: she states that online dictionaries, compared to paper ones, lose the quality of serendipity.
I’ve heard this complaint about the internet before, and it just floors me. The internet is the greatest possible engine of serendipity. (I’m pretty sure I stole that line from somewhere, btw)
I recently tested a youtube-esque video service being tested by my department at work; I uploaded an Alison Krauss video I happened to have on my machine. This led me to visit her official website, which, like most musician’s sites, kind of sucks for content. This led me, of course, to the real live YouTube, where I searched for Alison Krauss, saw a video in the search results titled “Cluck Old Hen-Alison Krauss/Sierra Hull“, was duly impressed, and followed a link to a “related” video called “sierra hull playing roanoke on guitar”:
I had never heard of Sierra Hull, and now I’m serioiusly considering buying her album. How is that less serendipity than I would experience in the real world, say by flipping through the racks at a record store? A given store might not even have Sierra’s album, and anyway, I don’t visit record stores.
An online dictionary has the potential for great serendipity — just let the page for an individual entry show content from nearby entries; define “nearby” not just by spelling but by definition (i.e., thesaurus functionality), language of origin or other etymological info, or even obscure academic measurements of lexical distance. Add in a “random word” or “word of the day” feature.
I’ll note in passing that of the movies I’d like to see that I listed back in June, 9 have come out. I have managed to see exactly 1 (one) of those: Ratatouille. Daphne was only moderately impressed.
It would appear to be too late for Harry Potter, and of course Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean are long gone.
We really need to work harder at finding babysitters. Or even making any kind of effort at finding babysitters, for that matter.
‘Course, with school starting and Holly still being sick and 6 kinds of hell at work, I need to work on sleeping more, rather than seeing more movies.
Things I would kind of maybe see, if I had a lot of time on my hands and, like, nothing good was on TV, and maybe I’ll eventually see it on Netflix or something:
