Mmmm... Rhubarb Pie...

I wandered over to the Portland Farmers' Market this morning, which in itself is a sign that spring is here, finally. I was picking up a few staples and noticed that a few vendors had rhubarb for sale. I'm not exaggerating when I say that in an instant I'd decided to buy some and make a pie today. Making pie is an occasional hobby of mine, but I'd never made a rhubarb pie before. I'd always meant to, since it's about my favorite, but for whatever reason I usually don't start making pies in earnest until June or so, when cherries are available. I think my food impulses sometimes tend to lag a few months behind what the weather's doing, so that a big plate of sausages, potatoes, and sauerkraut sounds great for a month or two after everyone else is eating light summery nibbles. But I overcame this tendency long enough to put a pie together, and I think it turned out pretty well.

I chatted with a couple of other people at the market who were also buying rhubarb, and they were all intending to use it in various dishes combined with strawberries. I didn't say this at the time because I often try to be reasonably pleasant in person, but adulterating rhubarb with strawberries or any other fruit is an abomination, pure and simple. It's not that I don't like strawberries, because I love strawberries. I don't want rhubarb in my strawberry pie either. The two tastes don't go together. It's just plain wrong.

The other thing I noticed is that none of the other customers was making pie. People have gotten the idea that making pie is just too hard. Meaning that making the crust is hard. And they aren't entirely wrong. I just recently switched to doing pie crust with half butter, half shortening, which I'm currently convinced is the secret to good crust. I used to use all butter, but this gives you a crust that's tasty but really hard and tough. The shortening gives you a nice flaky consistency, but it's got no flavor whatsoever -- try tasting a dollop of Crisco some time. A lot of restaurant and bakery pies seem to go the 100% shortening route, which makes the result bland and uninteresting, and kind of greasy if it's done badly. I've always heard that lard crusts turn out really well too. I've never tried that, but I'm thinking it might go well with an apple pie, sort of the whole pork & apples thing, since I understand you do get a faint sense of the pig in the result when you use lard. Not a lot of people use it, I'm not sure why. I expect it's the saturated fat, although if you're eating enough pie that the fat content is a serious component of your diet, you're probably eating way too much pie, and you ought to think about maybe reducing your intake a little.

One "pie secret" you hear about a lot is the importance of making sure your fats don't get evenly mixed into your flour. In practice this means keeping the fats from softening up too much. You can be as obsessive as you like about this. It doesn't get really critical, or difficult, until midsummer when the days are hot and it doesn't cool off at night, but trying to minimize heat absorption is kind of an engineering problem, so I play around with it even when I don't really have to. I tend to put the butter in the freezer, chop it up with a sharp, chilled knive once it's really hard, and then put it back in the freezer. I try to do this with the shortening too, but it doesn't work out as well. That's a point I haven't quite figured out just yet. The general idea is to keep everything as cold as possible, touch things with your hands as little as you can, and generally do as little as possible to the dough, right up until it goes into the oven. You want everything to hold together, so you have to work with it a little, but in general the less you do to it the better. That's been my experience, anyway, although I'm certainly not a pro at this.

I think my biggest problem is technique. Everything I do tends to come out a bit, ah, rustic looking. One look and it's obvious I don't do this for a living. Not even as one of those "artisan bakers" who makes things carefully designed to look rustic. Hence I haven't posted any photos. Well, mostly that was because we ate part of it before it occurred to me to write about it. Which is because even I have my priorites straight from time to time.

Here's a page with a whopping 52 rhubarb pie recipes. Many are of the abominable multifruit variety, but some people apparently like that sort of thing, and it's a free country. The Wikipedia article about rhubarb pie is no great shakes, but their rhubarb article is interesting. My pie today was sort of based on the rhubarb pie recipe in Ken Haedrich's book Pie, which I highly recommend. My sole complaint is that it's so big that it doesn't want to stay open to the recipe you're working on, so your copy will end up with some doughy fingerprints on it sooner or later.

I tend not to stick to recipes all that religiously regarding what to do with the fruit. Fruit is flexible, and if you don't have / can't find a certain ingredient, there's bound to be something else available that will go nicely in a pie. I didn't have any orange juice or orange zest today, so I substituted a bit of lemon juice, and a bit of grapefruit juice, which I thought turned out pretty well. Cherry pie recipes often call for a splash of liquor, usually some kirsch (cherry brandy), which is something I don't often have sitting around the house. One time I used dark rum and a bit of vanilla instead, which turned out really well. Last year I simply couldn't find any fresh pie cherries anywhere, so I got cherries of a couple of other varieties and soaked them overnight in some Belgian kriek lambic beer, which is produced with sour cherries and additionally has a lot of lactic acid sourness from the lambic process. You want to add less sugar if you do this, since the kriek is pretty sweet in addition to being sour. That turned out rather well too. Obviously you want to use fresh sour cherries if you can get 'em, but for some reason nearly all of the nation's sour cherries are grown in the midwest (mostly Michigan) and not here. So sometimes you just gotta improvise. Sometimes that turns out great. And if not, well, it's just pie, you know.

More from Mars

These may look like abstract expressionist paintings, but in fact they're actually global maps of various minerals on Mars, created by the OMEGA instrument on ESA's Mars Express. The researchers' paper is here [PDF].

The big news here is that they've identified hydrated minerals at various places around the planet, which helps a great deal in sorting out the planet's geological history. Hydrated minerals need water to form, obviously, and on Mars this means you're looking at terrain that dates from the early days of the planet, and has survived more or less intact. ESA's PR plays up the usual "possible life on Mars" angle, the idea being that a young, wet Mars would've been much more inviting for microbes than the current situation. The artist's conception image at the top on that page shows ESA's upcoming ExoMars rover nosing around.

A few media stories about the new research: New Scientist PhysOrg.com.

It's a strange thing about Mars that the features that look the most superficially Earthlike (volcanoes, canyons, outflow channels) all seem to have come about long after the possibly-life-friendly epoch of Martian history had ended. If you want to look for fossil bugs, it appears that the best place to look is in the ancient, heavily cratered parts of the planet. You see those areas on a map, and you immediately think of the moon -- geologically dead, sterile, and uninteresting -- and your eyes glaze over. Or at least that's been the reaction in the past. I imagine we'll see a new crop of clay-digging robots sooner or later. The NewScientist article I linked to suggests that the 2009 Mars Science Lab rover might go to a clay region. Previous discussions seemed to center around sending it to Terra Meridiani, where the Opportunity rover is still poking around, which I thought was kind of silly. If you're going to go to Mars, you may as well go somewhere new on Mars.

Apocalyptic Magic Square

Meet the Apocalyptic Magic Square [Word DOC]. This beastie is a magic square where everything adds up to 666, and every single number in the square is prime.

[I don't know why, but both IE and Firefox are rendering this table really badly, inserting a vast expanse of vertical space above it, entirely against my wishes. I certainly didn't put it there. You can view source on this page if you don't believe me. Until I figure this one out, you'll just need to scroll down a bit to get to the rest of the post. Feh.]

3	107	5	131	109	311
7	331	193	11	83	41
103	53	71	89	151	199
113	61	97	197	167	31
367	13	173	59	17	37
73	101	127	179	139	47

You might have noticed that my nym includes a certain "number of the beast". There's a story here. The "Atul" part honors the godawful worst programmer of all time, as I once explained here. When I was setting up my longtime Yahoo account some years back, around 1999 or 2000, I quickly realized that "Atul" is actually a very popular first name in India, and apparently every last person by that name already had a Y! account. So I kept trying different combinations until I finally found a name that wasn't taken already. It wasn't my first choice, or my second, but I eventually came to realize that the name itself drives fundies batty. Ok, even battier. Not only does it contain the hated number 666, but it also sounds suspiciously foreign.

This is not the first nym I've used. Way, way back in the old BBS days of yore, I often used the nym "Elvis Khan", which I thought was really funny and clever at the time. I assumed that everything I'd done online back in those pre-Internet days had passed over the event horizon, but Google dredged up an old archive page that somehow survived all this time. It surprises me that this is what survived, of all the stuff I wrote back then, since I think I only visited this BBS once or twice. Mostly I played around on WWIV boards, but all of that stuff seems to be gone with the wind. So here's the sole surviving fragment (that I'm aware of) from my days with a 2400 baud modem:

32 004=Usr:348 Elvis Khan 11/03/90 02:12 Msg:5603 Call:31844 Lines:9 
33 Neat Middle-East articles, where do they come from? Jus' wonderin'. I *think* 
34 this is where I should be putting this, I'm not sure. I'm new here, and the 
35 message style isn't like anything I've ever seen, so bear with me, ok? 
36 
37 -*Elvis Khan*-  
38 Well, I see it's working. That's good. 
39 
40 Well, I guess this isn't where I should have posted my message. So sue me. 
41 -*Elvis Khan*- 005=Usr:322 

Well! That was awfully scintillating. You may notice I mentioned articles about the Middle East. You may remember that in November 1990 we were ramping up towards Gulf War #1. I was against that one too. Oh, hey, here's an ancient Portland BBS list from back in 1993. Ahh, the memories. Thinking back, it occurs to me that I really, really had no life whatsoever, even more so than now.

While I'm busy reminiscing about the good old days, I was digging through some old papers yesterday and came across an ancient yellowed dot-matrix printout of one of the first things that really bowled me over about the internet. This was back in the Gopher days, before WWW really got going. The thing that amazed me more than anything else was that you could interact with a computer on the other side of the world, just like it was right next door. The really cool thing was that this internet thingy even extended to ex-Eastern Bloc countries. Recall that this wasn't all that long after the Soviets had been chased out, so breaching the Iron Curtain still felt really novel and exciting, even if you were just doing it electronically.

So I came across a Gopher site in newly-independent Slovakia, and one section of the site included a number of traditional Slovak recipes. I picked a recipe for something called "bryndzove halusky" and printed it out, partly because I was amazed at how I'd gotten it, but mostly because it sounded really tasty and I planned to try it sooner or later. The original gopher presumably no longer exists, but the link I provided points at one of several copies floating around the net. I swear I'm going to try it sooner or later. It's got bacon and potatoes and feta cheese, so it's bound to be delicious.

There was a time when I thought gopher was the wave of the future. I played around a bit with that other thing called "WWW", but I thought it was pretty clunky. Lynx was the most advanced browser out there at the time (unless maybe you were on a fancy-pants NeXT machine with OmniWeb) and tabbing through a page full of links just seemed a lot clumsier than the nice, clean gopher interface where you could do everything with arrow keys. This was at the Portland Community College library, which (IIRC) had a couple of PC's acting as dumb terminals, talking to a VAX, if I'm not mistaken, and it in turn talked to the outside world. There was another lab that was an all-IBM shop, with a bunch of PS/2s talking to a single RS/6000 in the back room. There was also an AS/400, I think, and a mainframe that students weren't allowed to use. No direct internet access there, but I think they did have a BITNET feed, for whatever that's worth.

Straying back to the topic of this post, such as it is, here are some, ah, resources about the infamous number 666:

• 666 Watch is your home for apocalyptic numerology.
  
• Another page with more numerology. Apparently the pope himself is in on the conspiracy. But of course you knew that already.
  
• A page full of fun math trivia about the number.
  
• Here's the Wikipedia article.
  
• More 666-related conspiracies unveiled, by the nice folks at GreaterThings.com. They don't seem to be very fond of Prince Charles.
  
• Oh, and those darn Illuminati are involved as well. This page has a different magic square than the one you'll see here.
  
• Also, there's an asteroid coming to get us, among other things.
  

I could add quite a few similar sites, but you get the idea.

Updated 7/09: We have linkage, in a post titled "The Devil's Staircase" at Eunoia, the aforementioned Devil's Staircase being a rather peculiar, irregularly stepped mathematical function. Go check it out.

Saturn 3

Today's awful movie is Saturn 3, an SF movie from 1980 starring Farrah Fawcett, Harvey Keitel, and the legendary Kirk Douglas, in one of his, ahem, lesser roles. Let me start out by saying that I only caught the last half hour or so of this movie, but I really think that was quite enough. At least for my purposes.

The movie falls prey to one of the many curses of b-movie makers: If your budget's tight, the cheapest way to pad the thing out to feature length (other than using stock footage) is to have endless shots of people walking or running down the same corridor, pretending it's not the same corridor. If the actors can emote a little while they're doing this, hey, that's frosting on the cake. I call this a curse because the one unforgivable sin of bad movies (or critically-acclaimed "good" movies, for that matter) is to be boring. People love bad movies for bad dialogue, bad acting, bad special effects, bad plotting, you name it. But nobody watches for the running-down-corridors sequences. I mean, why would you? Saturn 3 has quite a lot of running down corridors. The sets are kind of interesting, at least. It looks like they spend most of their budget on sets, and it shows.

Don't get me wrong, though. Other than the sets, the special effects are really dreadful. Recall that the movie came out in 1980, the same year as The Empire Strikes Back, but you wouldn't be able to tell that by watching. "Hector", the amorous, homicidal robot, is also pretty crappy, right down to the name. I read once that the design of the original iMac was somehow influenced by the set design in Saturn 3, but I'm not buying it. Nothing I saw in the movie looked even remotely like an iMac.

The film also suffers from a less common b-movie curse, that of getting stuck with an a-list (or wannabe a-list) director who wants to make Great Cinematic Art. You'll get some guy who ignores the low budget, untalented talent, and dodgy script, basically the whole essential nature of the film, and tries to do something "meaningful" instead. This never turns out well. The Wikipedia article about the movie suggests it was originally supposed to have a much stronger exploitation angle, with more of a focus on a scantily-clad, or unclad, Ms. Fawcett being menaced by lusty ol' Hector. I'm positive it would've been a much better movie if they'd just embraced the script's innate B-ness and gone with the Farrah-in-peril angle, instead of trying to rip off Alien. Nothing in the movie is even close to being scary enough to pull off an Alien ripoff, and the filmmakers were wrong to try. As for creepy robots go, Hector is even outclassed by Maximillian, the baddie bot from Disney's abysmal Black Hole.

The movie does get a few points for starring an aging big-name actor. The movie isn't able to make us care for its characters, but Kirk Douglas the actor inspires a great deal of sympathy, even pity. He grits his teeth and slogs his way through this mess of a film, giving the audience somebody to root for. You want to yell "Cut!" and hand the guy a glass of bourbon to steady his nerves for the next scene.

Farrah Fawcett was cast for sex appeal, but wasn't used to advantage. I understand there's a very brief bit of skin somewhere in the movie, but it must be in the part I missed. She spends the last half hour being completely helpless, nothing but run, cower, run, cower. Maybe the movie's an Alien ripoff, but her character's certainly no Ripley. In this respect, the film hasn't aged well.

I'm afraid I missed Harvey Keitel's performance completely. I'm not all that broken up about it, though. He always plays the same guy, no matter what the movie's about, so simply knowing he's associated with the film somehow gives the same effect as actually seeing him on screen. Your imagination can fill in the blanks.

When Kirk finally sacrifices himself to destroy the robot, the film both wins and loses points. It loses points because strapping dynamite on yourself, and tackling the robot so you both tumble into a nearby tank of water and then explode is a really low-tech way to off a robot. I don't ask for a lot of creativity in bad movies, but offing the baddie is the most important moment in the whole movie, bar none. It's the big payoff your viewers have been waiting for, impatiently, for the last 90 minutes or so. It's the one reason they stayed awake all that time, so you really owe it to them to deliver something. If the movie was being made today, they'd do this part better. We can at least be sure the exact means of dispatching Hector would be different, so as not to remind viewers of a suicide bombing or anything.

On the plus side, when the big explosion does happen, you get shot after shot of water and broken robot bits flying through the air. In slow motion, no less. It's practically a b-movie cliche: They could only budget for that one big explosion, so they're going to show you every last frame of footage they have of it, however long that takes.

The ending's kind of a downer: Farrah arrives at the Earth, which she's never visited before, and sits there gazing out the window and moping because poor ol' Kirk's out of the picture. The spaceship glides towared the Earth, as mounting tense music blares on the soundtrack, as if building to some sudden surprise. And then the film just ends, without anything else happening.

Not everyone hates the movie. For some people it's quite the opposite, and I can respect that. There are a few movies out there where I get to be the lonely voice in the wilderness, after all. Here are two positive reviews of the movie. for the sake of counterpoint.

Mock Chow Mein

Updated: This has proven to be quite a popular post, and every few days someone shows up at this humble blog, looking for Mock Chow Mein recipes. I originally wrote this post because I thought the stuff sounded icky and I wanted to make fun of it. Now that I'm getting so many hits from people sincerely looking for information, I feel kind of bad about that. I'd hate for people to come here and go away disappointed, and I do think there's a kernel of a good idea within the recipe, so at the end of this post I'm adding a few thoughts on how to improve on the dish. Enjoy!

Updated II (8/18/06): I'd like to further point out that roughly 85% of the hits I get for this recipe come from the upper Midwest, primarily from Minnesota. So I'm wondering if we ought to consider this a regional specialty, and treasure it alongside the likes of New England Clam Chowder and Memphis-style BBQ. Hmm. I dunno about that, really, but I figured I'd pass it along, for whatever it's worth.

---

Here's a recipe that was recently brought to my attention, for a classic, uniquely American dish known as "Mock Chow Mein". It's originally from a newspaper somewhere out in Eastern Oregon. Possibly it was the Baker City Herald, although I can't find it on their site. [Updated: Wrong paper; it was the Heppner Gazette-Times. I stand corrected.] Perhaps they want to keep this fabulous taste sensation a secret only the locals get to know about. But somehow a hardcopy version has come into my possession, and now all shall be revealed:

Brown together:
1 lb. ground beef
1 chopped onion
1 cup cut celery

Add:
1 can mushrooms
1 can tomato soup
1 can cream of mushroom soup

Cover and bake 1 hr. at 350 degrees.

Just before serving, stir in one pkg. chow mein noodles, 
so they're still crisp when eaten.

What could be easier? What could be more scrumptious? Well, just about everything, quite honestly, but it's still a classic, dammit, just like the Edsel.

Here are three more recipes, although it must be said that all 3 introduce suspicious foreign impurities, such as rice and soy sauce. The recipe sitting on my desk has the fewest ingredients, and it also has a grainy picture of the nice(?) little old lady who contributed the recipe. It looks like she's smiling, so we can assume she meant well when she sent the recipe in. Since it has the fewest ingredients, and contains no added seasonings whatsoever, I have to conclude that hers is the most purely American of all the variants, and is therefore the best. I'm 100% sure of this despite never having tried any of them. The experts do disagree on whether Mock Chow Mein is a casserole or a hotdish, and I'm not sure where I stand on that controversy. It seems to draw equally from both rich cullinary traditions, so it's hard to say.

Most recipes don't include a tomato component, so the consensus seems to be that you can omit the tomato soup if you prefer. Also, the celery and canned mushrooms are just there to provide roughage, not flavor (as far as I can tell), so you can probably get away without those either. The truly minimal recipe is simply to eat the chow mein noodles directly out of the bag, and dispense with all that other crap. It's faster, it's cheaper, and the noodles stay crisp for as long as you like. This is the only version I was able to find a picture for, for some reason.

The ideal drink pairing would be an O'Doul's, or perhaps a Kaliber if you're feeling extra fancy.
For dessert, serve Mock Apple Pie and a nice cup of Postum.

Bon appetit!

---

Like I said, I do think the basic idea has potential, and so here are a few ideas on how to make something tastier than the recipe given above. The main problem with that recipe, and with the other recipes I've seen, is all that canned soup. Ugh! Dishes made with canned soups are always way too salty and underseasoned for my taste. It also seems like you could save yourself an hour or more if you just did everything in the pan or skillet and didn't bother with baking it all into a casserole, which seems kind of pointless.

A brief survey of mock chow mein recipes via Google gives us a few clues about the "essence" of the dish. Let's begin by completely abandoning any idea that we're making Chinese food here, because we aren't. This dish has nothing whatsoever to do with what people in China actually eat, but that's ok, because we're not in China. Well, I'm not, anyway. And as a result, we're free to cook it however we like, and ignore any silly questions about whether we're being "authentic" or not.

As for ingredients, I think the guiding principle is flexibility. You should be able to make it with things you're likely to have at hand. If you need to omit or substitute a few of the ingredients, it's not a big deal. And it just seems wrong somehow to require any weird, hard-to-find, expensive ingredients. That would really violate the spirit of the whole thing.

• First we have those crunchy chow mein noodles. We'll keep those, because it just isn't chow mein without the noodles. When I talked earlier about eating chow mein noodles right out of the bag, I was speaking from experience. The most important thing with the noodles is to keep them crispy, and the best way to do that is not combine them with the other ingredients until serving time.
  
• Then there's meat of some kind. Ground beef is the default, and if a recipe simply says "mock chow mein", you can bet it's got ground beef in it. I'm a big fan of beef, so we'll go with that.
  
• I expect the onions are included because they go so well with beef. That's an undeniable fact, unless you're a vegetarian or something. Browning/sauteeing the onions with the beef is a fine idea.
  
• Mushrooms are a matter of personal opinion. I think they go great with beef, but I'm the mushroom-eating half of a divided household. So let's agree they're optional. Oh, and don't use the canned ones if you don't have to. Please.
• Then we have one or more crunchy vegetables, typically celery and/or water chestnuts. Both of these are longtime staples of so-called "oriental food", but I think you could just as easily use bell peppers, for example, or just dispense with the vegetables if you prefer. You already have the crunchy noodles, so you'll still have some texture even if you leave the veggies out. It's no big deal either way.
  
• Which brings us to the canned soup. Most of the time it's cream of mushroom soup, which I understand was the magic elixir of every 60's housewife. Sometimes a second soup is added, like the tomato soup in the recipe above, but let's focus on the mushroom soup right now. Every canned mushroom soup I've ever tasted has been a complete salt grenade, so let's not bother looking for the "right" canned soup, and try to figure out why the soup goes in in the first place. A quick Google search gives lots of mushroom soup recipes. The recipes differ in a few details, but they're broadly similar in their ingredients: Mushrooms, chicken stock, salt, pepper, nutmeg(!), butter, cream (or half & half, or evaporated milk, or even sour cream), onions (or shallots), salt & pepper, sometimes a bit of sherry, sometimes a bit of flour to thicken things up. Let's assume we're already covered in the mushroom and onion/shallot departments, and go from there.
  
• I have to admit I'm not keen on the dairy component, but you're the chef, not me, so feel free to add it if you think you need it.
  
• The stock and the sherry both sound like great ideas, and you can use either one, or both. They can just go in the skillet along with the beef, onions, and other veggies, and then use one or the other to deglaze with afterwards. I'd use red wine instead of sherry, myself, because I think it'd go better with the beef, onions, and mushrooms. Heck, you could probably use beer instead and it'd be good too.
  
• I'd add some garlic, too, because garlic is great in everything.
  

As for preparation, just cook everything up together in the skillet, until the beef and onions are done, and serve over the noodles. It's not fancy, it's certainly not gourmet or anything, but I'll bet money it's better than anything you can make by going the traditional "Campbell's soup casserole" route.

we can only hope...

From here, and probably elsewhere.

Today's great Washington Post headline: "White House Shifts Into Survival Mode". And by "survival", the Busheviks mean of course themselves, not, you know, the country, and certainly not the planet.

Let it be known I'm swearing a solemn oath not to use any analogies involving outdoor furniture and ill-fated cruise ships in describing the personnel changes at the White House. That would be far too easy. Instead, I'd like to suggest that this is one of the very, very few instances where having tech industry experience helps to understand what's going on in the political sphere. The media meme seems to be that the shakeup proves Bush & friends now understand the problem. We're told they're taking decisive action now because they know exactly how to fix what's wrong. Yes, the whole list. Anyone who's toiled in the salt mines of a tanking dot-com company will tell you that the opposite is true: If your crappy dot-com CEO responds to falling poll numbers, I mean, marketshare, by juggling the exec staff around, it's a sign he (it's almost always a 'he') is in way over his head and has no clue at all about what to do next. All he's really doing is shaking the magic 8 ball over and over, hoping for a better result this time around.

Maybe it's unwise to prescribe what ought to happen next by continuing on with an analogy about the present, but let's try. From what I've personally seen, the only thing that really turns things around is replacing the CEO and reversing his failed policies. Get the burn rate under control, get your budget out of the red, produce actual products instead of marketing nonsense, rebuild your credibility and mindshare in the industry, think long and carefully before expending blood and treasure on forays outside of your core market.... Perhaps you can guess what I'm getting at here.

Updated: Researchers have discovered Karl Rove's most distant ancestor, the oldest snake(like) fossil ever discovered. Like I mentioned a couple of days ago, it's a terrible, terrible week to be a creationist. Which is fantastic, of course.

Doubleupdated: Today's amusing anti-Bush animation.

Obligatory All-Local Post

I've fallen pretty far behind of late on my solemn blogger's duty to offer outraged and ill-informed commentary on all local issues of the day. So I figured I'd try to cover a bunch of PDX-centric items in one swell foop and be done with 'em. If you're not from around here (which is true of the vast majority of the Earth's population, let's not forget), this post may bore you silly. Feel free to pick out something else from "Previous Posts" or "Archives" over on the right sidebar. I won't feel hurt or anything.

• In our endless small-city inferiority complex, we Portlanders are always looking for any sign that we're finally a "real city". Don't worry, we'll have another reason soon. If all goes according to plan, we'll soon be able to have dramatic aerial tram rescues, just like New York City. Hooray for us!
  
• In general, if the powers that be in Portland, or statewide for that matter, keep calling something an "innovative" solution, what they mean is that it's cheaper than the correct solution, at least in the short term. Even at its current, more realistic cost, the OHSU tram is still cheaper than actually sorting out the transportation nightmare south of I-405. That would be expensive, and hard, and doing it right would probably require another bridge, so instead the Powers that Be punted on that and decided to just connect the two dots they care about at the moment.
  
• The tram, at least, may be kinda cool when it's done, the tourists will love it, etcetera. So it may yet have some redeeming qualities. The real winner of the Cheap-N-Stupid award is the plan to run MAX down the Transit Mall, along with cars and buses. And insufferably smug bicyclists, of course -- I mean, this is Portland, after all. Ask any TriMet driver about the plan. Or just sit on their bus for 5 minutes as they navigate the existing transit mall, and chances are they'll start ranting without any prompting at all. Every single driver I've talked to has been convinced it's going to be an utter disaster. More cars on the transit mall, and MAX trains? The right solution would've been to put the trains underground through downtown, but that would cost too much. Then it might've been possible to add cars in a sensible way, with on-street parking. As it is, each "stakeholder" gets maybe 20% of their ideal solution, resulting in an unworkable compromise. If you want raspberries for dinner, and I want garlic, the solution isn't to throw everything in the blender and hope for the best. But that's what we're going to do. It doesn't help that this Frankenstein's monster of a transit plan was cobbled up behind closed doors and then unveiled to the public as a done deal. This may work in larger cities where the Powers that Be have a degree of basic competence and common sense, but here it's a recipe for disaster. Again and again we have these massive screwups that anyone with a brain could've predicted, but nobody managed to prevent.
  
• But contrary to what the good-ol'-boy media would like you to think, public financing of elections is not among our many disasters, the Emilie Boyles scandal notwithstanding. The Oregonian would have you think that clumsy amateurs getting caught taking the money in public is far, far worse than slick professional insiders raking in the dough in smoke-filled rooms away from the public eye. And why is that, exactly?
  
• I'm also failing to get worked up over the so-called Foxworth scandal. If a.) Foxworth was white, or b.) this was a real city, it'd probably still be grounds for a civil suit, but there wouldn't be a media feeding frenzy about it.
  
• In real crime news, here's the latest on the drive-by shooting at 5th and Oak. My office is just a couple of blocks from there, and I walked right by there maybe half an hour before it happened. Yow. I mean, I'm a jaded urban dweller and all, and I don't scare easily, but I'm getting really sick and tired of the transit mall being downtown's "Crack Alley". It's not known right now whether it was drug or gang related, so it's probably unwise to jump to conclusions. But in my experience, nobody else does this sort of thing, generally speaking. I mean, I doubt it's the result of a blood feud between rival mortgage brokers, or a disgruntled urban planner whose blueprints had been turned down by the PDC for the last time. That just doesn't seem very likely, is all I'm saying.
  
• If you look closely at the photo in that shooting story, you'll see that in the background is our semi-fabled bank of tasty lunch carts, a cullinary mini-Shangri-La which draws hungry office workers from all over downtown. The bright yellow cart on the right is the Smokin' Pig BBQ cart. Mmm! Drool! Highly recommended.
  

Welcome, Visitor No. 1000(ish)

After a mere 4 months, this lil' blog's hit a whopping 1000 visitors. Roughly speaking. Anyone who has sm3.sitemeter.com redirected in their hosts file or whose browser doesn't load images won't be counted (a category that also includes search engine bots). Populating your hosts file to block unwanted sites is actually a really smart idea. It's not the end-all and be-all of security, by any means, but it does get rid of a lot of banner ads. Also, I didn't have that hit counter set up for about the first week or so, so I've got no record at all of my very earliest visitors. Oh, well. The number's probably correct to within an order of magnitude or two, anyway. So an enthusiastic "huzzah!" may be in order.

I'd like to thank the academy, and all the little people who made this possible (you know who you are). Oh, and my agent, if I had one. I'd just like to say that this humble blog's come a long way since the early days, although that's not really true as far as I can tell. I'd also like to express my sincerest hopes for an ever-brighter and more wondrous future for this thing. Really, it's probably just going to be more of the same, day in and day out. OTOH it's been four long months so far, and I haven't gotten bored with blogging yet, which I think has got to be some kind of personal record for me.

I probably ought to give out some sort of prize to the 1000th visitor, but I don't have any bright ideas about what it ought to be, plus I'm too cheap to actually do it. Talking about it is absolutely free, though, so long as you don't try to put a dollar figure on the amount of time wasted, both mine and yours. I think I'll go with a line from an obscure 80's radio commercial (don't ask me why I've remembered it), and say in a really bad French accent, "You ween a zmall, but beauuuutiful potato!". I don't actually have a potato handy (too cheap, remember?), so in lieu of that here's a link to Global Potato News. Seriously. And there's more news than you might expect.

If the winner doesn't like potatoes, perhaps he or she would prefer a neutral B_s meson. They do exist, according to that PhysicsWeb article, though I'm not sure whether I personally own any or not. They're awfully small, see, and they move kind of quickly, plus they don't hang around very long before decaying. So maybe they aren't really a great gift item, come to think of it.

And now I've completely run out of ideas for prizes. That didn't take long.

Anyway, the picture up top is of a giant grouper, taken by NOAA researchers near the island of Agrihan in the Northern Marianas. Yes, the obscure US territory you might have heard of in connection with that Abramoff guy. It all comes back to politics sooner or later, I'm afraid.

Today's imperiled charismatic megafauna

• Baby Walruses [pic 1, from WHOI]
  
• Desert Pygmy Owls [pic 2, from USFWS]
  
• Turtles in Colombia
  
• Mermaids
  

Please note that I'm trying valiantly to be "fair and balanced" here. We can shake our fists at the Bushies for the first two, since we all know how much they love greedy developers and big CO2 polluters. And come to think of it, they're probably not too fond of mermaids either.

But Georgie may be on the side of the angels on the remaining item. I'm confident he'd be staunchly opposed to turtle-based aphrodisiacs in any form. That is, unless there's money in it for a large pharmaceutical conglomerate.

Updated: Yet another article about overfishing. Let me go out on a limb and predict that the current overfishing of tuna, sharks, etc., will continue unabated until the fishieries collapse and there's no more money to be made. That's what always happens.

Here's the latest huge carnivorous dinosaur, newly discovered in Argentina. Oh, and they may have hunted in packs. Gaaaah!

Oh, and while I was checking for dinosaur news, I came across two good articles about Republicans (big surprise): "Conservatism is a mental disease" and "The Price We'll Pay for Countenancing Presidential Omnipotence".

And one final political item: A poster over on the SCOX board shared this cute "What, Dubya Worry?" video clip [MPEG]. It's supposed to be a morph effect, but I have to say the beginning and end pics look pretty much identical to me. But then, I'm way overdue for an optometrist checkup, so what do I know?

Enjoy!

foo

A few unrelated items I've accumulated for today.

• In a recent post of mine (GWB: Double or Nothing), I sort of tried to suggest that the neocons' current designs on Iran were akin to compulsive problem gambling behavior. I've since come across an article over at Whiskey Bar which makes this point far, far better than I did. Read "The Flight Forward" and be afraid. Be very afraid.
  
• Need a breather? Here are two MSM cute animal stories. First, an NY Times story about why the city goes bonkers for dramatic cat rescues.
  
• Also, a pair of crows are nesting outside the Guardian's offices.
  
• Cute animal stuff is the closest I get to celebrating Easter. But I think someone's finally figured out how to do it right. The Portland Mercury lets us know that the Sabala's Mt. Tabor club up on Hawthorne is doing a special screening of The Passion of the Christ, accompanied by the music of Slayer. Ooooohhhh...
  
• Two other Easter perspective, if you care: a mythological/anthropological interpretation, which is somewhat interesting (though I don't buy into all that Joseph Campbell silliness), and the inevitable absolute literal historical truth angle.
  
• If you (like me) find the US's current grim blood-n-guts approach to Easter kind of icky and offputting, here's a small breath of fresh air: Some pics from an easter egg hunt at a recently-renovated park in Geneva, Switzerland. Previous posts at that blog detail the ongoing renovation efforts.
  
• And some Easter photos from a Polish blogger visiting the Netherlands.
  
• Ok, breather's over, back to politics again. What's it going to take to finally impeach Bush? Here's one great idea. Volunteers, anyone?
  
• On a vastly more serious note, The Nation has an article by Kevin Phillips, based on his new book American Theocracy, which I've mentioned a couple of times before. Truly frightening, all the more so because he's not writing in the near-hysterical mode we get so used to on the net (and to which I myself am prone on occasion). At the very start, he explains that we aren't heading for an all-out revival of Calvinist Geneva, but the things that are possible are scary on their own. I don't usually run out and buy the controversial political book of the moment, but this time I may have to.
  
• Is a Jamaican theocracy in the works, too? Two scary articles suggest it's already well on its way. People in the US tend not to realize that much of the Caribbean is deeply religious and conservative, I guess probably because they only ever talk to their fellow cruise passengers and avoid interacting with the locals at all costs.
  
• As a non-churchgoing state, Oregon's usually not fertile ground for the theocrats, but at least one of the leading Republican candidates for governor thinks we ought to start teaching creationism in the schools. And the scary part is that this'll probably play extremely well with voters in the May primary. And the R's keep wondering why they keep losing general elections in this state. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.
  
• One endlessly fascinating bit about right-wingers is that they'd love a theocracy so long as their own religion gets to be in charge, but they absolutely freak out at the prospect of living under someone else's theocracy. And then they turn around and fantasize happily about those other evildoin' theocrats coming here and blowing up liberals. Truly disgusting.
  
• And thanks to the magic of the internet, we learn that there are creationists in India, as well. Who knew? The article seems to assume readers already know what a "Cosmo Theorist" is, and I'm afraid I don't.
  
• And a couple of perspectives on the current Rumsfeld controversy. from Political Cortex, and the ever-brilliant Jon Swift. I actually think the anti-Rumsfeld campaign is pointless, maybe even counterproductive. His replacement would just be another chickenhawk neocon, just as bad or even worse than the current guy. There's zero chance of getting a moderate, non-divisive defense secretary so long as Bush & Cheney run the show. Zero. Replacing the current guy would make it look as though something positive had been accomplished, and that's how the media would spin it. And then nothing would actually improve or change in any way. Any attempt to mitigate the sheer badness of the current administration is doomed to failure, and it's pointless and counterproductive to even try. Why help them rearrange the deck chairs? The new chickenhawk would just get a fresh grace period in which to screw up over and over again without being criticized for it, and that's the last thing we need right now.
  
• Switching gears completely, here are some cool new Mars pictures from MRO.
  
• Returning to cute animals for just a moment, here's today's tiny tidbit of echidna news. Awwwwww.....
  
• Here's someone's list of the Top 18 skylines in the world. This was going to go into either one of my recent art-related posts, or something about Dubai (since it's one of the 18) but it didn't fit anywhere, so here it is.
  
• Meanwhile, fresh off the Dubai ports deal, we find out that a Kuwaiti company's buying a minority stake in Krispy Kreme Donuts.
  
• I'm actually ok with that, though. I'm not a Krispy Kreme fan. If you're looking for good donuts in the greater Portland area, I recommend Donut Day in Aloha. I should add that the owners are immigrants from (I think) Lebanon. And they're wonderful people.
  

Venus Vortex

The first images from ESA's Venus Express are now available. The top pic here is a near-IR image of the funky, swirling clouds over the planet's south pole.

For the sake of comparison, the second pic is of the south pole of Saturn (more pics here), and the third is a bunch of swirly lollipops. Note that the lollipops appear to swirl in the opposite direction as the Venusian clouds, although the significance of this (if any) is as yet unknown.

Magellan images of Venus' north pole can be found here. Apparently there's a swirling cloud vortex at the north pole as well, but I haven't been able to find any images of it.

Also, live pictures of our own south pole can be found here. Well, ok, it's dark there right now, but you get the idea.

Enjoy!

tags: venus venus express saturn lollipops

Missing Links

Today's biology and/or politics tidbits.

• Some are calling Australopithecus anamensis a "missing link" between early hominids and more apelike ancestors. The researchers' paper is here.
  
• In some ways the creationists have it really easy. If you dispense with the notion of evidence-based empirical proof, you can work really, really fast. Here are two articles announcing that they've already "debunked" Tiktaalik, just days after it was announced. Those poor saps in the fact-based biology community often take years or even decades to come up with "conclusive results" like those.
  
• Luckily, however, detonating the fundies' so-called rebuttals doesn't take decades, or years, or even days. Minutes, is more like it. Here are two examples.
  
• National Geographic has an article about a type of catfish that likes to crawl out of the water and hunt on dry land. The researchers say this helps show that water-to-land adaptations are really not that complex or difficult. I just say "Yikes!".
  
• That article links to a good essay titled "Was Darwin Wrong?".
  
• An article over at Political Cortex: War of the Worldviews: The Religious Right vs. Democratic Pluralism
  
• Meet Himantura kittipongi, a newly discovered freshwater stingray(!) that lives in the Mekong River. Newly discovered, but already considered endangered. You hear that a lot these days.
  
• The latest Laonastes update. Seems the locals consider them rather tasty.
  
• The fundies are claiming that a professor at Cornell will be teaching a pro-ID class in the near future. Well, except that he isn't, really, so don't freak out. His blog is here. You may or may not agree with the reasoning, but it should be obvious that he's not one of "them", and the ID folks are (as usual) misrepresenting what's really going on. Be sure to read his article arguing there's an evolutionary connection between religion and warfare.
  
• More creationism in Kentucky.
  
• Believe it or not, we're now seeing creationism controversies popping up in Canada and the UK. And here I always thought they were both such reasonable countries...
  
• A blog post titled Tiktaalik is putting the WIN back in Darwin. Great title, great post, and it even comes with a picture of cute baby animals. What more could you ask for?
  

tags = australopithecus tiktaalik Himantura kittipongi missing link creationism intelligent design evolution fundies

A Taco for Lenin

Another picture from Seattle, this time of the Lenin statue that graces the Fremont neighborhood, right in front of the local Taco del Mar. The statue's presence inspires frothing-at-the-mouth rage from the usual quarters, naturally. Do conservatives just have no sense of irony at all? Yes, we all realize he was a bad guy, ok? You'd think that just living here in the irony-soaked, angst-ridden Northwest, at least a very teentsy amount would've rubbed off on them, but apparently not. I mean, the local merchants (capitalist running dogs that they are) decorate Vladimir Ilich for Christmas. In that Christmas article, a local gelato shop owner remarks that she first thought it was a statue of Ivar, the local clam chowder baron. Which, quite honestly, is what I thought at first too. A giant bronze Lenin statue is not exactly the sort of thing you go around expecting to see every day. At least in this country, and in this day and age.

In Budapest, there's an entire outdoor museum devoted to old Socialist Realist sculptures discarded after 1989. I have to admit I rather like some of the statues done in this style. Your art history professor will scoff, of course. I personally think the art world's scorn for all things Soviet is primarily due to aesthetic trendiness, not ideology. While the outside art world had moved on to increasingly abstract and esoteric works, comprehensible only to an elect few, the Soviets stuck with their own brand of romanticized neoclassicism, in art, architecture, music, and literature. In the Western art world, being seen as stodgy and outdated is far worse than being ideologically suspect, so the entire creative output of a very large country was lumped in with the likes of Norman Rockwell, Rogers & Hammerstein, and Thomas Kinkade. It seems to me this is a rather harsh and unfair judgement. Sooner or later a major museum will do a "groundbreaking" show, and there'll be a critical reevaluation, and prices of old Soviet statues will go through the roof. Mark my words. Not next year, and probably not in the next five or ten, but sometime within our lifetimes, I think we'll see it.

Meanwhile, the Financial Times has a great article about the ambivalent legacy of 20th century modernism, in response to a new show at the V&A Museum in London. It'd be interesting to go travel a couple of centuries into the future and see what stuff from the 20th century turned out to have staying power in the long term and what didn't. I think the results would be surprising, although I wouldn't dare to guess about the particulars.

It's not like most of the art created in the West during the last hundred years or so has been all that fantastic. The last 50 or so, in particular, have produced some great works, and literally tons of absolute crap. I'm not one of those people who freak out about abstract art and sculpture, and I think some of it can be quite nice. There's even a small amount of modern classical music out there that I'd consider to be "nice". But it's rare for a modern artwork to elicit a stronger reaction than that, and quite a few simply get dismissed without evoking any sort of feeling or response at all. This is fine in an art museum; different works will strike different people in different ways, and all that. However, if you're going to plunk a sculpture down in a park or public square, I'd argue that you have additional obligations toward the general (i.e. non-art-major) public. Presumably it's supposed to be there for everyone, not just an in-crowd elite, so you should at least try to make the work appealing to a broader cross-section of society. There's a limit to how much aggressively ugly modernism the public should be asked to put up with. I don't care what the experts say, Rusting Chunks #5 is not a real improvement over a grouping of heroic steelworkers and peasants striding into the glorious future. Yes, a world of nothing but endless worker-and-peasant statues would be monotonous, to say the least, but an occasional one here and there would be nice, just to spice things up.

You'd have to adapt the style to local conditions, of course. No Lenins (Fremont notwithstanding), and most likely no hammers-and-sickles. I mean, nobody actually wants to live in a totalitarian society with a broken Leninist command economy, except perhaps the president of Belarus, and he's a complete lunatic. You could possibly get away with a statue of John Reed, since he was originally from Portland and all. (I've heard there's a park bench dedicated to him somewhere around town, but I don't know where it is, if it exists.) For the most part, though, you'd have a lot of burly, square-jawed loggers, cowboys, and fishermen. I recall having seen at least one example of a Soviet statue of heroic engineers, and I'd obviously be ok with that. Heck, I'd even model for one, if I was asked nicely.

Not Very Strong Swimmers

Here are a couple of fun photos of freakish fish, taken at the Seattle Aquarium the other day. You can probably tell why I don't take photos for a living. Neither of these fish are very strong swimmers, so at least they held still for the camera, more or less.



The first is a cowfish, and the second is the Northwest's very own Pacific spiny lumpsucker. No, seriously, that's its real name. Honest. Oregon Magazine has a bit more about the spiny lumpsucker here, and there's a good Wikipedia article as well. Also, here's a WP article about Tetraodontiformes, an entire order of smallish and very droll fishes including cowfishes, pufferfishes (=fugu), and much, much more.



While we're on the subject, the third image is a drawing of the recently discovered Tiktaalik roseae, which looks an awful lot like a transitional form between fish and land animals. (I'm guessing it wasn't a very strong swimmer either.) You've heard of transitional forms, right? You know, the thing the creationists keep insisting doesn't exist. D'oh! If you're a hardcore Tiktaalik fan, CafePress already has a line of T. roseae casualwear.

The image links to a good story over at Pharyngula, and The Lancelet also has a good story. If you're a Nature subscriber, you can find the researchers' original articles here.

The creationists beg to differ about Tiktaalik, of course, and they'd like to offer a bit of lame and ignorant criticism of the new beastie. Another fine example of their usual faith-based "reasoning".

A good post over at HinesSight proclaims this to have been a bad week for creationism, with Tiktaalik just the tip of the iceberg. The Panda's Thumb also suggests this has not been a good week for the ID camp. Not to be outdone, a couple of posts at Scientific American's science blog call it a lousy week for creationism, giving even more reasons why this is so. The biggest reason, of course, is the new molecular evolution study, which in the end is probably a bigger (though less accessible) story than Tiktaalik, even. It may be worth noting that the lead researcher on the study is a professor at the University of Oregon.

I'd like to take things a step further and label this a truly crappy week for creationism, and more generally for the notion there are things that only religion can explain and science can't touch. Today comes a new report indicating that near-death experiences may have a purely biological basis. So much for the whole "move towards the light" thing.

Oh, and fundies in Kentucky are freaking out over efforts to replace "A.D." ("Anno Domini") with "C.E." ("Common Era") in general usage, which also seems to have some sort of murky connection with evolution, as well. At least they seem to think so. I was at the Portland Art Museum last week, and noticed that they've begun using C.E. in their exhibits. There's a sign explaining C.E. vs. A.D. in their current exhibit of Han dynasty objects. Not really the best explanation I've seen, since I think they were trying to be overly tactful and avoid criticizing the religious basis of "A.D.". Instead they just argued that "C.E." is newer, and it's the trend these days.

Also, here's a good article arguing that if you're a genuine ID true believer, you ought to witness for your faith by not getting a flu shot ever again, and most definitely not for the bird flu, since in order to pose a threat to humans, the H5N1 virus will need to evolve a bit more, which is "impossible", according to the usual ID wingnuts.

But not all the news is bad in Jesustan this week. Remember that one-eyed "cyclops" kitten that was in the news a few months back? Apparently the creationists have gotten their grubby hands on the remains, and the poor thing will soon be a new attraction at a roadside fundie freakshow in Syracuse, NY. (Don't worry, the link does not have a picture of the kitten, which you probably really don't want to see.) Either the fundies don't understand the difference between a genetic mutation and a birth defect, or they're deliberately trying to confuse the issue, or quite probably a bit of both.

Updated: Creationism is near the top of the list of things You Must Believe to be a Republican.

Also, you might enjoy Jane Smiley's recent posting titled "Tolerance", or Social Control?, about the larger secular vs. fundie conflict. I'll probably link to this story again, since placing it as an addendum near the end of an existing mostly-unrelated post doesn't do it justice.

And here's an interesting, rambling blog post speculating about the progressive/conservative divide and related matters. This is a great line: "This was going to be a post about something else. My posts never do what i want them to do.". I know the feeling. I really do.

More: A couple more related items worth reading: Tangled Bank #51: the Seattle Tour! and Does gravity explain why basketballs fall down?.



tagz: cowfish spiny lumpsucker tiktaalik evolution creationism intelligent design oregon

GWB: Double or Nothing

So GWB now admits he, ah, declassified the infamous Plame/Yellowcake material. And of course the usual suspects are rushing to let us all know that it was all technically legal, since the president's a law unto himself and all.

It's quite gratifying to see conservatives jumping in with these legalistic, hair-splitting arguments, quibbling over what the definition of "is" is. We may as well dispute the legality a bit, just to make them keep offering these lame excuses. But it's actually not a completely outrageous idea, so let's assume it's true, purely for the sake of argument. I don't see any realistic prospect of GWB ever being held legally accountable for any of his actions, so arguing over legality is a purely theoretical exercise, anyway.

The R's would like to only talk about the letter of the law, and they'd rather not have a conversation about whether the disclosure was ethical, or politically wise, or good for national security, or the sort of conduct we ought to expect from presidents. Well, George sort of took a stab at that today, arguing that he wanted the country to "see the truth" and so forth, but this argument is unconvincing even by his usual standards.

The problem, of course, is that the Niger yellowcake story had already been discredited at the time George leaked it, so it's not clear what connection there is here with the public "seeing the truth". Maybe Bush still believes it, for all we know. Someone ought to have asked him today. It sure sounds like the usual "conservative relativism" we've come to know and love so much, where truth is just any crazy notion you choose to believe, regardless of the evidence (e.g. creationism), and falsehood is anything you happen to disagree with for whatever reason.

I suppose you could argue that there's no way national security could be harmed by releasing a completely fictional tale about African uranium, since no real secrets are being disclosed. We'll probably hear this argument before long.

Meanwhile, George's next war is starting to take shape. No doubt you've already heard about Seymour Hersh's New Yorker story discussing a possible US attack on Iran in the near future. If the account is accurate at all, the most, ahem, striking thing about it is how similar it is to the Iraq plan. The military particulars are different -- instead of a massive ground invasion, we'd apparently stage a huge air attack against Iran, with no advance warning, a la Pearl Harbor. Aside from that, though, it's like deja vu all over again. The Iranian public, apparently, will greet us as liberators, even if we nuke their country a little here and there. We'll get us a second helping of that tasty regime change, and then we roll the credits. Mission accomplished! The article also asserts we've already got covert operations in place, trying to stoke interethnic tensions in Iran. Fortunately there's absolutely no chance there could be any possible downside to this, certainly not after the regime change happens. Because then the country will be an absolute paradise (well, except for all the radiation). Or at least nobody's thought that far ahead. So long as you avoid ever asking "What happens once we win?", there's no need to have an answer, right? Look at Iraq. Three years on, and we're still making amazing, remarkable progress every single day. Bush and Cheney keep saying so, so you know it must be true. And what's all this crazy "exit strategy" nonsense you hippies keep babbling on about? What part of "mission accomplished" don't you understand?

The current WH spin is that they'd maybe kinda prefer a diplomatic solution. Which, again, is exactly what they said about Iraq. And yes, there were diplomatic efforts. They just weren't good faith diplomatic efforts. They were designed to fail, so that war would appear to be the only remaining option. Some people might argue that threating people with nuclear annihilation is just a really shrewd negotiating tactic. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. There's a fine line between taking a hard line to push negotiations along, and taking a hard line to poison any chance of a deal. You see the latter a lot in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with each side pairing a negotiating track with a parallel track of sucide bombings or forcible land confiscations. And we all know how well that's worked out over the years. I'm convinced Bush & Cheney won't settle for anything other than a war. We'll be told that the Iranian leadership is untrustworthy (the complete opposite of our own leaders), fanatical (again, totally unlike Bush & Cheney), and an imminent threat to world peace (once again... you get the idea).

Hersh quotes sources as saying Bush now sees Iran as his presidential legacy. Which again is what was being said about Iraq a few years ago. That one didn't turn out so well, so we're going to try to change the subject and not talk about it anymore, or think about it, or learn anything from any mistakes that may have been made. Instead we're just going to pick a new country, place another high-stakes bet, and roll the dice again. Double or nothing.

Updated: Read this great rant titled Is Your Entire Country on Crack?.

Venus: Final Approach

ESA's Venus Express spacecraft is on final approach to the planet right now. Here are a few pictures of the planet, which will soon cease to be state-of-the-art if all goes well.

More images of the planet. I've deliberately omitted any Magellan images, just for the sake of variety.

• NSSDC
  
• Anglo-Australian Observatory
  
• Caltech
  
• Mental Landscape
  
• Steve Massey's Video Astronomy Pages
  

Updated 11:51pm PDT: Inexplicably, there's no mission status page up over at SpaceflightNow. The closest you can get to live updates, as far as I can tell, is a webcam at ESA mission control, which updates every 30 seconds or so. You can see what's happening, more or less, although there's nothing to explain what's happening.

Many of the latest batch of stories showing up on Google News mention that the probe will research the planet's runaway greenhouse effect. Which is a big reason you won't see a US probe to the planet any time soon. Certain interested parties don't really care to learn any more about the warming effects of CO2. GWB & Co. would never fund a mission to Venus, and if a successor did so post-2008, it wouldn't make it out of the appropriations committee in Congress. The media would compliantly label the whole idea "too controversial", a "hot potato", and it'd be dead for another decade or two. And any insights that come from Venus Express will be automatically dismissed or ignored, just because they come from foreigners, from whom we can learn nothing.

And that's assuming that ESA's lackluster PR outfit gets the news out in the first place, which is far from certain.

On the bright side, we do get another NASA impactor mission in 2008. The LCROSS probe will be a secondary payload riding along with the big Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The plan is to crash the LRO/LCROSS launch vehicle's upper stage into the moon and study the debris looking for water. Well, that, and also because big explosions rock, and grow hair on your chest. Gotta teach those hippie moon-huggers a lesson, or something. Maybe we'll even do it on the 4th of July again, or maybe even right before the election. Well, actually I don't know how that would play with the flat earth crowd, so we'll probably have to run some polls and consult with Karl first. I mean, the planet is apparently mentioned in the Bible, so we can be sure it really does exist and isn't just a liberal conspiracy or something -- although the brief reference seems to indicate the ancient Hebrews followed contemporary Greek practice and identified the morning and evening "stars" as separate entities. So assuming the Bible is inerrant, there's got to be two Venuslike planets out there, not just the one. Oh, except that they're actually stars that move, not planets.

Here are some additional goofy ideas about the planet:

• Velikovsky was a prominent astronomical crackpot back in the 50's. In his theories, Venus wandered the solar system at random, wreaking havoc everywhere it went, explaining all sorts of historical phenomena.
  
• A site suggesting that the planet's "Biblical orbit" was off by 5% from what's currently observed, and this has all sorts of obscure numerological implication.
  
• An article about Astrology in the Bible. Two great tastes that taste great together!
  
• Another religious article, Venus and Last Days Deceptions. Naturally, the gray aliens are involved somehow.
  
• Also, there's a conspiracy going on. But you probably knew that already.
  

Updated again: Venus Express is now in orbit. Or at least that's what "they" want you to think. :)

Updated yet again (4/12): The Planetary Society reports that the first Venus Express images will be released at 7am PST, 4/13. The current orbit is fairly distant and elongated, so it's supposed to be just an inkling of what we'll be seeing when VEX gets down to business. Of course, if ESA's image release policy is the same as what they've been doing with Mars Express and SMART-1, the public will get to see maybe one new image a month, tops, no matter how many they actually take. But that's just their way, I guess. Nature has an article titled "Venus ahoy!" that's also worth reading.

On the road again...

Gentle Reader(s), I'll be out of town for a few days, and I'm nowhere near cool enough, or lame enough, to bring a laptop along and blog over WiFi from Starbucks. And I'm far too behind the times to even consider posting photos directly from a camera phone, which I understand you can do these days.

So basically what I'm saying is that it would be surprising if you see any posts from me before at least Sunday, and if you see any, suspect an impostor.

I was going to post some pics or give some advice or something on what to do until I get back, but we're all adults here, probably, and if you still haven't figured out how to amuse yourself for a couple of days, there's very little I can do to help. Sorry, but that's just how it is.

On that cheery note, see ya!

Gorge

So I drove out to the Columbia River Gorge yesterday, hiked around a little, took pictures, and had a pizza at the Pietro's in Hood River.

If I may digress for a moment, the Pietro's excursion was worth the trip just by itself. Classic pizza parlors have gotten quite scarce over the years, and when you find one, it's to be treasured. It takes you right back to 1983, after soccer practice. It does for me, anyway. There was a time when every pizza place was basically the same: The same fairly short list of toppings, the same bank of classic 80's videogames, the big gas fireplace, the salad bar, everything. If you wanted pizza, that's where you went, rich or poor or anything in between. I don't know what killed off so many of these places. Maybe it was delivery, I'm not sure. My personal theory is that it has to do with the eroding middle class. If you look around the Portland area, you'll see plenty of gourmet pizza places selling fantastic pizza with prices to match (Pizzicato, Hot Lips), and you'll see even more places (nearly all of them big national chains) offering truly disgusting pizza for a heavily advertised low, low price. And next to nothing in between. It's sort of like what's happening in the retail world, where you'll do fine if you're a discount store -- Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, etc., or a high-end ultra-deluxe retailer like Nordstrom, but there's not a lot of money to be made anymore in between the two extremes.

But I digress. The picture deserves a bit of explanation, I guess. I took lots of pictures of the usual suspects: Multnomah Falls, the Vista House, Horsetail Falls, and so forth, but I thought they were generally sort of unremarkable. You can find far better examples just by googling, But I thought this white sturgeon picture was fairly compelling. I coudn't quite capture the whole face; sturgeon have some droopy catfish-like barbels under their chins, and I missed those. Hey, the fish was moving at the time, I'm just happy it turned out as well as it did. This was taken at the new-ish white sturgeon display at the Bonneville Fish Hatchery. Sturgeon have armored plates instead of scales, resulting in the extraordinary texture it shows in the photo. To me it looks like someone's attempt to carve a fish out of bubbly black basalt. And let's not forget that weird, glassy eye. Freakin' sea monster, that's what it is.

At least it's an edible sea monster. Here's a recipe that purports to be similar to how Lewis and Clark might have prepared sturgeon. And if you have sturgeon left over, which you will because they're so huge it's not even funny, your favorite search engine will happily give you page after page of sturgeon recipes. I mention this partly because of the whole double meaning thing with the title "Gorge". It's like I'm being sophisiticated and artistic, or something.

So anyway, that's what I did yesterday. Today I went to the art museum and wandered around the new wing. But I'll save that for that other art-related post I promised a couple of days ago.

tags: oregon sturgeon columbia river gorge multnomah falls pizza

Mmmm.... Lemon Bars...

It's sunny outside and I have the day off, so I think I'll go up to the Gorge and hike around a bit. If I take any good pictures, I may post them here. Or not. We'll see.

In the meantime, I haven't had breakfast yet, so I thought I'd do a brief post about lemon bars, my favorite (perhaps my only favorite) classic 50's American pastry. Ok, I don't know whether they were invented in the 50's or not, but when you think bar-shaped pastries, you think 50's. It's right up there with vaccuuming in pearls.

The difference is that lemon bars are actually good. At least the ones made today are good. I didn't experience the 50's firsthand. The originals were probably made with artificial lemon flavor, yellow food coloring, saccharin, and lard. But today you're allowed to use actual lemons, and that can be quite tasty. It's not the world's most complex taste, but hey, it's dessert, it's breakfast, it goes with coffee, what more do you want?

Seeing lemon bar recipes in old cookbooks is all the more amazing when you look at the recipes surrounding them. On either side, you'll find endless soul-crushing jello molds packed with pineapple, shrimp, and beets; horrific casseroles of ground mystery meat, lima beans, ketchup, and lots of extra salt; a catalog of unnatural acts done with hard-boiled eggs; bland, greyish roasts covered in deep layers of quivering fat...

Wait, I'm wandering off topic here. And it's getting kind of gross, too. So back to the lemon bars, already.

Some lemon bar recipes, from Cooking for Engineers, about.com's Southern food, and the above image, which takes you to a lemon bar recipe in Japanese, believe it or not.

Still don't think they're a sophisticated, modern delicacy? Here are two recipes in French. Convinced now?

Key Lime bars are nice also, btw.

Warhol Goes To Mars

Here's the latest set of images of the Martian atmosphere, from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It's a cliche anymore to compare things to Andy Warhol's Pop Art, but I do wonder whether it was at least semi-deliberate in this case. If not deliberately Warholian, I suspect whoever put this image together had some sense about the formal, abstract properties of the thing, completely apart from what it's a picture of. Scientists tend to have a much broader education than people realize, and they generally don't have a horror of the arts in the way that many artists have -- and pride themselves on having -- a deep horror of the sciences.

At the risk of sounding like your tedious aunt the librarian, let me recommend another book: Darwin's Audubon: Science and the Liberal Imagination, collected essays by Gerald Weissmann. The Powell's page describes the book thusly:

In this retrospective of Gerald Weissmann's best-known essays, the reader is treated to his unique perspective on what C. P. Snow once dubbed "the Two Cultures" — art and science. In Darwin's Audubon, Weissmann examines the powerful influence that the two exert over one another and how they have helped each other evolve. From listening to the scientists who gather ever year to sing at the Woods Hole Cantata Consort to looking at the influence of Audubon's watercolors on Darwin's On the Origin of Species; from comparing William Carlos Williams's poetry to his unedited case books to watching Oliver Wendell Holmes grow as doctor and as poet, Weissmann weaves a rich tapestry that will delight fans and newcomers alike.

If you like Godel, Escher, Bach, or anything by Stephen Jay Gould, you'll probably enjoy this book as well.

When I was gathering bits and pieces for this post, I ended up with a lot of links and notes about modern art and modernism, intending to take some ideas from a couple of essays in Darwin's Audubon and run with them a bit. But I looked over my draft of this post, and this portion doesn't flow into the other part very well (and the other part's not really done anyway), so I'll punt the rest off to a subsequent post. That'll give you time to go find the book and read it, so you'll have a better idea of what I'm mumbling on about. If you choose to ever come back here, anyway. Either way, go ahead: Good writing is good for you.