Fatally Ambiguous

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

2009-07-27T19:20:00.002-04:00

You may or may not have noticed an alarming drop in blog posts over the last few months. Since I moved to Virginia, I've lost my verve.

So, for the time being, I am retiring the blog. I will continue to tweet away (@fambiguous), but I won't be blogging, at least for a while.

If it's not too onerous, check back every now and then to see if I've restarted the blog or moved to another one.

Best,

Evan

Bakewell Tart, Part Deux

2009-07-11T18:58:00.003-04:00

The first Bakewell tart worked so well that I decided to make another for a meeting with some fellow teachers.

This time, though, I actually remembered that the recipe only made enough for a 9" tart and multiplied the ingredients by about 1.25. That should be enough for two extra inches, right? Well, no. I forgot the whole geometry thing; it turns out that an 11" pan has about half again as much area as a 9" pan.

*Facepalm.*

All-Star Selection (Updated)

2009-07-03T18:38:00.006-04:00

While I was in D.C. this past weekend, my brother politely mentioned that he hardly ever finishes a post about food. I started this blog to have some fun and keep in touch with friends and family in a new and interesting way. Since food is one of the most consistent things in my life, I blog about it a lot. Today's post is dedicated to my brother; I'm trying to get back to writing about other things. I promise!

Voting for this year's All-Star Game closed last night at midnight. This Sunday marks the annual hoopla of the All-Star Game Selection Show. It's time to reflect on the spectacle that is the Major League Baseball All-Star Game.

Every year around this time, there is a rash of articles listing sports journalists' "picks" to some fantasy All-Star team based solely on worthiness. Almost as frequent as the preseason predictions and early season "duds & studs" articles, these "picks" are almost always accompanied by some light moaning and groaning about how the fan vote, especially with fans stuffing virtual ballot boxes up to 25 times each, makes it a popularity contest, or how the modern requirement of one all-star from each team shafts some truly deserving players.

These arguments are predicated on one assumption I don't entirely buy: that the All-Star Game, with all its pomp and circumstance, is actually prestigious. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure it's an honor to be named to the team. Red Sox stalwart Tim Wakefield has never made it, and I'm really rooting for him to be there this year. I'm just not sure there's much prestige to being an all-star any more.

Let's assume briefly that there is prestige in being named, which means that perhaps the players with the best stats should go. How do we determine worthiness? Obviously the fans fail pretty miserably at that, not because most baseball fans are idiots, but because large-market teams will always benefit from having more fans (and, in the case of the Red Sox, a truly national following). And, well, because some fans are idiots. But players, manager, and writers are idiots. They are responsible for voting for the important end-of-the-year awards, and they get it wrong almost as often as they get it right. How else do you explain Nate McLouth and Michael Young both receiving Gold Gloves (managers' vote) last year. McLouth finished last in both leagues in the Dewan plus/minus system, a system developed by John Dewan and the good folks at Baseball Info Solutions to measure defensive performance. This system is one of the best at measuring defense, and it has McLouth as a staggering MINUS 40 defender last year. That basically means that McLouth made, wait for it, forty fewer plays in centerfield than a league average player. That number would improve if someone got him the hell out of centerfield, but it still boggles the mind that anyone would see Nate McLouth play centerfield and think, "Hey, this guy deserves a Gold Glove." Point is, players, managers, coaches, and writers are only marginally better at selecting players based on "worthiness" than fans, and that likely only because they don't have the chaos of the masses.

The highest honor in the game, induction in the Hall of Fame, is voted upon by members of the Baseball Writers Association of America. They mostly get it right, but, as better writers than I have attested, there are problems, ranging from mule-headed voters to a pesky emphasis on character and reputation. If the selection process for the most prestigious honor in the game is flawed, then why is there so much fanfare about the selection process for an exhibition game that is, as far as I can tell, no longer even prestigious? Some of it has to do with the fact that the selection process for the All-Star Game has changed so much over the years, making it feel less entrenched than the HOF process. And, of course, most of the fanfare is harmless fun. The dialogue occasionally gets nasty, though, which is what baffles me the most. It's obviously a flawed process, but if there's a better way, I'd like to hear it.

In fact, I'm even for the one-player-from-every-team rule. It was instituted in order to take away some of the large-market bias of the fan vote and allow fans of teams like the Royals and Pirates to have some sort of rooting interest in the game.

And it does that. Quite simply, it makes the game more fun. And that's what the All-Star Game has to be about: fun. SI recently ran an article about the players that are fun to watch. Marchman takes the idea to an extreme, but I like the idea of picking players based on who is fun to watch. Of course, that preferences speed, which is more fun to watch than, say, OBP. Still, it would be lots of fun to see Ichiro, Carl Crawford, and Jacoby Ellsbury patrolling the outfield grass at Busch.

Ultimately, it doesn't really matter who gets selected to the All-Star Game. For the guys who do go, it's great and fun and an honor. For the guys who don't, it's a few extra days off. But it's not like the major awards, which can cement a player's reputation (no one will move McLouth from center now that he's a Gold Glove outfielder!) and pad a HOF resume. One trip to the game doesn't really affect HOF votes at all.

Everything about the All-Star Game should be good natured. (Remember Larry Walker batting right-handed against Randy Johnson? That's the All-Star Game for you.) I'm one of the few die-hard fans who can watch the Selection Show this Sunday without yelling at my TV. That's the Zen of the All-Star Game. In the end, it's doesn't really matter, and it's all about having fun.

Update: Wakefield got an All-Star nod, and, just two days after writing this post, I got all teary-eyed listening to him talk about the honor on NESN. I suppose I never really believed what I said myself.

Bakewell Tart (The Daring Bakers)

2009-06-27T06:00:00.001-04:00

The June Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Jasmine of Confessions of a Cardamom Addict and Annemarie of Ambrosia and Nectar. They chose a Traditional (UK) Bakewell Tart... er... pudding that was inspired by a rich baking history dating back to the 1800's in England.

A month ago, if you had told me that I would soon need to grate a stick of butter, I would have laughed, thought for a minute, then realized: the Daring Bakers. For my non-foodie readers, the Daring Bakers are a group of brilliant bloggers who take on challenging recipes once a month and all blog about them on the same day. I am a member of both the Daring Bakers and its sidekick, the recently created Daring Cooks. Only three challenges in and I've already had recipes call for things I don't normally do, like, say, grate butter.

For the most part, these challenges are thoroughly enjoyable. And this recipe is! Grating butter, though, not so much.

Let me bring you up to speed. This tart (pudding?) is composed of a shortcrust (basically a slightly flaky and very buttery shortbread), a layer of jam, and frangipane, a spongy, "slightly squidgy" (their words, not mine!) almond-flavored cake/topping. First you need a tart pan. The recipe suggests 9", but mine was 11". That would have been an important fact to note ahead of time. Live and learn, live and learn.

To make the crust, you need:

225g (8 oz.) all-purpose flour
30g (1 oz.) sugar
2.5ml (½ tsp.) salt
110g (4 oz.) unsalted butter, frozen
2 egg yolks
2.5ml (½ tsp.) almond extract (optional)
15-30ml (1-2 tbsp.) cold water

Combine the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl and grate the butter over them. Quickly use your hands to mix together the flour mixture and butter until it "resembles bread crumbs."

Next, lightly whisk together the egg yolks and almond extract (if using).

Pour into the dry ingredients and mix together. Add just enough water to form a cohesive dough. Knead it out onto the counter and form it into a disc. Wrap in cling and refrigerate at least 30 minutes (this step can be completed the night before you assemble the tart).

Once the dough has chilled, roll it out to approximately 5mm (¼") thickness. If you can't follow directions and didn't make enough dough for your tart pan, don't worry, it will turn out just fine. Press the dough into the tart pan and trim off any excess, using it to patch any holes in the crust. Toss the finished crust in the freezer for 15 minutes and start preparing the frangipane.

125g (4.5 oz.) unsalted butter, softened
125g (4.5 oz.) powdered sugar
3 eggs
2.5ml (½ tsp.) almond extract
125g (4.5 oz.) ground almonds
30g (1 oz.) all-purpose flour

Feel free to grind your almonds by hand or buy them pre-ground. I chose to use a food processor, and it worked beautifully.

Isn't it cute how my food processor bowl nestles directly onto my scale pad? It's like they were made for each other.
For more fun with butter, cream together the butter and powdered sugar. Using a hand mixer, beat in eggs one at a time. The mixture may appear to curdle, but it will be alright. Pour in the almond extract, scrape down the sides, and add the almonds and flour. Mix well.

As rarely happens in my kitchen, the timing was perfect and I finished the frangipane about the time the crust needed to come out of hibernation.

To assemble the tart, warm some jam or curd (I'm sure homemade would be good, but I used store-bought seedless, sugar-free blackberry preserves) in a pot of boiling water or in the microwave. Spread it out in an even layer on the crust. Top with the finished frangipane and smooth the top.

Pop it in the oven at 400°F for 30 minutes. With 5 minutes remaining, garnish with slivered almonds.

If you can't tell from the picture, my crust does not go all the way up the sides of the pan. It is also a little thinner than I would have liked. All the same, everything worked out. The textures are wonderful and the almond-blackberry flavor is spot-on.

I would have prefered the poofy, slightly rounded look that other, more capable Daring Bakers most certainly achieved, but the flatness of my tart did not affect the taste at all.

That this recipe can withstand my inevitable bunglings and taste no worse for wear speaks volumes. It's a relatively quick recipe to prepare (especially for the Daring Bakers), and it's tons of fun (except, of course, the butter thing). I'm three challenges in, and every single one of them has been fun and tasty.

My rolling pin's just sitting there at the top of the post, waiting. What's next?

From the Daring Kitchen: Dumplings

2009-06-17T13:27:00.007-04:00

The June 2009 challenge is hosted by Jen from use real butter. She has chosen Chinese dumplings/potstickers as the challenge.

For various reasons, I missed the inaugural Daring Cooks challenge of ricotta gnocchi. I would not miss the second one for the world, though. If you know my cooking, you know that dumplings (gyoza in Japanese) are right up my alley. My wife absolutely loves Chinese steamed buns, baozi (包子), also extremely popular in Vietnam, and I have tinkered around with some recipes for those. They use a very simple leavened dough and can be filled with virtually anything (my favorite are red bean paste and sesame paste).

I don't have much experience with gyoza, though, so this month's challenge was still a challenge. Unlike steamed buns, the dough for these puppies is unleavened and oh so simple. It is:

2 cups all-purpose flour (250g)
½ cup warm water (113g)

I strongly suggest weighing the ingredients and not trying to halve the dough (the voice of experience speaking). Flour is cheap, right?

Assemble the dough in a large bowl or with the dough blade of a food processor. Jen's blog post has plenty of pictures (hence the dearth of pictures in my post), but the most important part is the consistency of the dough. I did two separate batches and both came out of the food processor firm and the slightest bit sticky. After 2-3 minutes of kneading, thought, they were soft and silky to the touch. That silky texture was perfect for rolling and filling the wrappers.

Making the filling is the easy part, so look at the recipe on Jen's blog post. K. doesn't like most of the ingredients, so I only used:

1 lb. ground pork
7 shitake mushrooms, minced
¼ cup ginger root (55g), minced
3 tbsp. soy sauce
2 tbsp. sesame oil
2 tbsp. cornstarch

The filling cohered beautifully and filled the kitchen with the delightful aroma of sesame oil.

If possible, it tasted even better than it smelled.

Before filling the dumplings, though, you need to make the wrappers. Form the dough into a flattened dome and slice it into several strips. Roll out the strips into cylinders and cut discs ¾" thick and ¾" in diameter. On a floured workspace, press each disc flat with your palm. Roll each disc out to form the wrappers.

Note: the wrappers are supposed to be round. You can always use a biscuit cutter to shape them. Or, just run with the misshapen ones.
Fill the wrappers with about a teaspoon and a half of filling. Follow Jen's instructions for folding and pleating the dumplings.

You can even make wontons for wonton soup from the reject wrappers!

I will also bow to Jen's expertise on cooking the dumplings. You can steam, boil, or panfry (my preferred method) them. I do, however, suggest that you cook them immediately after assembling them. The dough tends to get stickier as it sits, and we let several dozen rest for too long.

We steamed and panfried them, and the results were delicious. Homemade dumplings are much better than anything you can buy elsewhere. The filling for this particular recipe is flavorful. The wrappers are extremely fun to work with (not sure this counts for much, but K. said that assembling the dumplings was the most fun she has ever had helping me in the kitchen) and a great texture.

A great, simple dough + tasty filling = great fun to be had by all. Get thee to the kitchen!

(My apologies for the fact that this post reads contains even less insightful commentary than usual. I really don't have much to say that Jen has not already said in her exhaustive blog post.)

Strawberry Jam-Like Substance

2009-06-09T11:27:00.010-04:00

I have a shiny new toy and it looks something like this:

That's right. Counter space. And a brand new stove. And a range hood. And heating elements that are level and don't cause sauce to go sliding around the pan. Did I mention the counter space?

My parents came up to help me move, and they gifted me, among other things, a gallon of strawberries, thus answering, once and for all, the age old question of "who gives someone a gallon of fruit?" with the apropos "my mom."

I really was grateful, but I had no idea what to do with a gallon of strawberries. I cut some up and put them on cereal. I covered some in white and milk chocolate and devoured them greedily. After that, I still had approximately 3.9 quarts left. So, I did the next best thing and made jam.

Well, sort of. Intimidated by the instructions on the back of the pectin box, I opted for the "no cook jam" pectin. It didn't help that I had just seen Mike Rowe attempt to make cranberry jam and burn himself roughly thirty-seven times.

I followed the recipe on the back of the package and crushed enough strawberries to produce 4 cups.

Aren't cut strawberries a thing of beauty? As you can see, the lighting is much better at the new place, even though I still have the same crappy camera.

Except, of course, in this picture.
Most people would have crushed the fruit in the blender, but I (stupidly) crushed it by hand with a meat tenderizer (What? I just moved in and couldn't find my potato masher!).

Crushing the fruit is the hard part. The rest is just stirring. According to the package, 4 cups of fruit should be sweetened with 1.5 cups of sugar (I used Splenda). I was a little leery of that number, since various recipes online suggested anywhere from 2 to 4 cups of sugar. In package recipes I trust, though, so I steamrolled through and it resulted in perfectly sweetened strawberry jam.

Again, sort of. The "no cook" pectin never really fully set, so it's almost like really thick strawberry mush. It's delicious, mind you (the wife, who claims to not like jam, likes it). And, with only three ingredients (fruit, Splenda, and pectin), it tastes exactly like fresh strawberries. But jam it is not, at least in the strictest sense of the word.

I'm still getting used to the kitchen and getting back into the habit of cooking and baking. The craziness of moving meant that I missed the last Daring Bakers challenge, as well as the first Daring Cooks challenge. This month's Daring Cooks challenge is right up my alley, though, so I'll be back with a vengeance in less than a week.

While I find my way around the new kitchen, I'll leave you with a very zen picture of a strawberry floating above it all.

Five-Four-Three Things...

2009-06-09T10:00:00.004-04:00

It has officially been 18 days since my last blog post. *Hangs head in shame.* I could make excuses: I've been moving, unpacking, etc. While they are all true, there's still no excuse. So, I'm trying to get back in the swing of things with a couple of blog posts, one in honor of the move and another about the christening of my new kitchen.

For those of you who didn't know already, my wife and I, two cats in tow, recently made the trek from Bangor, Maine to Blacksburg, Virginia. We moved from a nearly 1,000 square feet two-bedroom apartment to a 700 square feet one-bedroom. But hey, the neighbors are great:

That's right, we live across from sheep.
As anyone who has moved from region to region has experienced, crossing state lines means more than just changing gas prices; it means changing cultures. So, in honor of that, here are five things I'm going to miss about Maine and four things I will decidedly not miss about Maine (because, really, Maine is a nice place).

Five things I will miss about Maine...

1.) Fried haddock.
2.) Being called "dee-ah" by waitresses.
3.) Giving directions to my house with landmarks like Stephen King's house and the giant Paul Bunyan statue ("reputed to be the largest ... in the world").
4.) Dysart's.
5.) Acadia National Park.

Four things I will not miss about Maine...

1.) Complete and total darkness ... at 3:00 in the afternoon.
2.) Perpetually going "down" to get anywhere because there simply is nothing north.
3.) Slanted floors.
4.) Drivers stopping in the middle of the merge lane because they have no idea how to deal with "traffic."

And now, a couple of bonus lists:

Four things I have already enjoyed about Virginia...

1.) Oriental grocery stores.
2.) 24-hour grocery stores.
3.) Truckers helping me back out of a space and telling me that I'm well on my way to being a trucker (while reminiscing about their "first time").
4.) Southern food. I went to Ryan's and they had no less than fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, fried okra, and biscuits and gravy on the buffet.

Three ways Virginia is surprisingly like Maine...

1.) Shirtless, toothless yardsale peddlers.
2.) Everything is closed on Mondays.
3.) Vast stretches of nothingness on the Interstate.

Coming up soon: strawberry jam and the new kitchen!

Chuck Norris Baseball Facts

2009-05-22T10:28:00.001-04:00

I've been posting about baking far too much lately, so here are some Chuck Norris baseball facts (inspired by Halos Heaven) for my non-baking friends:

Chuck Norris doesn't steal bases. He is given them as gifts.
When umpires make a call, they turn to Chuck Norris and say, "If that's alright with you, sir."
Chuck Norris once hit a home run through the Green Monster.
The Milwaukee Brewers added a new feature to Miller Park: everytime Chuck Norris hits a home run, Bernie Brewer will slide into a mug of blood.
When Chuck Norris plays third base, the first baseman wears a catcher's mitt.
Teams recently started employing the Chuck Norris shift, in which all eight fielders stand in the bleachers and the pitcher stands behind the batting practice screen.
Barry Bonds did not take steroids. He was touched by the right hand of Chuck Norris.
When Chuck Norris bats, he hits 2.000.
Monument Park is actually a memorial to all the players beaned by Chuck Norris.
The Tampa Bay Rays took the "Devil" out of their name because it was trademarked by Chuck Norris.
Players who hit behind Chuck Norris don't get any RBI, because Chuck Norris always drives himself in.

Review: Smitten Kitchen's Russian Black Bread

2009-05-22T09:26:00.004-04:00

Chuck Norris doesn't use a bread knife. He uses dental floss.
Chuck Norris doesn't bake bread. He scares it into baking itself.
When Chuck Norris kneads bread, the neighbors feel the tremors.

Smitten Kitchen's Russian black bread is an intensely flavorful pumpernickel. Many adjectives could be used to describe it. "Hardcore" comes immediately to mind. This bread has seventeen ingredients, including unsweetened chocolate and shallots, or double what any normal bread on God's green earth should ever have. Step aside, my friends, because this, this is Chuck Norris bread.

Since this is a recipe review, I won't provide you with a recipe or any other pictures. For those, you can head on over to Smitten Kitchen and marvel at the fancy camera work. Instead, I'm going to give you the low-down on the recipe:

1.) Make it now. It's a messy, complicated dough, but it makes an insane amount of a delicious, aromatic bread. The apartment will smell like pumpernickel for the next few days, and that alone is worth the price of admission.

2.) When Deb at Smitten Kitchen tells you that you can make rounds or loaves, what she really means is that you should make only rounds. The crust on this bread is delightfully cruncy and thick, but it doesn't set up quite right in a loaf pan. It needs to be exposed to air; otherwise, it kind of crumbles and falls apart. So, make rounds, please. They're more aesthetically pleasing anyway. And, as you can see in the picture above, they slice beautifully.

3.) There is no real need to grind up the fennel and caraway seeds. The dough is so large that a few tablespoons of seeds are hardly noticeable.

4.) If you're like me and regularly alter recipes accidentally on purpose, do not fret. This bread (or any yeast bread, really) is resilient and can take pretty much any substitutions or alterations. I, for instance, stupidly added extra chocolate (cocoa powder + shortening for those of you without unsweetened chocolate on hand). It turned out perfectly all the same.

While the dough might kick your ass, the finished product is a pungent and delicious kick in the tastebuds. Unless you want to feel the wrath of a Chuck Norris roundhouse, you might want to get into the kitchen and start baking.

Cooking with Apples, Part Deux (Updated)

2009-05-21T12:18:00.000-04:00

I've had some leftover red delicious apples sitting in my fridge for a while now. I baked an amazing apple coffee cake with some, but I needed something else to finish off the rest of them. Thankfully, Rachel came to the rescue and told me how to make applesauce. Just boil some peeled, cored, and sliced apples and toss the results in a blender. Simple, right? Before you answer that question, have you ever seen me cook? Nothing is simple in my kitchen.

I bought a cheap apple corer to commemorate the occasion and promptly peeled the apples and sent them through the gauntlet of blades.

A close-up of the victims.
Since I can't follow anyone's directions (even my own; I've written down some of my recipes, but I never actually follow them), I decided to make flavored applesauce. The only things I had in the house (remember, we're moving soon) was some blueberry pomegranate juice and some frozen Maine blueberries. Blueberry applesauce it is!

I boiled four apples in a thin layer of the juice (around ¼ cup), then covered and simmered for almost half an hour. The smell was kind of bad, so I decided to sweeten them with around ¼ cup brown sugar. That's entirely optional, though.

Once that was done, I tossed the apples and some of the juice (leaving a small amount in the pot) into the blender. I threw some blueberries on top for good measure.

Blended it all together and it turned out beautifully.

If you can't see the texture, enlarge the photo. Trust me: it's perfect. And the taste (even though I've only had it warm) is quite delicious. Most importantly, for once, it actually was simple.

Tonight I'll be trying this ridiculously complicated black bread for a potluck at my wife's work. I've never worked with half the ingredients (shallots? really?), so wish me luck.

Update: after checking the cooled product, it thickened more than I anticipated. Suggestion: double the liquid base (you can use water, fruit juice, apple cider, apple juice, etc.) so you don't have to add apple butter and fruit juice to thin out your applesauce. Just an idea.

Make This Coffee Cake Now

2009-05-15T01:06:00.001-04:00

Please? It's the best coffee cake I've ever had.

Adapted from a recipe by Emeril:

Batter
1 stick unsalted butter, softened
1½ cups packed light brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 cups self-rising flour
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 cup sour cream
2 apples, peeled, cored, and chopped

Topping
½ cup packed light brown sugar
½ cup all-purpose flour
½ tsp. ground cinnamon
½ stick unsalted butter, softened

Glaze
½ cup packed light brown sugar
½ tsp. vanilla extract
2 tbsp. water

I came into some apples recently. Unfortunately, they're red delicious apples, which don't hold their shape when baked. Since I'm not all that fond of eating apples straight (especially red delicious), that meant something with chopped or pureed apples.

I stumbled upon Emeril's recipe and am very, very glad I tried it.

Start by placing a stick of butter in a large bowl and half a stick in a medium bowl.

While those are softening, whisk together the self-rising flour and 1 tsp. cinnamon in an even larger bowl.

Once the butter is soft, cream together with the brown sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, incorporating thoroughly. After one egg, the batter will look deliciously peanut-buttery. After the second, it will look runny.

Make a well in the flour and add what you just mixed to the flour. Add the sour cream and vanilla, stirring together. Fold in the chopped apples. The finished batter will be extremely thick (perfect for that crumb texture). Preheat the oven to 350°F and grease a 13x9 baking pan. Pour the batter into the pan.

Prepare the crumb topping by mixing together all four ingredients until the result resembles coarse crumbs. Sprinkle uniformly over the surface of the batter.

Place in the oven. Bake approximately 35 minutes or until golden brown on top.

Let cool on a wire rack for at least 10 minutes. Meanwhile, whisk together the three glaze ingredients. It's okay if the sugar doesn't dissolve fully.

After the cake has cooled for 10 minutes, drizzle the glaze over the top and let harden slightly.

I cannot say enough about the results. The texture is divine, and the apples give it a light fruity taste. I love the taste of brown sugar, too, so truckloads of the stuff can't hurt.

The cleanup's a bitch,

but well worth it. As I said before, this is the best coffee cake I've ever had.

I still have four more apples to use up. I'm thinking about making apple dumplings. Any other ideas for good apple dishes that could stand some red deliciousness?

Some Baseball Questions

2009-05-14T00:59:00.000-04:00

With popular color analyst Jerry Remy on indefinite leave after a bout with lung cancer, NESN has turned to a revolving door of analysts to patch the hole left behind by the RemDawg. The experiment has seen everyone from Dennis Eckersley to Kevin Kennedy to Dave Roberts try their hand at analysis.

Even the best baseball commentators say some absolutely ridiculous things. I chalk that up to a number of reasons, chief among them the fact that most analysts are former players. If you think about it, most field managers are ex-players, but very few general managers or front office professionals are. That is partially because the front office has to deal with so much more than just the game of baseball. But, it is also partially because ex-players tend to rely on instincts and feelings and can rarely view the game as a business or from a critical distance. Remy occasionally said some ridiculous things, but he was always able to view the game the way any good analyst should: from multiple perspectives. He recognized the value of statistics and of subjective, intangible evaluation.

Without Remy in the booth, I've been listening a little more closely to his temporary replacements. Just the last couple of games, they have said several things that have baffled/puzzled/intrigued/infuriated me. Mostly, though, they have made me wonder. If I were a smarter/better person, I would whip out the ole sabermetrics and try to find some answers to the questions they've raised. Since I'm not, I'll just ask the questions. These are some thing that I would love to have someone (other than me) complete a statistical analysis of:

1.) Does ritual trump athleticism or vice-versa? Commentators frequently assert that a player seems "out of sorts" or "uncomfortable" because his routine is off. Japanese players struggle because the American baseball is a slightly different size than the Japanese ball. Position players commit more errors when they play in a position they're not used to. On one level, that logic absolutely makes sense. Baseball players are creatures of habit (which makes me wonder: how much of "home field advantage" is mere comfort?). On another level, though, that logic makes no sense to me at all. These players are paid millions of dollars to be athletes. They should be able to throw a cantaloupe if required, right?

2.) Every time the Sox have the bases loaded, the graphics folks at NESN kindly provide us with the hitter's career numbers with the bases loaded. Almost invariably, the average hovers around .360 and the RBI total is about the same as the AB. Then, also almost invariably, the analyst will assert that the hitter is "clutch" with the bases loaded. My question: how much of the .360 is the hitter's "clutch-ness" and how much of it comes from the fact that pitcher's are usually not on top of their game when the bases are loaded. In other words, are bases loaded averages inflated by hitters capitalizing on a taxed pitcher?

3.) Kevin Kennedy, my favorite of NESN's stopgap announcers, constantly referred to 2-2 as the perfect "running count." Why is that? Do certain counts actually lead to more successful stolen bases? It stands to reason that first pitch steals are successful more often than steals later in the count (if only because the percentage of straight steals is higher on the first pitch). Beyond that, I have no idea. Joe Posnanski has a great piece on hitters' vs. pitchers' counts. I would love to see a similar piece on what happens on the rest of the field for various counts.

4.) The only claim that has truly infuriated me was the idea (perpetrated by both Eck and Kennedy) that a baserunner can "do more damage" by staying at first base early in a count than by stealing second base on the first pitch. The theory behind this is seems sounds: the pitcher will throw more fastballs to the hitter with the threat of the steal looming. Honestly, though, isn't it always more damaging to have a runner on second base? Would you want a speedy runner to pull up with a single instead of taking a clear double? If the guy is going to steal anyway, why not do it early in the count and increase the likelihood of him scoring on a single?

5.) I'm always fascinated by the tension between rationality and emotion. When K. and I watch TV, she always complains that characters do things that just don't make sense. I always remind her that they are often in the midst of emotional turmoil and therefore not entirely rational. Of course, these things are not entirely mutually exclusive, but they tend not to mix well. Thus, I always wonder when commentators talk about a player being "distracted" or "consumed" by emotion. Most analysts say that they will "take" the "fiery, passionate" guy over the lackadaisical player (read: J.D. Drew). Then, they turn around and claim that players (pitchers mostly) are too emotional and therefore more likely to get distracted and not execute properly. Is emotion a strength? Does it have any tangible effect on a player's performanace?

These are all questions to which I have no answer. I am only a baseball fan, and one with no advanced knowledge of stats, at that. I am curious, though. Mostly, though, I want Remy back.

Ryan Zimmerman's Hit Streak Ends :(

2009-05-13T19:32:00.003-04:00

I had no idea Ryan Zimmerman was such a ... player. *Laugh track.*

Sorry for the outage lately. Big baseball post coming up; hopefully some baking posts, too.

Until then, my friends.

The Life of a Graduate Student

2009-05-05T22:41:00.003-04:00

I'm never quite sure how I'm supposed to feel about it. Graduate students, querulous animals that we are, like to complain about having lots of papers to write and grade. I would often agree: juggling all the concerns of a teacher and a student at once can be frustrating and tiring.

But then, as I drive through the rain to go to the gym, I watch the undergrads filing from building to building, exam to exam, and I realize: I get paid to sit at home, read some books, and write some stuff. That's a pretty nice gig, right?

Pecan Pie and Banana Nut Muffins

2009-05-04T19:41:00.004-04:00

I'm moving in less than a month and will be coming into a lot of free time in approximately 48 hours. What to do but bake? I have a lot of stuff in my pantry that needs to be eaten, and baking is the best way I know to use up ingredients pre-move.

I've had some recipes from Simply Recipes waiting, so I decided to take the opportunity to try them. First up is a classic pecan pie, which, for the record, I always seem to screw up.

This recipe is delightful, though, and the added molasses and brown sugar makes for a dark filling that isn't too syrupy sweet.

For the record, I was able to eat a quarter of the pie in one sitting, something I would never be able to do with a regular pecan pie.

Grade: B+
The second recipe I butchered is Elise's take on banana nut muffins. Of course, I only had one banana in the house, so I had to dramatically abbreviate and alter the recipe and combine it with a package of banana nut muffin mix.

Despite all my attempts to the contrary, this recipe turned out quite well.

They're basically your classic banana nut muffin. The mashed banana makes them much more moist than muffins from the package, though.

Grade: A-
I will be reviewing some other recipes in the coming weeks. The fewer non-perishables I move with, the better. I inherited almost a dozen red delicious apples, so expect some awkward apple recipes soon.

Raisin-Walnut Rye Bread

2009-04-29T22:28:00.003-04:00

"Don't you know that love / Is stronger than Jesus," Nina Persson croons on A Camp's new album, Colonia. Well, I know something else that is stronger than Jesus: bread.

This recipe, adapted from one on the King Arthur Flour website, is a keeper. It's delightfully soft, and it features both the slightly tangy taste of classic rye bread and the sticky sweetness of raisins, with a bit of crunch in there just to screw things up.

The best part about it is that it is easy to make, and, if you regularly bake bread, you likely have the ingredients already. If not, you can easily go out and get them.

Mix the following ingredients in a bowl (or in your bread machine on the dough setting, if you prefer):

½ cup pumpernickel flour
½ cup rye flour
2 cups bread flour
1¼ cups water (room temperature)
2 tbsp. melted butter
3 tbsp. brown sugar
1½ tsp. salt
2 tsp. instant yeast (room temperature)

Mix to form a shaggy dough. Knead 10 minutes, let sit 10 minutes, then knead some more. Near the end of the kneading process (if you're using a bread machine, when it beeps), add 1 cup raisins and ½ cup chopped walnuts. You can substitute any dried fruit and chopped nuts here.

If you made the dough by hand, let it set in a bowl with a damp cloth over it for about an hour. It should double in size. If you made it in the bread machine, just wait until the dough cycle is complete.

At this point, transfer the dough to a lightly oiled loaf pan and cover it with lightly oiled plastic wrap.

Let sit for another 45 minutes or so until the dough crests over the top of the pan. Preheat the oven to 350°F. The dough should look something like this before it goes into the oven.

Bake for about 25 minutes (or longer if you prefer a thicker crust). Remove it from the oven and tent it with foil to keep the crust from burning. Return to the oven and bake another 15 minutes. It's always difficult to tell when bread is ready. I've found two good ways: you can either use an instant-read thermometer (the inside of a medium-sized loaf should hover around 190°F) or you can thump the outside of the loaf with your fingernail. If it's done, it should resonate slightly and hurt just a bit when you thump it.

When the loaf is done, slide it out of the pan and onto a cutting board. I like to cut my bread soon after it's out of the oven (my wife would disown me if I didn't give her a warm piece of bread).

Since water-based loaves can be rather soft and moist, I usually cut them and let them sit on a wire cooling rack for about an hour. Doing so allows them to cool and draws out some of the excess moisture so they will be easier to package.

While it's not a true rye bread, this recipe yields a loaf that is dark and rich like a traditional rye. And the texture of the bread is so perfect that I couldn't ask for more. It's going to be tough not to eat it all now while the wife is sleeping.

Seven Simple Steps to Chicken Curry

2009-04-28T18:00:00.000-04:00

1.) Cut up a couple of boneless skinless chicken breasts into bite-sized pieces.

2.) Shake a good deal of curry powder and black powder onto the pieces and roll them through your hands to coat. They will turn dark orange.

3.) Toss the chicken pieces in a wok (or deep skillet) with a tablespoon of vegetable oil. Heat on medium heat until white all the way through.

4.) In the meantime, mix whatever yogurt you have in your fridge (plain yogurt works best, but vanilla and other flavors will do in a pinch) and add a couple tablespoons of curry powder and a tablespoon of ground ginger. Stir until combined.

5.) Once the chicken breasts are done, push them to the sides of the skillet (or up the sides of the wok) and pour the yogurt in a pool in the center. Let simmer briefly, then slide the chicken in and mix together, coating all the pieces.

6.) If you want to spice it up, add some steamed veggies or stir-fry the veggies before you cook the chicken. I chose broccoli, carrots, and snow peas.

7.) Once the sauce thickens (it won't take long, since yogurt is already thick), serve hot and enjoy. This recipe is perfect with saffron and chicken rice: I'll post that recipe another day.

From the Daring Kitchen: Cheesecake

2009-04-27T06:44:00.003-04:00

The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey's Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.

I've been craving cheesecake for a while now, so it was fortuitous that my first Daring Bakers challenge was to make an entire cheesecake. The recipe provided was very basic, but it encouraged us bakers "to take this basic recipe and play with it. Make it unique."

My friend Amanda took those instructions to heart and made a Maine Deer Tracks cheesecake in honor of the Gifford's ice cream flavor. Head on over to her blog and check it out.

I'm nowhere near as creative, so I made a lemon cheesecake with a raspberry swirl. It was just the right amount of Springy goodness for a drizzly 50°F day in Maine.

The graham cracker crust was, honestly, the most fun I've had in a while. I'm a cheap date.

I love my food processor, and I used it to make crumbs of these crackers in about 15 seconds.

After about a half a box of graham crackers, a stick of melted butter, a bit of sugar (which I accidentally forgot), and a splash of vanilla,

I mixed it all together and pressed it into the disposable casserole dish I bought for the occasion.

(Springform pans are wonderful and all, but the recipe called for a boiling water bath, and watertight they are not.)

Meanwhile, I got out the cream cheese and started letting it warm up to room temperature.

While that was warming, I made a simple raspberry puree by putting a container and a half of raspberries (saving the remainder for garnishing) into the food processor. It was a pain in the ass to strain out all the seeds, so I only got most of them (no one noticed, anyway).

Kind of creepy, no?
After that, it was time for the cheesecake batter, which included three bricks of cream cheese and a cup of sugar creamed together,

three eggs,

a cup of heavy cream, and a splash of vanilla.

I really wanted the cheesecake to be lemony, so I grated two lemon peels into the batter and added the juice from both lemons, as well.

Poor naked lemons.
Then came the hard part. To make the characteristic swirl, I poured the raspberry over the cheesecake batter and awkwardly ran a knife through it to swirl it. I stuck it all in the boiling water bath and baked it in the oven for about 45 minutes.

You're next, sweet, innocent blackberries, you're next.
It wasn't beautiful, but once decorated,

it didn't look half bad. Besides, I've never been good at making things look good. I learned to cook from my grandmother, whose biscuits roughly resembled potatoes left in the sun too long, and my mother, who is known for trying things like the freakish-looking Toad-in-the-Hole (her only spectacular failure, according to my dad).

I took the finished product to a wine reception at the University Club on campus and donated it to the cause. There was much hyperbole to be had, and the person in charge of the event made me wave to a table of middle-aged women devouring my cheesecake.

While it was not as good as people made it out to be, I was quite pleased with the results. The recipe yielded a cheesecake that was perfectly light and fluffy (none of that dense cheesecake that will fill you up with a couple of bites). The extra lemon zest and juice gave it some zing, and the raspberries softened that bite a little.

I am happy to declare my first Daring Bakers challenge a success!

Roasted Carrots

2009-04-26T08:00:00.003-04:00

I like eating cute things, so it's nice to personify my vegetables before I kill them.

Amanda, whose culinary prowess and razor-sharp wit have netted her a Friendship Blog Award from foodie How to Eat a Cupcake, recently turned me onto delicious roasted vegetables. I've tried a number of my favorite veggies roasted now, including brussel sprouts, mushrooms, potatoes, and broccoli. Next on the list: carrots.

I was really worried about roasting carrots. Everytime I sautee carrots (my preferred method), I have to watch them like a hawk to make sure they are cooked without being mushy. I want crunchy-soft carrots, rather than pot-roast-style carrots. Of course, roasting vegetables is the perfect way to get them crunchy and soft.

It turns out that roasted carrots are, I kid you not, perfect. They taste almost exactly like sweet potatoes.

So, cut up some carrots and pop them in the oven on a roasting pan (or any other metal pan) at 375°F for about half an hour. If you want, you can toss them in a tiny bit of olive oil and ground sea salt. Or not. They're fine just on their own.

While you're at it, let me know what vegetable to roast next. I have some asparagus waiting in my crisper, so I might just try that.

16-Whaaaa?!

2009-04-25T21:14:00.005-04:00

All I have to say is this: after an 11-inning marathon last night and a 5-hour slugfest tonight, it's only fitting that Sports Illustrated couldn't manage to fit the entire score of the Yanks-Sox game in one headline. (I would direct you over there, but it seems they fixed the problem immediately after I took my screen cap.)

My Worldview

2009-04-25T10:00:00.003-04:00

I don't know if you've heard, but my Canadian Literature class is a disaster. Our instructor basically gave us free reign to teach ourselves for the entire semester. That might work if he were to just listen in, but he frequently interrupts and chips in with comments that are either off-track or just plain strange. Even that might work if it weren't for the fact that we argue so damn much. I completely and totally disagree with most everything that the instructor (and one other student) says in class. As I'm sure you know, I'm prone to air my disagreements, too (rather than let them "fester"; more on that later).

My friend occupies herself in that class by taking her notes backwards, Leonardo da Vinci style. Another friend doodles. My new pastime for getting through every Wednesday night is to use the discussion in class to contemplate my worldview and just how different it is from the other people in the class.

Sometimes, it's refreshing being around people that are like-minded. I occasionally get a little tingle of joy when I realize, hey, I'm in a room full of atheists. Then, other times, I'm reminded that these people really are not like-minded. Here are some observations about my own worldview that I gleaned from this week's class.

People do not fundamentally change.

I'm not saying that people don't change. Of course they do. I'm also not trying to appeal to some kind of greater human nature; like any good postmodern scholar, I recognize the contingency of life and the socially constructed nature of identity. Rather, I am of the opinion that change is extremely hard for most people. We get into certain ruts and like to stay in those ruts. Even as adolescents, when we are changing most quickly, we fight change as much as possible. Maybe I'm straying too much into the "human nature" camp, but I believe that there are only a few exceptions to this rule.

This issue came up in reference to Sarah Sheard's Almost Japanese, a novel about a young girl from Toronto's obsession with an older Japanese orchestra conductor. Most everyone in the class thought that the narrator of the novel moved on from her stalker phase at the end of the novel. I can see the value in that reading, especially since I think the text wants its readers to read it that way. I couldn't, though, because I fully believe that her obsession, which lasts somewhere around five years, would be extremely hard to shake. I am an optimistic person, but I'm not optimistic that she would make the radical change others seemed so willing to believe.

We are all fucked up in some way or another.

I promise, I really am an optimistic person. This week's class just reaffirmed my view that everyone is fucked up somehow. This, because I discovered that 13-year-old girls are psychopaths who harbor secret obsessions for various famous people. Who knew that it's apparently perfectly normal to keep a lock of hair and a used drinking glass as keepsakes?

We are all deeply sexual creatures, whether or not we want to admit it.

Excluding the few million asexuals in the world, I firmly believe that sexuality is a major part of all our lives and that it informs our movements and actions socially. Apparently others do not entirely buy this. Some of the people in my class talked about their teenage years as if they weren't raging balls of hormones at fourteen. Some of the people in my class talked about the older Japanese orchestra conductor as if his actions in Almost Japanese (or anyone's actions in the book) were somehow divorced from any kind of sexual nature. Yes, sex can be on the periphery at times. Yes, it's rarely purely about sex; power almost always comes along for the ride. But, at least on some level, I believe it's usually about sex. There's some kind of saying out there that all literature is really about love. One could say the same thing for sex, for even when there isn't love, there's always sex.

We are steadily marching towards progress in some kind of Hegelian manner.

I struggle with this notion constantly, but, as I said, I'm an optimist, so I like to believe that humanity's history is fundamentally the history of progress. There are absolutely steps backward. There are times when progress is stalled. Just looking at the history of America, the Jim Crow period post-emancipation completely stalled all progress. But, we slowly have resolved a number of issues over our history as a nation.

Here's where the "festering" comes in. One student made a comment that fascism and bigotry is "more dangerous" when it "goes underground" and "festers." Her argument was that "festering" fascism leads to crazy totalitarian states like the one in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. On some level, this argument makes sense. On another level, it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense (at least to me).

You see, the opposite of festering fascism is outright fascism. It's state-supported bigotry like Jim Crow laws. On this level, I would much, much rather racism be "festering" and "underground" than out in the open and acceptable. Hatred is never more dangerous than when it is an acceptable part of society.

That is the fundamental reason why I see our history as a country as a history of progress. We have had and will continue to have problems—hell, we still treat Native Americans like third-world citizens—but we have mostly made racism, sexism, etc. go underground. I happen to think that's a good thing.

Ignore the inherent racism of this image, please.

I'm sure you've had enough of my poorly-argued-for worldview. I leave you with this thought: next time you're in a situation where it appears that you disagree with almost everyone in the room, whether it be a class or a meeting or something else entirely, don't get angry or defensive. Instead, take the opportunity to ponder your worldview and revel in the fact that, as Whitman would say, you "contain multitudes."

Bodies of Water

2009-04-24T15:27:00.004-04:00

Ever fall in love with a band that has only released a couple of albums? Ever wish that band had released dozens of albums so you could listen to them all in a row, never tiring of the different iterations of the same basic musical formula?

Yeah, I'm there.

Chivalry = Chauvinism

2009-04-24T08:00:00.004-04:00

I'm going to pull an ENG 101 student here in order to show that two words that are technically opposites are really the same.

According to WordWeb, my new dictionary friend, "chivalry" is defined as "courtesy towards women." "Chauvinism," then, is "activity indicative of belief in the superiority of men over women."

Really, though, aren't they the same thing?

Let's unpack this box: modern notions of chivalry—holding the door open for women (more on this later), opening car doors, etc.—are informed by medieval chivalry. We all know medieval chivalry: women on pedestals, women as inspiration figures. These women were entirely without agency, though. They were allowed to keep up their knight's weapons and hand their knight his sword before he rode into battle, but they certainly were not allowed to follow their knight into battle. In other words, wars were fought over women, but never were they fought for women. This is the history of woman (see The Iliad).

If we shift the example from medieval to modern chivalry, it becomes clear how chivalry = chauvinism. One of the most infuriating things in my world is when an adult male refuses to go through a door opened by a woman—"Hell, no! My mama raised me better than that!"—somehow relying on the crutch of chivalry as the final bastion of civility. That form of unthinking chivalry, though, rests on the assumption that women are somehow more delicate, more in need of having a door opened for them.

I also love what happens when one guy opens the door for another guy who happens to be into the whole chivalry thing. I love destabilizing people's world view, so I will frequently force chivalrous people to go through a door I'm holding open for them. Just the other day at the gas station, I had one guy refuse to go through the door four or five times, until I looked him square in the eyes and said, "Please go through the door, sir. I promise you that my holding it open for you is not some kind of homoerotic gesture."

He quickly hung his head and beat a hasty retreat for the nearby bar, likely puzzling over just what "homoerotic" meant and wondering whether or not I was hitting on him.

Big Papi

2009-04-22T23:58:00.004-04:00

I absolutely lurv the phenomenon, nay, the force, that is David Ortiz, or "Big Papi." Everything about the guy—his fractured English, his knack for big hits, his playful demeanor—makes him an absolutely joy to watch both on and off the field.

The subject of today's post, though, is Big Papi running (if you could call it that). As any Red Sox fan knows, there's a bit of cringing and some laughing whenever Big Papi motors around the bases.

Can't you just feel the earth shaking beneath your feet?
I thought pretty much all the jokes about Big Papi running had been made by now. But I was listening to the WEEI broadcast of tonight's game against the Twins, and the announcer said that Big Papi "rumbled over to third base on the play." Okay, I thought, rumbled is a nice word to describe that. Not exactly original, but nice all the same.

The announcer followed that call with the rather innocuous statement that Ortiz "moved from second to third." The prefect juxtaposition of "rumbled" and "moved" sent my mind into overdrive. The image I got in my head is this: Big Papi packing up his moving boxes and reluctantly renting a U-Haul to drive all the way over from second base to third. This is a delightful image for a number of reasons, most notably because Big Papi really does take up residence on one base.

This line of thought inevitably led me to wonder: What other metaphors could we use to describe Big Papi running? What are some good verbs to use, other than "rumble"? I would like to expand my vocabulary for making fun of Big Papi, and the more elaborate and complex, the better.

A Feed Conversation

2009-04-20T20:26:00.004-04:00

The following is a creative piece I wrote for my Young Adult Literature class last semester. It's an imagined conversation in the vein of M.T. Anderson's sci-fi novel Feed. I feel guilty posting things I didn't write specifically for the blog, but I rather like this piece and think it stands on its own very well, even for those of you who haven't read the book.

     Titus? Are you awake? She was chatting me. At one o'clock in the morning. I rolled over and tried to go to sleep.
     I just had this awful dream. The feed somehow knew I was dying. I don't know how. Maybe FeedTech realized how bad my state is, even though the bastards denied my maintenance. Maybe it ran a self-diagnostic or something or other. But it knew.
     And so it kept telling my dad about grief counseling and sending him ads for funeral homes. "Duckett-Robinson wants you to know that cremation can be affordable! This week only, cremate one body, get another half price!" and that kind of shit. And you know what it sent me?
     What?
     Wow! Here I thought I was talking to myself.
     I didn't wake up until you were already chatting, I lied.
     Anyway, you know what the Feed sent me? An ad for the latest spa on the moon. It thought I should beautify myself. Look nice for the end, you know. Feel a little better being dead, because it would ease the burden on the living if I looked good dead. My dad told me that we, humans that is, like to think of death as clean, peaceful. Apparently, back in the day, they used to do funerals with the casket open. But they would only do that if the deceased—my dad says that's the word for a dead body—had died in a way that left the body looking perfect. They wouldn't do that for someone with AIDS—that was their version of the lesions everyone has—because that would make death seem violent, you know?
     I didn't know. I could hardly follow her when I was awake lately, so I had no idea what she was chatting about now. She kept going, though. She was like,
     My dad said that most death is not peaceful. He's not very good at comforting people. Who the hell am I kidding? He's not very good at people. Do you think he's right? Will it be painful? Maybe I won't feel anything at all. Like when my legs go completely numb. Titus?
     I don't know. I don't know what death is like, since I haven't died yet.
     There's no need to be an asshole. That reminds me. I came up with a theory.
     A theory? I said. You sound like your dad. And she went,
     Yeah, well, that isn't such a bad thing. Anyway, I think maybe the Feed is at its best/worst—it thrives—when we are at our best/worst. So when I fall down the stairs because something in my head is broken, it tries to sell me deodorant. And when I'm dying, it tries to sell my dad grief counseling.
     That was just a dream, I interrupted.
     I know. Let me keep going. But it's not just when we're down. It takes the best moments of our lives and makes them its own, too. Like when you give birth. Well, not you, but, you know, people. Women. It has to show you something, so it probably sends you the latest sales on baby clothes. Maybe a place to sell your maternity ones. Maybe more counseling, you know, for postpartum depression.
     She kept chatting. We're a nation—minus the people without the Feed—of people not used to silence. We never hear silence. I bet silence would be blissful. Or music. And dancing.
     I'm scared, Titus. What happens next? I know, you don't know what happens next. I think I might welcome whatever it is, though. Maybe somewhere else, it's silent. And maybe, like me becoming my dad, that's not such a bad thing after all.

South Park: Making Stones Funny

2009-04-18T07:22:00.000-04:00

The best satirists possess an almost superhuman ability to take a simple conceit and spin a long and elaborate narrative from something most people would take for granted. Witness the original satirists, writers like Swift, whose "A Modest Proposal" is based around a single joke that seems like it would get old quickly, but never does, and Pope, whose "Rape of the Lock" takes the most banal of social scandals and turns it into something epic (and epically funny).

This, I believe, is the greatest skill of the writers of South Park.

It may be difficult to imagine South Park in the same vein as Swift and Pope, but I wholly believe the show is a top-notch social satire, perhaps unlike anything else on television. Let’s look at some examples.

In last week's episode, "Fishsticks," the writers took a shot at Kanye West. I like Kanye, but I don't find him all that funny. Likewise, I know Kanye has a massive ego, but I also don't find that to be all that funny. The writers of the show, though, were able to take a simple idea—Kanye West has a big ego—and inflate it to the level of hilarity. In the episode (go ahead, click the link and leave me for South Park), Cartman and Jimmy create a joke that goes something like this: "Do you like fishsticks? Do you like to put fishsticks in your mouth? What are you, a gay fish?" The joke sweeps the country and Kanye just cannot figure out why he is being called a gay fish for liking fishsticks. The Kanye-bashing is kind of funny at first, but as it multiplies like cloistered rabbits, it gets funnier and funnier, culminating in the final scene of the episode, in which Kanye embraces his identity as a gay fish and dives into the ocean, "singing" (in auto-tune) a song about being a gay fish while Frenching a flounder.

This effort is slightly different than the literary ideal of defamiliarization (one poet once said that the goal of poetry was to "make stones stoney"). Instead of reimagining the familiar as the new, the great satirists repeat the familiar in a slightly altered way. This repetition is what creates the comedy of shows like South Park, which make stones funny in their stoniness.

Another example would be beneficial here. As any Seinfeld fan could attest, it's extremely difficult to choose a favorite episode in a long-running comedy. If pushed, though, I think my favorite episode of South Park would be "Grey Dawn," an episode from their seventh season. This episode again takes a familiar idea (old people driving are scary) and weaves an elaborate tale around that idea. The episode is essentially a horror movie spoof, in which the monsters are old people in cars. After the town tries to take away senior citizens' licenses, AARP airlifts in reinforcements, who hold the adults in the town hostage. Eventually, the boys stop the senior citizens by locking the doors of Country Kitchen, the South Park version of Cracker Barrel. The funniest moments of the episode (watch and you'll see what I mean) are the horror movie-esque parts, the parts that take the simple idea (old people driving are scary) and inflate it to ridiculous proportions.

I could list countless episodes that do the same thing. Just last season, "Elementary School Musical" reexamined the familiar idea that High School Musical is completely and utterly ridiculous. The episode I show in my writing class, "Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow" again takes a common assumption (people talk about global warming as if it were the end of the world) and inflates/repeats it to satirize it.

I'm not sure where I was going with this, other than to make an impassioned plea for you to start watching South Park, if you aren't already. Yes, there are far too many poop jokes and slapstick moments. Yes, the show can be uncomfortably bad or offensive at points. When the writers are on, though, when they take something familiar and blow it way out of proportion, then it's a satiric goldmine.

The Parker Theory of Net Carbon Displacement

2009-04-17T06:35:00.001-04:00

I have a theory that will likely not change the way anyone sees the world. That's what most of my theories are like, though.

The theory is this: an individual person's effect on the effort to curb carbon emmissions is greater than the sum of that person's measures to cut carbon. Say, for instance, that you cut out three metric tons of carbon from your carbon footprint by biking to work and unplugging your cell phone charger when not in use. My theory holds that your net carbon displacement will be greater than three tons.

How much greater it is depends on how visible your activism is. That's the crux of the theory, which is named after a friend of mine who lived on campus and walked literally everywhere. My friend graduated after a year, and I noticed in the year after he graduated my friends began to drive around campus more, instead of just walking from one end of campus to the other. I could attribute this change in emissions patterns to any number of things, but I think that the visibility of someone else doing these things suddenly makes it accptable, good, even right for others.

Of course, this is also the downfall of my theory. I have no skills in math, so I have no way of calculating how much one's visibility affects other people.

This theory isn't completely out of touch with reality, though. It is the same basic theory behind the grassroots movement, which holds that real change happens from the bottom up. It is the theory behind local carbon-free movements like that of Samsø, Denmark. It is even the basic sentiment of the old saying, "Monkey see, monkey do." That efforts to better the world are as important for their visibility as for their actual effort is not a new idea. My theory is likely not a new idea either, but it extends that same principle to the individual arena in hopes of saying, perhaps too optimistically, "Every person can make a difference."

So, the next time you walk to campus or to work, make sure you take the road more traveled. Instead of cutting through the woods or taking a bike path, walk along the main road. You'll thank me later.

The 2004 Boston Red Sox: Major League IV

2009-04-15T12:53:00.004-04:00

My friend Amanda wrote a wonderful paper prompt for her first-year writing students. The book her students read was published in 1998, and it makes the argument that entertainment has overrided all other forces in American society. Her prompt asks her students to apply the author's argument to any event since 1998. It sounded like such a fun prompt that I decided to write a response to it myself. I hope it's good enough for her to give to her students (or at least give me a decent grade):

Ask any Red Sox fan about the 2004 team, the first group of Sox to win a World Series in 86 years, and you will likely hear about Dave Roberts' stolen base or the shocking trade of franchise player Nomar Garciaparra. You will almost certainly be treated to the story of Curt Schilling's heroic "bloody sock" game in the ALCS or Bill Mueller's base hit off Mariano Rivera. For sports fans, these individual moments are what crystallize into memory; Red Sox fans, for instance, are less likely to recall Bill Buckner's fruitful career than they are to associate Buckner with his crucial error in the 1986 World Series. What connects these isolated stories, these "spots of time" as Wordsworth would call them, are storylines: the story of the 1986 Red Sox, who came so close to winning a World Series before the "Curse of the Bambino" struck them down, or the story of the 2004 Red Sox, a ragtag band of self-professed "idiots" who finally overcame adversity to win it all. Like background radiation from the Big Bang, lingering throughout the known universe, these storylines are everywhere: they are part of the fabric of American sports. To be a sports fan or a Red Sox fan is to follow these storylines, whether you want to or not.

When Neal Gabler wrote Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality in 1998, he both could and could not anticipate the 2004 Red Sox. Gabbler's argument, that entertainment is "the most pervasive, powerful and ineluctable force of our time," is confined predominantly to fifty years prior to the book's publication (9). Life the Movie trades in specific instances of the ways entertainment has come to rule over every facet of American life, from politics to sports to religion. While Gabler's concrete examples stop in 1998, the force of entertainment rolls on until today: as Gabler admits in the introduction, "Every day the life medium generates new episodes. Every day someone finds more inventive applications for its use" (10). The 2004 Boston Red Sox were one of these "new episodes," as much TV show as baseball team. From their identity as a band of "idiots" to the drama of their ALCS win against the Yankees, the 2004 Red Sox were a team based on entertainment, a team that sold itself so well to American sports fans that they created an entire nation of followers.

Prior to the 2004 season, the Red Sox, along with the Chicago Cubs, were perennial "underdogs," always expected to finish second to the mighty Steinbrenner-led Yankees and never expected to win a World Series. The entertainment value of the 2004 Red Sox lay primarily in this underdog identity. The story of the underdog is one of the most enduring stories in American sports, likely because it reaffirms the "American dream" of self-betterment and provides the illusion that sporting events are spontaneous and unpredictable (in other words, the illusion of "reality"). Hollywood has capitalized on this borderline-mythological trope for decades: Gabler, for instance, extols the brilliant cross-marketing of Disney films and sports franchises in The Mighty Ducks and Angels in the Outfield (118). The '04 Sox, though, were one of the first "real" teams to embrace this identity and appropriate it for entertainment purposes. If we follow Gabler's argument, then this appropriation of a Hollywood trope by an actual team is only natural. Gabler argues that the traditions of nineteenth-century baseball would be sacrificed on the altar of television and twentieth-century entertainment: "lowering pitching mounds, shrinking strike zones, quickening playing surfaces … all designed … on the assumption … that for most fans high-scoring games were far more entertaining than low-scoring ones" (118). In this light, the 2004 Red Sox were merely a more sophisticated continuation (a "new episode" if you will) of the trend in baseball toward mascots and other sensory delights.

The underdog identity of the team manifested itself in a number of ways, but the most prominent of those was the team's own label of the "idiots." The "idiots" epithet emerged from Kevin Millar's 2003 coining of "Cowboy Up!", a phrase that was meant to encourage teammates to give their all. The '04 team embraced the "idiots" label and constructed themselves, consciously or unconsciously, as a group of characters in an ongoing baseball comedy. There was Millar, the fun-loving first baseman who kept things light and enjoyable in the clubhouse. There was Millar's partner in crime, Johnny Damon, the hirsute center fielder, affectionately dubbed "Caveman Johnny" by fans, who entertained fans by hustling around Fenway Park's cavernous center field and showing off what everyone knew was quite possibly the worst arm in the history of the game. There was David Ortiz, "Big Papi," the team's lovable teddy bear of a designated hitter, a reclamation project from the Minnesota Twins, who would rumble around the bases with a grin of his face. And, of course, there was the paragon of entertainment, Manny Ramirez, who fans would later remember for making phone calls from Fenway Park's famed Green Monster in between innings and diving to cut off an outfielder's throw from fifteen feet away. On the one hand, they were simply a good baseball team led by a new manager and the youngest general manger in baseball; on the other, they were the living embodiment of the Charlie Sheen movie Major League, in which a team of misfits put together for the sole purpose of losing band together to win a division title.

Of course, sports provide fans with the illusion of "reality"; sports marketing focuses on the sport itself, the actual games of baseball being played. Gabler calls this phenomenon the "macguffin," or the thing that is ostensibly the purpose of any given discursive realm (for baseball, the game itself, for religion, salvation, and so on). According to Gabler, the macguffin is an elaborate ruse, a bait-and-switch, but it is, to reappropriate his phrase, "the most pervasive, powerful and ineluctable" ruse of all. The "macguffin," the ruse, of the 2004 Red Sox was that these individuals, these characters, were baseball players first and foremost. The media coverage of their American League Championship Series (ALCS) victory over the vaunted Yankees, though, reveals just how much of a ruse that is.

The 2004 ALCS was full of singular moments like Roberts' steal and Mueller's hit up the middle, but, more than anything else, it was a theatrical dramatization of the underdog story. The best-of-seven series started inauspiciously for the Sox, who dropped the first two games by a combined five runs, 10-7 and 3-1. The series moved from New York to Boston, and the Sox were promptly humiliated, 19-8, by a Yankees team that won the AL East that year (MLB). The story should be familiar by now. ESPN's SportsCenter constantly flashed various statistics that basically told the same story: no team in the history of baseball had ever come back from three games down to win a best-of-seven series. Of course, the Red Sox would eventually come back to win the series, dramatically defeating the previously invulnerable Yankees closer Mariano Rivera in Game 4 and mostly cruising through the rest of the series. Media coverage of the ALCS focused on the dramatic reversal of fortunes, the underdog finally conquering the pit bull. And why not? This was entertainment at its finest. Talk of the "Curse of the Bambino," an 86-year-old curse that started with the trade of Babe Ruth to the Yankees, sold the team to its fans. Ironically, the media would later divest itself of the "Curse" and all its trappings. The retrospective official website of the 2004 Red Sox says of the ALCS, "It wasn't miraculous, it wasn't mystical, it wasn't mysterious. It was the Boston Red Sox being the better ballclub. Forget the Curse. Forget the ghosts of Yankee Stadium" (MLB). This effort to reassert the "macguffin" of the ALCS—it was about baseball, not the Curse—is entirely unconvincing to anyone who watched the events unfold. Of course, on some level, it was about "the Boston Red Sox being the better ballclub." Mostly, though, it was about them becoming the better ballclub, rising up from the depths of their division to overcome their greatest adversary and exorcise the "ghosts" of the Curse.

If the ALCS was the theatrical dénouement of the 2004 Red Sox soap comedy, then the World Series was its anticlimax. The Sox swept the St. Louis Cardinals in four games, absolutely dominating them by any measure. This less-than-dramatic ending to a supremely entertaining season did nothing to dispel the mythos of the Curse-breaking team, as news stories just after the Red Sox won the World Series affirmed what everyone already knew about the team: they were a baseball phenomenon unlike anything the game or its fans had ever seen. As Dan Shaughnessy of the venerable Boston Globe simply attested, "They did something that had not been done in 86 years." (Shaughnessy would later publish Reversing the Curse: Inside the 2004 Boston Red Sox, a book that epitomizes media coverage of the Curse.) Other sports teams, even other baseball teams, had entertained fans; this was nothing new. The 2004 Boston Red Sox, though, perfected the art of sports as entertainment: they thrilled fans with their "idiot" antics and reaffirmed the traditional American ideal that the underdog can win (rather, deserves to win). The force behind the 2004 Red Sox was the same force that Gabler would argue is behind all sports teams, the force of entertainment. This team, though, harnessed that force to shape its own identity better than perhaps any other team in the history of the game.

These Hard, Hard Times

2009-04-14T13:09:00.002-04:00

Fifteen-second commercial spots are always awkward. It's like a graduate student writing a five-page paper: there simply isn't enough time to do anything complex. That's why I'm always amazed by short commercials, like this one from Trojan:

The sex and alcohol industries are usually two of the last industries hit by a recession. Pornography sales are dropping, though. How does Trojan appeal to buyers in "these hard [hehe, hard] times"? Through the idea that buying condoms makes you patriotic! Wait, what? So, am I doing my patriotic duty by not bringing children into the world in its current state? If so, what does that say about where we're at as a country?

Seven Simple Steps to Chicken Marsala

2009-04-13T22:52:00.008-04:00

1.) Go out to the store and buy a bottle of marsala, unless you are a freak like me and keep it on hand. The cheaper the better.

2.) Pound some boneless-skinless chicken breasts (BSCB) with the flat end of a meat tenderizer until no more than an inch in thickness.

3.) Coat the BSCB in a mixture of flour, coarse ground black pepper, garlic powder, basil, and oregano.

4.) Add a tablespoon of olive oil to a hot skillet. Add the coated chicken breasts.

5.) Cook on medium heat approximately ten minutes each side or until browned.

6.) While the chicken is cooking, mix together equal parts heavy cream and marsala wine. Whisk in a pinch of cornstarch.

7.) Add the marsala mixture to the cooked chicken and bring to a boil. Simmer briefly and serve over pasta.

Fondue for You

2009-04-12T17:18:00.008-04:00

A thing of beauty, isn't it?

K. and I bought a Cuisinart electric fondue pot from a Linens 'n Things that was going out of business. We didn't want it to go to waste, so we invited five friends over to enjoy a three-course fondue dinner.

I only have photographic documentation of the chocolate course, but I'll walk you through the other courses, as well.

Our first course was, of course, cheese fondue. I've never done cheese fondue, but it was relatively easy. I deduced from recipes that cheese fondue has an alcoholic liquid base. For ours, I used some leftover Woodchuck hard apple cider (with a few squirts of lemon juice). Once you bring that to a boil (in the fondue pot or over the stove), all that remains is to grate some cheese into a bowl, toss it with cornstarch (to keep the grated cheese from sticking together), and add it to the boiling liquid. I used about 2 cups of Woodchuck and 1.5 lbs. of smoked cheddar cheese. We dipped all sorts of roasted vegetables: potatoes, mushrooms, brussel sprouts, and brocolli (the latter two kindly provided by A. Fiercehair). We also dipped a number of bread products, including croutons (yum!), croissants, and french bread. Everyone deemed it a succcess.

The face of contentment.
Our next course was a meat fondue. Meat fondues can be either broth- or oil-based. All my friends concluded that oil was too oily, so I went with chicken broth. I boiled about four cups of broth in the fondue pot, tossed in an ounce of star anise, and set the pot to boil lightly. We dipped raw shrimp (peeled and deveined), chicken breasts, chicken sausage, filet mignon, and mushroom caps. Everyone (except me) was scared of having to cook raw meat in the pot, but they quickly got over themselves and had a lot of fun. The shrimp cook quite quickly and dip well in butter. The filet also cooks quickly; the rest of it takes about two minutes to cook through.

I'm sure you're all waiting for the chocolate fondue, so I will not make you wait any longer. I've done chocolate fondue several times before, so I will provide my own recipe:

2 cups heavy cream
¼ cup skim milk
30 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 tablespoon crème de cacao
1 tablespoon rum (optional)

Bring the heavy cream and skim milk to a rolling boil. Add chocolate chips slowly, stirring to melt the chips.

Ceremonially add the crème de cacao.

At this point, let your creativity take over. You can add anything you want to the fondue. Flavored liquers go particularly well. We took a vote and decided to do a relatively plain fondue. I'm a pyromaniac, though, so I added some rum to the top of the fondue and light it on fire. Fun.

We dipped some crazy shit in the chocolate fondue, including Easter Peeps and Twinkies. Yes, Twinkies are delicious dipped in warm chocolate. As various people said throughout the night, "It's _________ + chocolate. No surprises here."

We followed the fondue up with an embarassing round of Trivial Pursuit.

My team lost by one wedge. My teammate's roommate, though, won on "dental floss." We were all kind of pissed.

At least she seems happy.
There were a lot of dishes, but, all in all, it was a wonderful night of gluttony.

Thoughts on the Graduate Admissions Process

2009-04-07T10:46:00.005-04:00

As anyone who has applied to post-secondary institutions can attest, the graduate admissions process is a trying one, and the best way to get through such a labyrinth can be open and honest lines of communication. Unfortunately, not all schools can manage that.

I have received four funded offers to PhD programs in rhetoric and composition (or some variation therein). Virginia Tech and NC State are at the top of my list, in large part because of their thorough, prompt, curteous, professional, and downright friendly communication. I get the sense from these schools that these are people I would enjoy working with and would enjoy working with me.

I cannot say the same about some of the other schools I have applied to. I have applied to 28 schools in a span of two years and have received only 6 funded offers. That leaves 22 schools that either offered me admission without an assistantship or fellowship or refused me admission at all. The vast majority of those schools have been kind and thoughtful, even if the only communication we've ever had is through form letters. A select few schools, however, have bungled what I would think would be a fairly simple process. I will share my stories from my most recent round of applications today, not because I mean to complain, but because I mean to open a conversation about how to improve a back- and often heart-breaking process.

My admittedly cursory research indicates that there is not a single definitive statement of student rights. What I can glean from various documents is that there are several basic rights: the right to information/statistics; the right to make a decision without being pressured (the linked document is intended for undergraduate students, but it talks of "high-pressure sales tactics"); the right to considerate and fair treatment.

Let me give an example of the latter two rights in action. I applied to Northeastern's graduate journalism program. They offered me admission with a full tuition scholarship. Now, that may seem nice, but for a graduate program, it is not enough. I'm extremely unlikely to accept an offer of admission without an assistantship or fellowship. So, you can imagine my surprise when I received a phone call two weeks ago from Northeastern, asking, politely I might add, whether or not I had made a decision. This may seem like an overreaction, but I was offended by the call. Virginia Tech has offered me a fellowship they've never offered anyone else. They have a very limited number of spaces in their program. And still, they have not once pressured me into making a decision. I respect that. What I do not, respect, however, is being pressured by a school that is only offering me a scholarship. So, if I make my decision sooner, they can give that scholarship to someone else?

I am, of course, making something out of nothing here. My second story is equally dramatized, but I feel that I have more of a gripe here. The University of Florida is one of the top three schools, in my estimation, of the thirteen I applied to. I really would like to go there. My close friend, M., applied there, as well. M. applied to a different part of the English department, and he received word that he was admitted almost a month ago. Of course, that worried me. Why haven't they contact me yet? I wondered obsessively.

As it turns out, they hadn't contacted me because they fail epically at basic communication. When April rolled around and I still hadn't heard the slightest word from UF, I e-mailed their graduate secretary about the status of my application. I politely waited another week and e-mailed again yesterday. So, today, I received the following message:

"We have had you on the waiting list but have now found that we will not be able to offer you admission to our program. Good luck to you in your academic future."

Now, this is couched in polite language, but the context is horribly offensive. Remember: they had not told me a single thing until now. Then, I discover that I was waitlisted and subsequently rejected without ever knowing about it. I was holding out on making a decision until I heard from UF. I e-mailed back expressing my discontent, and someone else sent me a note with a common excuse:

"We are seriously understaffed, which means we have one secretary handling about 700 applications."

Apprently they do not have any system in place to notify waitlisted candidates. Does no one see the problem here?

So, I sent them a letter expressing my problems with that system. The letter is overly dramatic, and anyone who knows me knows that this is not me. But I sent it anyway.

Kenneth,

Thank you for the kind note. I would agree; you obviously do need to implement some kind of formal process. I am less upset by the fact that it is April 7 (you're right, I still have plenty of time to make a decision) than I am by the treatment I received. I would not be upset were my inquiries fielded in a prompt and curteous manner. I realize this in large part because you are significantly understaffed, but I had to e-mail Kathy twice in the past two weeks before receiving even the brief response I did receive.

You can imagine that it would be such a shock to me, since all the other schools I applied to have kept in contact thoroughly, promptly, and professionally. I can say for sure that a program's lines of communications speak volumes about the program itself and have played a major role in my decision-making process. I would hate for any qualified candidate to not choose Florida because of poor communication. I know that your communication with accepted candidates is likely much more streamlined; I also know, though, that how an institution treats even those who fall through the cracks, the marginalized in any bureaucratic system, in part defines that instiution.

I recognize that the process of graduate admissions is hard on everyone. I'm sure you all have had to endure mistreatment. From my vantage point, I have encountered a number of issues, including being pressured to make a decision by the end of March to attend a program that did not even offer an assistantship. I can unreservedly say, though, that being given the qualified honor of being on a waitlist to a prestigious program, then simultaneously having that honor stripped in a brief (two-sentence) e-mail, one that required what I would consider undue prodding on my part, is the bitterest pill I have had to swallow in the whole process.

Such is the plight of the waitlisted candidate, I suppose, but I do hope you will see this as a chance for improvement. That is what I intend my comments as: not as complaint, but as opportunity.

Best,

Evan

The response I received was, as I expected, tepid at best. Kenneth says,

"Thank you for your input and concerns. Difficulties aside, we are
pleased with our incoming class, and we hope you will be pleased wherever you land."

I may be expecting too much from schools. I consider myself blessed to have four funded offers. I consider myself blessed that two of those schools really, really want me, and I really, really want them. I feel like this decision will be the hardest of my life; I feel like the child befeore King Solomon, ordered to be torn in two.

Nevertheless, I know several people who have been mistreated in the admission process by even the best schools. This is never a case of bad or malicious people; rather, it is, almost always, institutional. I feel like Joel Bakan of The Corporation fame, arguing: The people are well-intentioned, but the organization itself is designed to do bad things!

Of course, all this might just be jealousy that M. got into Florida and I didn't. Would I be above such a thing? Not today, my friends, not today.

Boothier and Bonesier

2009-04-04T16:48:00.004-04:00

I am fully convinced that Bones is the coolest show on broadcast television. It's a crime drama, which is good for ratings. It is part-CSI: ("the squints") and part-Law and Order, and those parts work in equal harmony. It embraces the constant sexual tension between the male lade, David Boreanaz, and the titular character, played by the beautiful and talented Emily Deschanel*.

Why do some families get all the talent?

*It's like a modern day X-Files in that regard. Even the promos for the show recognize that the as-yet-unfulfilled sexual tension between them is at the heart of the show. One spot claimed that new episodes would be even more "Boothier and Bonesier." Could they possibly have found a more akwardly goofy word in the English language than "Bonesier"?

All these things, alongside snappy writing and good acting, make the show successful. They don't make it cool, though. What makes the show cool is the fact that the writers seem hyper-aware (at least for the writers of a Fox crime drama) of the diversity of the world around them.

I have always thought this about Bones, since one of the motifs in the show deals with Bones, the hyper-rational anthropologist, becoming more and more like her partner, Booth, the irrational, hunch-following type. The writers of the show recognize both the value of scientific rationality and the need for emotional connections, as well as the paradox that those two worldviews often inhabit the same individual.

Recently, though, Bones has cemented its status as the coolest show on broadcast television with one of the only lesbian relationships on broadcast television. Grey's Anatomy and a few other shows have flirted with lesbianism, but few have what it takes to keep a lesbian relationship going. I'm not saying that Bones is one of those few, but it has the potential to be.

Even more recently, the writers of the show gave a nod to hipsters everywhere. All sorts of shows are borrowing music from indie bands, but rarely do those shows actually reference said bands. In an episode from a couple of weeks ago*, Bones's Muslim assistant** makes a "break-up" CD for the bisexual lab worker, Angela. The first song on the CD? "Hope There's Someone," by Mr. Antony and the Johnsons (the lab assistant actually says "Mr." in his cute accent, later explaining that "Mazzy Star" is a band, not a person). Of course, the one song from the CD we actually hear is José González's cover of the Knife's "Heartbeats." Small steps, people, small steps.

*I'm behind on my DVR watching. So sue me.
**The writers are doing an experiment in which they change Bones's assistant every episode. Some people come back, but each assistant has his/her own quirk. This is after her first assistant was brainwashed into being an apprentice for a ritualistic cannibal serial killer. The experiment, at least in my opinion, is not working.

I have some larger and more complex theories about the show, but I'll save those for another day and "Another World."

Double Lemon Poppy Seed Cheesecake Muffins

2009-04-03T15:01:00.009-04:00

Let me begin by saying that I fail epically at using mixes to make something more complex. I can make things from scratch. I can follow box instructions. But when I try to combine the two and make alterations to a box mix, my world falls apart quicker than a nymphomaniac at a prison rodeo.

Thank goodness I have the Cake Mix Doctor to help me out. My friend A. has made numerous recipes from the Cake Mix Doctor's cupcake cookbook. She lauded them to me, saying that they were delicious (I tasted the results, so I could not object) and, with only a few ingredients including box cake mix, oh so easy to prepare. I borrowed her copy of the cookbook and made Double Lemon Poppy Seed Cheesecake Muffins for my hungry first-year students.

The recipe, for those of you baking along at home:

Cheesecake Filling
1 package (8 ounces) cream cheese, room temperature
1 large egg
¼ cup sugar
1 teaspoon grated fresh lemon zest
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Muffins
1 package (15.8 ounces) lemon poppy seed muffin mix
1 cup milk
¼ cup vegetable oil
1 large egg

The Cake Mix Doctor is a little too verbose for my taste, so I won't copy her instructions verbatim. Basically, all you do is combine the cheesecake filling ingredients

And blend them together using a hand mixer.

If you're me, you try to grate the lemon zest using a cheap, battery-powered food processor you bought at Goodwill for $2.

You realize that it runs at approximately 7 rpm, which means that nothing gets grated. So you pick up the grater in the food processor and use it to grate the lemon zest, since it's the only thing you have in the house.

Then, since you don't want to throw out a perfectly good lemon, you squeeze half a lemon's worth of juice into the cheesecake filling and muffin batter. Then you eat the other half for breakfast. Did I mention that I was baking this at 7:00 in the morning?

Once you're done mixing the cheesecake filling, do the same for the muffin mix.

I'm sure you know this already, but muffin mix need only be thoroughly combined, so there's no need for a hand mixer.

Again, if you're me, you remember to "preheat" the oven to 400°F just prior to putting the muffins in the oven. Drop the muffin mix into each muffin cup and top it off with a heaping tablespoon of the cheesecake mixture.

This recipe is supposed to yield 12 muffins, but it made more like 11 gargantuan ones. Also, my oven is hotter in the back than in the front (don't ask my why), so some of them were burned while a few were undercooked.

All the same, they were a hit with my students. Granted, that doesn't say much, since first-year college students are part-Gremlin and part-tribble. In other words, they multiply like crazy and consume everything in their path. Still, they enjoyed the muffins, and so did I. So there. Thank you Cake Mix Doctor for keeping my world together.

Racquetball Lessons

2009-04-03T11:30:00.009-04:00

I'm fairly decent at racquetball, but I want to get better. This desire was sparked when I was absolutely destroyed by a semi-pro player I found online. Dana is sponsored by Head and plays consistently in tournaments around the country. He recently won the men's "B" bracket, so he has moved up to the men's "A" bracket, the highest competitive bracket. I don't understand the structure of professional and semi-pro racquetball, so I may be butchering what he told me.

Point is, Dana is good. Very good. And he's trained and practiced. That, I am convinced, is the difference between us. I picked up racquetball a year and a half ago, and I've never been told anything about my swing. I know to swing with my wrists and let the ball get between my knees and the floor before I hit it. Other than that, though, I'm flying blind. I hit what I think are good shots.

When we played, Dana gave me a few pointers about my swing. I really want to be extremely good at racquetball, so I took his pointers to heart. I've been experimenting with my swing, both on my own and in games with my poor, unsuspecting friends. I played around with a new serve on Wednesday, and A. said that trying to return it (and often failing miserably) made her feel "legit."

I don't know what else to do, though. I can't afford racquetball lessons. Everything I found online looks like it was cobbled together by a 13 year-old kid using Geocities. I can find detailed images of stretches to do before and after racquetball

but no definite resources for various types of racquetball swings and shots.

Any suggestions? How does one get better at a sport without knowing the proper technique? Where could I go to find out more without having to pay for lessons?

I'm playing this afternoon, and I'll keep experimenting. Hopefully I'll continue to get better. At the very least, I'll look damn good while doing it.

Inspiration Strikes

2009-03-31T07:02:00.007-04:00

I'm currently dealing with a leak in the water heater upstairs, so I'm not in the best of possible moods. That said, I've been thinking about this for a while, so I thought I'd get it out there.

My question is this: Is it bad form to want to do a research project about the rhetoric of one's own discipline? Specifically, I'm interested in working with the rhetoric of creative writing. Creative writers and literary critics often have a peculiar relationship (parasitic isn't the right word, but it's close), and they often occupy the same department (or, in the case of my M.A. program, the same students).

As someone who is almost certainly going into composition and rhetoric, I consider myself blessedly outside this loop of production and critique. Still, literary critics and compositionists trade in a certain type of language, a certain way of writing, a certain mode of production, that values completely different things than creative writing does. And yet, literary critics rely upon (to borrow another biological metaphor, prey upon) the literature produced by creative writers.

So, the point of this is: creative writers are given a lot of leeway in their writing processes. Hemmingway is allowed to write naked at a podium. Robert Frost is allowed to throw coffee mugs at undergraduates who ask him what "Two Roads..." "means" (true story!) and just generally be curmudgeonly. In fact, we might go so far as to say that creative writers are encouraged in their eccentricities. They are encouraged to have a very specific place to write (even if that place is anywhere). They are encouraged to drink a butt-ton of coffee (LSD for a new generation of artists).

Most of all, though, they are encouraged to be fickle. I have several creative writers in the courses I'm taking, and the topic of "inspiration" has come up several times. As a compositionist (and former literary critic; damn it feels good to say that), I find the concept of inspiration equal parts baffling and infuriating. Either I have never been inspired to write in my life or I am always inspired to write. Because I know I never have any flashes of ideas. I either produce writing (usually when I have to), or I don't. Perhaps other academic writers have a "muse" and go on long streaks of productivity. Not I.

I am interested, though, in the concept of "inspiration" and how it works in creative writers. There appears to be a dichotomy in the field: some writers say that you must sit down and produce something every single day, not waiting around for inspiration to strike (it's like lightning, see). Others embrace the fickle nature of inspiration and only write when they are "inspired."

Of course, both of these camps recognize the existence of "inspiration." I wonder, and perhaps this is heresy, but I wonder if "inspiration" is not merely a rhetorical device (I will not step over the line and say "an excuse") used by creative writers. This is why I want to do a rhetorical analysis of creative writing, particularly its relationship as a field to the larger context of English studies. I simply do not know. And so I return to my original question: is that bad form?

I doubt very much that I will ever figure any of this out. In the meantime, I'm going to put a bucket under the leak and hope that some inspiration drips out of the hole in my ceiling.

Finding Things to Do in Maine

2009-03-28T18:13:00.008-04:00

Who says there's nothing to do in Bangor? I suppose I do. But today, I found things to do. Bangor, ME is not exactly known for its cosmopolitan lifestyle, its shopping experience (unless you're one of the Canadian tourists that bus down to take advantage of the slumping American dollar), or its lively nightlife. And yet, I spent a fun and eventful day in Bangor today.

First of all, my beloved and I stumbled upon a Freihofer's bakery outlet on Outer Hammond St. If you have not been to a Freihofer's outlet before, get your butt out to the one in Bangor. And if you don't live in Maine, there's an outlet locator on their website. I love Freihofer's bread, but I usually have to pay $2-3 a loaf for it in the grocery store. In the outlet, the loaves were about $1 each. They also had Thomas' English muffins and bagels (again, about $1). And cakes. And pizza crusts. And all sorts of other goodies. I left with a massive bag of baked goods for about $6.50.

I probably shouldn't be eating most of this, but it's so good!

Two years, and I didn't even know this place existed. As Jenny Boylan would say, "It's possible to live in the same town as a monkey house ... and never even know it."

After purchasing our delectable comestibles, we stopped by the Civic Center for the What Women Want Expo. We weren't sure what it was (I was hoping for lingerie), so we looked it up online. The advertisements featured many pictures of shoes and smiling women (almost certainly happy about their shoe purchases). And, of course, this beauty:

My apologies for the glare. If would like to see better pictures on this blog, you may donate your used digital camera to me. Anything would be an improvement upon my old Nikon, which is the 90s brick-sized cellphone of digital cameras.

The answer to the age-old question? "Extra Money to spend at your favorite stores!" (I'm not even going to go into the grammar issues.) I suppose I should have known, then, that the expo would be bordering on offensive. Still, it surprised me when the very first booths were for plastic surgery. I understand that these companies market to women, but do the Pampered Chef and Mary Kay and other such companies have to rub their sexist assumptions in our face? The entire thing was a shrine to commercialism in all its glory. Trust me when I say that it was spectacular.

Of course, I was one of about seven men in the entire place, and I was promptly ignored by all of the vendors, except for the Pampered Chef girl, who struck up a conversation after K. told her that I was the cook in the family. Also, the very nice lady at the Passion Parties booth explained the whole process to me. I had never heard of them before (in case you're similarly ignorant, imagine an erotic Mary Kay and you have the gist of it), so she explained to me that they do things "tastefully. Sometimes the guests can get kind of wild," she said, laughing quietly and tastefully, "but we don't force anyone to do anything they don't want to do." Good to know.

After the excitement of finding things to do in Bangor, we capped off our night with Spruce Run's silent auction and dessert party. My good friend A. Fiercehair was one of the "local confectioners, businesses, and artisans" featured in the event. She baked miniature strawberry cupcakes, and they were delicious. I overloaded on cheesecakes and truffles and other fancy desserts. There was jazz. And a silent auction! Considering the crowd at the event, I was expecting everything to be expensive, but it was quite affordable. We left with four pictures frames and a floral arrangement for $20.

Ah, the irony of taking a picture of flowers and of a picture frame with a picture of flowers in it.

Needless to say, we had a blast. I'm still a little amazed that such fun can be had in Bangor. Like most mysterious yet good things, though, it's best not to prod too much, lest it all collapse.

Meet the Buttertons

2009-03-28T18:08:00.004-04:00

I generally try to avoid commercial recipes older than a decade. There's just something about cookbooks produced in the 70s, 80s, and 90s that turns me off. Perhaps it's the poor lighting and disastrous color schemes. Whatever it is, I'm perpetually afraid that anything I make from an older cookbook will turn out like the Ham and Egg Salad from one of the many 70s Jello books.

So, it took a lot of courage for me to break out some recipes from the DAK bread machine cookbook my mother gave me. I don't think DAK even makes bread machines anymore; either way, the 1992 Guide to Automatic Bread Making is an ugly beast of a cookbook. I've tried some of the bread recipes (both machine and hand-made), and I was none too impressed. Tucked in the back of the book, though, is a recipe for "The Kaplan's Better Than Butter." I was enticed by the highly original name, as well as the vivid description:

"It's frustrating. Bread is filled with fiber and good-for-you wholesome ingredients. But, if you're always dieting as I am, butter and margarine are killers. Well, no more. Forget 100 calorie per tablespoon butter loaded with cholesterol. Forget 100 calorie per tablespoon margarine. Now, just 7 calories gives you a really rich tasting spread that will enhance the flavor of all your bread. Forget thin diet spread. Forget the taste of cottage cheese (which I hate). With this spread, which you can make it minutes, you can enjoy your favorite breads smothered in better-than-butter spread any time."

My bread-loving spouse is on a diet, so I figured I would try the recipe. It's quite a simple thing. You just blend (I used a food processor) a pint of lowfat cottage cheese, ¼ cup water, 4 tablespoons nonfat dry milk, a couple of envelopes of Sweet 'n Low (if you're classy like me, stolen from the local Chinese buffet), and a butt-ton of artificial butter flavoring. The recipe calls for 2 envelopes of ButterBuds, but I used almost half a container of Molly McButter sprinkles. Add more butter flavoring to taste.

At first, I was underwhelmed by the spread. It certainly doesn't look like much. It's rather thin, but the butter taste does mask the cottage cheese taste (and it fits beautifully back into the cottage cheese container). I left it in the fridge for a couple of days and came back to it. I put it on a toasted bagel (I know, I'm weird), and it was delicious! I suppose I should always wait to judge spreads until I put them on things, but I was very pleasantly surprised that the texture worked well with the bread.

So, go out and make yourself some 7 calorie butter. It won't work miracles like DAK would like you to believe, but it is quite tasty.

Besides, I'd hate for you to end up like my spouse's family. We always joke that the "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" commercial with the Buttertons is about her family. Every "family recipe" I receive from them involves at least one stick of butter and most likely some heavy cream. Of course, fat makes everything delicious. As Mike Rowe would say, "Fat is money."

"Know That I Will Always Run to Greet You"

2009-03-27T14:05:00.005-04:00

I've been in a bit of a blog funk lately, overwhelmed by work and life and such. What better way to break out of that than by pretending that I have a larger blog audience (blogdience? blaudience?) than I actually do.

I was listening to a mix in the car the other day, and up came Bishop Allen's "Butterfly Nets." Now, this is one of my favorite songs; it was the less-famous-yet-equally-important "second dance" song at my wedding. Of course, by that point, everyone had exhausted any chance of dancing, especially since it was roughly 9,000 degrees outside. But, this song has a special place in my heart.

This is precisely what I imagined butterfly catching would look like.

I started humming along. It's a short song, and near the end I thought to myself: I'm getting kind of tired of this song. This was a monumental moment, one that made me ponder. How many times do I have to hear a song before it gets old? There are still a few songs that I can listen to over and over again without getting tired of them.

I'm curious to hear what you readers think. What are some songs that never get old for you? What is about those songs that seems to hold up well to repeated listens?

Experimenting w/Pesto

2009-03-22T15:26:00.005-04:00

In the past year or so, I've become a veritable pesto expert. Last summer, I took a class on reading, gardening, and meditating*. We planted a labyrinth garden, and one of the main crops was basil. We grew six or seven different varieties of basil, so I started making pesto with a hodgepodge of species. Soon after the first frost (you know, in August) killed all the basil, I received one of those fancy hydroponic gardens as a gift. One cannot overestimate the worth of plants in winter in Maine.

*Sounds Zen, right? It was. We totally did t'ai chi. And walked in circles in a labyrinth. And read children's books. And planted plants. And had "snack time" in the middle of class.

At first, I only made pesto every now and then, but I did make it enough to hone my recipe (see below). Then, I bought an entire garden's worth of basil, and now all I grow is basil. I dry some of the basil, but the rest becomes pesto. I give away some of my pesto, but it tends not to freeze well, so I'm getting kind of tired of it, which led me to experiment with my recipe.

I'm in the midst of baking a loaf of sundried tomato and asiago bread (today's my cooking day: pesto, bread, and pulled beef BBQ), so I decided to add some sundried tomatoes to my recipe. The results, if I do say so myself, were marvelous. It was difficult to get the tomatoes small enough to work in pesto, but lots of pulsing in the food processor did the trick. Without further ado:

4 parts fresh basil leaves (you can retain some of the stems but it's best to have only the leaves; one harvesting of my plants usually yields about 1.5 to 2 cups packed)
1 part olive oil (more or less, depending on how thick you want the pesto)
1 part pine nuts (walnuts will do in an emergency)
1 part parmesan cheese (asiago or other cheeses will do, but don't add quite the same flavor)
1.5 teaspoons minced garlic (or, if you have it on hand, 3 cloves fresh garlic)
A pinch of salt
A pinch of sugar

I'm sure there's a certain order you're supposed to add the ingredients, but I just toss them all in the food processor and turn it on for a while. If you want to freeze your pesto, do so before you add the cheese, since dairy doesn't do too well in the freezer.

This time around, I added 1 part (about 0.5 cup) chopped sundried tomatoes.

I like to think there are three layers of flavor in this pesto: first you encounter the traditional pesto taste (basil, garlic, parm), then there's a slightly sweet taste (sugar), and it finishes with a pleasant, salty aftertaste.

I'm going to go package this up and bring it to the office so I can make my Italian friend a very happy person.

Internet or internet?

2009-03-21T22:24:00.008-04:00

I've been browsing the internet for years, but sometimes I still feel a bit like an online n00b. I still haven't hopped onboard the social networking bandwagon, and I wouldn't have a clue how to Digg something del.icio.us. As I struggle with questions about my blog's identity (what should I post? who is my audience and how do I reach a wider audience?) I realize: the internet really is a fascinating phenomenon, and it's almost certainly the defining invention of our time. There are inventions that saved more lives and took more lives, but the internet* has arguably done more to change social interactions and the ways we humans exist as socially constructed individuals than anything since the rise of civilization some 10,000 years ago**.

*Why does the OED still capitalize Internet? Is it a brand name or something? Is it not at the point where we can probably just drop the capitalization? Just asking.

**Complete guess.

There are a number of fascinating things about the internet, the negative correlation between anonimity and civility being one of them*. I'm sure we've all been fascinated by memes, and I'm equally sure we've all woken up in the morning next a meme and realized that something, be it alcohol or staring at a screen for hours on end, impaired our better judgement**. So the idea of an enduring meme is an intriguing one, and it's one that, according to this Slate article, a Seattle-based company called Pet Holdings has made quite a profit from. Pet Holdings own everything from ichc.com (go ahead, abandon me for lolcats; you know you want to) to Fail Blog and GraphJam.

*While doing some research for a project last year, I came across brilliant teacher and comics author Gene Yang's acceptance speech for the prestigious Printz award. In his speech, he provided examples of MySpace comments about his book American Born Chinese and a discussion on a library's messageboard. He intended the contrast to be shocking, and it was, but I wonder about the worth of the MySpace commentary (Yang implied that it had no cultural worth). How many "Chink" slurs does it take to render someone an idiot and unable to produce any kind of cultural meaning other than offensive noise?

**What is the proper way to spell this word? The OED tells me that it can be spelled with or without the first "e," and I've seen it both ways. Is this some kind of a British/American thing?

If the internet changed human interaction so dramatically, then it only makes sense that it has revolutioned marketing, the field responsible for the quantification and categorization of human interaction. I'm sure marketing execs can explain this one in full, but reading about Pet Holdings makes me wonder how exactly a meme (or, more generally, a website) builds up an audience and maintains that audience. There's absolutely something to be said for tapping into an already potent social network (the Slate article mentions that Pet Holdings does not have any competitors in part because they can advertise new memes through their current websites and generate millions of hits). There's also something to be said for user-generated content. It seems like the most successful websites give users some ownership of the content, even if its only the production of a discourse surrounding existent content (see any number of viral videos).

I don't have much else to say; this is far too big a topic to do more than pose questions and prompt inquiry*. Other than this: speaking of my students**, I find it disconcerting when the internet meets real life. It's a little like those stories about two people dating online, only to find out that they're related. One of my students brought into class Friday an honest-to-God real-live internet meme. He had a leftover container full of water, and one of my other students said, "Show Evan! It looks like water, but it isn't."*** When someone told me to stick my hand in it, I knew what was coming, and I pulled out several what I will call "water balls" for lack of a better word (Google supports my almost-certain misnomer with multiple videos about how to make water balls). Apparently, these things are so full of water that their index of refraction is almost equal to that of water. Science is so cool, no? Anyway, I stared at the water balls for what felt like five minutes but was more likely five seconds****. I was a little speechless, since I had never actually seen in person any of the science-based memes (e.g., Diet Coke and Mentos). What do you say in that situation (especially when said situation occurs while twenty students are watching)? "Oh, that's cool"?! I went with an acknowledging yet hopefully suave "Hmmm," and my student scuttled back to his seat. It was an experience I'm sure neither of us care to repeat.

Google: success. Google Images: not so much.

*I have to say, my students actually called me out for asking questions with reckless abandon the other day. I tend to be very bad at giving answers and very good at asking questions, but I never thought my students would actually call me out on it. Touché, kids, touché.

**Yes, I'm experimenting with asterisks and how we read them. Give me a break.

***My first thought was, "Vodka?"

****Is there a word for those times when an event feels longer than it is? If not, there should be. I'll get right on inventing that.

World Baseball Classic

2009-03-20T11:21:00.006-04:00

I've been sitting on a long, rambling post about the World Baseball Classic since before this blog even existed. Now that Clemson has promptly bowed out of the NCAA Tournament and my brief flirtation with March Madness is over, that post will see the light of day.

I, like most Americans, have mixed feelings about the Classic. When it premiered in 2006, I found it interesting, but little more than a novelty. As I mentioned in my last post, though, I've started reading more baseball books in the past year, a symptom of my increasing interest in the sport of baseball as a whole, its cultural construction, its history, its traditions (most notably the Hall of Fame), and its future. I used to follow the Red Sox and a few other teams. Now, I follow baseball. And, by God, I love the sport quite unlike I love anything else in my life.

It's 2009 now, and I absolutely love the idea of the World Baseball Classic. Baseball is far too insular, and the chance to see international legends like Sadaharu Oh and young prospects alike is exciting, to say the least. Its execution, on the other hand, is sometimes less than desirable. I know this is a gross generalization, but there tend to be two camps when it comes to opinions on the WBC. There are those who think it is a travesty and a farce, that it has no real significance (with my '06 "novelty" stance as a moderate view). This is the prevailing opinion of the media, which did not even bother to televise the U.S.-Venezuela seeding game. Then, there are those who revere the tournament and what it brings to baseball, but lament America's apathy and criticize American fans and the baseball powers-that-be for not being engaged on the same level as other countries. (This group is very similar to other discourse groups of which I have been a part, where advocacy is so crucial that "immanent critique," or the criticism that emerges from within that discourse, is not tolerated.) I tend to borrow freely from both camps: I love the Classic, but I think that the American apathy surrounding it is as much the fault of the WBC and its setup as it is of MLB and American fans.

The evidence that America considers the WBC an exhibition, part of Spring Training, is ample. Many of the country's best players, particularly its ace pitchers, are not participating. Guys are thrown out there to "get work in," even in high-leverage situations. The fans are equally unconcerned, and one game in Miami drew barely 13,000 fans (roughly a third the number of fans at a practice session in Tokyo). Can we blame them, though? Because of the timing of the WBC, smack in the middle of Spring Training, and its numerous built-in off-days, it becomes difficult for players to get ready for the coming season and still participate in the tournament. When the interests of an MLB club and the interests of the WBC collide, the MLB club will almost invariably win out. Thankfully, a number of American players share my love of the WBC. After the U.S.'s stunning walk-off win over Puerto Rico, players like Brian McCann and David Wright talked about the night as the most exciting of their professional careers. This is the kind of enthusiasm that other countries already have and the U.S. desperately needs.

Unfortunately, this enthusiasm did not carry over to American fans and MLB clubs. Hell, it didn't even carry over to the next game, as U.S. manager Davey Johnson acted like the game didn't matter. Of course, the game didn't technically matter (it was only a seeding game), but as the Japan-Korea seeding game attests, even a trivial game in the WBC is still an exciting international matchup.

While the format and schedule of the WBC is clearly partially to blame for America's apathy, the fans, the media, Major League Baseball, and the culture of American sports in general are also to blame. With a few exceptions, such as the Olympic basketball "Dream Team," American fans have never been particularly enthused by their country’s participation in international sporting events. I find this strange considering the sense of blind patriotism in the country, but, such is the price to pay for not caring about soccer (sorry, football), the only sport to provoke massive riots in international play.

The distinctly American attitude toward international sports goes far beyond that, though. I'm not sure whether to blame the media, the fans, the clubs, or the athletes themselves, but I'm fully convinced that American athletes are expected to be docile, non-confrontational, and, to be frank, stupid.

Remember John Rocker? He was publicly lambasted (in no small part by Sports Illustrated) for speaking his mind and saying that, gasp, New York's subway system is dirty and full of freaky people. The comments that so provoked an entire nation:

"Imagine having to take the 7 Train to the ballpark looking like you’re riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It's depressing."

Now, Rocker was not a particularly brilliant individual, but I have to stretch to find his comments even mildly offensive. Sure, the "queer with AIDS" thing is a problem, but people have said much worse things before.

The proverbial buck does not stop there, though. Oh no, American players are taught not to criticize anyone, including those deserving of criticism. When baseball players talk trash about another team, they are called loudmouths and idiots. When they, heaven forbid, criticize a member of their own team, they are called traitors.

International players, on the other hand, are taught to speak their mind. They have not adopted the dumbed-down, non-confrontational jock-speak of American athletes. One need only listen to the press sessions for other countries in the WBC to see evidence of the cultural difference. I'll provide two examples. After his third base coach made an obviously poor decision to send a runner home at a crucial point in the game, Netherlands left fielder Bryan Englehardt (pictured below) said,

"Maybe the coach needs to stop the guy on third base. After the game, you think about it, and you say that it was one [turning] point."

In America, calling a coach out like that would be unthinkable.

In the Japan-Cuba elimination game, Ichiro Suzuki, one of my favorite players, tried to lay down a bunt. Ichiro, who usually excels in international play, has been abysmal this WBC, and he got under the ball and popped it up. After the game, he said (in loose translation),

"That failed bunt put another crack in my very tattered heart. It was as if I was the only guy on our side wearing a Cuban uniform."

I'm not sure about the combination of "crack" and "tattered," two words that don't normally go together, but I don't claim to understand the subtleties of the Japanese language. Point is, Ichiro wears his heart on his sleeve frequently, but you don't hear him say these kinds of things after Mariners games. I'm sure that's because his identity in Seattle is primarily as a Mariner and MLB player, not as a Japanese baseball player. That's just not the kind of thing you say in Major League Baseball.

Unfortunately, we'll have to wait until 2012 for the next Classic to see if the U.S. can get its act together. I suspect it won't unless some significant changes occur. (What those changes involve, I'm not sure; I just invite the possibility of change.) In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy watching Japan and Korea battle it out baseball's greatest stage. It's nice to see countries actually care about being crowned the best in the world.

Buying Books at Borders

2009-03-19T18:17:00.003-04:00

I just got back from Borders, where I went to spend a gift card leftover from some occasion or another. Now, I don't buy new books in stores, unless they are of the bargain variety. I mostly buy books used or new on Amazon, and I've been borrowing more and more from the library lately (this semester, for the first time, I got my class books from the library). So, this was an experience for me. Of course, I was overwhelmed by all the gorgeous books on display in Borders, and I left with more than I intended. I went to get Jennifer Boylan's two memoirs, She's Not There and I'm Looking Through You. Borders claimed to have both, but neither a nice salt-and-pepper gentleman (I hope I age that well) nor I could find She's Not There. I had to settle for I'm Looking Through You, but now I'm anxious, since I can't possible read the memoirs in reverse chronological order. That's just not who I am.

I'm excited, though, because Jennifer Boylan will be coming to my school to give a talk. Our English Graduate Student Association, of which I am a part, is bringing Jenny to talk to us about memoir writing. Of course, people can't possibly ignore the fact that she is transgender, so the college's LGBTQ club will have its own separate event with her. Needless to say, I'm thrilled. I haven't read her work yet, but I'm planning to do so as soon as possible. Do you think she'll sign my books?

Borders has ordered She's Not There, but who knows how long it will take.

I succumbed to the buy-one-get-one-half-price table, as well. I bought two books I've been meaning to read:

I absolutely love Nicholson Baker, but I've been putting off Human Smoke since its publication a year ago. It's just so long. Plus, my school contacted Baker to see if he would speak to us about writing (he lives in Southern Maine, so it only makes sense), and his publicist said that he would give a one-hour lecture for $10,000, plus airfare. $10,000? Airfare from Portland to Bangor? The man's no Thomas Pynchon, but he's certainly living like it.

As for Moneyball, I've arrived at the point in my life when it's a must read. For some reason unknown even to me, I only recently, in the past year or so, started reading extended baseball writing. I don't know why I kept those two parts of my life separate, the baseball and the books, but I did. Until now. I've been reading some of Bill James's books, and my wonderful spouse bought me the Hardball Times Baseball Annual from last season. Next up, Moneyball. A lot of people have misconceptions about Moneyball, fed mostly by Joe Morgan and the like. While I'm interested in the Moneyball approach, I think the bigger issue at play in the book is the fight against the traditions of baseball and how deeply rooted in tradition on-field (and front-office) strategy really is.

Now that I'm done with the M.A. exam, I'm hoping that I actually have time to read for pleasure. My optimism is not based in any reality: reality is the dozen student papers that sit untouched on my computer. Perhaps I should get back to those and stop spending time writing about things I'll be reading when I have more time.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Your 2009 Boston Red Sox

2009-03-17T22:26:00.003-04:00

I just felt a macabre sense of satisfaction and giddiness when I realized, while reading a story about Julio Lugo undergoing arthroscopic surgery, that Opening Day is two and a half weeks away. The story indicates that Lugo will miss 3-4 weeks, "eliminating any chance he had to be ready for Opening Day." This bits of news answers one of the many questions swirling around this year's Red Sox team. Mind you, I love questions of the baseball variety; the anticipation of Opening Day, especially the Spring-time feel that comes with Truck Day, Spring Training, and the WBC, is one of the best things about being a fan.

Here are my other questions about the 2009 Boston Red Sox:

Who will emerge as the ~~Opening Day~~ regular starting shortstop?
Can Big Papi bounce back from an awful (for him) year?
Will Lester reward his lucrative new contract?
Is this Jacoby Ellsbury's year? The Sox front office certain seems to think so.
Which prospect will contribute significantly to the team this year?
Will Rocco Baldelli survive the season? Can Smoltzy return to his former strength?
How early in the season will J.D. Drew bow out?
Who's our biggest rival? I'm not sure I can accept the Tampa Bay Rays as a power in the AL East.

We're in for one hell of a ride this year. Is anyone else as excited as me?

Read This Out Loud: Graduate Admissions

2009-03-16T22:26:00.005-04:00

As anyone who's been through the process of graduate admissions can attest, institutions of higher learning are some of the strangest, most labyrinthine bureaucracies on earth. And those bureaucracies produce some of the vaguest language imaginable.

The English language is a many splendored thing. Though I suspect it's an urban legend, I've always heard that, like snowflakes, no two words in the English language have exactly the same meaning. (In case you were wondering, according to the Discovery Channel, the snowflake thing is not a myth.) So how is it that the language can produce a sentence like the following?

"You're near the top of our waiting list, so there's a good chance we might be able to grant you admission in April."

This is from UGA, who regret to inform me that, despite my high qualifications, they are not able to offer me admission at this time. They are, however, prepared to offer me a place on their waiting list. What are my chances of admission, then? Apparently there's a high likelihood of the possibility of maybe perhaps being admitted.

We (I) here at Fatally Ambiguous delight in ambiguity, but hate to see the English language rendered useless by pointless vaguery. Read This Out Loud, UGA. Can you find a way to reword it to clarify your point for me?

Cat Café of Bangor

2009-03-16T15:20:00.007-04:00

A colleague directed me to an intriguing article today. Apparently, Japan has a thing for cats. I had no idea.

In case you can't be bothered to follow links, the article is about a cat café in Osaka. Considering all the other services that large cities offer, this one makes a lot of sense. You pay about $5 for an hour of cat love (such as it is) with 20 free-range kittehs.

I really want to learn to make cat cookies. As I said, this seems like such a brilliant idea. If I started the cat café of Bangor, do you think anyone would pay to pet this?

Yeah, you're right, probably not. But it's worth a try, no?

Surviving the M.A. Exam

2009-03-16T08:53:00.008-04:00

Well, I (somewhat miraculously) survived the M.A. exam. I've never experienced anything quite like it. I've written twenty page papers in a single day, but, as my beloved reminds me, that is a completely different exercise than writing four separate essays. Starting and stopping again had its benefits and drawbacks, but it was nowhere as horrific an experience as I expected. Here's the death toll for my exam:

Twenty-four pages, not including Works Cited pages.
Nine works, including:
o Four theory texts
o One short story/novella
o One play
o One collection of poems
o One epic poem
o One novel
Twelve hours of my life, and far more than that in preparation.

And, visually:

That's a lot of books. Still, there are quite a few more sitting on my desk that I did not get to use. Oh well. The only one that I regret not using is King Lear. I wrote an essay on the right to rule, and it felt almost tragic (get it?) to omit Lear. But, I had already written on Measure for Measure, so I had had enough of Shakespeare. Instead, I chose to write about Paradise Lost and Oroonoko. The other three essays are as follows:

An examination of the device of "delayed recognition" in Melville’s "Benito Cereno" and Measure for Measure.
An argument for the collaborative nature of Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.
A peculiar yet indefatigable exploration of the demystification of authority and how Edward Said's approach in Orientalism is parallel to the reading strategies at work in Gender Trouble, The Subject of Tragedy, and Sensational Designs.

I give myself a 97% chance of passing, with a 27% chance of an elusive "high pass." Now I get to tackle a long list of things I've been meaning to do after I finish the M.A. exam. On the top of that list is cleaning out the memory card from my camera, a task that yielded such gems as

Cats v. Lobster, and

Stephen King's house, a bit of Bangor localia.

Next on my list? Get some sleep.

Layouttakes

2009-03-15T22:23:00.012-04:00

Since the whole blogging thing is brand new to me, I'll be messing around a lot with the site's layout in the coming weeks. I've taken a good deal of pictures to use as headers and such. Here are a few of the outtakes:

Yes, that's my cat. Yes, he gets in the way of everything possible. He is, after all, a cat.

Expect some fancy new digs every now and then, and expect a post on the M.A. exam tomorrow.

Read This Out Loud: Billy Corgan (Updated)

2009-03-13T02:41:00.010-04:00

How does one begin an inaugural blog post? If I were making a speech, I might start with, "is this thing on?" which, coincidentally (or not), is the title of my good friend and blog inspiration A. Fiercehair's personal blog.

Instead, I'll start with the first installment of what I hope will become a regular feature on this blog. Now, don't expect regular features to be, well, regular. I know theme blogs reach a wider audience than hodgepodge personal blogs, but this blog decidedly falls in the latter category. I will be posting my reflections on music, baseball, teaching, food, and all the other things in my life.

I'm calling this regular feature Read This Out Loud in honor of my first-year writing students. Every time I run aground on one of their sentences, stranded on a sandbar of labyrinthine syntax, I place a nice comment in the margin to the effects of, "Read this out loud. You can hear the cadences of speech in your own writing when you read it aloud to yourself." This is my subtle way of saying, what the hell does that mean?

And who am I telling to Read This Out Loud today? Billy Corgan. Yes, that Billy Corgan, the frontman of the Smashing Pumpkins. Perhaps you've heard of the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger that's all the rage on Capitol Hill lately. The proposed merger would join together the largest online concert ticket retailer with the largest owner and promoter of live music venues, so it's kind of a big deal in the music community. You know the shtick: large corporations band together to increase profits and screw over the little guy. Except, in this case, it might actually be true. There are a number of reasons people are opposed to the merger—too many to go into here—but the overall consensus is that the merger would essentially allow the new company, Live Nation Entertainment, to fix prices and scalp their own tickets, as well as run smaller ticket companies like StubHub out of business.

It's obvious that a merger like this one, which would revolutionize the face of live music, doesn't come along every day, so Congress is investigating the issue. And here's where we get to Corgan, who just so happens to be managed by Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff. Corgan recently appeared before Congress to support the merger, and in doing so, he joins the ranks of Seal, Journey, Shakira, and Van Halen as respectable *cough* purveyors of music *cough* to praise the deal. This concession is part of Corgan's rapid descent into commercialism. I will be the first to admit that I loved the Smashing Pumpkins. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is one of my formative albums, and it influenced my taste in music for years. I still enjoy the album, but Corgan's recent shenanigans—releasing special edition after special edition of the latest Pumpkins album in order to pump up dwindling sales, alienating fans by deriding them for not appreciating the disaster that was Zeitgeist, and now his appearance in front of Congress—have turned me off the band.

Endorsing the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger is quite a reversal for the Pumpkins frontman, as well. In the past, he has avoided Live Nation like the plague, instead touring through independent Chicago agency Jam Productions. He's also spoken out against Ticketmaster. In this light, it's hard to see his open embrace of the merger as anything more than a thinly-veiled plea by his manager, Irving Azoff. That Corgan would allow himself to be used in this way does not make me think any higher of him.

And the best part is yet to come. Corgan also wrote a letter to Congress elucidating the inner workings of the merger. I've posted the letter in full (from the Chicago Sun-Times blog) below:

Dear Chairmen Kohl & Leahy and Ranking Members Hatch & Specter:

The merger as proposed before you on the surface may seem to be too much power in the hands of the few, and I can understand the need for Congress to review this matter. Here I would hope that my 20 years in the recording and touring business will allow me some candid authority on these issues, and would help shed some light for you on some of the nuances that perhaps could easily get missed.

The 'system' that was once the modern record business, essentially ushered in with the meteoric rise of the Beatles, is now helplessly broken. And by almost every account available cannot be repaired. Personally I would add to that a healthy 'good riddance,' as the old system far too often took advantage of the artists as pawns while the power brokers colluded behind the scenes to control the existing markets. This control often saw the sacrificing of great careers to maintain that control. Look no further than the major record labels' intense fight to slow down the progress of Internet technologies that more readily brought music and video to the consumer because they couldn't completely control it. This disastrous decision on their part has destroyed the economic base of the recording industry. It is now a shadow of its former self.

Artists now find a heavy shift of emphasis to the live performance side, and this is where this merger finds its merit. The combination of these companies creates powerful tools for an independent artist to reach their fans in new and unprecedented ways, all the while restoring the power where it belongs. In today's ever changing world, the ability for artists to connect to their fans and stay connected is critical for the health of our industry. Without sustainable, consistent economic models upon which to make key decisions, it is both the music and the fans that suffer.

In short, we have a broken system. This is a new model that puts power into the hands of the artist, creating a dynamic synergy that will inspire great works and attract healthy competition. The proposed merger you have before you helps create those opportunities by boldly addressing the complexity of the existing musical and economic landscapes.

Billy Corgan

Corgan begins his plea by admitting that the merger seems like a bad idea. Wait, wait! he says, not all is as it seems. He promises to "shed some light for you on some of the nuances that perhaps could easily get missed." "Perhaps could"? Are you sure you're qualifying yourself enough, Billy? I'm also extremely dubious of a 370-word letter illuminating any "nuances." I'll give Corgan the benefit of the doubt, though.

That is, until the final two paragraphs. The second paragraph makes the rather ambitious, though not entirely crazy, claim that the modern record industry is broken and irreparable. In fact, Corgan hits the nail on the head with his statement that the industry has battled digital distribution to its own detriment.

Corgan's letter quickly descends into the chaos of vaguery, though. "The combination of these companies," he says, "creates powerful tools for an independent artist to reach their fans in new and unprecedented ways." Really? How, pray tell, Mr. Corgan? Well, it turns out that the merger does so "by boldly addressing the complexity of the existing musical and economic landscapes." Here we return to my original question: What the hell does that mean? Billy Corgan promises us "nuances" and provides only mystery.

The larger question, for me, has to do with the man behind the Pumpkin, Irving Azoff. Is Azoff really the architect of Corgan's sharp U-turn on Ticketmaster and Live Nation? If so, is this the best he can come up with? Is this just empty rhetoric, or are there some real benefits to the merger? I could always turn on C-Span and see for myself, but that would require knowing what channel C-Span is.

Update: Apparently, the whole corruption thing is a lot bigger in the ticket business than I thought. If there's a silver lining in the TM/LN merger, it's the scrutiny the industry is now receiving (prompting even the Wall Street Journal to write about it).