trogon

09:40 am: North American megafauna
Now:



Back in the day:



Way back in the day:

05:55 pm: Roddenberry would have loved this
Astronauts watching the new Star Trek movie, FROM SPACE.

http://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/real-live-astronauts-are-watching-star-trek-in-outer-space-right-now/

(I haven't seen it yet. Please don't discuss the content of the new movie in comments here.)

09:00 am: Iowa???
So Iowa, of all places, has become the third state where marriage equality is currently the law of the land, beating both Vermont and New Hampshire (where measures are making their way through the state legislatures) to the punch. I hereby apologize for every Iowa joke I ever made as a kid growing up in South Dakota.

Not that this will matter for anyone reading this, but I'd urge any gay Iowans considering marriage to (1) remember you're on a deadline, and that if Prop 8 is any guide marriages that predate a constitutional amendment may be allowed to stand, and (2) (and this one goes for straight allies in Iowa, too) take your opponents seriously, and don't fall victim to the complacency that some Californians did of thinking "it could never pass".

05:27 pm: Um.
From a Washington Post article about the new White House garden:

With the Obamas as role models, it could also be a turning point in their battle to overturn the perception of organic food, farmers markets and gardens as the preserve of the elite.

If the President of the United States isn't "elite", who the hell is? I think this is a great idea, but I find that sentence utterly baffling.

04:11 pm: Look what I made

10:48 am: Also
As I remarked to L-M last night, this is the first time since I've been able to vote that not only did the guy I voted for for win (which happened the first time I voted in a Presidential election, for Clinton's second term) but the guy I voted for in the primary won. And the first time in a long while that I got to vote FOR someone instead of AGAINST someone. It was a nice feeling.

07:27 pm: I am a real American.
I am a real American.

I'm a lesbian, newly and happily married to my wife though we've been together for almost 8 years.

I'm an atheist.

I have a PhD in astronomy.

I live in California.

I eat sushi, enjoy the occasional latte, and read the New York Times.

And I am every bit as much a real American as Joe the Plumber, either the real Republican shill or the non-existant construct, or as my late and much-missed grandmother, who lived most of her life on a farm or in a tiny town in rural South Dakota and who always went to church except when she was caring for my grandfather in his last years.

And I am getting really, really tired of Republicans saying that because of my choice of newspapers, or my religious beliefs, or my taste in coffee, that somehow I am not a real American. They don't get to define that word.

05:17 pm: Data love, again
Via Bitch PhD comes a lovely and exceedingly geeky electoral-college and poll-watching site, Five Thirty Eight (named, of course, for the total number of electoral votes.)

I love it.

So far, I really love this post, about the Bradley Effect and the so-called "Reverse Bradley Effect" (summary -- the former doesn't exist anymore. The latter -- Obama substantially outperforming his polls, in a way correlating with African-American population -- appears to, but only in the South), and this one which is a real thing of beauty analyzing the potential effects of increased turnout among young and African-American voters.

05:42 pm: It's about time.

10:43 am: WOO HOO!
The CA Supreme Court just ruled that the law banning same-sex marriages is unconstitutional.

CA already has a good DP law, so this is specifically repudiating the separate-but-equal status of DP or civil unions -- the legislature isn't going to be able to get away with that here.

More later. Reading decision now.

05:31 pm: Things younger than McCain
http://www.thingsyoungerthanmccain.com/

"Dirt" is not on the list. The Golden Gate Bridge, Cheerios, and both of Barack Obama's parents are, however.

12:25 pm: Data love
The NYT had an amazing graph today on the breakdown of spending of the average American household:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/05/03/business/20080403_SPENDING_GRAPHIC.html

You can zoom in to find that, for example, the average household spends 0.3% of their income on beer at home, and 0.5% on alcohol (not further subdivided) away from home, or that while the price of eggs has skyrocketed in the past year the prices of fresh vegetables has gone down sharply.

SO COOL.

10:48 am: Not content with going after street vendors of Sonoran hot dogs, the City of Angels has turned its sights on an even more iconic institution, the taco truck.

Bastards.

10:05 am: Six Maasai warriors from Tanzania are running (by now, probably have run) in the London Marathon to raise money for clean drinking water for their village. Currently 40% of children in their village die before the age of five because of the water. It doesn't get much more elemental than this.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/7338122.stm

This being the 21st century, they of course have a website and a PayPal account:

http://www.maasaimarathon.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=c_pages.showPage&pageID=1

Help them meet their goal, and please spread this around. Just remember the donation is in pounds (basically $2 = 1 pound right now), so you don't end up donating twice what you expected.

12:50 pm: Anyone job-hunting?
I have specifically been asked if I know anyone looking for a job at Hooray!. The position I was asked about is here in Burbank and I know the team is a good bunch, but we're also getting extra referral bonuses for any position at any Hooray location. So ping me if you're at all interested or know someone who is.

09:06 am: 2008 New Recipe #10: Potato Tacos
Yeah, we've been a bit negligent lately.

Last night's new yummy was potato tacos. Details of the recipe mostly invented.

A bunch of potatoes
Two small red peppers
Half a large onion (I should have used the whole thing)
Crema or sour cream
Two chipotles from a can of chipotles in adobo
Queso fresco
Peruvian yellow pepper sauce, or salsa
Avocado

Corn tortillas

Chop and boil the potatoes. While they're cooking, roast the red peppers and finely chop and saute the onion. Once the peppers are roasted and you've removed the skins, chop finely and mix with the onion. When the potatoes are done, coarsely mash them by hand -- a pastry cutter works FABULOUSLY for this -- and stir in the peppers and onions. Add some crema and the finely chopped chipotles. I should have added salt at this point, too.

Put a big spoonful of the filling onto a tortilla, then add a little queso fresco and some sauce. We used an astonishingly yellow Peruvian pepper sauce, sort of like something we'd had with potatoes at the Peruvian restaurant in Tucson, that looked amazingly like French's yellow mustard. Close up your taco, and cook it in a frying pan with a little bit of oil. Serve with sliced avocado and hot sauce.

We had a ton of filling left over, but fortunately we have lots of tortillas left over too.

L-M says these were as good as the potato tacos we had at a taco joint nearby. I'm flattered.

04:27 pm: Spreading a word
I realized that I have not yet blogged about the extreme usefulness of a word L-M and I coined several months back.

The word is "helpy", a backformation from the also-coined "helpiness", which was created by analogy to "truthiness"; the analogy should make the meaning fairly clear.

Something which is helpy has the outward appearances of being helpful, while not actually being at all helpful and usually being actively detrimental. Ever baked cookies with an enthusiastic three-year-old, and noticed that the more the three-year-old did to "help" the more work it meant for you? The three-year-old was being "helpy".

L-M's sister has already started using the word. This word actually serves a useful purpose -- spread the joy. I'd love to see it become popular.

I'm leaving this post unlocked just so there's a record on the off chance it DOES take off.

09:02 am: Jitlada Thai: Respect the Curry
All right, chileheads.

Once you've been out to San Gabriel to have the chicken at Chung King, the next trip to LA should include a swing in to Thai Town for Jitlada Thai, which has very hot and very good Southern Thai food. (Well, mine was very good. livewire_monkey was less impressed with hers.)

No review of Jitlada would be complete without telling the story:

( The Story )

Jonathan Gold's review is here, and his list of the top ten dishes in LA in 2007, including one from Jitlada, is here.
(On an unrelated note, I adore that that list juxtaposes a hole-in-the-wall taco stand, Spago (one of those insanely expensive Famous People restaurants), and a donut shop.)

( The Food: )

09:02 am: 2008 New Recipe #3: Middle Eastern Savory Pies
This is a bit of a placeholder since I don't have the cookbook at hand and can't actually transcribe the recipe.

#3: Middle eastern Savory Pies from Sanaa Abourezk's "Secrets of Healthy Middle Eastern Cooking".

Some of the best Middle Eastern food I have ever eaten is from a restaurant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It's run by a Cordon Bleu-trained chef married to a former senator, and somehow it's in South Dakota. When I learned that the chef and owner had a *cookbook* I pounced on it.

Then I gave our copy to my mom for Christmas and couldn't find a replacement for a year since it was out of print, but that's another story.

Anyway these are from Sanaa's cookbook. L-M made these -- she made basically everything for the Middle Eastern munchies party we had on Sunday.

One recipe "pie dough" (basically enough for two big loaves of bread -- a yeast dough with eight cups of flour) made enough of these for ten people with lots of other munchies and lots of leftovers.

Each of the two pie recipes we made -- the tomato/feta and the spinach -- called for half a recipe of dough, divided into little balls and rolled flat.

Tomato-feta pie:
1 cup diced tomato
8 oz. feta
oregano
salt

Combine and put on the dough circles, then close up.

Spinach pie:

2 lbs. fresh spinach, chopped
2 medium onions, chopped
1 cup pomegranate seeds
sumac

The recipe didn't have you cook this beforehand, but I did. Combine and put on the dough circles, then close up.

I have no recollection whatsoever of how long these baked, but they were GOOD.

Tags: new recipe

11:47 am: Digital camera recommendations
I'm going to buy a digital camera, and I'm looking for suggestions. (I know about and am using Dave's Picks, but I'd like more personal stuff as well.) I suspect nobody will have experience with exactly the type I'm looking for but general brand-level stuff would be helpful as well.

I'm more concerned with optical zoom than with megapixels; my main use would be to take pictures of birds when I'm out birding, so I'm looking at the 10x (and up) optical zoom models. Besides, past about "Burst mode" would be nice, as would the ability to take AA batteries. Almost all the models in this category have image stabilization, which is essential at the long-zoom modes. It looks like the market is dominated by Panasonic, Canon, and Olympus. The Panasonics sound nice but require expensive proprietary batteries which may be a deal-breaker. Anyone have anything to say, positive or negative, about the other brands?