When we last left the never-ending thread, the subject was cooking. Eat this!
One thing that annoys me in these shows is the completely uncritical acceptance of a culture's primitive beliefs in sympathetic magic. It's meat, people. It's got no powers other than the basic, material ones of providing nutrients.
More like this
No.
However, there is never a shortage of crankery from Mike Adams who asserts Microwave ovens destroy the nutritional value of your food. There may be too much idiocy here to address but let's get started.
The rise of widespread nutritional deficiencies in the western world correlates almost…
File this under You Can't Make Stuff Like This Up.
Just when I think People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) can't get any more zany or ridiculous in its never-ending battle against meat eating, it comes up with a gem like sending a request to the jail where a cannibal killer is being…
As someone who's spent a lot of time in a University setting, one of the thing that often shocks me is the number of vegans that are out there. Why is it shocking? Because you need meat for proper nutrition. Now, I thought this was common knowledge, that humans are omnivores and that eating other…
Last week, we watched Evolve: Eyes on the History Channel; tonight, shall we watch the next episode, Evolve: Guts, together? Tune in shortly!
A disgusting beginning: competitive eaters? Bleh. It's a basic introduction to mammalian digestive physiology — I can tell we're going to get lots of Big…
You can talk about your gourmet cuisine all you want, but for me? There's nothing quite like a good bacon, lettuce, tomato, and bull-penis sandwich.
While I'm at the top of a subThread here, I'd like to thank PZ for paying attention enough to turn over a new subThread at the exact 1-year mark.
And hey, look: episode numbers!
This is a class operation.
Pat Allen, the woman who used to run the Alley Theater in Houston, used to use a cane covered with leather made from what was euthemistically called a "bull's goober".
Claimed it gave her the strength to do her job.
Right.
You flatter.
Speaking of 'cooking': I've just filtered the last batch of sloe schnapps. Smells loverly. Now it'll just have to last till next Winter.
Can I get the recipe for that chicken potpie mentioned yesterthread? I have some chicken thighs in the freezer.
channeling today's Doonesbury?
In the words of Peter Gabriel: "This time you've gone too far."
I tasted bull penis in Bejing last year. It had a rubbery and slimy texture. It was pungent. I cannot recommend it.
I can also attest to the fact that it did absolutely nothing for my libido.
The lecturer definitely got it backwards. Shouldn't taste (and nutritional value) be the primary reason to eat something, way before superstitious beliefs.
And speaking of bull genitalia... In some parts of the world, where bull fights are popular (mainly in Spain, I suspect), the balls are a highly prized delicatesse. I wonder if it comes with the same set of nonsense about boosting virility?
Today is blockuqote day. Almost every single instance gets spelled this way at first.
Also, 47 Things That Never Happen on Star Trek. Of course, most of them fit the rest of TV/Hollywood just as well.
Perfect. Prince Charles really should fund it.
So what? I've never done any training for my arms whatsofuckingever. Next to no body fat (as determined by poking and tweaking myself), probably not quite 60 kg (though I haven't weighed myself in months, perhaps years). You can't escape having more muscle mass than I and therefore weighing more, never mind the 3 cm of bone.
I have one big meal per day and spend the rest snacking. Grazing – continuous eating the way all other apes do it.
Before I forget, Wiener Schnitzel isn't eaten with anything but rice and the oil it was fried in.
I remember an old Dallas episode where they were serving the balls from the steer making process at a luncheon. Texans, is this still the case?
Here is a first hand account of an experience with a different highly prized delicacy. Cocka-doodle-doo!
Yeap, it does. At least in Spain it does.
Sven DiMilo@6,
Well, I'd much rather my son played the piano in a brothel, or even joined the army, than became an investment banker or private equity fund manager!
Really? I've seen it served with chips before (and this was in Austria). But maybe that's only for the tourists, and, admittedly, I haven't been to Vienna (only to Salzburg, Vorarlberg and the Tyrol).
Rice?!
No, Brasenkartofln.
Yes, that's probably true. Before I started going to the gym regularly (at the age of 17/18), I was stick-thin and weighed about 56 kg, while being about the same height I am now. So I'd like to think that a lot of the gain over the last few years has been muscle mass. This is borne out by the fact that I still have a narrow waist, and little apparent body fat.
Despite this, I still (irrationally?) worry about my calorie intake, especially when I'm not exercising regularly.
Bull, or actually calf testicles are pretty standard exotic fare in the ranching areas of North America. They sometimes call them "Rocky Mountain Oysters" or just mountain oysters. At the local grocery store(Fiesta), when I've seen them, they're called "Calf Fries". Having tried them in several ways, I'd say they are okay, sort of weird tasting, like most organ meats. They are also reported to have aphrodisiac properties, which may have a minute bit of truth, especially of eaten raw. They probably do have a bit of testosterone, which if it survived cooking, and your digestion, would make you feel a bit randy. Especially if you are a woman, and not already poisoned with the stuff.
These stupid superstitions might be simply laughable in cases like this, but many of them are far from benign. For example, use of bear bile as a "medicine" has lead to a great deal of poaching of wild bears and of obscence cruelty to caged bears.
Why is it that "potency" aids never come from really prolific animals like rats?
Here in Colorado I have heard a waitress explain Rocky Mountain Oysters to a tourist: "Them's bulls balls, maam".
I have to admit I would not have known what they are. If pushed I would have hazarded a guess they were not a freshwater shellfish delicacy though.
Bulls penis - No, thank you. personally, I prefer nursing at the wife's teets. "Milk makes strong bones".
I know I've seen a couple of studies about the evolution of morality here in the past few months or so. Anyone have any links handy? Thanks.
Why is it that "potency" aids never come from really prolific animals like rats? - Doug
In case this isn't a rhetorical question, it's because they wouldn't then be difficult to obtain, and thus no-one could charge a lot of money for them.
Bull penis as an aphrodisiac? Come on, that the the most direct example of "placebo effect" in the world. Sex drive is 90% mental (if not higher), so here we have the perfect case study. ("Damn, Johnny, those are the biggest sugar pills evar!")
(Wow, signing in via google really chews up your name, doesn't it?)
Got my kids an order of Rocky Mountain Oysters some years back. Didn't tell them what they were until we were in the car heading out. My ears are still ringing from the screams...
Only 22 comments so far? What is this, slow-news day!?!
That's very common, but only in restaurants AFAIK.
Steamed potatoes are occasionally eaten with Schnitzel.
Do you mean Bratkartoffeln? Fried potatoes?
Eat. Eat till you stop being hungry.
Frankly, you deserved it.
Seems like a lot of effort for an aphrodisiac... what ever happened to just making out?
I have not been offered any balls since I landed in Texas. At least not in a literal sense. :)
It is quiet even on the climate change threads.
Recovery from Six Nations Rugbybazillion pints 'o beer day.
I watch a lot of travel/food shows. The pattern I've noticed is that anytime the locals claim a dish is an aphrodisiac or has a medicinal property, what they really means is that the dish is disgusting and some sort of lie is needed in order to convince people to eat it.
you do realize that a lot of European traditional food is also stolen from Native Americans? or where do you think the main ingredients for marinara sauce, pierogi filling, or Schwarzwaelder Kirschtorte comes from?
And why does it matter that American traditional foods are "minority" foods? how does that make them NOT traditional American foods? or are only WASPs real Americans now?! how absurd...
I'm sorry, but I'm not buying that. Thanksgiving alone would suffice as a proper "traditional American" food culture. Shoot, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie alone would suffice.
Most traditional foods were holiday foods because they were expensive and rare; the rest of the time people ate some boring, flavorless staple. This is not something magically unique to the U.S. of the past.
ah, so I was right. you do for some reason think only white Americans legitimately qualify as bearers of American (food) culture. WTF?
The apparent slowdown is not illusory. The Threadiversary subThread registered (slightly) less than 200 comments/d, which was typical of late January. (data shown here)
Teh Thread is merely dropping back to a sustainable long-term pace.
I hope.
[Those knowledgable in population ecology may be reminded of a logistic growth curve with time-lag-induced overshoot (e.g.)]
Aquaria #666 on the last thread
Perhaps you meant northern American cuisine? In the South we fry everything and it's quite tasty. I can't think of anything other than cabbage and soup in our traditional, rural Southern cuisine that my family boils.
yes, it's definitely irrational. to be honest, it's sounding borderline anorexic. you don't need to worry about calorie intake; worry about the quality of the food you're eating, instead.
But isn't the bull the loser in this case? Wouldn't it be considered more desirable to snack on the balls of the clear winner - in this case, the matador's?
/snark
Aquaria,
I just finished reading the last Thread, and I've got to say something.
None of the women (the primary cooks) in my family used cookbooks. My grandmother never owned one and my mom only uses them to make dishes that are not part of our cultural heritage (i.e. dishes she learned to make from her mother). Using cookbooks, especially commercial creations like Betty Crocker, isn't telling you that much about what people ate, especially rural people.
Aquaria:
No, not at all. I have several 'Inquire Within' type books, complete with cookbooks, dating from the the 1800s. I've deciphered many of the recipes (no temps and few cooking times, this was pre-modern stoves/ovens) and the food is tasty.
By my primitive calculations it's brunch time on the West Coast (USA), lunch time in the rest of the USA and approaching dinner-time in Greenwich & a few more time zones to the east. What to cook?
How does this sound?
For those waxing nostalgic about food from the '50s, one visit here should cure such notions.
Ah. Anchovies! I knew there was a reason I'd repressed the memory of that garnish. I've never had Schnitzels that way, myself.
There's even a FB page ...
Probably. Boiled, then fried potatoes. Often a way to use leftover boiled spuds, but also made specifically for some things - like Schnitzel.
Sili,
You reminded me of another food we boil, potatoes for mashed potatoes! That's the only reason I ever boil potatoes, otherwise, I pan-fry them or bake them.
Mormon Elders are working hard to add Spanish-speaking peoples to their horde (and to the tithing hoard), but they also want them to conform. Spanish speakers are encouraged to drop any cultural practices that don't jive with mormon nonsense.
More news about Catholics and mormons uniting to fight secularism
Givesgoodemail (@4):
It makes me feel older than I like to admit to hear someone other than Nina Vance referred to as "the woman who used to run the Alley Theater"!
My mother was an arts critic in Houston in the 70s and 80s, and wrote a history of Houston theater¹, in which, as you might imagine, the Alley figures prominently.
¹ I clicked through to view the used copies available for sale, and was surprised at the prices being asked for them... up to $125 for a signed copy! Hell, I wouldn't pay that, and she's my mother! (Of course, I already have a signed copy....)
Pygmy Loris (@34):
Whut part o' the South y'all frum, Hon'? 'Cuz my Georgia-raised Grandma mightuv fried chicken and catfish and breem, but she shore as shootin' BOILED them snap peas and turnip greens the whole doggone day... in a big ol' pot with about a pound o' baconfat.
Hey, it's Nostalgia Day!! ;^)
Or worse. See the comment from July 30, 2009 11:39 PM at this page (I can't link to the comment directly) after having a look at the post itself.
Even in richer areas, the diet was somewhat monotonous and predictable, as explained on August 5, 2009 04:34 PM on the same page (in German, but I can of course provide a translation).
<leans back>
<pretends to eat popcorn>
Oh, that reminds me... artificial sweeteners, like those of the famous Diet Pepsi, are approved for pig fattening. Mammals, unlike bees, are fooled by the sweetness into preparing for an onslaught of sugar that doesn't come; this creates a hunger attack.
It is indeed thought by some that the winners, not the losers, of the sacred ball games of the Maya were sacrificed. Not in that way, though.
Yes. To quote out of context: "yumyum".
Pygmy Loris @ 37:
I wish we weren't still buried in snow. Nothing like a dandelion bud & chive blossom omelette. Or a cattail salad.
A great show for seeing some of the "weird" stuff people eat, and actually making you want to try some is "Bizarre Foods" with Andrew Zimmern. I have a whole list of things I want to try now. He says that camel tastes like what beef should have if we hadn't bred the flavor out of it. Bring on the camel!
Angie The Atheist is still being called a murderer and sinner, among other things. Her latest video on the topic of abortion can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72oITn2ZEhE
And a little plug of shameless self-promotion here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBZ7shVluQ0
Send it to all your loving Christian friends. :P
Bill,
My grandparents were from Arkansas and Tennessee. My memories of what my grandmother cooked are colored by what I liked to eat, fried chicken, fried catfish, fried okra, fried green tomatoes, fried squash, fried hushpuppies, fried corn fritters, and so on, so I forget about stuff like canned (at home) green beans and peas and such, but my grandmother never made turnip greens because none of the family liked them. I have extended family, however, that makes turnip greens and they do boil them all damn day, in a crockpot!
One of the things I remember is that at Grandma's house we rarely at anything from the oven in the summer because it was just too damn hot to cook in it with no air-conditioning. At Thanksgiving we would have roasted turkey, cornbread dressing, pecan pie, pumpkin pie, so much tasty stuff.
Pygmy brings up a good point about the variety of "American" cuisine. Before I lived in the south for three years, I thought "American" food was that boiled, un-spiced, blanched-of-all-color-and-flavor stuff I knew from growing up in the Northeast.* That stereotype about bland, boiled American food is actually true in areas and among families (like mine) that descended from the Brits and the Irish. I love ya, my UK friends, but you full well your indigenous cuisine is exactly like that:) Aside from fish and chips, you never had anything good to eat until curry takeaway became your national past-time.
I learned the uses of buttermilk, hot sauce, ham bones, and lots of other good stuff during my time in the South of the US. But on the flip side, I found that the local cuisine was just as "one-note" in its own way as what I grew up with. It was nigh-on impossible to find anything that wasn't fried, soaked in fat, or any veggies that weren't boiled with pork. I love all that stuff, but not every day, for every meal.
* Waspy Americans really have been terrified of the spice cabinet until very recently, equating "spice" with "my mouth will burn off." One of the funniest things I ever read was in the late, lamented Weekly World News. They hired a "typical American family" (I really think this was legit, not satire) to taste-test the various fried chicken sandwiches at national fast food chains. Their verdict on Burger King? "That was a little too spicy for my family." Still kills me.
that reminds me... what is it with Europeans and their habit of naming new foods "apple"?
earth-apples (potatoes), chinese apples (oranges), deep red apples (pomegranate), golden apples (tomato), pineapples (really? pine apples!?)....
mmm....buttermilk biscuits with gravy.... *drools all over keyboard*
Pineapple was what we now call a pine cone. The tropical pineapple resembles a pine cone, hence the transfer of the name. From the Online Entomology Dictionary:
minor etymology fail: apparently, the "granate" in pomegranate doesn't come from the color (deep red, or purple; which, come to think of it, probably takes its name from the fruit, not the other way round), but from a word for seeds/grains.
anyway, it's still an apple.
@Josh, #50
The fear of spicy food turns up everywhere. I've got something wrong with my guts, and a lot of foods make me violently sick - but I love spice.
So *any* time I eat something spicy in front of someone else who knows about my digestive problems I have to verbally fence with them several minutes about how spices or hot peppers have nothing to do with it. Typical responses are "Oh my god! No wonder your guts are messed up!"
I can eat banana peppers out of the jar all day and suffer no ill effects. But specific fats, sugars, and vegetables might as well be poison.
Bring on the heat!
Until recently, apple was a generic term for all fruit. Also from The Online Entomology Dictionary:
That's something new to me, I was always wondering why the unnamed fruit in the Eden story is commonly called an "apple".
If a bull's penis really gives a boost to your sex drive, I think, by now Pfizer would be already marketing it to people.
Chuckgoeke, the dish is also called prairie oysters, and there was/is a band Prairie Oyster.
oooooooohhhh..... now it all makes sense
one more thing to add to the "things I learned on Pharyngula" list :-)
@Mike, #55
I should have been more clear. The fear of spice I was talking about was the equation of flavor from spice with heat. They're not the same thing. For example, beef in much Middle Eastern cooking is highly spiced - cinnamon, cloves, garlic, onion - but it is no more "hot" than an American meatloaf. Many Americans mistake the word "spice" for "tongue-burning heat," and run away screaming.
Dawkins' apology - see here:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/i_so_do_not_want_to_get_suck…
I've heard rumours that the traditional Irish shillelagh is made from a boar's penis, which is a tough and fibrous spiral. Most people say it's club of tough wood such as oak or blackthorn. Any opinion?
SC, #61 - Boy, am I glad to see that. Now, who wants to place bets on whether Ruth Gledhill or Andrew Brown will devote as much column space to this as they did to the distorted version of the forum closing that they used for gloating?
Josh, Official SpokesGay @ 60:
Truth. I was lucky, both my great-grandmothers and grandmother cooked with the full range of herbs and spices. I grew up eating nicely spiced food; learned to cook that way. When I was newly married (30 some years ago), my husband was rather shocked by all the herbs & spices I bought, but he learned quickly and couldn't imagine cooking without them now.
Of course it's a slow day. All right-thinking people are rushing around finishing their weekend tasks so they can watch the Canada-U.S. hockey game at 12:00 Pacific Time. The U.S. won handily last time, thanks to their great goalie.
That's why you should drink beer. Yeast are far more prolific than any rat.
(Whee! A topic I know something about!)
I have to respectfully disagree that American cooking in the early part of the 20th C was bland and unimaginative. I’m rather proud of my 20+ years of collecting 19th and 20th Century US (and Australian and British) cookery books. Just glancing at a few that I pulled off the shelf this morning give these interesting recipe titles:
Abalone Dinner DeLuxe
A Novel Way with Venison
Poached Eggs Espagnol
(these from Sunset’s New Kitchen Cabinet, 1938)
Bran Upside-Down Apple Cake
Lobster a la Newburg
Almond Soup
Belgian Hare Fricassee
(from The Settlement Cookbook, 1940)
Crab Meat Timbales
Lake Trout Baked in Paper Bag w/ Sauce a l’Italienne
Egg Plant Saute
(from 52 Sunday Dinners, 1915)
These are all American cookbooks. Given how difficult it would have been to get food out of season and to distribute unusual ingredients, I think our foremothers were clever and did rather well with what they could actually get at their shops.
Oh sure. There are some truly awful, bland and horrible concoctions from the same era (someone already pointed out Lileks' site upthread), but I don't think that it's fair to paint with too broad a brush when judging historical cooking styles. Though I do agree that some of the muck from the 1950s was a nadir in flavour and adventurousness!
Me, too. I was hoping for something like that, which I thought there was good reason to expect after he apologized recently for something else. (I do wish he had said something about the deleted users' posts, though, and I wouldn't blame people if they were wary about being involved with Timonen still at the helm, especially since he hasn't apologized publicly for his actions.)
*eyeroll*
It's true among some, no doubt. You shouldn't generalize like that - that's the problem with stereotypes, dude.
Josh:
Outdated, Josh. Times past. Yes, curry - and Chinese and French and Italian and Vietnamese and Thai and ...oh, yeah, Fast American.
Surprising factoid for the day:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/bunhillbritish-garliceaters-nos…
Oh, knock it off SC. I'm allowed to make generalizations about the region and families I personally grew up in without your self-righteous eyerolling. Do you understand the difference between speaking about that which you know from personal experience, and extrapolating that unfairly to that which you don't know? There are worthier targets out there than me, SC. Aim somewhere more important. Dude.
My apologies if this has been already posted:
Westboro Baptist's version of Lady Gaga's "Poker Face."
Although I usually avoid anything involving Westboro, a friend assured me that I'd laugh when I saw this, and I did.
me, three. it's great that he's gonna archive the old forum, but that's not gonna bring back the 15000+ deleted posts by the removed posters. and people might well be wary of believing that this sort of thing won't happen again, considering no criticism or chastisement of, or apology from, the actually guilty party has been forthcoming.
You don't seem to understand what "self-righteous" means, Josh. You've used it about me twice in the last several days, and on neither occasion was it apt. Look, you're making dumb generalizations about and contributing to a false impression of the region I grew up in.
Yes. You apparently don't.
I'll aim wherever the hell I please. I don't like stereotypes.
Jadehawk #54- I always thought it was an "apple of Granada", which bears the fruit in its coat of arms.
Attn: Baltimore Pharyngula Fans!
Just a reminder that our next get-together is this week: Thursday, March 4 @ 7 PM. More complete details on the group site.
Hope to see you there.
SC - You have many admirable qualities, which is one of the reasons I jumped to your defense in the whole Greg Laden affair. But you do have a tendency, on occasion, to take offense where I don't think there's a good reason to - and you're very aggressive about it.
When I made my comments about the region I grew up in (yep, that's right, I did too, not just you, SC), I was specifically referring to the place, and the families, in which I was reared, and where I went to school, etc. I'm allowed to make characterizations of my own family, friends, and hometown and regions, because I lived it. That's not stereotyping, that's personal experience. I was careful to qualify what I said to make sure people knew I was talking about my experience. What more could you want?
You're allowed to have a different view, and a different experience. But it's not legitimate to characterize my personal observations about a place and people where I grew up as an illegitimate stereotype. Are you telling me I don't know my own family? My own friends? My own hometown? Seriously - what is it that you want?
And yeah, I do find you self-righteous sometimes. I don't appreciate you policing things and finding offense in the most innocuous statements. As someone myself who has a passionate temperament, and is often too quick to make a snarky or judgmental comment, I have to do a fair amount of apologizing when I speak more quickly than I should. It bothers me that you don't seem to be capable of doing the same. You're never wrong, it's always someone else. It stings even more because I respect your politics, your passion, and your eloquence.
Sigh. If we want to continue to debate this, we probably shouldn't derail the thread with a personal disagreement. I'm sorry for my contribution to that. You can always email me at spokesgay at gmail, or not.
Anyone who equates boiled food with bland has never tasted boiled chittlins, aka chitterlings. More here.
Disclosure: I am among the group which firmly believes that this dish is one of the few foods which could reasonably classed as a Weapon of Mass Destruction.
I've never been able to work up the nerve to try them. Everyone I've talked to who's been in a kitchen where they were cooking says the scent is. . . singular. Anyone here actually had them?
1)that Westboro Clip is.... fucking disturbing, on multiple levels.
2)after watching that, I actually watched some real Lady Gaga music clips, since I've never actually heard any songs, because I don't listen to pop. Turns out she's not bad at all. lyrics are stupid, but the music is fun enough.
Josh, the statements above are NOT just about your friends and family, it's generalizing from your family and friends to the whole of the groups you mentioned. you can argue whether this is worth getting upset about, and whether SC is unfairly singling you out, but you can't argue you didn't stretch your personal knowledge into a generic and general area.
After seeing the Westboro clip, I kinda wish that I liked Lady Gaga...but I can't make myself.
All right, true enough, I can see that. Do I think reading that much offense into it is an overreaction, and am I irritated about that, yep. But you make a good point.
only pop singer I can honestly say I really like: pink
Interestingly, chicken ṭikkā masala was apparently invented in Scotland because the Brits were used to having a sauce with meat. It's now, says the same article, the most commonly sold restaurant dish in the UK according to a survey.
Had it last year in Bristol. Was good...
Easy: in Europe north of the Alps, there simply aren't any native fruits other than apples, pears, and a few berries. Even cherries are an import (as the word attests: it's from Latin ceresia – must have entered Proto-West-Germanic or whatever when the Latin c was still pronounced as [k] in all environments).
Just like how there are no vegetables native to Europe north of the Alps other than <voice mode="despise">cabbage and turnips</voice>.
Interesting, a food that sounds good even though I don't already know it <duck & cover> ;-)
That's got to be the plural. Hnutu, hnyte just like German Nuss, Nüsse, or so I've read.
<lightbulb above head>
From "grain" itself (Latin granum), I suppose: pomum granatum, "grained fruit/apple"...?
The stone being named after the color of the fruit makes a lot of sense.
Entomology is insect biology. En-tomon = in-sectum = cut in. Compare ana-tom-ia, "cutting apart", and "tome" = "volume" = "section of a series of books".
David:
Is it also true that chicken korma is a sort of British/Indian fusion dish that didn't exist originally in Indian cooking? Sort of like chop suey is an Americanization of Chinese cooking?
It's interesting to look at what we consider "ethnic" foods, and how they change over time as they get into the mainstream, and blended with other traditions.
A tip for those, like me, who don't cook much: Trader Joe's frozen version is my current favorite food. Just behind: their cheese & green chile tamales.
ooh! ceresia = czereśnia!
Through all the years of Latin in school, it always amazed me how many Polish words are from Latin originally. It doesn't seem like a very obvious transition, since I don't remember Romans ever having any direct contact with that part of Europe...
Trader Joe's
(and the original tune)
You're the one reading that much offense into it. "*eyeroll*" somehow became in your reading a "self-righteous eyeroll"? What the hell?
Hmm... here in Texas the more "traditional" food tends to be anything but bland. The other side of my family is Polish and central to eastern Europeans are fond of a lot of pungent things that may not be to everyone's liking. Mmmmmm.... cabbage and beets anyone? Although kluski lane and milk, or pumkin/squash is still a favorite comfort food of mine and it's pretty bland.
As for the bull's penis, while I think the "magic" is silly I don't see what's wrong with eating a part of the meat of a slaughtered animal that way.
People getting so touchy about it ought to consider what goes into the mechanically reclaimed meat that is in most hamburgers. Hint hint!
Waste not want not.
SC, I wouldn't rather continue having a disagreement in the thread.
So perhaps it's the other way around...?
But you're generalizing that to all of New England.
Well... I haven't been paying that much attention, but I can't actually remember an occasion when she was wrong :o)
:-o
OMFSM. She actually sings, instead of desperately trying – and failing – to scream louder than the drums. The rhythm doesn't give you heart-chamber fluttering...
I had no idea this kind of thing even still existed.
The (rather short) lyrics are rather disturbing, except for the funny part. Britney Spears X-D
Interesting how she pronounces the r in star, are, and doctor as such, but vocalizes it in more every single time.
PL (@49):
As soon as I hit "Submit" on my previous comment, I remembered that I'd left out hushpuppies. But I can't recall that my grandmother ever fried a vegetable in her life: I recognize fried okra and fried green tomatoes as Southern classics; they just weren't part of Grandma's repertoire.
And my grandparents lived (when I knew them; there were already in their early 60s by the time I was born) lived in a residential neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida (in the house my father grew up in), with not much more than a postage-stamp sized lot, so no home-canned veggies for them. They did, however, have a couple fig trees and a couple pecan trees, so we got fig preserves and what my wife assures me must have been only the second best pecan pie in the history of the world, no matter how I recall it.
My granddaddy had a little skiff, and he used to go out in the marshes and side-streams of the St. Johns River and bring home fresh panfish — sunfish, bream, Sailor's Choice, whatever you call 'em — which my grandmother would pan fry and serve up with hushpuppies, corn on the cob, and the aforementioned boiled-to-mush turnip greens (it was years before I realized any other part of a turnip was even edible!).
And, of course, the second best pecan pie in the history of the world for dessert... maybe with a little ice cream from the Piggly Wiggly.
I don't think I ever actually appreciated these meals as a child — it just seemed like old folks' food — but what I wouldn't give for one now, overcooked greens and all.
*comment retracted just in time*
Can Campus Religious Groups Exclude Non-Believers?
Fine with me. And while I mentioned it at the time, I'll say it again - I really appreciated your vocal support during the Laden thing.
***
Ken Cope posted this a while back:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_8_lee_looks_for_general_tso.html
***
I've been eating Indian food - especially the spinach/paneer - that's like preserved with the space-mission methods, in those silver pouches. I was eating the ones from Kitchens of India, but those are way expensive here so I switched to some other brands that are pretty good, too.
The Westboro Baptist Church ditty cannot be accused of being overly subtle: "Your whorish face" and so forth. What I find interesting is that the ladies of Westboro studied the original long and hard. That should foster a bit of creative cognitive dissonance, if nothing else.
I grew up in the Midwest. My paternal great-grandparents came from England and Ireland and my mother was born and raised in England. I had spicy food, including genuine Indian curries and real Mexican (not Tex-Mex) food, frequently when I was a child.
Sorry about shattering any illusions.
If you like paneer (and I'm addicted to it, especially in spinach), you might try making your own. It's super easy, although it takes a little time. All that's required is a gallon of whole milk, lemon juice, salt, and cheesecloth. Much less expensive than buying it, though you do have to be patient while pressing the water out of it. Best to have some on hand from yesterday so you don't go crazy with cravings.
that's because the whole phrase (don't[...]no more) has its own pronounciation, like "you betcha" or "howdy partner" or any number of other short phrases imported into Standard American English from slang or local dialects.
'Tis -
Oh, they've been quite thoroughly shattered already, have no fear. My mother has some answering to do, it seems, about why we had to grow up with boiled string beans:)
Apologies if this has already been posted, but, WTF - the Utah Legislature has passed a shocking bill:
Under a bill that has passed the legislature and awaits signature by the governor, miscarriages that result from an "intentional, knowing, or reckless act" would be treated as illegal abortions, punishable by life in prison
The only two Southern (US) foods I don't like are pecan pie (too sweet) and catfish. To me catfish has a particularly unpleasant muddy taste. As in tastes like mud. I tell this to people and they often say "Oh but you've never had my mother's/my Greataunt Berthatrude's/the Catfish Shack restaurant in Bumfuk, Mississippi's catfish." And every time I try Berthatrude's catfish it still has a nasty, muddy taste.
CPAC, The Tea Party And The Remaking Of The Right -- This is a podcast (text also available) in which journalist David Weigel is interviewed about his attendance at CPAC and a host of other right-wing events. I say "right-wing", but Weigel makes it plain that what was once right-wing is now, for the most part, mainstream. The only John Birch Society message he could name that was not being bandied about at CPAC was a message dissing fluoride in public water systems.
The interview is interesting for the way it highlights the intention of politicians like Ron Paul, Dick Army, and Sarah Palin to take the USA back to the federal government of about 1912 (before Roosevelt, at least).
Glenn Beck was keynote speaker, Dick Army spent half his speech questioning Obama's citizenship -- you get the idea. Weigel makes it clear that right-wing talk shows and Fox News (as well as other right-wing organizations) have played a big part in turning the fringe right into an acceptable almost-middle.
Before this year's CPAC, the John Birch Society was marginalized. Now they're co-sponsors. Ron Paul was once denied the privilege of a debating spot on a Fox News-sponsored event. Now he's all over the news, and he's the straw-poll presidential candidate (not an official candidate, but the recipient of the most votes at CPAC).
Weigel tells how much the Teabaggers really believe all that crap they're spouting, including the conspiracy theories and the "Obama is ruining our nation" stuff.
For Johnny Cash fans, there's a good retrospective, done to celebrate what would have been his 78th birthday, up on Fresh Air. They air quite a few of Cash's last recordings, plus replay earlier interviews. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124074975
Greataunt Berthatrude - LOL! Right there with you on catfish; I find it tastes like mud, too. I've tried it in the cheapest greasy spoons, and in upscale restaurants. No matter, it still tastes nasty to me.
Josh, Official SpokesGay @ 102:
*Sigh* Every day, that little corner of my brain which tries to insist that people just can't get more fucked up is dying at a faster and faster rate.
so, i looked up "paneer"; by the looks of it, it resembles polish biały ser. my mom used to make that when we were still in poland. only required leaving the milk bottles out for a couple days, then heating it, and then squeezing the results through a diapercheesecloth
Wha?
Miscarriage from a "reckless act" is fairly hard to define.
So is "miscarriage" for that matter.
And God causes an awful lot of pregancies to terminate, often without the woman knowing anything about it. But He surely is knowing. Can we put Him in jail? Please?
LIFE in prison for illegal abortion?!?!? That seems way the hell excessive.
Catfish. Oh yeah I eat it but then I eat almost anything. It tastes like what it is, a bottom dwelling substrate sucker often from particularly nasty rivers. The goal with catfish, I always thought, was to fry them and eat them with spicy enough seasoning that you wouldn't know whether you were eating fried rubber anyway. The muddy taste you guys, Josh and 'Tis Himself, are talking about is called catfish flavor. That's the way the fish tastes. It never tastes like orange roughy. I think even with soaking the meat for a while the taste still stays there. It's either tolerable to you or not :P
Pink is phenomenal. I fell totally in love with her when I heard Stupid Girls and haven't looked back since. She's had a few poppy bubblegum songs, but most of them are clever in all sorts of ways. Her videos are even better - take one like So What, which sounds mainly like an aggressive proud solo anthem, but the video adds an undercurrent that it's a cover for the pain of being jilted.
I also adore Amanda (fucking) Palmer, who's Who Killed Amanda Palmer album has the most brain-twisting homage to abortion ever. Is it taking a serious subject too lightly? Is it being ironic? Is it showing that girls in that situation are better served by taking it lightly, or just showing that they do? Great stuff. Plus she just got engaged to Neil Gaiman, so rock on. I'm a little put off by her latest Evelyn/Evelyn project because it's a big wad of crip drag, but I'm reserving judgment for awhile.
Lady Gaga is growing on me. Her entire persona has a decent amount of subversiveness, and she's just got creativity oozing out every pore. The songs don't sound so fantastic, but the videos are something else entirely. (Start with Paparazzi)
Except for the n, which I can't explain at all, that one looks like it must have been passed on through some sort of Germanic, but before... hang on a second... "probably before 500 CE". Such second- and tenth-hand loans are common phenomena worldwide.
Except... can't give the links to the Wikipedia articles because there are too many; don't get confused by the sour cherry if you decide to look them up yourself*... Czech třešeň and BCSM trešnja begin with t, which confuses the story beyond my ability to figure it out. As if that were not enough, it's čereša in Bulgarian, without the bizarre ń of the other forms that comes out of nowhere if we assume a Latin origin. Then there's Slovene češnja... Oh, and then there's this, which just doesn't make any sense I can see. I retreat to bed with a headache.
Greek kerasiá.
* Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte my ass. Those aren't cherries (Kirschen), they're sour cherries (Weichseln, called Sauerkirschen somewhere in Germany). Various relatives of the Polish wiśnia are used for that species** in various Slavic languages, except that, judging as always from Wikipedia, this is the cover term for both cherries and sour cherries in Polish.
** And even as a girl's name. I'm actually related to a Višnja who lives in Belgrade. Compare Japanese Sakura = AFAIK cherry blossom.
*blush*
I'm wrong all the friggin' time!
***
Well, if I'm being honest, I'll probably never make any. Would love to try yours, though.
;D
***
I love how Dawkins' admission that he acted badly and apology is making Laden, who apparently has no clue what's going on, look even sillier:
This is a couple posts before someone linked to Dawkins' apology. Heh.
*He's calling this a "Blastulista" approach.
I've probably mentioned it already, but I'm seeing her Thursday night. It should be awesome. I saw Dresden Dolls a few years back and really enjoyed that.
lol. that reminds me of Belinda Carlisle, Belinda Fucking Carlisle.
Today's bit of useless trivia.
During the American Civil War the Union usually named battles after nearby rivers and streams and the Confederates usually named battles after nearby towns. Thus the first big battle of the war was named First Bull Run by the North and First Manassas by the South (Second Bull Run/Manassas was fought about a year later). There were a few exceptions like Gettysburg. Both the North and South called one battle "Chickamauga" after the stream which runs through the battlefield. That's because the nearest town was Snodgrass, which doesn't have the right ring for a battle.
oh yeah, have I mentioned yet that I hate you? stop seeing bands/singers I want to see, you bastard.
AAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaa.....
YOU SUCK, WOWBAGGER. Give her a kiss for me. Or don't, since that would probably get you arrested for assault. :)
Here is a recipe I saved for Chimpy,and all bacon lovers, this looks like the appropriate thread to post it on:
PIG NUTS
1 pound bacon
2 cans (8.5 oz. ea.) whole water chestnuts
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup catsup
Fry bacon (not crisp), divide pieces in half. Wrap around water chestnuts, secure with toothpicks. Combine brown sugar and catsup, pour over hors d'oeuvers. Bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes.
January 1987 issue of The Workbasket
WOOOOO!
Canada wins gold in men's hockey after defeating the US in overtime!!!!!!!
<lightbulb above head>
The ń thingy suddenly makes sense (perhaps!) if it's the German(ic) plural ending!!! This kind of misunderstanding is very common in loanwords worldwide. Off the top of my head, skunks is actually the singular, but the final -s was misinterpreted as the English plural ending. English cakes became German Keks, singular, plural Kekse, in the 19th century...
There's a term for such words that spread through a region from one language to the next. But still, the variation in the initial consonant doesn't make sense to me.
Hereby added to the list of things I learned on Pharyngula.
Judging from Wikipedia, that must be true; it's cottage cheese, German Topfen/Quark, French fromage blanc ( = "white cheese" again).
Jadehawk wrote:
You mean you don't enjoy living vicariously through my smug announcements?
SC @113: I don't know how you, Knockgoats, and 'Tis (and others that are used to reading here) can stand to read the Laden blog. One has to fight too many errors to get to the meaning.
Pink is touring mainly in the UK this year. Walton, I'd suggest you go to one of her concerts. It would be quite an experience for you. :)
As for food, there are a lot of ideas out there on why food in the 50s and 60s middle-class US got so bizarre. Most of the hypotheses swirl around the move for women to go to work after they did it during WWII and then got banished back to the kitchen, and the rise of "technology will save everything" and "if it's tech it's good" wrt food, and things like that. Also, if you go back further, there were a lot of great recipes that got lost when there was a big shift from rural to urban and people sort of lost their heritage (including their moms teaching them how to cook), in addition to losing time to cook and not having good ingredients available.
And then there's the whole idea that bland = bad. On the frontier there weren't necessarily a lot of spices to work with (and the people moving in didn't know how to use the ones that were there), but people did the best they could and came up with foods that still tasted good, just didn't pack much punch. I think there's a conflation of "bland food" with "bad food" that's a little unfair. I have my great-grandmother's recipe for chicken and dumplings that has no seasoning other than salt and pepper (and parsley flakes if you're feeling all wild), and it is sublime. Oh, speaking of that, there's also the problem that following old recipes now might result in a worse-tasting product than it did historically. I pooh-poohed at the idea that factory farmed chickens have had most of the taste bred out of them in favor of large meat masses etc. until I actually started buying heritage breed chickens from a local organic farmer who keeps them out on the grass to eat most of the summer and OH MY GOD CHICKEN. Same with the eggs and bacon we buy from him. Different breeds and different food fed to them really do make a substantial taste difference - they're a lot more flavorful.
Regarding the vocalized "r": I think Lady Gaga is from New York. People from that area often are inconsistent with "r" vocalization... eg "whateva", and "fuhgettaboudit". When I was very young, my family moved from Staten Island to southeastern Ohio, and the foremost difficulty that I faced was communicating with new classmates*. It took me a while to figure out when to pronounce the "r" without overpronouncing it. My relatives in Jersey** have a terrible time, often adding an "r" where it doesn't belong, as in "idear" (rather than idea), or "sawr" (rather than saw). I still find after many years that I revert to "r" inconsistency when I am either tired or drunk.
*Unrelated, but equally difficult was spelling. When the letter "r" is pronounced inconsistently by those around you (including teachers/parents), it is difficult to remember how to spell words.
**My peeps in the Shaolin Slum (SI, NY) have an even greater problem, sometimes pronouncing "r" like the letter "v" or to use the technical linguistic term "r-v smooshing", eg my cousin "Patvick".
@113: What's with the requirement that 'Tis Himself use his real name? Or am I reading that incorrectly? Sounds like Laden is telling 'Tis that he can no longer post on Laden's blog unless he uses his real name. That strikes me as really odd.
Carlie - You are spot on about the eggs and chickens. I recently started trading eggs to an organic sheep farm, what a difference some pasture makes!
cottage cheese and quark are only marginally like biały ser. completely different texture and taste. for recipes requiring biały ser where none is available, I use ricotta.
Finally found the lyrics of the parody of the Marseillaise. Not a working video, though.
#25
Think yourself lucky that they didn't throw up. We had frogs with ginger in Malaysia a few years ago. When one of the girls was told what she'd eaten, she made a hasty dash for the toilets with one hand over her mouth.
I don't really read it. I was reading a couple of threads because they were about the Dawkins thing and I wanted to see if he would be as sloppy and incoherent as usual. Didn't disappoint. I don't think 'Tis and Knockgoats read it, either, but that they were also amused that he would be offering condescending lessons in communication.
It's totally odd. I think it's fairly risky commenting there at all - he's shown he can't be trusted not to alter people's posts or reveal their emails.
Tis Himself,
You should try buttermilk pie, which is, IMHO, even sweeter than pecan pie.
The muddy taste of catfish is a result of insufficient soaking before preparation. Many people don't realize you have to soak it at least overnight if it's river fish. It's always disheartening to have nasty muddy river fish at a restaurant.
That's consistent... it's a vowel both times.
Oh yeah, r-labialization. I encountered that in Bristol; I had read about it, but it was still a bit difficult to keep up with. At first I heard [w] all the time (it's actually between [w] and [v]).
From Mrs. Owens' Cook Book and Useful Household Hints [1887]:
Confederate Army Soup, as made at General Pickett's Headquarters.
One ham bone, 1 beef bone, 1 pod red pepper, 1 pint black-eyed peas. Boil in a mess-kettle in 2 gallons salted water. Splendid soup for a wet day.
- contributed by Lieut. Col. S.G. Leitch
Carlie,
I had the good fortune to see Amanda Palmer in concert last year and she was fucking awesome! One of my favorite singers/songwriters.
No – he's telling him to suck up or he, Laden, will divulge 'Tis' real name next time. It's a threat. A particularly evil one.
I only care about the smell and the acid :-þ
I use requeson, which is usually available in Mexican groceries. Taste is pretty similar. I used to use that in place of paneer too because no where near me sold paneer for an acceptable price.
The hambone they were boiling was Gen. Pickett....pffft!
A fate worse than bannination.
Salt is the seasoning I use most often, but, as I mentioned above, I love Southern food and it's full of salt.
you're every hobby-cook's nightmare.
What Carlie #124 said: My mother rarely uses spices when she cooks, but across the board her food is delicious. Using good ingredients in the proper combinations and cooking things at the right temperature for the right amount of time makes a big difference.
We ate a lot of boiled cabbage growing up, and I have not a single complaint. A quick plunge in boiling water renders the leaves cooked yet crispy...a little salt, pepper and butter...delish*. Also, the woman in my experience has never made a turkey that wasn't damned near perfect. Again, not a lot of spices involved, but delish.
My wife (who is from a Sicilian family) does all of the above and is a genius with seasoning. In our first year of cohabitation, I put on 50 lbs (23 kg) from all the good eating.
*She makes wonderful turnips also, with nothing more complicated than water, butter, salt, and pepper.
Please, tell me you're joking.
(I'd only vaguely heard of her, but after seeing your post I went and read her Wikipedia article. I'm sure I've heard plenty of her songs without knowing it - it's impossible to escape pop music, since shops, gyms and so on insist on blasting it at their customers all day - but I'm too tired to bother to search for her on YouTube. I don't particularly want to have some ghastly pop song going round and round in my head all night.)
I take umbrage at your labeling of Pink as "ghastly pop". she's Teh Awsum
I'm with you. I get enough of it incidentally. Nothing I've willingly subjected myself to has improved it in my mind. Yes there is pop that exhibits more talent than others, but if you don't like the things that make pop, well pop, then it's like trying yet another type of beer when you really just don't like beer.
Another thing people keep forcing on me. Beer. Keep it to yourselves, it's all nasty to me.
You need help Walton.
boiled=bland
Kippers??
Christmas Pudding??
With what?
Patricia, Ignorant Slut OM @ 138:
I suspect you're right...nothing more was heard from Lieut. Col. Leitch.
One soup recipe from that old book I do make once a year is Chestnut soup. Yum.
Walton, Pink is smart pop. She also has ballads - here's one about George W. Bush. The reason I specifically suggested her to you is that she's a pretty fierce gung-ho feminist (not perfect, but fairly consistent) and the vibe at her concerts would probably be a kind of crowd you're not used to dealing with but might enjoy. And you might meet some incredibly awesome women there. ;)
Less than 2 weeks until the GAC in Melbourne and Carl Wieland still hasn't accepted Rorschach's and my offer to debate him and another of his creationist cronies. What's he afraid of?!?
Interestingly, one of my favorite dishes actually contains the stuff. With lots of herbs, surrounded by a variably noodle-like dough, and copious quantities of molten butter. It's so much work my mother usually makes it only once a year, for my birthday.
We had that topic a few subthreads ago :-)
If you're not eating, why are you still up? :^)
As I said above, judging from the 3 videos linked to above, Pink is quite a lot less ghastly than most to listen to. Still not my taste, though.
With being a young man instead of an old soaked mattress.
Patricia, stop the peer pressure. Not everyone wants to have an external influence take over control of their heartbeat. I, for one, prefer music where the rhythm is a side-effect of the tune rather than the other way around.
I've just posted the following on Greg Laden's blog:
I don't want to embarrass anyone but I've always found Walton's slight stodginess endearing. It encourages me to think that there are guys out there in my approximate age bracket that can combine progressive thought, lack of religion, and still have a that pleasant reserve about them.
Well anyway.
My family's chicken and dumpling recipe, for an example of classic midwestern farm food:
Take one chicken, put it in a pot, cover with water. Add an onion, a carrot, a few peppercorns, and a celery stick if you feel like it. A bullion cube or two is useful if it's a bland chicken, not if it's a fresh home farm one. Cook until the chicken falls apart. Disassemble chicken and save all meat bits (this is the fun part that makes me feel all pioneer thrifty woman - look, I can get the meat off of the vertebrae!). Strain broth to get any yucky bits out.
Dumplings (there are two definitions of dumplings I've seen in the midwest: thick noodles and biscuits. We're noodle people.)
1 cup of the broth, 1 raw egg, 1 cup flour, some celery or parsley flakes. Mix into a dough adding more liquid/flour as needed, roll and cut into 1/8 inch thick strips about 1/2 inch wide. Let dry overnight on racks, flipping halfway if needed. (I've tried making it with fresh, but it turned into goo.)
Put some water in a pot, add dumplings (broken into about 1 inch lengths), some of the chicken chicken that's been cut to your liking (shredded or just chunked), cook about 1/2 hour until dumplings are done. Add copious amounts of pepper and flake salt. Eat and be happy.
Happy St David's day to my old Welsh chums!
MMMM! Lava Bread!
Exercise for the reader: What skeptical podcaster(s) have this speech feature?
Also read "The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged" by Frank Rich from The NY Times. Scary stuff.
Walton asked
I suspect that if we choose to answer this, we're going to need a bigger boat thread.
Hey, since people are already pissed off at me for the stuff I'm seeing, it's probably a good time to let you know I'm online right now buying tickets for Sir Ian McKellan and Roger Rees in Waiting for Godot...
His stodginess might be amusing if one imagined it being spoken by an upside down turtle.
WowbaggerOM @ 161:
I didn't hate before, but I do now.
;D
Walton, maybe you'd prefer this cover of Pink?
seconded. personally, I prefer the clumsy/shy geek/nerd types of reserve, but this is cute, too; sometimes.
which has nothing to do with why Walton should hang out at a Pink concert, at least once. Or some other feminist musician (I can't suggest any, cuz the ones I know are all punk, which Walton likes even less, apparently)
So one year, instead of following the buttermilk pie recipe I had inherited from family (one of the few non-horrible things I inherited), I decided to prowl the internet and compare different buttermilk pie recipes. Some of them had as much as 4 times the sugar! Interestingly (though not surprisingly), 4 times the sugar doesn't make them 4 times as sweet; they're maybe 1.5 - 2 times as sweet. A little extra salt goes farther.
Dumplings are round balls, noodles are long and thin. You're making noodles but, for some inexplicable reason, calling them dumplings.
No wonder your fresh noodles turn to mush, you're cooking them far too long. I use a dumpling recipe similar to your noodle recipe and I cook inch to inch-and-a-half balls for fifteen minutes. When I make Italian style egg noodles I cook them for four to five minutes, not half-an-hour.
If you've followed human spaceflight significantly anytime since at least 1985, you've seen Waiting for Godot enough times to fill a lifetime.
llewelly,
how much sugar does your family recipe call for? Mine uses 2 cups.
29022
30K probably Thursday.
llewelly--c'mon...I'm dying to know...wait, wait, I got it. Is Rosy Perez a podcaster?
Two cups of sugar in a pie? I can feel my teeth decaying just reading that.
It's a regional dialect thing - everyone where I'm from calls them that. No different than "chips" having two entirely different definitions. At the basic level a dumpling is boiled dough, no matter what the shape.
For example, a Google image search for chicken and dumplings comes up with this as one of the first hits, which is basically what mine looks like.
Carlie--I've heard it both ways too. I never had the biscuity dumplings until I was in my late twenties.
I like 'em both.
I only like some punk, most of it old, and it's really hard to pin down what I like and don't like. I think it comes down to my perception of *sincerity* of it. Although I almost never will commit to really liking or disliking a genre because there will often be one or two things I like in something I don't generally like, or one or two things I just absolutely HATE in something I like. For instance if I said, I like jazz... oh but not that jazz, or any of that, or that... no that neither. Well what I mean is I like *this* album. And so it goes with everything for me. I can safely say the genre with the least stuff I like in it is probably alt-rock or new country, but pop is right up there with them in the generally disliked. Oddly enough I can be very fond of some hip-hop. Go figure. Fulla contradictions that one.
I wouldn't try and recommend music to Walton though anyway. Besides music is one of those things were the things you find on your own are more meaningful than the things other people foist on you. Or at least that's how it's seemed to me.
'Tis,
But it's sooooo good. I don't eat many sweet things, but when I do eat something sweet, it's really, really sweet.
Carlie,
People around here make the noodle style dumplings, and they're really good.
if that were true, then none of the music I listen to would be "meaningful". I found all the music I know because other people made me listen to it.
I don't think it'll be that cold.
Now that's interesting to me! I find I have to wait a while and give another listen generally because when some one tells me I just have to hear this my initial reaction is usually something along the lines of "No I don't." This can sometimes result in me coming around to something that I took six months to hear because I got tired of being encouraged to do so :P
Yes; she can be seen casting pods in the first four minutes of this vid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpDzd5Sw5HU
Ha. Not in Groton, certainly, but it's probably not a bad approximation for the Universe as a whole.
Adding: this would be a lot worse for me if I weren't such a neophile that I'm constantly searching for new things to listen to anyway.
Bleh... I got the blabbermouth block from scienceblogs :(
well, I just don't ever bother to "find" music either i overhear it somewhere, or I hear it during a show, or someone tells me about it & makes me listen to it. and then I pick whatever I like. and in any case, when you live with someone who owns almost 100Gb of music and something is always playing, there's no more need to go looking for more.
My mother made the biscuit style chicken & dumplings. I can't remember the last time the Redhead made it, but I think it was back when I was in grad school.
Right, I have my Godot tickets.
Llewelly wrote:
Three important words: Sir Ian McKellen. If he were doing spaceflight then I'd probably be interested in seeing that. Yes, Godot is unburdened by plot, but that gentleman's on-stage presence alone will be worth the 100 clams I just forked out.
Re: music recommendations - the majority of what I like is stuff I've found by stumbling across it, but there are exceptions; for example, I learned about Grandaddy and Elbow because they were suggested to me.
ah. Nope. An order of magnitude too high.
Congratulations to all the Canadian Pharyngulites on the Olympic hockey gold. I'm disappointed for the U.S. team but, as a hockey fan, that was one HELL of a game.
Here's a song I've liked ever since I first heard it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPOIS5taqA8
I was thinking more of Walton having the experience of being in a party crowd of fierce rioty womyn and their associates. :D
Haha... I am some one with over 100 GB music! But, and this is funny... I have to go to a concert now! Later :D
Almost 100Gb? Oh my FSM, you poor impoverished thing. I must have close to 1T on drives in addition to at least 2,000 CD's.
And I still get bored listening to what I have and seek out new stuff.
Ugh. No, it's a fine song, but it is associated indelibly in my memory with an incident that haunts me still.
I was attending a party at the Topanga Canyon home of a good friend* of my ex-wife's. Many people there were in the Industry (i.e. showfolk). At some point, one of those completely OTT stage-mothers insisted that everybody stop socializing to pay attention to her daughter, who had a song she wanted to perform for us.
Oh, that poor, poor kid. Six years old, face all made up and in a beauty-pageant "sexy" dress, sang that tune, complete with coy eyelid-batting and flirty lipsticked-mouth-pouting. All very well rehearsed. It was sad and entirely inappropriate and made everybody extremely uncomfortable.
So I hate that tune for making me think of that poor kid and her horrible mother.
*(and also an instantly recognizable minor TV celebrity, whose identity I shall not kw*k)
Jadehawk @87
My Polish partner has told me that the reason many of the names for fruits and vegetables in Poland are more Italian than Slavic goes back to when the Italian princess Bona Sforza became queen of Poland.
She influenced Polish cuisine because of her love of fruit and vegetables and to this day Polish food has more of a mediterranean style than other Slavic countries.
He has remarked how Czech people have such an aversion to vegetables they even throw away what little salad comes with a hamburger, but that might have been an exaggeration.
As for paneer, while it's likened to cottage cheese it is slightly different being pressed curds made from scalded milk split with acid, usually lemon juice. It seems closer to twaróg than biały ser, though I've only made paneer and cooked with the Polish cheeses.
Hey guys!
Get off the screens and have a look a the full moon! This one is awesome! ! !
( At least down here at the buckle of the bible-belt )
The poor reputation of British cuisine was certainly justified in the 1950s and 60s (aside from fish-and-chips, kippers, and cakes, puddings, scones etc.), when I was growing up, but not since. It's primarily the influx of European, Caribbean, Asian and African immigrants - and not just for takeaways, Josh, these immigrants and their kids and grandkids are British and so are their cuisine, music, languages etc. - and the first two at least have mixed and combined with that of the pre-existing population. However, the general availability of a far wider range of fruit, vegetables and spices would have happened even without that. As a child I never saw chili, capiscum, eggplant, broccoli, red onions, garlic, root ginger, fresh coriander... Many of these can be grown outdoors here, the rest in greenhouses which have along tradition of use, they just never were.
Oh, I forgot cheese. British cheese has declined in quality, but it's still far better and more varied than that in most of Europe (France and Italy are good), or anything I've had in my visits to the US. I'm not saying there isn't much better in the US, I haven't been shopping much there - but do you have specialist cheese shops?
Pygmy Loris | February 28, 2010 7:22 PM:
1 1/3 cups
Or maybe Alanis Morissette - My Humps?
boiled=bland
Kippers?? - Steve V
Take that man out and shoot him!
Boiling the noble kipper is unforgiveable: a kipper (which should not be filleted) should be fried on both sides in a little butter, then sprinkled with coarsely-ground black pepper and eaten with wholemeal bread.
I bet the US doesn't have this cheese shop...
Knockgoats @197:
Surdyk's in Minneapolis, for one.
Knockgoats | February 28, 2010 8:04 PM:
Yes, we do ... most of the best cheeses they carry are imported from Europe.
Bill Dauphin:
You are mistaken. No part of the turnip is edible, though I understand you can make turnip o'lanterns out of them. Apart from that, they are a dead loss with no insurance.
Knockgoats:
Don't worry, I've been well and truly spanked for painting with a broad brush:) In my defense, I'm working on my second head cold in a month, and I'm def. not at tip-top form.
It's very hit or miss, and very regionally dependent. You're more likely to find good quality specialty cheese shops in urban and more affluent areas in my experience. But, there are some surprising exceptions. When I lived in the rural Southern US, there were none for many hundreds of miles. But once you got to a college town, or a larger city, you could find them.
Here in Vermont, there's a thriving artisan cheese industry, and the quality is on par with some of the best cheese I've had from around the world - shockingly good. And, lucky for me, there's a wonderful gourmet cheese/wine/imported foods store near me with amazing prices:
http://www.cheesetraders.com/
I shop there several time a week (it's one of the only places you can get British cheese at all around here).
Carlie @190 - That is exactly what I think Walton needs too. *evil smirk*
This is my hillbilly grandmas recipe for noodles:
2 cups flour
3 egg yolks
1 egg
2 tsp. salt
1/4 to 1/2 cup water
Put the flour in a mixing bowl, make a well in the center. Add egg yolks, 1 egg and salt. (In the well) Add water 1 tsp. at a time, until you can form the dough into a ball. Cover with a clean cloth and let rest 10 minutes. Divide ball of dough in half, then roll it out to the thickness of a lady's little finger. Slice the noodles a fingers width. Lay them out on a clean cloth to dry for about two hours.
We cooked the noodles in a thick meat broth such as chicken or venison, and added the left over meat back to the broth about 10 minutes before serving. I still make these in the winter.
Thank you, Berthatrude.
;)
I'm kind of like Ol' Greg wrt music preferences...I both like and hate something from any genre I know...however, some with more intensity*. I didn't like hip-hop until my sister gave me good stuff that was little-known at the time: Talib Kweli, Aesop Rock, Common, Mos Def, etc have since blown-up. And then I started listening to older stuff that I now love, like Wu-Tang and Public Enemy. Listening to hip-hop is really different than rock (or country or opera), because the lyrics matter so much more...don't get me wrong...I like my rock with sharp lyrics, but at the same time will head-bang to the u**ber-retarded likes of AC/DC. Hip-hop without sharp lyrics is just a beat.
*I don't dig jazz for the same reason I suspect that I don't care for Ulysses. I don't get it. I don't have the ear/neurons to understand what it is. And I can listen to blues and zydeco for ~15 minutes before I want to hear something else.
**I know...it is spelled with an umlaut, but I don't know how to do that. I guess I am u**ber-retarded too.
There is no accounting for taste in food or music. Let me know if you want to hear my opinions on either.
Well, OK, here's a couple, gratis: AC/DC sucks! Mushrooms SUCK!
Hee hee...
:)
Sven: I agree that AC/DC sucks. And I love them. Because I am u**ber-retarded.
Abruptly shifting gears - know what I hate about Bejewelled? It won't let you save your damned progress. If you get to level 15 and you can't make any more moves on the board, you have to start at level one again. Arrgh. Yes, this seems overpoweringly important to me during my period of reduced cognitive capacity due to excess phlegm production.
Yet, Def Leppard sucks. And I hate them.
Ah! Common ground.
Antiochus Epiphanes, the shortcut for ü is Alt-0252. There's also an html code for it, but I don't know what it is...
Heck yes. I used to love them until I discovered good music. Listening to Hysteria now makes me want to vomit because of how slickly overproduced and soulless it is.
Motley Crüe...Thanks, Wowbagger!
AC/DC sucks
Heh, I just saw these gals this weekend.
Deep rifts!
Mushrooms don't suck.
Mammals all suck.
Except monotremes, which lick.
I'm unfamiliar with Mushrooms. Are they a punk band? The only videos I could find on YouTube were about fungi.
Well, OK, mushrooms don't all suck.
Just the ones passed off as 'food'.
Also, no thread mentioning AC/DC cover bands would be complete without Hayseed Dixie.
I bet Sven doesn't care for Toto either.
Don't make me call down the rains down in Africa on your ass, 'Tis.
If the conversation is going to turn towards the merits of licking versus sucking I'd better go mix up some Sangria....
I tried, Patricia, but no one seems to be taking the bait.
So was the weekend good? I won't ask for details, just a general thumbs-up or down. :)
Don't forget the wild dogs crying out in the night...
I HAZ NEW FISH STORYZ:
http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2010/02/the_hidden_face_codes_…
color and communication in fishes has always been a subject close to my heart, if not my pocketbook.
Sven - Have you ever had morel mushrooms rolled in cornmeal, well peppered and fried in bear fat?
Not plural, and...no:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mym2qi0m5dg&feature=related
I couldn't, Wow, no more than I could forget Kilimanjaro rising like Olympus above the Serengeti.
Oh, a pox on you, 'Tis, for infecting me with that god-damned song. Sure as shit I'll have some terrible nightmare featuring it, as always happens when I'm sick.
Carlie - I had a lovely time at the show, and allowed myself to be kissed twice in a rather genteel way accordingly proper to the status of a lady recently widowed.
Thank you for asking.
And no, you horny toads may NOT ask if it involved licking or sucking.
Patricia @ 232:
Spoilsport. :p I'm glad you had a good time.
Oh, so glad to hear it, Patricia! And I loved your description.
Perhaps you'd like to borrow some of my fantasy wardrobe for your next date. I had this bizarre -but very stylish - dream last night that I was trapped at a dreadful boring conference. I escaped by donning Victorian widows' weeds (complete with face-obscuring veil) and running away across a meadow, assuming everyone would think I was just Some Troubled But Picturesque Victorian Lady.
Freudians, have at it. I plead non compos mentis, on account of my cold/fever. I want that dress, though.
ah, here we go
Why, no, can't say as I have.
However, in every single one of the hundreds of other times I have tried eating mushrooms ("Have you ever had charcoal-grilled portabellos?" "Have you ever had shitake stir-fry?" "Have you ever had freaking Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots, mushrooms, and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam?") I have found them disgusting. Not just "eh, I don't really care for that, thanks anyway" but gag-reflex disgusting.
I do not like them, Sam I Am; I do not like them in a box, with a fox, wearing Crocs or served in jocks.
So if you're going to roll something in cornmeal, pepper it well, and fry it in bear fat for me, morels would not be my first choice.
But I would try it.
Yes, thanks, it was a rather Victorian "date".
Josh, for several years I played the role of a Confederate widow at some re-enactments. That's how I developed my fondness for corsetry. You could SO get away with that role, if properly costumed.
OK Sven you get a pass, I'll save the morels for myself...but damned if Spam rolled in cornmeal and fried in bear fat doesn't sound intriguing!
-Daevid Allen
Shit, I forget what tune that's from...as I recall, though, it's on the album with these cheerful little ditties:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jlQX8i3Abc
[p.s. in search of a vid I googled the phrase and got only one hit: Pharyngula! I can only assume that this was me, sockpuppeting solely to use the nym.]
I was trying to remember what we usually ate, growing up in the Pacific Northwest.
I remember pot roast, and meatloaf. Mom's potato soup (she is from Idaho, so. . .) Dad made a spicy, flavorful chili that he cooked all afternoon in a huge iron skillet. There were casseroles with lots of spices. Dad's marinara sauce would spend the day in the big skillet, too. Vegetables were steamed, until the invention of the microwave, then they were cooked in there until just barely done. And there was ALWAYS tossed green salad.
We had a pretty extensive spice cupboard, but I think I cook with a wider variety of spices than my dad did.
Oh, and catfish. I am deathly allergic to them.
oo, I had forgotten about this one with the twisted Bo Diddley beat and Gary Windo on sax:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YETauZzktC8
old-school Gong with excellent Betty Boop vid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FisaVM93bdg&feature=PlayList&p=C08E8194A…
Katrina - Growing up in the Pacific Northwest (that's where I live and am a native) did you try the local mushrooms?
Sven - your tune included the headline Black September, that was a terrorist group that 'saved' my late husband from being sent to Viet Nam during the war. I mention it in case you are too young to know what Black September refers to. He had to go deal with ammunion at the US Army base during their attacks. So much for ancient history. :)
Patricia:
What fun! Although you may get sassed a bit around these parts:)
Back in college, when my fellow SpokesGays and I used to put on cabaret shows, we discovered the wonders of corsets (oddly enough, the talented seamstress who made them for us was one of the most out, politically active lesbians in our class.) If you're really gonna look the part (especially if you have Man(TM) proportions), you gotta cinch that shit in. Whoa, did I learn a new respect for the torture women have taken upon themselves throughout the ages.
We did look fine though - lol!
One of these days I'm going to go all out, just one last time, for a Halloween party. I want to walk into the room looking like I'm wearing a damned wedding cake, 18th-century French Court-style.
Brilliant, Sven. You win the whole Internet back again.
see, I don't get that. I mean, I understand it on an intellectual level, since that's how I feel about verbal information (doesn't matter if its actual information, or fiction; I always want more, but am not really interested in re-listening to/re-reading information I already know). But I don't understand how that works for music. Music is not information, it's a mood altering substance. I don't need a million different and new ones, I just need the right one at the right time.
that's some awesome dissonance, hehe.
ditto. I can't feel jazz, and therefore it is useless to me.
pffft.... ;-)
awesome. the closest I've ever come to that was wearing a costume during RenFaire. does wonders for my posture, that.
and now for some music I discovered thanks to my favorite Seattle radio station (107.7 The End): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKWHr3mznME
Probably a really dumb question...couldn't the added shoulder width of a man more than offset the thicker middle? In which case you wouldn't need a corset as much as a prosthetic ass...to get that hourglass shape.
You may be surprised to know that I have little experience in costume design.
But you flatter me.
I was too young to go to Vietnam, 'tis true, but I watched it on TV every night.
And I remember vividly the '72 Olympics in Munich when Black September killed all those Israelis. Fucking fuckheaded fucks.
Patricia
I never did, growing up. The mushrooms that were local to us were in pastures, if ya know whatta mean.
Now that we're (finally!) back in the PNW, I'm hoping to be more adventuresome. My next door neighbors are mushroom-hunters, and I learned (too late this year) that we had at least three deliciously edible varieties growing on our property.
Speaking of local foods at our new home, the entire wooded side of our property is full of huckleberry bushes.
I was too harsh, and too hasty.
You can always feed the turnips to hogs, leading, eventually, to bacon.
(I can't listen to that Toto song without laughing...."Frightened of this Thing that I've become". I can't see the Serengeti for all the tentacles.
I might have them if they were served on jocks.
I want to know which one of you painted my damn moon.
Antiochus:
Not a dumb question. But no, the shoulder width isn't enough. If you're trying to do a convincing impression (and I do mean impression; drag is about performing a certain constructed notion of womanhood, not women themselves), you have to do more. Cinching in the waist to get the proportions of waist-to-hips is key to the illusion. Even good drag queens who don't corset end up ruining the illusion, because men's waists and hips are flat and in line with each other - it gives the whole thing away.
I say all this as someone who hasn't done drag for 15 years, since I was a kid from a small town bursting at the seams (!) to go wild in my newly liberal college environment. I'm a fairly staid, ordinary looking guy with a white collar job these days:)
What a delightful-sounding date, Patricia!
I love the look of corsets, but surprisingly, given that they are supposed to be a slimming garment, it's tough to find them in fat sizes. Also I would have nowhere to wear one besides the RenFaire once a year.
As for music variety, I get stuck on things for up to months at a time, and have been known to play a single song dozens of times in a row. But then eventually I tire of them and can't stand to listen to them for months to a couple of years and need new things. I've really glommed onto Pandora for free variety and finding new bands.
Sven - Those are exactly the fucks I ment.
Katrina - My outlaws live in Tillamook, so I know just the pasture mushrooms you mean. So far as the Huckleberries go, in the summer we used to ride our Harleys to Trout Lake, WA - there is an ice cave there that will sooth the over heated bosom in 100 degree plus weather - and the local burger stand serves huckleberry milk shakes that are to die for! Yumm!
Josh - You naughty dumpling, I only lace that above the navel.
Josh - You aren't figuring in the illusion created by veils and hoops.
Whatever:) Go here, and scroll forward to 5:20.
"Our new one-piece lace foundation garment, zips up the back, no bones!"
Disclaimer: It's from the 1939 picture, The Women. It's a cesspool of sexism and dreadful caricatures of society women. It's dated, and in poor taste. And it has the most delightfully catty insults in cinema history.
Oh, and it has Crawford. And her shoulders.
Patricia - the first time I ever tasted huckleberries was on a horseback riding trip through the Coast Range. We picked a bunch of them one morning and had them in pancakes. Luscious!
When we noticed the Robins were absolutely stuffing themselves every morning on some berries at our new place, we took a closer look. Sure enough, they were huckleberries. We had some fine pancakes that morning, and my eight-year-olds got to have their first wild-berry harvest.
Oh, but I am. The veil is absolutely necessary to give the skin the. . impression of poreless beauty, beyond what mere Mac Cosmetics can do (and trust me, they can do a lot. Even for gentlemen who have to appear on TV, but not look made up). And the hoops definitely help to balance out the whole I Have a Man's Blocky Body thing.
But ain't nothin' does it like a waist-cinching corset, Patricia, and you know it:)
that is a thought, but I was rather thinking of the bosom elevating properties.
Somebody is going to chime in here & tell us to get a room with a large wardrobe and a steam iron. *grin* The 1939 movie - I got so hung up on the knitting scene I almost missed the all in one.
Carlie - I've seen some ladies that would make a Clydesdale seem petite ordering corsets at re-enactments.
Antiochus Epiphanes, #209:
Jazz is made of the same stuff as all other music. If you're not accustomed to listening to the improvised stuff, then the unpredictability probably would make you feel a bit uncomfortable. Don't expect it to sound like a ("popular", "classical", "folk", etc.) song with an easily-hummable melody. Instead, try to focus on whatever is happening and appreciate it for what it is.
I also suffer from blues fatigue, because twelve-bar blues is often too predictable. Zydeco I don't listen to very often, so when I do it at least has some momentary novelty value.
Being a musician, it's hard to simply stop here. Now for a few more music musings...
Although I would reword "harmony" as "consonance", since harmony has a more general meaning which includes dissonance (or discord, if you will). By definition, every piece of tonal music contains both consonance and dissonance. Most of us just happen to disagree about their "proper" proportions and arrangement in time, because most of you people haven't yet come to understand my impeccable taste. ;)
It's important to understand why there is so much dissonance and chaos in some music. Just remember that it's an artform which isn't simply for dancing or entertainment. If you can't stand the heat... well, you know.
I also want to make it clear that instead of jazz or hip-hop, I could just as easily be talking about the Beatles, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, etc. Many are deliberately trying to not let you settle into a comfortable illusion that all is well with the world. It was not alright in their experience, and they attempted to represent that with sound. I'm not claiming that is the raison d'être of dissonance or anything silly like that, just trying to describe how it is typically employed by a wide variety of musicians across history.
Oh, dear lord, I'm spurting liquid refreshment out my nose.
Carlie, if your seamstress can't make you a corset that fits/flatters your body, she's doing it wrong. Srsly. It's not about fat/thin, it's about what works for the client.
more from The Fratellis, just because: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b9BdFmM8S8&NR=1
?????????
Yes, yes it is.
But... but.. you just never know how a new one might make you feel. Just like (chemical) mood altering substances: some depend on set and setting, some will blow you away regardless of either.
It's that possibility of being blown away that keeps me seeking new music. (And new psychoactive substances.)
Jadehawk, #244:
How about that, I entirely disagree. Deep Rifts.
Music is much more than something that alters one's mood. Let me ask an impossible rhetorical question: how would you describe paintings or architecture or literature, if you had to use the same "mood-altering substance" language?
That last part about your needs makes some sense to me, but there is already far too much out there to know what is "the right one". I, for one, do not intend to stop looking for new music, or to stop creating it myself.
MrT:
This is very interesting, especially your use of the word "tonal," which I take to mean "somewhat related to Western diatonic scales." Is that right?
My ear is prejudiced toward classical modes. I enjoy major and minor "harmonies" skillfully done, in a conventional "common practice period" sort of way.That includes most of the conventional chord progressions and deviations therefrom we hear in pop music, jazz or not. Because of that, a lot of "freestyle" jazz sounds, to my ear, "a-tonal," or excessively dissonant. I realize some of this is a matter of acculturation, and taste.
But I have to wonder if all of it is. I have some friends who are into. . . excessively. . .avante garde "music." The kind of stuff that adheres to no tonal scale at all. My friend Cath - who is married to one such afficianado - describes it as "throwing forks on a concrete floor." That's exactly what it sounds like to me. Wretched, dissonant for the sake of dissonance, almost as if it's actively trying to frustrate the listener.
I can appreciate harmonic adventurousness, but, to me, there's a limit beyond which I have to suspect the human mind's organization of sounds just can't be tortured any further. Your thoughts?
Goodnight sweethearts, this cunning conversation of corsetry has this old vixen verily vaporous.
exactly the same, since I don't process either at any level other than "how does it make me feel?"
music has the added layer of lyrics, which I don't always care about either, though. (well, representative art also has stories, but sometimes I don't care about that, either)
and the reason I'm not looking for more is because the mood-altering effect wears down with use. I need most of my time to be sound-free. filling it all with music reduces the music to headache-inducing background noise.
Noodles vs. dumplings: Same difference, as my sainted mother used to say, with pot pie vs. pot pie. Where I come from, pot pie is a sort of chicken stew with homemade and used-immediately noodledumplings, maybe 1/8 in. thick, if that, and 2 - 3 in. square. You use vinegar as a condiment at the table. That's Pennsylvania Dutch, and if you want a fine North American cuisine there you have it.
I make Mom's coleslaw sometimes, by ear, so to speak. Half a head of cabbage wants three eggs and a third of a stick of butter, plus vinegar, sugar, and salt. I suppose it's a sort of hollandaise; you cook it. The sauce, not the cabbage.
I'll be struck down dead for saying this, but Joe makes better potpie than my mother did. He uses a Reading recipe, with saffron.
Shoo fly pie. Schnitz un knepp. Pot cheese, cup cheese, boova schenkel. It's supposed to rain this week, so the weather's right for this stuff. Now I'm hungry.
How to tell if a cookbook actually got used? If the pages are clean: No.
No.
Dumpling vs. Noodle
Wasn't someone just complaining about pecan pie being too sweet? Shoo fly pie is lethally sweet.
You didn't mention scrapple.
wrong.
Dumplings vs. Noodles
I think you're right. Maybe at some point, we would experience something like a Total Perspective Vortex, but well before that we just can't grok it.
However, I still have to try to balance that with what I know about our society and our history. What is considered "avant-garde" for most people today could easily have been written over a hundred years ago. To be just a bit condescending about it, the plebs simply haven't caught up with the times. Maybe pop music will catch up one of these days. The fact is there are only so many things you can do with triadic harmonies, circle progressions, waltzes and marches.
It's been a long time since composers began exploring what else was possible. This is fair game as far as I'm concerned, but without some arbitrarily-imposed limits or conventions (such as triadic harmony or the twelve-tone method) there simply are no rules to follow, which has both good and bad consequences. It's not necessary to disregard all the great things about tonal music, but it's also not necessary to limit oneself to that. For example: Debussy didn't write tonal music. If you can find someone who thinks his music is ugly, I can find someone who is tone-deaf.
I'll try to briefly explain some basic things about harmony which sadly many don't understand... Because of their simpler proportions, some intervals are in some way easier for the human brain to process. They provide us a feeling of order or well-being, because of the mathematical relationships between the frequencies. Rather than complicate things with equal temperament, just consider them as pythagorean ratios: octaves are 2:1, while fifths and fourths are 3:2 and 4:3, respectively. Easy. Things get more interesting once you introduce major and minor thirds, sixths, seconds, sevenths, and the tritone.
I hate how po-mo it sounds, but dissonance is relative, once you put it in context, add a note here or there. For example, a minor second (or major seventh), which most feel is very dissonant, is a ratio of 256:243. However, in the context of a major seventh chord like C-E-G-B, it sounds quite pleasant or relaxed -- the C-G is a fifth and so is E-B. Fifths are easy, so we can deal with the slight pinch between the C and B.
The tritone's ratio is 729:512, and is also considered dissonant, but as part of a V7-I cadence it's probably the most commonly heard harmony and the most convincing resolution one can write. As we all know, it's a nice feeling when tension is released (is anyone else thinking of sex right now?). Hang on too long, and we get bored or annoyed.
I think there are a lot of things just about everybody understands about music at a basic level, but applying that to a new creation is much more difficult. Still, those are the kind of things which are helpful to consider no matter what kind of music you're writing. It requires a lot of trial and error, as well as borrowing/stealing things you know have worked in the past.
It's very hard to compare Goulash to
Jadehawk:
You seem to be describing what you want from music or what you get out of it, rather than what it is. And that's okay.
grrr... there aren't any other good pictures of it on the web. and it's not the goulash you're supposed to be looking at, anyway.
ok, so I temporarily stole the picture and re-posted it: http://inlinethumb44.webshots.com/45739/2757027580075107219S600x600Q85…
MrT - I'm way too tired to be coherent, and I'm going to bed. But this conversation about consonance and dissonance is fascinating - you can talk to me about Pythagorean intervals, and equal temperament, all night long, and I'd never get bored. Hope it comes up again as a topic of conversation! If not, please email me.
Okay, it has decided to load. But I still don't see the similarities. Dumplings that I've worked with either looked like this or this.
As opposed to this and this.
I have returned. Show was good, made better by a waaaay over-enthusiastic girl shrieking (it was pretty low key show) so that was fun.
Ah, this I don't get. Music is not just information it's sort of my primary input for information. Other information is just parts of music, out of time, or in other formats. Everything comes down to music for me in my head, but then I'm a musician so that shouldn't be too surprising!
well, of course, since I was talking about why I don't feel the need to have a very extensive music collection. but really that IS what music is, for me. I'm not in the slightest concerned with what it's made of, why, or how. I am sometimes somewhat interested with the culture/message of a some music, but mostly it exists in my life only as a mood altering device.
huh? similarities to what? one picture was of potato dumplings, one picture was of egg-drop noodles.
To the original statement that noodles and dumplings are the same.
ah, I wasn't even dealing with that. I was just poking fun at your definition of "dumpling" and "noodle"
dumpling and noodle aren't the same, it's just that "dumpling" doesn't seem to mean anything and is applied to all sorts of things; including noodles.
Oh neat, yeah. Some times I think some of older avan-garde classical is referenced at least a little bit by some post-rock bands, and it always excites me even to see that tiny bit of risk taking. Some times I think the point of some of that music, if nothing else, is simply to make you consider the nature of music. Well you might also think of abstraction after representation fell by the wayside, then people were thinking about form and pattern and nothing else for a while. Some music of that era also follows suit. Similarly in minimalism you see focus on the underlying structure, and even music which is intended to draw attention to the resonance of the room or to the ear itself. Not that all things sync up between the two, but I do see form/visual input as sort of fused with auditory input anyway.
So Dawkins has arrived in Oz for his book tour apparently.
And PZ is going to see Skippy next Thursday, which I just learned from the FB invite I received from the UMSS.I'm not going, I have to work until 6 that day.
Poor PZ, I better start stockpiling drugs for the man's sore back already...:-)
I was brought up with one concept of dumpling. Later in life, I thought it was odd that people would use dumpling to describe Jiaozi and Baozi when Baozi is so radically different.
DAAAAMMMMMMMMMMMMNNNNN YOUUUUUUU!
I had to miss a Peter Hall Ensemble performance of it, since I had to go home before they got that far in the repetoire.
No link (at 'work'), but Derek Lowe has nice recipe for pecan pie as well - go back to Thanksgiving for it.
If music is not mood-altering, you should delete it, because it's fucking boring.
llewelly, I agree with you, but I hope you aren't misinterpreting me. Let me put it this way:
If music is only mood-altering, you should delete it, because it's fucking boring.
Is "mood-altering" a necessary condition for something to qualify as "music"? Maybe so. Is it sufficient? No. That isn't an adequate way of describing what it is or should be.
It's also just plain wrong to say "Music is not information". Why not? How could that possibly be true? It's not the same kind of information as numbers or language, but that is beside the point.
Boring is mood-altering.
windy:
You've been listening to Brian Eno again, haven't you?
"Repetition is a form of change."
interesting. so what does music inform you about? what new knowledge do you gain from it? what do you learn from it?
I'm honestly asking, because music doesn't do that for me, therefore it's not information to me. which is why i don't get bored with it to the point of having to constantly find new music the way I have to with sources of information; because receiving the same information multiple times is, indeed, boring.
IOW, music does not perform the function of an information-source for me. does it do that for you?
Mr T | March 1, 2010 3:11 AM:
I didn't think about what I wrote in that much detail, but I can agree with this.
Kel @ 151,
I plan on being pleasantly inebriated for the duration of that weekend, and would probably just become exasperated debating that fool, unless the Bride of Shrek and 20 other hot atheist women would care to cheer us on from the audience, preferably by throwing pieces of underwear at us for every killer blow argument delivered to some creationist nonsense !
Aside from getting there, I realised recently that I have nothing planned for that weekend at all. Should have gotten the Saturday night dinner ticket
well, I'm about to go to sleep, so I won't be able to continue this conversation until later tomorrow, so I just wanted to clarify real quick:
Information is something that I receive, absorb, and then do not need to receive again, unless I've forgotten all of it. and even then, re-receiving it isn't nearly as enjoyable as the first time round. And I was saying that if someone perceived music that way, I could see how they'd be able to have 1Tb and 2000 CDs worth of music, and still get bored with it.
But it simply doesn't work that way for me. For me, music is a sensual experience, like food. And just because I had one slice of cheesecake, doesn't mean I won't want a second, or a third, or a tenth (well, ok; maybe not a tenth). And even though I am interested in new foods, I do not need to search them out in the same volumes as new information, since the foods I already know don't stop being tasty just because I've eaten them before. On the other hand, a piece of information is only enjoyable once, after which it's boring, and I need a new piece of information.
Carlie @#150:
Wow. I just clicked on the link, and it was surprisingly not bad. I'm not sure I agree entirely with the political message, but it was a clever and meaningful song. So I will have to admit that my (prejudiced?) assumptions were not borne out.
(Although I can't help finding it jarring to hear a multi-millionaire musician, who is as personally wealthy as Bush himself, singing about the hardships faced by single mothers on minimum wage.)
Kel, if you are in Melbs Thursday, mail me or the BoS, same goes for Wowbagger.
Knockgoats #200
‘Take that man out and shoot him!
Boiling the noble kipper is unforgiveable: a kipper (which should not be filleted) should be fried on both sides in a little butter, then sprinkled with coarsely-ground black pepper and eaten with wholemeal bread.’
And I deserve shooting.
In mitigation I have to share the house with Miss M, whose nose rivals a mass spec in sensitivity. Now I know that this only compounds the grossness but the only way I can have kippers is if they are the Boil in Bag variety.
*cringes, expecting blows*
In the summer, however, we can cook outside.
Sprats, grilled pilchards, fresh mackerel MMMMMM
I guess we're discussing two different kinds of "information". Here's some information:
729
What did that inform you about? What new knowledge did you gain or learn?
And remember, this is for posterity, so be honest. How do you feel?
I'm not talking about whether we consider it an "information-source", but whether information is in fact present. I do not think music can represent anything in particular, in the same way we try to represent things with language or other symbols (although even these kinds of information are inexact).
If someone plays a C+7 chord on a piano followed by an F major chord, I hear the notes C E G# Bb followed by F A C. From past experience, I know to call that an authentic cadence (V-I). I hear the chords in whichever register and configuration they were played, in some rhythm and at some volume, with the tone colors of that particular piano in that particular room. I also get information about the room I'm listening in (if different), the speakers or instruments directly transmitting the sound to me, and which direction it's coming from. If I play name-that-tune, or someone plays a short clip from an artist with whom I'm familiar, I can usually recognize the name and all sorts of other associations come to mind.
Aren't all of those different kinds of information?
well, that's so trivial as to be a non-point. in that sense, everything is information. but it is of course not what I was talking about, as I explained.
And it's completely missing the point I was making, which was to describe the only situation in which I could imagine amassing such a large collection of anything and still being bored with it, which is to consider it a single-use source of pleasure*. information (or knowledge, if you prefer; but that's less accurate) does that for me, whereas music does not. they are completely separate categories, and as such one can be reused and therefore I need less of it, and the other cannot, therefore I need constantly more of it.
ok, NOW I go to sleep :-p
------
*hmm....but then... why keep all of it? the reason I have no books is because there's no point in buying something I'll read only once... is it just a matter of virtually non-existent storage costs (in terms of actual money, and space)?
Nah, I'll be getting in Friday evening and leaving Monday morning. Thanks for the offer though.
Uhm, if you knew what the offer was for you would reconsider lol......
I have btw an empty house over that weekend, if 30k out of the city, and a bit of space in my apartment over the road from the convention centre.
Enough space in the apartment to crash at?
Yeah easily....It's been done before lol
Awesome, that makes things a lot easier. Thanks
email me kelskye(at)gmail(dot)com if you can, and name your poison :P
Jadehawk:
So we agree that it's information, at least in some trivial sense. I thought I was stating the obvious, but there still seems to be confusion. I don't really understand the point of the distinctions you're making. I will again state the obvious, but let me know if somehow this doesn't sound right to you:
Music can be a really interesting type of (mood-altering) information (substance), so much so that it's not necessarily boring to receive it over and over, as information is ordinarily defined by Jadehawk. Also, since it's possible for music to be memorized and recalled at will (as musicians and others do quite regularly) like other information, it's not actually necessary to receive it over and over, despite the fact that many take pleasure in doing so.
Kel, check mail !
and when they came for my blog comments section, there was no one left to protest . . .
(meaningless comment made for the sake of humor)
Checked, and replied.
Oh no DLC, you are not bringing that argument over to this thread.
(You have inadvertently stepped on the third rail. I chuckle at your joke but pull you off of it very fast.)
I dont know what the third rail is, but DLC seems to have a habit of making bad analogies that are quite unfunny......
Can we please quarantine the RDF-related arguments to the latest designated thread? It doesn't need to spill over into the endless thread. Let's keep this thread for random ramblings about food, music and the insanity of Mormons.
Walton, you must be joking.
The thread is what the thread is, not what you would have it be.
Even PZ is sick of Greg's shenanigans :
Invoking its name brings it here! Stop, for the love of all that is tentacled, before you recite it three times!
I've anointed the Thread screen with calamari sauce; perhaps that will help.
Take one chicken, put it in a pot, cover with water. Add an onion, a carrot [...] and a celery stick if you feel like it.
Only one of each for an entire chicken??? And then it's even optional???
Then donate the entire skeleton to Darren Naish or your other favorite anatomy collection. :-)
From my experience with Czechs, it is. Which isn't to say there aren't individual people like that – I, for one, don't eat lettuce.
Oh yeah – twaróg is probably even the same word as northern German Quark.
Am I glad I'm not the only one in my generation (with my brother, that is). Am I glad there are still people out there who don't think their life needs a soundtrack.
:-)
That's a good place to stop, I need to go; I'll catch up later. I'll also post links to horned toads.
No new comments in a whole hour? I think I'm getting the shakes.
The celery is optional, because celery is an evil vegetable spawn of Satan. And the amounts are small probably because it was from a, shall we say, not hugely successful farming family. You use what you got. If the chicken is chickeny enough, it doesn't need much else.
I have made paneer - it was ridiculously easy. But then again, it was only once, so it may have been a fluke. I'm quite excited - some farms in my area have banded together for a new co-op, and one of them has non-homogenized milk (still pasteurized, of course). Although I can't stand the taste of whole milk, I'm interested in watching the cream rise and skimming it off for other fun uses.
At work eating smoked salmon on brown bread when Ian Dury's 'Poo Poo in the Prawn' comes over my phones.
*tries hard not to heave - succeeds just*
@Carlie, The video you posted contains the greatest high-five in the history of high-fives.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVlIsUoQsjY
Dydd Gwyl Dewi!
Or for non-Welsh speakers (including me), Happy St David's Day.
I would also like to recommend a cheese-maker based only a mile or so from where I live. Caws Cenarth make wonderful cheese, and if you ever get the chance to try some, do! The Golden Cenarth is especially good.
"Tribbles are fuckin' hot!"
disclaimer: I was never like those guys (@#319).
Never
Over at Tet Zoo reading about babirusas, and whether there are multiple species or not and what it even means to ask that question, and Naish dropped this little citation and then quickly backed way, way away:
Talk about yer proverbial can o' worms!
The abstract and a bit of intelligent-seeming commentary can be found here.
(Googling 'Woodley polytypic' also brings up some truly stomach-turning supremacist stuff, as might be expected.)
In Chicago, Illinois, there is a celebration of a mercenary who fought for the revolutionary side. And here is a song about the day that I am sure most of you will hate.
Oh this completely. Here's the thing. Let's pretend I'm listening to some kind of music. For the sake of argument let's make it rock, let's say it's the album Iron Curtain Innocence, or maybe that Grizzly Bear album. Whatever, it could be the Misfits it wouldn't really matter for my illustration. Ok, so maybe the first time I listen to the album it's in my house and I'm not writing or working on something. So I may not pay that much attention, but if something stands out I may go back and listen to that song, this time just actually listening the way you might read a passage in a book.
Now if I like it, I may move the album onto my ipod or phone and start listening to it in the car. I have to drive a lot because I live in Texas which means the car becomes a big music listening to room for me. Now as I continue to obsess over my new find I will start to listen to the structure of songs I particularly like. I will listen to the production. I will notice changes in the drums, snare heavy sections, basslines. Eventually I will understand the lyrics. I will notice harmonies in the guitar line, I will notice how the synth parts work, and probably get to where I can play them at home when I'm practicing if my mind wonders that way.
I do that a lot, sort of dallying around and then oops... haha... that's some one else's song!
What's always amazing to me is that with all the years of playing essentially similar music you can still *recognize* some bit of some one else's song when you hear it. Just that particular arrangement, inflection, etc.
After a while I will become some what absorbed in a little world created by that song. I'll notice how it sounds in my headphones at night, or how it has become my driving soundtrack. I'll notice how it sounds when I'm ignoring it, or maybe I'll use it to give myself a break at work (where I work gets NOISY some times because my coworkers are talkative and eat frequently in the office so tuning out is a must some times).
Now multiply that by lots of songs, and you can see how that if *how music works* is of some kind of interest to you as a special or privileged type of information then it can be the kind of thing you develop a consuming desire to expand your exposure to. Because, all of those little moments, I may revisit but the sense of discovering them is only new once. So it becomes an endless observation of how *they do it* or how it seems in this situation, etc.
That's not even touching the subject of live shows! Like some one said above, honestly I could be talking about classical with this just as well. The same process applies for me.
Here's Greg Laden coming almost clean: See the comment link pasted in below -- it's actually a comment that's up a screen or two from PZ's comment. http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/02/an_open_letter_to_richard_daw…
I am going the indirect route here, I do not want to listen to this and I do not want to inadvertently make anyone listen to it or provide site hits. But the alleged song is called OTP (One Term President) and it is by WOLVERINES!
Why do some deranged people think that Red Dawn is a documentary instead of a rather crappy action movie with a very dubious premise? Why, yes, I can see how an armed high school football team can defeat those damned socialists!
I don't get Greg Laden. He says he doesn't read blogs, doesn't like blogs - why does he have one, then? I visit there every now and then, and for the most part his seems generally pretty content-free.
He used to have interesting things to say. In the last six months or so he started producing great long posts on his blog that seem to be written in way that is intended to hard to understand. I have read some and been none the wiser as to what he on about. Not quite in Karen Armstrong class of waffle, but getting there. If someone has something to say, but cannot be bothered to do so in a concise and understandable way I am no longer interested in trying to pick the gems out of the dross.
In the cafeteria today: paupiette de veau – a sausage-like phenomenon filled with minced veal and surrounded by a delicious mushroom sauce. (With mushroom slices so large I was able to just leave them on the plate.)
That soup looks really good! But I'm somewhat surprised the term "noodle" is stretched that far in English. The closest thing I know to those kluski are csipetke – made from more-or-less-noodle-dough, but not themselves noodles.
=8-)
Baozi: Knödel.
Jiaozi: Tascherl. Uh… Täschchen? How do you say in Germany?
Then I envy your memory! :-) There are books that I like to read again every few years or so.
Now it gets interesting.
Medical Fucking Hypotheses!?! Wow. I overlooked that. Too bad I can't comment on that blog you linked to.
I don't understand why the abstract talks about amounts of variation in connection with the Phylogenetic Species Concept. Are there separate lineages, or not?
…No. The only human populations that have been isolated for centuries or more are the Easter Islanders (till a few hundred years ago) and probably the Tasmanians (till about 200 years ago). All else is just one single clade with lots of clinal variation – and a separate cline for every single gene that varies. Skin color doesn't covary with any blood group, for instance…
I thought eastern (including mountain) and western gorillas being separate species was now textbook wisdom? (Except that not many textbooks can't have been printed in those last few years.)
Now I want some souuuuup…
Oh yeah. Horned toads, aka pacman frogs.
More mormon gossip -- this time our high-profile mormon is Kevin Rahm who plays a gay dude on the TV show "Desperate Housewives". Gossip from the morridor is that playing a gay character so charmingly falls into the "appearance of evil" category, that in some scenes his mormon garments can be discerned under his costume, that he dropped out of pre-law at Brigham Young University because he really is gay (or because he really is not gay, but really is talented), etc.
http://www.affirmation.org/news/2007_097.shtml
From Deseret News:
This excerpt is brought to you by your friendly Reassurance Board, who would like to confirm that, yes, most TV is a waste of time, most scripts are still inane, and, no, there's no reason for you to rush out and buy a TV. And, yes, there are gay mormons, but unless they want to be excommunicated, they just play gay mormons on TV instead of in real life.... maybe.
My Hungarian father always called them "Paprikás noodles."
Knödel kann aus Baozi sehen, aber Baozi muss immer Brötchen sein. Ist Täschchen eine Handtasche? Ein Tascherl ist süß, aber Jiaozi ist salzig.
(I need an excuse to practice German)
The LDS Church has an intelligence-gathering service called the Strengthening the Members Committee. Excerpts are from a post by Steve Benson:
Benson goes on to document instances of phone taps. Other ex-mormons add their own experiences of surveillance to the thread.
I sorta wish I understood music, but when you start discussing it, this is all I hear.
Happy Chicken, Chopin!
Well, that gets to the heart of the issue.
I am not an expert, and no time this week for reading up, but it's my strong impression that that is simply not true: There is a lot of covarying, clustered genetic variation. Even the shopworn blood-type example: what is it? No B allele in the Americas?
Jadehawk: I think you and others have misconstrued what I was trying to say about the acceptance of ethnic cuisines within the majority WASP culture of America, a culture which does exist. I'm not condoning it (and you're putting words in my mouth if you imply that I do); I'm merely pointing out the reality of WASP influence in America. Supporting ethnic diversity (as I do) does not change that.
What I was saying was in regard to the political/cultural implications of the current diversity in American food, which has given America a richer culture than it had when the WASPS had a stranglehold on the culture at large (not so long ago). Diversity has improved our cuisine, and is a decided improvement on the culture we had before.
Sad as their treatment by whites and attempts to obliterate their cultural contributions have been, the Native Americans aren't the only peoples of this country with a cultural heritage, and certainly not the only ones to be pissed on by the dominant WASP culture. It is to these people and their contributions to our continuing heritage that I was speaking of.
My point was that America has been a culinary backwater because the dominant WASP culture did everything it could to deny ethnic cultures, and that included the food of those cultures, and the reason for that has everything to do with the racist heritage that their denial of others has created in America.
Most ethnic cuisines are viciously castigated for many years before they're ever accepted; it's a reflection of the dominant culture's fears of being diminished.To give you an idea of what I mean: Do you think Chinese food was popular, right away in America? Or Mexican food?
If you think the food and ethnicity issues weren't jumbled up together, it wasn't so long ago that has dominant white culture routinely and openly called Mexican-Americans beaners and taco-benders as pejoratives ("beaner" is still in common use amongst racists today). Why use food to refer to Mexican Americans? Might it be because it is something basic and obvious that quickly distinguished them from the dominant culture, a sign of "other"-ness?
You cannot look at the history of food in America without looking at the racism prevalent in the country, and how the rise of acceptance for various minorities (or at least awareness of them) has coincided with the acceptance of their cuisines into the mainstream of American life. Even the Italians dealt with this when they first came to America in large numbers in the late 1800s.
If you look at it this way, then, yes, we have a much richer culture now than we've ever had, and definitely superior. I am saying that the WASP culture didn't offer much. It was not a statement about what they took and didn't give credit for.
Besides, you have the contributions of Native American food culture respected and acknowledged in modern America. Unless you think that Mexican food isn't derived from Native culture.
Just dropping in; between the Olympics and a project at work that's been keeping me not only crazy busy but also away from my regular computer, I'm afraid I've been pretty hit-and-run lately. And also lagging behing the wave of comments. Forgive me?
Carlie (@124):
I see this comment has been well discussed since you made it, but I confess my first reaction was: "Yeah, because what Walton needs most is to hear an empowered woman sing it's just you and your hand tonight! at him at FSM-knows-how-many decibels!" ;^)
At to the ensuing conversation, I agree that Walton's primness is sometimes... umm, endearing isn't a term I usually apply to other men; let's just say amusing... and I support his right not to like pop music. That said, though, I agree that Pink is teh awesome (though I might not know that if I didn't have a teen daughter!) and I'm pleased to see that W. is at least open to learning that.
Cicely (@204):
Funny, I don't have much use for cooked turnips, either, but I had a fascinating experience as a youth: A friend gave me a turnip freshly pulled from his mother's truck garden, and I impulsively bit into it like an apple. I was shocked at how good it tasted, spicy like a radish (no surprise, I guess; AFAIK turnips and radishes are pretty closely related, and what passes as a "radish" in East Asia looks mor like a turnip to my nonbotanist eyes).
What I've discovered is that a bunch of food (veggies) I hate in its "normal" cooked form is awesome when eaten raw (or nearly so). You couldn't pay me to eat the typical cooked beet, but recently I've been ordering a dish at my favorite Indian place that comes with shoestrings of raw beet as an edible garnish, and it's totally fabulous!! Who knew?
David M,
Basically, yes. There are holdouts, but most textbooks now list two species, and several sub-species, of gorilla. Gorilla gorilla is the western clade and Gorilla beringei is the eastern clade. Though it's not textbook, I know many people who classify mountain gorillas as their own species, too.
I think part of the push to put mountain gorillas in their own species is due to conservation efforts since they're critically endangered, and don't reproduce in captivity. However, they are behaviorally and physically distinct, so it does make sense.
Anyway, back to work.
You know what is funny about food in the US is that if you happen to have a branch of your family that goes back far enough and covers enough ground (my maternal side goes back to Jamestown) you get to see through various family artifacts the real richness and diversity of culture through a long line of time. Yes this means you may have unpleasant things to see like records of people sold as slaves, their job and physical stats, monetary value, etc. It also means that you get to see recipe books and notes going back for generations to the days when nut-loaf was served because meat was scarce, or when cabbage dishes became "liberty salads" because German names had to be avoided, or the wonderful fifties when people discovered the joys of instant puddings and canned peaches, and further back when it becomes clear that cooking was something sort of different (done in outside houses by staff, etc.) and so on. One thing that becomes evident is that what is eaten varies. Poke dishes are in my family. That's highly regional. The contributions of slaves as they worked in the old kitchens created dishes like benne cookies that became accepted by WASP culture so much so that their origin gets overlooked. Then there's other old groups, the French in Louisiana where my family picked up it's "pullet" dishes and at the same time where there was an undeniable blend of culture.
As various immigrant groups gain acceptance the marriages bring in different twists and traditions. Anyway, it's hard to ascribe as single flavor to it, and I think that's where some of the "dominant" WASP bull comes in. People select a few things and decide they'll represent (and only temporarily though people will deny it) whatever that dominant WASP flavor is meant to be... but from what I've seen (and honestly I'm NOT AN EXPERT, but I do enjoy reading about US history) there's always been more diversity than is generally acknowledged. From what I've really seen a lot of the WASP branding comes from the 20's-50's but falls apart if you follow the family history past that point. And this is from some one with family members on both sides of the civil war.
I dunno, like I said... these are really idle and sophomoric musings. I just think it's interesting how much identity gets tied up into something that is so ephemeral.
Has anybody read Jaron Lanier's new book:
You Are Not a Gadget : a manifesto
the longtime tech guru/visionary/dreadlocked genius (and progenitor of virtual reality) argues that unfettered--and anonymous--ability to comment results in cynical mob behavior, the shouting-down of reasoned argument, and the devaluation of individual accomplishment. Lanier traces the roots of today's Web 2.0 philosophies and architectures (e.g. he posits that Web anonymity is the result of '60s paranoia), persuasively documents their shortcomings, and provides alternate paths to "locked-in" paradigms. Though its strongly-stated opinions run against the bias of popular assumptions, You Are Not a Gadget is a manifesto, not a screed; Lanier seeks a useful, respectful dialogue about how we can shape technology to fit culture's needs, rather than the way technology currently shapes us.
There's also a video of him presenting the book at zocalo public square (where he talks quite a lot about evolutionary biology).
(He's a weirdoe and a nerd and a visionary, it's well worth listening to him)
He makes a lot of claims about how the internet is affecting human behaviour, and not only in a positive way. Some of his claims, I think, are well supported, others less.
It's true that in the past, we have mainly reacted to technologies, we weren't capable nor willing to see the long term benefits and costs a particular technologies over the long term, say 50 years. But are we now capable and willing to do this?
Are we already having another fundraiser? "Get Walton Laid".
I really need to find a job, if you keep finding these charitable cases.
Wow. Greg Laden really hates us! Good thing I never kept up with his blog much I guess. I hate being hated, especially over something trivial like where I choose to leave internet comments :(
But whatever... onward and upward! I come here to hang out and talk to people who share a couple things in common, and to learn through observation and interaction. You know, I think a lot of people really do thing the world would be a better place if there were only a certain type of people in it.
negentropyeater,
I've long thought that the anonymity on the internet brings out the stupid. One can be as dumb, nasty and disruptive as one wants and there are no consequences.
It is one of the interesting things about Pharyngula--it seems to function as a quasi-anarchhy, but under the benevolent despotic hand of PZ when some asshole-jerkoff gets out of control. To someone in the trenches of the current climate wars, it presents an interesting contrast.
It does but it also gives marginalized people like myself a chance at feeling human, which is something different. You see, in the sea of internet stupid, you can see your worst in contrast with others worst too.
Well, I suppose a more radish-y tasting turnip could only be an improvement.
One year, my folks' garden produced a bumper crop of turnips. I am not given to the frivolous dropping of f-bombs, so you may get some inkling of the vehemence of my loathing for turnips when I say that we ate fucking turnips, frozen or left-over, every fucking day of the next fucking year.
The freezer ran out of boxes of the damned things just in time for the next year's fresh crop.
Jesus and Mo show that no-win situation with critics of religion.
This has been posted before, but Greta names a few other Catch-22's atheists encounter.
Turnips
Laden:
[my bold]
The problem here is that there was never any substantive critique. There was a lot of insinuation (ludicrous in my case), but no substance ever offered no matter how many times it was requested. I asked for it at Mors Dei and got the same response: nothing. What is this language people should be careful about, and in what contexts? Nothing. What are some examples of reasonable allies being alienated due to our statements? None. What are the benefits of moderating our language (somehow) in the context of the real advantages of being able to speak freely in some spaces? Nada. Just 'I criticized people with nothing to back it up and they got angry, so I must be right'.
He appears just to want to slime people (though he claims to include himself, he doesn't give examples of his own mistakes, and hasn't chosen a term to "honor" his own damn blog). If he were serious about this he would come up with some substantive examples that reasonable people could discuss. Of course, after what he's done and given what a horrendous communicator he is, few are listening anyway, but I thought it needed to be pointed out.
Blue water ain't always a good thing.
Quite:
I'm another one of those people who is always seeking out new music. Not that I get tired of listening to the old stuff, but I like to explore, to try out new genres* and to do it at my own pace. I really enjoy listening to something that is totally new for me for a while and then getting back to my all-time favorites**. It's like traveling: you get pleasure from getting away from what you're used to and from getting back to it. At least I do.
* The latest being trip-hop. I don't remember what triggered me to listen to this stuff, but for some reason I'm liking it. Listening to Massive Attack's Inertia Creeps right now...
** And yes, Wowbagger, that includes Faith No More. So I still hate you. A lot. :P
Laden wouldn't know "clear and explicit" if it bit him on the ass.
Having just buzzed over to Ladens blog to look at the link above, I have to agree with you Sven.
1)If you music lovers would bother rereading my first comments about this music thing, you'd notice that I did say that the only way boygenius' huge collection could bore him would be if he perceived music the way I perceive knowledge (and you've all now supplied sufficient evidence for that hypothesis, I think); and I was saying that while I intellectuall understand that, I don't "feel" it, because to me music is virtually content-free. it is not a source of knowledge, it's an experience. for me. personally. not in some sort of general, universal way. so can we stop talking about it as if I claimed that "music is not information" was supposed to be some sort of general fact of life?
2)Aquaria, I don't give a flying fuck about the mainstream american food culture. I never ever talked about it. what I WAS talking about was the fact that many Americans are no longer cooking the recipes of their parents and grandparents (of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds!); it seems fewer and fewer people cook in general and prefer to go to restaurants, and when they do they have bookshelves full of "asian cooking" and "indian cooking"; but not much in the way of "stuff my great-grandparents cooked"; REGARDLESS of what ethnicity or culture those great-grandparents were from. Too many Americans are throwing away their local food-culture in favor of the big international food culture, because local food culture is, as Bill D said "old people food". and i find that to be a great loss. that's all.
3)I'm gonna go away now for a while, because I'm in an incredibly bad mood today, and Pharyngula isn't helping right now, and I don't feel like accidentally ripping someone's head of, which i might regret later.
tried weed?
Nicht unbedingt. Käse-Topfen-Tascherl, Kräutertascherl (…auch mit Topfen…)…
Ah, also doch. Dann sind es wirklich keine Knödel!
Knödel können wie Baozi aussehen/ausschauen.
LDS? No Such Agency!
This covaries with what?
Anyway, less that a year ago Pharyngula provided me with a series of maps of allele distributions for blood groups and the like. I'll post a link soon.
Hahaaa! I make a guess about textbooks based on a popular article I once read, without actually knowing any textbooks, and I get it right! <mad cackling>
weed - munchies - food
*withdraws head under carapace*
I get it!
I never took your comment that way. Pardon me for sharing a type of experience with you. You can assume if you want that any further discussion on music that I might post on this thread is not directed to you or even intended to include you. Better then?
A little venting might, however, help.
I still like this stuff. It was what I listened to all the time in middle school/early HS! Massive Attack, Tricky, Portished, Goldfrapp, Bowery Electric, DJ Shadow. Now I get all nostalgia-y about it. That and Radiohead. That already is dating me, some day it will prove that I am old. Meh... that's cool. Old is ok. I like lots of old people :P
You know though, I think as time goes some things sound dated and other things still sound relevant. I don't know why. Often I continue to like the things I once liked but every once in a while something I was into once seems less... interesting after a time. That happened with Tori Amos. I was obsessed with her say around the time I entered middle school. By college I was kind of embarrassed by her.
To this day I only some times like to go back and listen to a song or two from her b-sides usually, and usually a cover. She's just doesn't reach me now.
I watched The Beatles on Ed Sullivan.
old.
To avoid that kind of regret, I find it helpful to purposely rip someone's head off - metaphorically speaking, of course. That way, there is only satisfaction!
I wish I had gotten into this food conversation. I am of an age where my parents could leave this mortal coil any day, and so I have been spending a great deal of time going through photographs and old films from "the old country", which in my case is Italy. I am trying to learn to cook as much of my mother's recipes as possible, so that the knowledge won't pass with her; both my siblings feel the same. Food represents more than just memory, but also connection, a tether to my parents' past and to the region in Italy where my cousins still live.
Now, I'm going to have a slice of my mother's bread with a chunk of parmesan sent to me by my father's cousin, while wishing I had my uncle's hot home made pork sausage to add to it...
My Grandmother and mother were and are terrible cooks.
One of the reasons I'm a badmother fucker in the kitchen. Out of necessity.
Though I'd be interested in what the mountain folk of North Carolina were cooking in the 1700 and 1800s, just haven't really looked into it (hence your point above).
All of the alleles that give rise to the distinctive phenotypic characteristics of Amerindians as a group (as well as, I'll hypothesize (because I am too busy and lazy to look it up), enzyme variants). The old categories of "race" lack clear boudaries, are social constructs, etc. but they were not based on nothing. They were based on geographically covarying, more-or-less fixed phenotypic traits (and not just, as current American social constructs imply, skin color).
I have them too, and I'll grant at the outset that those allele frequencies correlate poorly to "racial" characteristics. That's a somewhat special case, though, since it's a polymop[hic locus nearly everywhere and (iirc) there is reason to suspect that selection (as well as the clear founder effect in the New World) has been involved.
I should probably shut up abnout this.
There are few things more rewarding that finding those old recipes and digging in on a Saturday night, music in the background and wine at your fingertips. But then, I am a major "foodie" as my previous comment demonstrates.
As a history guy, though, it really is true that the food that is your heritage gives you a connection to your past. It's one of the reasons why, whenever I travel, I make it a point to try something on a menu that I've never heard of, but that the locals tell me is part of their cuisine - if you want to get to know a people, one of the best ways is to know what they eat!
I think self-critique is difficult to organise on the internets. I thought Greg's original idea was a good one, but he didn't express it well and it was poorly organised, and it turned sour. It became them versus us.
I agree with what a_ray said in #343. And I value anonymity. But I think what Jaron Lanier talks about (see my #340), the cynical mob behaviour, is generic to all blogs and forums with anonymous commenters that are so distant apart.
We should look into this for the blog we care about, try to reduce its potentially negative influence if we can detect it.
Ja, Ich sehe. Du bist fast richtig.
Oh, Knödel ist Plural? Ich hatte vergessen, dass "aussehen" trennt.
Deutsch ist sehr schwer.
Nederlands is eenvoudig. ;-)
You need a hug.
In news: truthwinsout.org reports that Rev. Martin Ssempa, mastermind of the kill-the-gay bill in Uganda, is blogging about his homophobia. He says "sodomy is not a human right, it is a human vice" to which I respond "faith is both a human right and a malicious vice."
vittles
Yeah.
'some day it will prove that I am old'
Saw the Beatles live Bristol Colston Hall 1963
old
Bobber - DO IT. Good on you. I can barely make my grandfather's braciole and have no idea on the sauce because I kept thinking I'd learn the next time I was in town, and then it was too late. :(
Chimpy - I left you a silly bacon recipe up thread.
There. I fixed it.
Carlie, I still can't approximate my mother's sauce, nor can I duplicate her bread. And if I can't do either, I will never be able to make her pizza - which is as fine a food as will be found in any place, any time, in this world.
Now, I haven't tried my hand at her braciole - but now that you mention it, I really really need to.
Heresy (just to me)! How could you be embarrassed by her? Well, actually, it is getting harder and harder to put up with faitheism, spiritualism, deism, and what have you after reading Pharyngula for several years and watching all those Dawkins' lectures and Hitchens' debates, and I was disappointed to learn that Tori falls in there somewhere. Still, I don't get the feeling that she puts her beliefs in her music.
Sven DiMilo @ 369:
All of my old Household books have extensive sections on game cookery. Mrs. Owens' Cook Book [1887] does have Opossum:
Other recipes under Four-Footed Game include Beaver-Roast, Hare-Jugged, Rabbit Pie, Rabbit Stew, Pemmican - To Prepare, Squirrel Pie, Venison Sausage, Venison Steaks and Woodchucks and 'Coons.
mmm 'coons
I have no idea what this means. If a certain kind of language or behavior is troubling you enough to post about it, you should describe it concretely and provide some examples for people to talk about. If you're saying "I find myself doing it," you should be able to say when. (By "you" I mean Laden.)
What idea? That we aren't avoiding being "racist slobs"? Show me where that is. He alleged a problem (a problem with other people) but never showed that it existed.
It was always sour, because he didn't have a case.
Well, he was talking about "us."
Who says we don't? And Laden wasn't saying that there's a generic "cynical mob mentality" on blogs, but that on atheist blogs - this one in particular - a rejection of religion in practice dangerously shades over into racism. It's bullshit, and his example about our alleged response to information from a "religious source" was ridiculous.
And when you do detect it, I'm happy to discuss it.
You do realize, don't you, that now you're just feeding my new obsession? ;)
I think that happens to everyone. There's a lot of stuff I was into that I just don't care about anymore. Things that once made feel so good and now just feel indifferent. There's even stuff I once loved that now I just can't stand. But then there are those songs I grew up listening to that still give me the same feeling when I listen to them today... And no matter how many times I listen to them, they never get old.
Too... cutesy, out of touch,safe? It's hard to define. I know when I was in HS I realized some of her references and sources and it started to seem like she just borrowed from relevant (and irrelevant) issues and threw in the right keywords, mixed with quirky cute overkill, and maybe a sort of mixed metaphor/personal symbol so that it was always just a little shy of active. But I respect her playing.
She was kind of a hero to me as a young girl. I played the piano, and sang, and wrote music, and wanted to be famous. When I first saw her I was probably 10 or so. I was blow away because I didn't think that through-written music existed anymore in popular music, especially that which involved a clunky instrument like piano.
Now I play the piano, and sing, and write music, and know I'll do that for the rest of my life without ever being famous. I can certainly respect having what it takes to make it, even to get into a tour. So maybe some of the reason I'm so hard on her is that during my own life as a musician I moved so far away from what she was trying to do/be. Yet I still gotta say if people ask who do you sound like. PJ Harvey, Tori Amos... etc.
He alleged a problem (a problem with other people) but never showed that it existed.
And I'll also mention that since he admitted to only having read 5% of the immediate discussion (and none of the original) that led to his original insinuation and then the firing-squad post, and now has acknowledged that he doesn't really read blogs, it should be pretty obvious where he's pulling his observations and analyses from.
quoted for truth
sweet
cloying?
affected?
pretentious, even?
YMM of course V
"Tribbles are fuckin' hot!"
@19:
Or tribbles?
OTOH, rats and tribbles may rate less well in, ahem, endurance.
Bobber - now I'm having visions of my grandpa stirring up a big pot of "gravy" that's been sitting on the back burner all day, full of meatballs and braciole... *whimper*
Ol'Greg, you want to talk embarrassing high school music? I have you beat, hands down. I used to listen to stuff like this. And this. And this.
I'm sometimes surprised I ended up as well-adjusted as I did, little thought that is.
Yes. Those words are more precise and more accurate than mine. That is the gist of what I was trying to say.
Modern Human Variation.
Why? :-)
Yes, of course selection and the founder effect exist and have left visible traces; I'm just saying the correlations are never very high and drop further the more genes are involved.
Auch.
B-)
I do hope it's that simple.
Form Carlie's first link (#388):
Uh...yeah, I think you... win. Don't even need to click the other two...
Ugh.
Ol'Greg wrote:
Dammit, I was going to stop with the smug announcements but I've just got to throw out just one more after seeing this list; Massive Attack will be in Adelaide the weekend after the GAC, and I've got tickets to them, too...
It's the last one, I swear!
Oh, but I hate you so much...
Interesting. I would never have chosen those words in describing Tori Amos.
I guess I can see that transpiring, and you probably know more about what she references and what issues she borrows from in her work than I do. Her words and imagery have normally had great significance for me ever since I started listening to her, especially so with the Boys for Pele album, my first of hers.
For me too but for different reasons. I was particularly drawn in by her blasphemous lyrics (things like, "Muhammad my friend, it's time to tell the world, we both know it was a girl, back in Bethlehem") as I began my breakaway from Christianinsanity. I find myself able to connect her music to the vagaries of my life even today. She is still kind of a hero to me even though her newer stuff is getting a little esoteric.
Even though her music still clicks with me, I think I can understand what you meant now and how you grew away from her music.
I don't think "vary" even begins to demonstrate how differently we think on this matter. "Worlds apart" might be better.
Janine wrote:
I - for one - don't hate it. I have Chicago and it's an amazing album (though some of the songs are far better than others); Sufjan Stephens is a freaking genius, despite being sadly woo-soaked.
Seconded.
It's especially good that the No Child's Behind Left Act is mentioned, even though they mangle its name.
Sidebar quote:
I had this fleeting daydream that, while Amanda Palmer was in Adelaide playing, NG would be here too and and I'd bump into him at the gig and have the sort of profound conversation that would result in us becoming friends (and him agreeing to show my short stories to some publishers).
However, the more I thought about it, the more I remembered that 1) my short stories aren't that good, and 2) I become an absolute blithering idiot in the presence of even semi-interesting people; to even try to talk to someone as mindbogglingly awesome as him would almost certainly result in a) my head literally exploding, b) my response to seeing him being limited to falling to the ground at his feet shouting 'We're not worthy' à la Wayne and Garth to Alice Cooper in Wayne's World 2, or c) both.
WowbaggerOM @ 399:
If you ever do meet him, just remember he was a scientologist. That ought to keep him in the "firmly human" camp in your head. ;)
A lot might be explained if I said that by the time Boys for Pele came out I was really into The Swans albums like Children of God and Public Castration is a Good Idea.
...Yeah God is mine
Yeah my sin is me/ and God is mine/ Now I am ready/ to receive/the new mind
Now people get ready
The sex in your soul will damn you to hell...
Let the light come in
Damn you to hell
Let the light come in
Damn you to hell
Now save your soul
Damn you to hell...
etc
WowbaggerOM, do you always have that many amazing things going on!?
I think when a community of people decide to say what troubles them about a certain kind of language or behavior, it's already quite difficult to arrive at a constructive result when it's face to face. On the internet it's even more difficult because of the anonymity and the physical distance, people tend to be more hurtful and crude than they would be face to face, there is no body language, signs, and it can degenerate rapidly into a pissing contest.
I think (I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt) he wanted to start a conversation with a critique of blastulas (a generic term for atheist/secularist/rationalist blogs, which he never explained properly) but he failed for all the reasons you have pointed out.
I detect it now, in the way people who read both blogs have been behaving since this thing with Greg started. You have perfectly good reasons to feel hurt and angry about what he said. Greg should have apologized to you early on. Then it was more people who felt angry, and it's degenerated rapidly into cynical mobs fighting against each other in devaluating comments.
So, one may think that it's all Greg's fault, but could we have behaved in a better way ? Are there things that were said that should have been avoided in order to calm things down and arrive at a more positive result?
Hay guise?
Just out of curiosity, is there a link to an explanation of what all this argument with Laden comes from or is about? I'm totally lost and confused. Part of me figures I should just ignore it and ultimately that's likely what I'll do, but I'm also kind of curious what has even been going on.
negentropyeater @ 403:
I don't know how closely you followed Greg's mega-fuck-up, but plenty of people took a great deal of time to repeatedly explain things in long, thought out, calm posts. Every one of them garnered juvenile responses from both Greg and Sidekick. The whole nasty mess was Greg's making from the outset, and they kept on making it worse.
Well he sort of lost me early in the process, with the firing squad analogy.
As a by-the-way, what's happened to the archives at Pharyngula.org?
TRiG.
Laden lost it when he gave SC the have you stopped beating your wife being antisemitic post.
Ol'Greg @ 404:
You can start here: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/02/what_does_an_atheist_firing_s…
Caine,
Not just that; the worst part was that when we asked direct, relevant, clarifying questions, they were ignored. Over and over again, different questions or the same ones, it just didn't matter. All we got was abuse.
Despite
Paul W:
That's true. It made reading highly frustrating (nothing near the level those posting experienced) because the posts and questions were so clear and could have been easily answered. Instead, there was a lot of doublespeak and insults flung back.
oops... another one got away from me. Damn this tiny keyboard.
Lest I be accused of apologizing for a short post, though... there you go. That's it. (Ignore the "Despite.") Hope you like it.
Hmmm... that struck me as sanctimonious horse poo. Are there racists, sexists, etc. among us? Sure. Actually. I'm just not really sure what his point is!
I wish he'd just say something like:
I have the following problems with Pharyngula. Some posters, like this one, or this one, make comments that lead me to believe that this social problem is being exhibited and even condoned when it is really anti-social and shouldn't be tolerated... or something like that.
Ol'Greg @ 413:
I wish he'd said nothing at all.
Sven,
Except that the traits used to identify "races" were anything but fixed. Most of the phenotypic traits that were used to establish racial classification schemes were not only distributed in clines, but also plastic in expression.
Most of the loci that actually code for the phenotypes used for racial classification are polymorphic. The traits themselves are also polygenic. This was why blood groups were a huge deal in physical anthropology. People thought, finally, traits that have no environmental influence on expression and no adaptive value! We'll have our racial classifications perfected in no time. The problem is that while the former assumption is largely true, the latter is not. There are very few, if any, phenotypic traits that have no adaptive value.
We saw a similar attitude when the early mtDNA studies came out. "Ooh look, mtDNA isn't affected by natural selection, so it just reflects population divergence times! YAY!"
No community of people did decide to do that. Laden did, making serious charges with nothing to back them up but lies and misrepresentations.
What language, specifically? What behavior, specifically? Where were we racist slobs?
It's always difficult to have a constructive result when you accuse people of things without offering any evidence.
Whether or not this is true in general, it's completely irrelevant here.
He explained it in a way that made it clear which blog he was talking about.
That it was a malicious, baseless charge, yes. Not because it was poorly organized or expressed.
You detect what now? The behavior Laden was describing in his firing-squad post? Anger? What? He leveled a terrible and false accusation and then a baseless "critique" (which he is still talking about), his sidekick lied and misrepresented, and then he proceeded to do things to commenters that were completely unethical. The people affected were and are annoyed or angry about it. That doesn't signify anything about internet culture or any broader, generic issues. Nor does it demonstrate any validity to his initial insinuations, which were not generic. And I'll say another thing: the firing squad post, it appeared to me as I was reading it at the time, looked like a cynical fishing expedition. He was looking for someone, anyone (connected to these blogs or not), to say something bigoted or extreme so as to latch onto it as evidence, however tenuous, for his claim.
Yes, thank you.
They're not mobs, and they're not cynical. Neither are most of the people who are upset at what happened at RDF. Sometimes people have legitimate reasons to be angry. Before chalking everything up to psychological motives or group dynamics or dismissing it as internet drama, I think we should look at what people are actually saying they're hurt or angry about and whether it has substance.
I don't regret how I behaved. What of your behavior do you regret? What specific behavior of someone else are you criticizing?
A positive result for me is a public apology and a retraction. I don't want to calm things down. It's not my responsibility to make Laden grow up and show some character.
:-D
Yeah. Whose classification exactly? I've seen some from the early 20th century with up to 66 races.
ROTFL!
Given the DRAMA over Laden and the DRAMA over RDF I think that Internet Drama is Dramatic.
I may go and have a lie down and clutch my fainting salts whilst on my smelling pearls. Or something.
Mind you, it is more fun than television.
Louis
P.S. On the other topics:
1) Don't you have any good music*?
2) Recipes? Grandparents' recipes? Grandparents? If it's not kleftiko made with properly stoeln lamb, I don't want to know.
* The best indicator that you have invited an enormous wanker to your party is if they look at your music collection and ask this question in a supercillious tone. I think it is a good indicator of abject muppetry and responding with violence is the only rational course of action.
It's just the time of year - festival time. The tail end of the summer rock festivals and the beginning of the autumn arts/comedy/cabaret season. Adelaide's a pretty big place (pop. 1,000,000 or so) with a reputation for being arts-friendly so we get most (sadly, not all) of the big name international acts who come here.
But even by the normal standards there is an unusual level of great entertainment going on now and in the near future; I'm kind of blown away by it, actually.
It's both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because I love bands and cabaret performers and world-renowned stage actors (who happen to have also played über-nerd idols like Gandalf and Magneto on screen); a curse because - with so much happening at once - it's exhausting both my energy levels and my bank balance.
On a related note I'm not going to tonight's big show, AC/DC. I'm now trying to work out if it's going to affect me getting to what I am seeing: Antigone followed by a stage adaptation of Frankenstein.
Either way if he wants Pharyngula off scienceblogs or something I'm sure there are proper channels to vent his frustrations to, and probably to mitigate from PZ's end. Lashing out and getting down and dirty with commenters seems pointless from both sides to me especially when he didn't just start by calling out whatever or whoever it was that prompted the observation.
OMG some atheists are assholes! Say it ain't so! People have a wide variety for any opinion they may hold, and some opinions may be held for nasty reasons. Point taken.
Well anyway, thanks. I kind of get it. Like I said I've just never really kept up with his blog so all this was weird and confusing for me.
No. Have some more bad music.
I totally missed that band. Ah heck, I missed a lot of the best of the music scene in the 80s and 90s. I'm listening to "Love will save you" right now on YouTube. It sounds like a cross between NIN and Johnny Cash. :)
Ol'Greg @ 421:
Yeah. I used to read his blog semi-regularly, but with the firing squad/open letter posts, he lost me completely. All he did was out himself as a beetle-headed witling who was desperate for attention.
You were about as calm and conciliatory as could humanly be expected (and thank you again). Got nowhere.
And even after dozens of people requested such examples, he ignored or belittled them and the sidekick attacked them.
***
By the way, I'm not at all saying that I'm never a major participant in escalation or that I couldn't try to calm things down more often. Some of my arguments with truth machine (if people want to call those internet dramas I won't dispute it), for example, have been as much my creation as his (and that's saying something!). There are plenty more examples of times in which I've said hurtful or unproductive things, and I've tried to express my regret but sometimes failed to. This is not one of those times, and I don't think anyone else from "here" did anything wrong, either.
Nah, he's an atheist and he and PZ are friends. He's just a dipshit.
That doesn't matter. I have not lobbied nor will I ever lobby to have anyone ejected from Sb.
Speaking of not wanting people off Pharyngula...
I do think that Greg has crossed a couple of lines that ought to be against the rules at Sb, and that that the lines should be clarified and enforced.
In particular, he's threatened to out pseudonymous posters he doesn't like, and in one case exposed a pseudonymous poster's real identity briefly.
IMHO, that is way, way uncool. It's his blog, and if he wants to censor or ban people, thats his prerogative. Outing pseudonymous posters is something else entirely.
Is there a Sb rule about that? If not, I think there should be. Either way, Laden should be warned not to go there.
Oops! If this was because of me then that's not what I meant to imply. Only that if some one wanted this blog off there's probably some countermeasure that could be taken in defense... anyway.
Huh? Of course not. I think she was speaking about Laden wanting you off, which is a mistaken impression.
I'm seeing too much of this mob thing, forget it.
I have nothing else to say.
And thanks SC and others for your clear thinking comments on Greg's self-immolation.
Paul W @ 428:
Yes, he recently threatened 'Tis Himself with that one.
Which is the worst, lowest kind of scumbag move there is - it almost guarantees self-censorship or non--participation beyond the kind of echo-chamber they insist takes place here - but clearly, as the RDNet thread illustrates, doesn't.
I didn't spend much time on his blog before; this, combined with his 'editing' of people's posts, means I won't spend any time there now. How the heck do I know that any post is what the poster themselves actually wrote?
Was this last part sarcastic? If not, I guess I don't mind being part of a mob as long as it's a virtual, clear-thinking mob.
;)
***
Speaking of the horde, Heathers, and such, it is officially Molly time....
Yep, and thanks. What I meant was rather more like:
If he wanted Pharyngula off I'm sure there appropriate ways to lodge real complaints, and appropriate ways to defend one's self from those complaints if they prove unfounded.
NB: I have nothing else to say ... about the Ladenwreck.
But I'm like the Walrus, I can talk of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing-wax of cabbages and kings.
And lemons.
Anybody has some ideas what to do with lemons? I just harvested my two lemon trees and have stacks of beautiful juicy non treated fruits.
I plan to prepare some Limoncello and make jars of citrons confits (no idea how translate this : Lemons preserved in salted water, to be used later in various recipies such as yummy Lamb Tadjine with Lemons)
What else ?
I'm doing a bit of campaigning on behalf of Paul W. I'm thoroughly impressed by him and I'm going to nominate him for a Molly. I ask you all to consider joining me in the nomination.
If you actually hit the link I provided, you would have known it was not Sufjan Stephens. I will not be linking to anything by him. I will leave that to the younger and more hip indie kids.
No.
How 'bout some Doobie Bros:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqZ95a249p0
Rev:
You sound just like my dad. Cooking was his passion, for many years. He told me he learned to cook out of a sense of self-preservation. He used to say that his mother would know when the bacon/fried hamburger/fried whatever meat was done because the smoke detector would go off. I have no idea how she could tell before they invented smoke detectors.
Dad's cooking was a combination of West Coast cookery, with East Texas and Japan thrown in.
Oh, and in response to the question earlier about "chitlins." Yes, I've helped prepare them and have eaten them. Once. My (not yet) mother-in-law sort of bullied me into it. Family traditions and all that. Yes, I suppose I let her bully me, but I was much younger then, and she was pretty intimidating to me.
At least I can say I've tried them. And they are not a part of our own family tradition. It's been 20 years now, and my husband has never once spoken of them in wistful tones, so I'd say I'm safe.
negentropyeater | March 1, 2010 8:11 PM:
Ingredients:
Instructions:
Separate eggs. Set whites aside (I meringue the whites later). Whip yolks until smooth. Add sugar slowly. In a separate bowl, shred (or cut) butter into flour. Pour in buttermilk, and whip until smooth. Stir in lemon peel and lemon juice. Stir in yolks. Pour into pie shell.
Preheat oven to 425. Cook at 350 for 20 - 25 minutes, or until just before browning (I know, hard to judge, but a little browning doesn't hurt) . Let cool at room temperature. The pie will set up as it cools.
Meringue the egg whites, and top pies with meringue after they have cooled. Optionally, put the meringued pies back in the oven at 425 for about 2 minutes to brown the meringue. Let pies cool before serving.
(I admit it doesn't use up very many lemons. Oh well. Guess you'll just have to make some lemon jalapeno jam.)
it's not about good memory. My memory isn't any better than most people's. It's just that I get less-to-no enjoyment out of re-learning something, so instead I go learn something new. which means I have a stupendous amount of half-remembered, disjointed knowledge.
Pharyngula has been a pretty good tool for fixing that problem, since information here gets repeated (thank FSM for trolls!), but often in a new way, from a new perspective. so it doesn't bore me to have all this knowledge constantly reinforced. That's why the stuff I learn here actually sticks, whereas everything else usually doesn't (or only in small, random bits)
IOW, I'm a knowledge slut.
mostly, yes. something to get rid of that massive headache that's been plaguing me all day would help, too. and a magical dish-washing fairy.
'Tis Himself, OM @ 437:
I already planned on nominating Paul W. He more than deserves it.
Lots of candied lemon peel. Store in airtight jars and you've got a whole year's worth.
negentropyeater,
You could make lemon curd.
125 ml (1/2 cup) freshly-squeezed lemon juice
100 g (1/2 cup) sugar
2 large egg yolks
2 large eggs
pinch of salt
85 g (6 tbsp) unsalted butter, cubed
zest of 1 lemon
In a large bowl, beat the butter and sugar with an electric mixer for 2 min. Slowly add the eggs and yolks. Beat for 1 min. Mix in the salt and lemon juice. The mixture will look curdled, but it will smooth out as it cooks.
In a medium, heavy-based saucepan, cook the mixture over low heat until it looks smooth. (The curdled appearance disappears as the butter in the mixture melts.) Increase the heat to medium and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens, about 15 min. It should leave a path on the back of a spoon and will read 80°C (175°F) on a thermometer. Don't let the mixture boil.
Remove the curd from the heat; stir in the lemon zest. Transfer the curd to a bowl. Press plastic wrap on the surface of the lemon curd to keep a skin from forming and chill the curd in the refrigerator. The curd will thicken further as it cools. Covered tightly, it will keep in the refrigerator for a week and in the freezer for 2 months.
Janine wrote:
You got me - I can't; I don't have YouTube access from this PC. I just calculated the probability that anyone else would have written a song about Casimiar Pulaski that would be on YouTube and found it quite low - so I ran with the assumption that it was the Sufjan Stephens song.
I'll have a look/listen when I'm at home and can actually view it.
Will anthropomorphic singing animals do?
Along with this helpful organic molecule.
he's probably gonna get mollified with the January molly, so you'll have to find someone else to nominate for February.
Trouble-Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions
well, look at that. David is in that clip, pretending to be a deer.
Rev, you said you'd
I can't help with what they were cooking, but I have some family documents from 100 years ago that shed some light on the ingredients. My grand-parents were sharecroppers in NW Georgia and they 'shopped' at a store owned by my great-grandfather. I've got the store account book, so for the month of May 1910 the total food purchases were:
100 pounds of flour
16 pounds of sugar
6 1/2 pounds fish
2 1/2 pounds of cheese
3 1/2 pounds of coffee
1 gal syrup
1 bushel meal
2 (?) salmon
Total cost $12.20, settled up at harvest time.
What they did with it is anyone's guess, but I'm thinking that biscuits and cornbread played a big role. Since they didn't buy meat or lard I'm also assuming that they butchered their own hogs in the fall.
The Foxfire books are one of the best sources I've run across for details on how people in the rural, southern Appalachians lived. You can see more here.
llewelly,
thx for the recipie.
Lemon jalapeno jam ? sounds nice, any recipie you can recommend ?
And, Yes, I'm looking for ideas that make use of lots of lemons and can be stored. I got 30 Kg of lemons, so you see what I mean.
And there's no hope giving them to friends and neighbours ,they also have stacks of lemons. In the nearby town of Menton, it was last week the lemon festival, where entire streets and floats are laden with lemons and oranges.
'Tis,
how do you eat lemon curd ? like a jam ? Or is it more like a cream ?
neg: do you want my recipe for limoncello?
You could make...more liqueur, only with the pulp of the lemons. Unfortunately, I eye-ball the quantities, and therefore don't have a recipe as such, but I do know that the big jar I use (something like 5 1/2 qt.) takes 22-24 lemon innards, kinda chopped up. (Aside; when I first did this, on the fly, it never occurred to me that you could use the peel of the lemons, so I peeled them suckers. Lemons, unlike oranges and tangerines, resent being peeled. Bitterly. It took hours.) I then added some nebulous amount of vodka, about a cup of honey, and a cinnamon stick, and set the jar in the closet for 3 months. I suspect that it doesn't really need that long, but the reviews have been very favorable, so I figure it ain't broke.
And I also vote for Paul W. for Molly.
Anybody has some ideas what to do with lemons? I just harvested my two lemon trees and have stacks of beautiful juicy non treated fruits.
Gelato
Lemon Tarts
Lemon preserves
candied lemons
Take one bag of lemons and make whatever lemony shit everyone here thinks you should. Take the other bag out to a softball diamond and get your fruit game on with some friends. Hitting a lemon with a softball bat is a sublime pleasure that few have ever enjoyed.
A thread about penises and now lemon recipes.
SQUEEZE ME BABY, TILL THE JUICE RUNS DOWN MY LEG!
Someone had to do it.
negentropyeater | March 1, 2010 8:48 PM:
I wish. Now and then I have a craving for it, but I've not yet encountered a recipe, and I don't know enough about jams to devise my own recipe.
The times I've made lemon curd it's like a super thick pudding - useful in tarts, or larger pies, or as a layer in bar cookies, or in cream puffs.
Maybe you could adapt a lemon-ginger marmalade recipe to use jalapenos instead of ginger?
Lemon curd is great on biscuits, crackers, and breads of all sorts. I can't seem to find it around my area (northern Piedmont region of NC); had no trouble up in New England.
SC @ 425,
Ah, them were the good times !!!
Doesn't look like he needs anyone campaigning for him...:-)
As to Music, I just had a look, and there is about 20 Gb or so, but in day-to-day life I only listen to maybe 5% of that ever, and mostly the same stuff, except for in the morning when hungover, then I usually pick a trance or groove internet radio station, but I wont know or care about band's names.I know who Lady Gaga is, but thats about it, in terms of contemporary music.
The Redhead recently served some lemon curd as a topping for gingerbread. I liked it better than whipped cream.
Have to offtopic vent: for economic reasons I'm taking some college classes. Taking an intro class on childhood education. Worst textbook Evah.
Anyway this is the second written assignment: after doing the readings "the student will determine which theory-based body of knowledge most closely coincides with his or her personal beliefs as it pertains to how children, grow, and develop."
Beliefs? What? I try not to 'believe' anything. "Based on some stuff I just made up, Freud is right...blah blah blah.??? Is this typical for Education...um education? I am just flabbergasted.
/end soapbox
For your patience in reading: the best chocolate pie that is good for you.
Thanks to Alton Brown over a food network:
* 2 cups chocolate chips,
* 1/3 cup coffee liqueur
* 1 block silken tofu
* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
* 1 tablespoon honey
* 1 prepared chocolate wafer crust
Directions
Place a small metal bowl over a saucepan with simmering water. Melt the chocolate and coffee liqueur in the bowl. Stir in vanilla.
Combine the tofu, chocolate mixture, and honey in the blender jar. Liquefy until smooth.
Pour the filling into the crust and refrigerate for 2 hours, or until the filling is set.
Lemon curd: spread it on toast or English muffins.
SHAKER LEMON PIE
From “Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken” by Ronni Lundy
2 thin-skinned and juicy lemons*
2 cups white sugar
4 eggs
2 crusts for a 9 inch pie
Wash lemons, cut off knobs. Slice in half lengthwise, remove white pith from center, and discard seeds. Lay the lemon half, pulp side down, on cutting board and using a knife that will cut thin, slice the lemons into paper thin slivers.
Put lemon slices and their juice in a glass or ceramic bowl and pour sugar in, mixing the two together until every shred of lemon is coated with sugar. Cover and let sit at room temperature for at least 3 hours. If you let the lemons sit overnight, refrigerate and bring them back to room temperature the next day before proceeding.
Preheat over to 450 degrees. Put one crust in bottom of pie pan. Break eggs into small bowl and beat until buttery yellow but not foamy. Blend eggs with lemon and sugar until all is mixed well and pour into pie crust. Top with second crust, trimming and crimping it closed, then slashing several air vents.
Bake for 15 minutes, then reduce heat to 375 degrees and bake for 20 minutes more, or until knife blade inserted near the edge comes out clean. Remove from oven and let cool thoroughly before slicing.
* Recipe doesn’t specify Meyers, but they’re perfect for this pie.
Not many lemons but it's really really good
Moroccan-style preserved-lemons recipe coming up; Joe's typing it up. Easy to do.
Also: I make lemon simple syrup, and comb9ine the leftover rinds from that the a preserved lemon, half-and-half and chopped fine together, as a fast and nifty relish for lamb and such.
PZ: Shoo fly pie is lethally sweet.
Joe's is less sweet than his pecan pie, and/but deeply brown. So to speak. Wet-bottom of course. He uses a recipe from Edna Eby Heller IIRC. Best with coffee; some of us have it for breakfast. Recipe on request.
You didn't mention scrapple.
Mmmmmm, scrapple. And haggis. And boudin. Gawd I'm a cheap date.
I have no idea WTF is going on with Laden but I'd saw off my own head before I'd admit to being his editor. I read that post three times and still have only the vaguest idea what he was trying to write about. Honest to rocks, what offended me most was the insult to the language.
I third the rec of the Foxfire books.
The thing about Graanychow is that we don't have to stop eating/cooking it to enjoy everyone else's Grannychow. Three meals a day, 365/year... Lots of opportunities there. You should see our cookbook shelves. (I got a Rumanian cookbook the other day just because we didn't have one. What grabbed me is that the Rumanian word for "carp" is "crap.")
NORTH AFRICAN LEMON PRESERVE
(Meyers are perfect for this)
Put 2 tsp coarse salt in a scalded Kilner or Parfait jar. Holding a lemon over a plate to catch the juice, and using a sharp, stainless-steel knife, cut lengthways as if about to halve the fruit, but do not cut quite through—leave the pieces joined. Ease out any pips. Pack 1 tbsp salt into the cuts, then close them and put in the jar. Repeat with more lemons, packing them tightly and pressing each layer down hard before adding the next layer, until the jar is full.
Squeeze the juice of another lemon over the fruit. Sprinkle with more coarse salt and top up with boiling water to cover the fruit. Close the jar tightly and keep in a warmish place for 3-4 weeks. Do not worry if, on longer storage, a lacy white film appears on top of the jar or on the lemons, this is quite harmless, and rinses off easily.
Option: A mixture of 1 stick of cinnamon, 3 cloves, 6 crushed coriander seeds, 3 black peppercorns, and 1 bay leaf can be layered with the lemons.
Once the jar has been opened the lemons will keep for up to a year, out of the refrigeration, but a layer of olive oil floated on the surface will help to preserve their freshness.
Source: Hilaire Walden, “North African Cooking”
The firing squad trope made me recall the distinction between left-wing firing squads and right-wing firing squads. They're both circular; the difference is which way they're facing.
Oy. #467 was me.
One of these days I'll hunt down and slay a few of my Usenet ghosts.
In other news: Diamond Lil, the San Francisco webcam's peregrine, has laid two eggs.
The whole discussion on the RDF thread about material for future historians got me wondering. Centuries from now will some poor historian be reading through this endless thread to examine the early Pharyngula movement? Perhaps trying to find the earliest instances of Pharyngulistas pointing their computers towards Morris. Or trying to find out who was the author of "The Genesis of the Thread". Maybe they're documenting all the bacon-related humour.
To any future historians reading this I say 'hello'. How good is your knowledge of early 21st century internet culture? Are you aware of all internet traditions? If I said 'play him off keyboard cat', would you know what that meant? Are you now wondering if you are wasting your life reading material that was quite unimportant even in its own time? I don't think you are, but then again I've been dead for centuries (unless science discovers immortality in my lifetime *crosses fingers*).
I have many questions about the future. Are humans joined with aliens in a united federation? Or are they the slaves of (other) apes? Do people swear in Chinese? However, it appears this communication is one way. Anyway, on behalf of my contemporaries I apologize for ruining the environment for you guys just because we were too lazy to walk.
/brain broken from overuse
I don't think it's so much about internet history.
But think of how many people use Pharyngula to educate themselves outside their own field of study, and the same I guess was true for the RD forums(I didnt read there much).
A lot of people have taken huge amounts of time to write comment posts that hundrets of people use to inform and educate themselves about a wide variety of topics, and I think that accumulated knowledge and wisdom is worth preserving.
I hadnt read anything useful outside my own field since graduating in medicine really, and I painfully realised that after coming here, and now have a library full of science and other books, plus almost 3 years worth of reading here, and I can only imagine how it must have been for other people, coming here or to RDF.
Ah, this has to be shared :
Article about the Secular Coalition visiting the White House
Check this out, from the comments :
*Priceless*
facepalm
Do idiots like these even read, anything (even their own bible)?
Gyeong Hwa Pak, where did that come from?
The quote or my reaction?
The quote came from Rorschach who quoted an a commenter who was outraged that the administration would acknowledge the existance of people without religion.
My reaction was normal.
I must be tired, I missed that completely. Once more, I wish I could delete my more clueless comments. Also, I meant the quote.
Don't these fools know that soil is the result if billions of organisms? Even in my current mental fog, their ignorant questions offends me.
Being shit stoopid was God's plan for them.
So tired. . .(damn research)
I wish I could at once recieve the benefits of sleeping and do the effects of walking.
I was listening to the radio earlier today, and they had a vet on telling me that 1 in 5 pets("like humans")have a mental illness. Apparently there is a new drug out that combats "canine compulsive disorder".
I headdesked and facepalmed, and then wondered about the broader philosophical implications.....I guess dogs and cats have a neocortex, and can have neurotransmitter disturbances, but mental illness, really ?
Doesnt a mental illness require a "mens" in the first place ?
I'm curious what people here think about this.
Sounds like there's at least one vet out there that has a mental illness. Got anthropomorphism?
(not to say that other animals can't suffer from mental illness - just sounds like something a crank would pull out of his arse in order to sell a product)
From reading other threads, it seems the 'endless thread' has become the place to post random questions to the group, and I've had this one for a long time. Please stop me anywhere along the chain where I've heard/understood wrong:
I've been told that Darwin suggested increased sexual dimorphism was adaptive, and that humans, among other species, were increasing in sexual dimorphism. I'm not sure how that could happen unless the genes that express all of the characteristics (physical, mental, emotional) identified with gender were all on the Y chromosome, or something like that. Let's say, for example, that human males are becoming more burly and human females are becoming more graceful. If a burly male and a graceful female mate, wouldn't all of their children of both genders have both burly and graceful characteristics? And wouldn't that tend to reduce sexual dimorphism, even if sexual selection seemed to encourage it? I must be missing something, and I bet someone here will be able to tell me what it is. I guess I'm most interested in this argument as it pertains to emotional/mental characteristics, as I've heard people argue that women are becoming, for example, more innately submissive as men become more innately dominant because that's what mates are selecting for.
As far as my understanding goes, the Y chromosome doesn't really have much on it. Rather the difference is on the X chromosome. For women, the gene has to be on both copies of the X chromosome while for men whatever X they inherit is what they get*. So as I was told by the lady who sequenced the platypus genome, genes on the X are more likely to be expressed in men and thus dimorphism.
*this is probably a very simplistic way to put it, and probably wrong. Best to check this claim out.
neddy-s,
I'm sure someone will give you a more coherent answer in due course but, until they all wake up, check out Gregor Mendel on wikipedia. (And the link towards the foot of the page on Mendelian Inheritance.)
Sometimes I hate the 3-comment rule PZ.
Rorschach,
Are you interested in anecdata? Is dementia a mental illness?
My last dog had an rather dramatic personality change accompanied by strange behaviors as she aged. She would bark at things that no one else could see when before, she never barked at all. Sometimes she would behave as though she didn't know where she was. She developed a compulsive chewing problem, but she only chewed the edges of doors. It was very strange.
On a more general note, I don't see any reason a non-human animal couldn't develop some of the symptoms of mental illness such as auditory and visual hallucinations.
Zoo animals are well-known for developing "stereotyped behaviors," but those are a result of stress. One would have to know whether the behavior was a result of mental illness caused by stress, I guess.
Deep breaths, Rorschach! Deep breaths!
Until it is shown how genes affect this behaviour and that they are being selected for (it seems a very bare assertion claim), it's best to avoid such anecdotal offerings. That there is dimorphism is one thing, to extend from that to the emotional is playing a dangerous game - and using evolutionary psychology as a basis for this only serves to denigrate evolutionary theory.
Ask yourself: are men getting more dominant? Are women getting more submissive? How does this express itself in genes? Which genes lead to this behaviour? What environmental factors are causing this? Otherwise you're writing yourself a post hoc explanation which is based on nothing more than sheer conjecture.
Well, genes carried on the X-chromosome are sex-linked leading to disproportionate expression of recessive traits in males. There's a whole host of other genes that are carried on the autosomes (all of the chromosomes except the X and Y) that are sex-influenced. The presence and concentration of sex hormones influences the expression of a trait. Many forms of baldness are sex-influenced. High concentrations of testosterone mean a greater expression of the trait.
Many primate species exhibit high levels of sexual dimorphism. For instance, male gorillas are about twice the size of females. Female gorilla skulls are much more gracile than their male counterparts too. Baboons and mandrills have very high levels of sexual dimorphism in size and pigmentation.
My understanding of developmental biology is that most of the sexual dimorphism in primates (I'm not going to generalize outside of this order because I simply don't know that much about the others) is caused by high concentrations of male sex hormones. Female is the "default" body configuration. So, selection for larger males and (relatively) smaller females clearly happens and it's because of the way gene expression is influenced by the environment, in this case the concentration of sex hormones.
I'm going to stop now. I'm very familiar with sexual dimorphism among the great apes/humans, but I've not investigated enough into how it comes about.
Oh, somehow I missed that last paragraph.
Ack! I'll second what Kell, OM said. There's several huge problems here. First, we need objective evidence that women, on average, are becoming more submissive, which would require a standardized definition of submissive and what behaviors/thought patterns reflect "submissiveness." Then we'd have to do the same thing for men and dominant.
After that, the link between these two particular behavioral repertoires and specific genes would have be investigated. If such a link was found, we would then need to show how the genes are expressed differently in males and females, and finally there would need to be a demonstration that genes for female submissiveness and male dominance were increasing in frequency through time which would indicate selection for such traits.
Also, why in the world would males be the primary ones doing the selecting. In many species, females have many mating options, so they tend to be picky. The idea the females respond to selection by males, and not the other way around is antiquated; just look at peacocks/peahens.
To summarize, the assertion you heard is laughable because there's no evidence to back it up.
It is according to the DSM-IV .
I'm just not sure what say, schizophrenia would be like for a dog, they obviously won't be hearing god in their ear telling them to kill their mother, or think the TV news is a secret message to them.
Why is there a troll trying to make the argument that all gender characteristics come from the X or Y chromosome? What is the troll's point?
Yeah, tell me about it !!
As I said, damn the 3 comment rule ! :-)
Rorschach, I think it is more of a suggestion instead of a rule. Sick 'em!
Janine, yeah but I would have to read up on sexual dimorphism, and I'd rather keep playing guitar for the moment...:-)
Rorschach,
Thanks, I'm too tired to even use google right now :)
I guess part of the question is whether we consider mental illness as only the physical problems like low levels of serotonin or what have you, or is the diagnosis of mental illness dependent on the sentience of the patient. Does the patient have to be aware that they have a "mind*" in order for their "mind" to be sick.
As for a schizophrenic dog, I don't really know what would happen to a dog that had hallucinations. It would probably be weird. I'm pretty sure though that 20% of our pets are not mentally ill in a way that impacts their quality of life.
* I put mind in quotes because brain doesn't really seem to fit here, but mind feels kinda fuzzy to me.
Rorschach
I was always taught when I was nursing that mental illness fell into two (very broad and generalist) categories (albeit thay can and do often overlap). There was reactive type mental illness ie the illnesses that are respondent to certain situations or ie PTSD, Post Natal Depression etc and the illnesses that there was a gentic disposition to ie "general" depression, schizophrenia, OCD etc.
I'm wondering whether this holds true (indeed if it's true at all for humans- maybe someone out there with a background in mental health can clarify?) for other mammals and whether any studies have been done on this.
Fascinating question, isnt it !! Do you have to be self-aware to be "mentally ill". And I'm not talking about a dog or cat being held in the laundry without any place to run and hunt and play and do dog and cat things getting sad here....
Anyway, I thought that was interesting, I think what the CCD thing is really, is a great way to sell antidepressants to pets and get rich with it.
Rorschach,
I think you just hit the nail on the head. On that note, I'm going to head off to bed.
Pygmy Loris | March 2, 2010 3:20 AM:
No. A brain, however high or low its computing power, is capable of malfunction, and thus of being ill. This is true whether it has the right structures for self-awareness or not. It's like asking whether an eye that cannot see 3 primary colors (but, say, only 1 or 2) can have cataracts.
What "3-comment rule"? I've never even heard of it. Is that like the 3-revert rule on Wikipedia?
Well the one by which we are meant to show leniency to stupid first and second comments, and only murder them after the third attempt.
I dont like it, in case you wonder LOL
The one upthread seems to have been a drive-by anyway.