Kumq-what?

Today I made the worst sorbet perhaps ever.

It all began when I pointed to a rather large basket of kumquats at the farmer's market and asked, 'how much are these?' 'Two dollars.' 'What?! That is a great price!' I always buy things that are very cheap, even if I don't want them. And so home I came with my kumquats, which promptly started to rot. In desperation I decided to sorbet-them-up (Sig and I got an ice-cream maker for our wedding.) A little boiling, a little blending, a little freezing and tah-dah. Very orange sorbet.

At very first bite, it seemed good. Oh, I thought, how nice and sweet, mmm, and sour, ooo, tangy-smooth, and, and, oh, oh God bitter! So bitter! Argh, the bitter end!

At this moment my mouth is shriveling in what I think is a reaction to so much bitter at once.

I guess I ought to have taken the fact that I could only find one recipe for kumquat sorbet on the entire internet (and that posted by an Australian) to be a bad sign. This will have to go on my list of failed culinary adventures along with the macaroni and cheese made with mayonnaise.

And perhaps it's time for some listening.

Harold and Maude

Is it corny to say that this movie is a 'must see'?

It's the story of 19 year old (hearse-driving, death-faking) Harold who falls in love with 79 year old Maude (prison camp survivor with a zest for life.) The story could be hokey - he's depressed and obsessed with dying, and she shows him how to be happy before dying herself, by choice, but in a good way, on her eightieth birthday. Somehow though, all the bits that might be cliched are treated with such originality and humor that it feels real, and fresh, and beautiful.

Some lines that I would just like to repeat:

Therapist: So how many of these 'suicides' have you done?

Harold: I'd say about 15.

Therapist: And all for the benefit of your mother?

Harold: No... No, I would not say benefit.

In a later scene:

Maude: What flower would you be Harold?

Harold: I don't know. Maybe one of these.

Maude: Why?

Harold: Because they're all the same.

Maude: Oh but they're not! (Expounds on how some are bigger, some smaller, some are missing petals.) I think many of the world's problems stem from people who are this (gesturing to a single flower in her hand) allowing themselves to be treated like that (gesturing to the field of flowers.)

The movie ends (don't read this part if you want to watch it yourself) when Harold proposes to Maude on her eightieth birthday and she tells him that she's just taken the tablets that will end it. He tries and fails to save her. Cut to a shot of Harold driving his hearse up a hill and the hearse flying off a cliff. But then, there is Harold on the top of a hill, holding the banjo Maude gave him and insisted he learn to play. He walks away strumming as Cat Steven's 'If you want to sing out, sing out' plays on the soundtrack. Brilliant!

The best thing about this movie is that it is a sure-fire cure for the blues.

A Monkey's Half-Cousin

Did you know that the father of eugenics was none other than the half-cousin of Charles Darwin?

Sir Francis Galton was born in 1822, and was a crazy, many-talented scientist. Wikipedia describes him as: an English Victorian polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician.

The dude was the first to classify fingerprints, invented the weather map, and the concept of statistical correlation. He also invented the dog whistle (!)

After reading The Origins of Species (and corresponding with his 'cos), he apparently became obsessed with the question of whether human abilities were hereditary - investigations into which shortly led him to coin the phrase 'nature versus nurture'. Along the n v. n lines, he did the first twin studies, looking at identical twins separated at birth to see if they diverged.

In 1883, after years of research into human heredity, he coined the term 'eugenics' and started suggesting that superior brits should be offered monetary incentives to marry young and have a bunch of children! He then wrote a novel called Kantsaywhere which, according to wikipedia, 'described a utopia organized by a eugenic religion, designed to breed fitter and smarter humans.'

So...dude went off track, but he was still a serious baller. I miss the times of renaissance men. Nowadays you can't just zip about discovering new things in all manner of fields. It was even better back then you could learn everything there was to learn and, DaVinci style, be the best artist and best scientist and best engineer around. Can you imagine such a thing today?

Two last bits, first, an excerpt from a letter that Darwin wrote to Galton:

'Your proposed Society [to monitor the fitness of various families and promote eugenics] would have awfully laborious work, and I doubt whether you could ever get efficient workers. As it is, there is much concealment of insanity and wickedness in families; and there would be more if there was a register. But the greatest difficulty, I think, would be in deciding who deserved to be on the register. How few are above mediocrity in health, strength, morals and intellect; and how difficult to judge on these latter heads. As far as I see, within the same large superior family, only a few of the children would deserve to be on the register; and these would naturally stick to their own families, so that the superior children of distinct families would have no good chance of associating much and forming a caste. Though I see so much difficulty, the object seems a grand one; and you have pointed out the sole feasible, yet I fear utopian, plan of procedure in improving the human race. (italics mine)

And lastly, the Galtonia, native to South Africa, named after Sir Francis Galton.

5.10b

I believe I have just climbed my first 5.10b.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Cats

Now, according to the Engineer's Guide to Cats, "If you have one cat, you're just a guy who has a cat. If you have two cats, well, the cats are friends so they can keep each other company. When

you have three cats, you start to get to be that guy...who has all those cats..."

Sig and I fall into the third category: those guys...who have all those cats. The effect is magnified by the fact that we live in a rather modest sized apartment, and that they have to stay indoors. To clarify, this is not how we always envisioned our cat future. Rather, I made the serious error of bringing these...

...anywhere near Sig. He likes little snuggly things. At the time, I was doing foster care for the SPCA, just keeping the kittens until they were old enough to adopt. Now we're a bit of a legend there - the couple that adopted all three of their first set of foster kittens. We created further stir by naming them Catsius Clay, Margaret Catcher, and Chairman Meow. (The first two are easily shortened to Cash and Maggie, but there is no way to turn Chairman Meow into a nickname, so it's always, "Chairman Meow, quit chewing my bathing suit!")

The timing of the adoption couldn't have been worse. We had already planned a two week, cross country road trip to take us home for a summer of work/getting married/honeymooning. At 2 1/2 months, the new kittens were far too young to be left alone in California the entire time. And so, it was decided, they would come with us, on a journey that I like to call 'The Sisterhood of the Traveling Cats', though Sig sometimes complains about this characterization.

I jury rigged a little barrier thing between the front and back seats, but, unfortunately, 2 1/2 month old kittens 'really' want to be with their 'parents', so we spent the next two weeks in this sort of video-game-like reality where the passenger had to constantly keep a spray bottle aimed at the back of the seats where occasionally furry projectiles would appear and need to be shot down. Though they did, at times, get past security.

The journey was pretty stressful on Sig and I, though the kittens quickly forgot that they had ever lived in a home that didn't roll from place to place. The end result was a trio of remarkably well traveled felines. They've been to the Four Seasons in Vegas:

Yellowstone:

Devil's Tower:

Canada:

And the Jersey Shore (check out Maggie's situation):

Although at the time I thought we were some sort of insane, I now look back on the Sisterhood with quite a bit of nostalgia. They grow up so fast...

Silk on Silk

Earlier this year, my mother-in-law and I took a 10 day trip to India together (she was on business, I was her India-savvy travel companion.) Whilst there, I got to experience one of the more divine sensual pleasures - the feeling of a silk on silk Persian carpet.

My obsession with Persian rugs can be traced directly to my mother, who loves fine things, handmade things, beautiful things. To my mind there is little so indulgent as walking on a piece of art that took months of tedious hand-labor to create.

It was in this spirit that I said to my darling Siggy last spring, 'Darling, perhaps we can get a Persian rug at some point.' Sig responded with something like - 'But darling, we're planning on being academics and having a lot of children. I just don't think Persian carpets are in our future.' And so, it seemed, the matter was settled.

Until, that is, a series of serendipitous events brought us not one, but two lovely hand-knotted carpets from the vast, mysterious warehouses of the universe. The first rug was a wedding gift from our friend Garrett Lisi (the surfer physicist, this name deserves a googling if you haven't heard of him.) And then, about a month later, I brought home a $200 craigslist Persian carpet pictured here, sold by a barely-literate SoCal dude - 'uh, yeah, my mom, like, bought this rug in Afganistan or something. I dunno. I'm selling it to buy drugs."

Our rugs are both made with a wool warp (the foundation of the rug) and wool knots. They have knot densities of approximately 100 KPSI (knots per square inch.) Not bad. This means that for each square inch of carpet some fellow tied 100 pieces of yarn onto the strings of the warp, batted them down, cut them to the right length etc. etc. This is not a feat to be scoffed at. A 6'x8' carpet of this quality will take at least a few months to complete.

But in India, oh, in India.

After seeing the Taj Mahal - perhaps the most iconic representation of extravagance and luxury in the world - we allowed ourselves to be taken to a shop where we could see rugs actually being knotted, and then try our best not to buy one while plied with marsala chai and surrounded by fellows unrolling gorgeous carpets all around us.

They started with the wool on wool carpets, quite fine ones. And then, at some point, brought out the silk on wool carpets - these carpets have a wool warp knotted with silk thread. When you touch such a carpet, you think something along the lines of, "oh, I have never felt anything quite so soft in my life." Their density bumps up to about 500 KPSI, 500 hand tied knots for every inch of carpet.

And then, once we'd drunk quite a lot of lovely spiced chai, they brought out the silk on silk rugs, silk warp, silk knots, which range from something like 900 to 2400 KPSI. We were invited to touch them, and did, at which point I thought something along the lines of, 'how could I ever have thought those other carpets were soft? how could I ever have thought anything else in the world was soft?' It was the touch equivalent of foie gras, or perhaps Marilyn Monroe, or the Queen of the Night Opera as sung by Diana Damrau (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvuKxL4LOqc) though slightly less forceful.

We'll have to be rather successful academics to get one of these, I'm afraid. But if we ever do, I intend to put it in a secret place and walk on it every day.

Tampopo Ramen

Tampopo is not a 'spaghetti western' but rather a 'noodle western', har har. My husband and I bonded over this movie early in our relationship when he was still pretending to have some sort of taste in film. It's a brilliantly weird set of vignettes about food - most humorous, some sexy - all unified around the story of a widow (named Tampopo, or dandelion) who, with the help of a few Japanese cowboy-truckers, is attempting to perfect the art of noodle selling.

Incidentally, my friend Tor once described a scene from this movie as 'the sexiest scene in all of cinema'. You really must watch it to understand, but suffice it to say that he licks lemon juice and salt off her erect nipples and that they pass an egg yolk from mouth to mouth until it breaks and dribbles down her chin. Later on the same fellow eats a raw oyster out of the hand of a nubile teenager.

Now, I'm a vegetarian(ish?), but this movie provides shot after loving shot of steaming pork ramen. The heroine spends months in her samurai-like quest, and, in the end, boils up worshipful noodles and soup, topped with slices of fatty, gleaming pork. After seeing it again, and after reading a strangely timed NYT article (http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/travel/31ramen.html) about Toyko's ramen shops, I was filled with a sort of mad need to eat Tampopo Ramen myself, or the closest thing I could find.

My husband and I (shall we call him Prometheus? No, that's stupid, let's just call him Siegfried.) Siggy and I found a shop called 'Shin Sen Gumi' where we waited for about an hour in an unusual southern California drizzle to order bowls of ramen. They arrived - a thick meaty broth floating with little blobs of fat, piles of thin sliced pork and shaved scallions on top. I broke apart my chopsticks, inhaled the heady scent, and took that first bite...

There is something so sad about that moment where fantasy meets reality. I've done this so many times. The soup in my head wasn't soup anymore, it had become something like the Platonic ideal of 'soup'. The soup by which we measure all other soup. The soup that exists in a realm we may never touch or see. The soup we knew before we came into the world, and will some day be reunited with again. And, of course, the real thing was good but in the end just soup.

The next day I spent the morning reading with the cats. Well, I read, they napped on me or forcefully kneaded my poor stomach as they liked. As lunchtime rolled around, I realized I wanted more ramen. So Siggy and I headed down to another place called 'Santouka' and waited another hour, this time in a crowded asian market, for more real-life soup.

Which was actually remarkably tasty.