Author: Gil

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Black Coffee in Bed

Jane Galt has written about plenty of important topics these last few years, but none as important as Best Practices for Coffeemaking. It’s a subject near and dear to my heart, especially since I recently moved back to paper filters after two years using a gold filter. We recently bought a new coffeemaker, because Amy concluded that having coffee waiting for her when she wakes up is never a bad thing, and the old one wasn’t programmable.

Despite my issues with buying products from German companies, I went back to the Krups well on this one. They haven’t done me wrong yet, and this new model’s been working out okay. But the big change, as I mentioned, is tossing out the gold filter and going back to paper. This was supposed to be a temporary measure, but I’ve been pretty happy with the coffee in the morning, so I’m sticking with it. Also, contra Galt, this new machine has a built-in water filter. I may take up her suggestion and get a Brita pitcher.

Which brings me to my #1 suggestion for good coffeemaking: get good coffee. This means whole bean, and not the Starbucks beans at your supermarket. For me, the best affordable stuff ($7.99/lb.) is the Kenya AA “Out of Africa” beans I get at Chef Central. When I wanna splurge, I head into NYC for Porto Rico Importing Co. and buy Hawaiian Kona ($24.95/lb.).

In the afternoons, I have a second dose of the stuff. I make this with a French press mug from Bodum (which they don’t seem to make anymore, according to their site). My coworkers goof on the devotion I have to making this stuff (“You actually grind coffee in the morning and bring it to work?”), but I believe that life is too short for coffee that comes out of a prefilled bag from a “drinks station”.

(At a conference & trade show in Paris in October, some exhibitors had complimentary coffee for attendees. This was my first experience with pod-style coffee, and it’s a poor substitute; trust me.)

So get good beans, grind your own either the night before or in the morning, and maybe use filtered water. And you can go too crazy trying to get “the perfect cup”. As one of the commenters on Jane Galt’s site put it:

The problem with increasing one’s level of coffee snobbery too far, is the same as the problem with wines, home audio, or any other hobby that deals with diminishing returns: the increase in required investment (time, money, or frequently both) to go to the next level of enjoyment, begins to far exceed the marginal return from doing so.

(One major caveat I need to make: I take my coffee black. I’m pretty sure I adopted this style because it reduced the amount of variables that go into preparing the stuff. This way, I only have to deal with the quality of the beans, the water, and the coffeemaker. No worries about the milk being off, or having the wrong kind of sweetener available. Maybe I also drink it this way to avoid the chemicals and/or calories in the additives. Or I’m just all hardcore and shit.

The point is: my best practices for coffeemaking need to be balanced against this bizarre predilection I have. Similarly, never trust me with any issues involving alcohol.)

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Not Feeling the Pynch

I’m in between books right now. This condition never lasts long, but it’s strange that it’s happening just now. See, there’s a new book out by an author who used to be my fave, but I’m not interested in reading it, and I’m not sure why that is.

Last week, I stopped by a nearby bookstore and took a look at the new novel by Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day. I used to consider myself a devotee of his books, but I was surprised to find that I had little interest in buying this one. This is a marked change from the winter of 1990, when I got out of a (barely) moving car to run into a B.Dalton’s after seeing the newly published Vineland in the window. There was even some bating of my breath in 1997 when Mason & Dixon was released. Now? Bupkes.

It’s not because of an aversion to long / involved books (AtD is nearly 1100 pages); I just finished a 600-page exploration of the history and meaning of the mourner’s kaddish, worked my way through a 1200-page biography of Robert Moses last summer, and read Proust’s opus in the spring of 2005.

The problem (I think) stems from a short work by Pynchon: his introduction to a recent edition of George Orwell’s 1984. I read the intro a few weeks ago, and was amazed by how much Pynchon came off as an aging hippie who was trading off his old licks. Pynchon’s attempted hijacking of 1984 to tacitly denounce the Bush administration read as something far less nuanced than I’d come to expect from the writer. This, of course, led me to suspect that I was too kind in my past readings of Pynchon’s work, but I haven’t gone back to check.

(A gentleman named Mark Ciocco summed up pretty nicely some of his problems with Pynchon’s 1984 intro in a post and a followup) on his blog a few years ago.)

So, by the time this new book saw print, and the first review (from a right-wing newspaper) mentioned the cardboard-ness of The Bad Guys in the novel, it struck me that maybe I’m just too old for Pynchon’s whole Merry Prankster / anarchist counterforce approach, in which the doomed valiant create chaos just about for its own sake, with the corollary belief that order is inherently evil. Or maybe he’s too old to see the present era with the vivacity of his earlier work. Or maybe he’s still writing allegories of the struggle against Nixon.
I’m rambling, which you’re used to by now. I’m trying to convey this suspicion I have that, despite all the gorgeous, Rilkean prose and labyrinths of symbolism he broke out in Gravity’s Rainbow, and all the intricate, encapsulated plotting of The Crying of Lot 49, and even the wondrous camaraderie he evoked between Mason and Dixon, this guy may be a burned-out wreck who complains about The Government, Big Business, Dehumanizing Technology, and other embarrasingly obvious targets.

Driving home tonight, I heard a song by the Who on my Sirius radio. I hadn’t heard Cry if You Want in a bazillion years, and my first thought was, “Man, Kenny Jones was a boring drummer.” But then there were the lyrics, which feel apropos:

Don’t you want to hide your face
When going through your teenage books
And read the kind of crap you wrote
About “Ban the Bomb” and city crooks

So I’m back where I started: between books. I’d start Ron Rosenbaum’s Shakespeare book, but I’m flying soon (Toronto to visit a couple of clients) and I don’t want to carry a big hardcover with me. I could always follow Ron’s recent suggestion and start reading the Philip Kerr Berlin Noir omnibus. Choices, choices. . .

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Pray for change II

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve been out of the office for the past week-plus (except for Monday). When I have a big block of time available like that, I tend to put together a big-ass list of stuff that needs doing. One of the items on the list was cleaning off the console table.

The table is at the top of the stairs and is the first place small things get dumped upon entry into the house. It was covered in receipts, ATM slips, office memos, warranties, baseball caps, maps, Post-Its, and small change.

I made a couple of passes through the paperwork, dumping most everything in the shredder. Soon I was left only with a significant quantity of change. I dumped it on my desk and thought, “Well, as long as I’m clearing that stuff out, I oughtta get the change that’s been piling up in my car for the last 3 years, too.”

That was a little tougher, insofar as pennies and nickels were consigned to the cup-holder area, which left some of the coins at the bottom a little sticky. In fact, there’s still a penny that I simply am unable to pry from the cup-holder, but I guess that’s tribute to Charon or something.

On the other hand, the actual change-holder, which I use for quarters and dimes, turned out to be cavernous. Amy joked that I’m going to get better mileage and handling now that I’m not hauling a ton of loose change in the car.

So I looked at this enormous pile of change lying on my desk, and I thought, “Surely the time it’ll take me to count all this is worth more than the value of the coins.”

But my ethnic stereotype was undeterred. It took even longer than I feared, and put me in mind of being a little kid with a piggy-bank. Final count?

  • $5 in Sacajawea dollars
  • 1 50-cent piece (I also carry a “lucky” one in my wallet)
  • $1.71 in pennies ($1.72 if you include the one that’s permanently stuck to my car)
  • $4.00 in nickels
  • $18.70 in dimes
  • $23.25 in quarters
  • 25.60 Euros (about $33)
  • 64 Danish Kroner (about $11)
  • 400 Hungarian Forints (about 3 cents)

I don’t think there’s any sorta lesson I can impart from this, outside of “Don’t let your change pile up” or “Just use CoinStar, fer chrissakes.” My next challenge will be finding someone who can exchange the Euros and Kroner, since my local bank won’t touch foreign coins, only paper money.

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Pray for change

Sometimes, dear readers, simpler is better.

During my week away from the office, I spent a bunch of time working on rebuilding/redesigning this blog. Midway through the process, it occurred to me that this involved three tasks:

  1. Learning how the WordPress database system runs the site
  2. Learning how Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and plain old HTML display the site
  3. Doing the actual graphic design for the site

I picked up a bunch of tricks as part of 1) and 2), but I also found a template that I liked, which eliminated a chunk of 3). So I uploaded that and have been tweaking away at it all day. I’m trying to add a third column on the left, so as to redistribute some of the stuff that’s currently in the column on the right side of the page. At present, I’ve been stymied, but once I’m back at the office, I’ll be able to ask our IT guy for the incredibly simple thing that I’m overlooking.

Why did I want to get away from the old site? I was bored, and it was either this or spring $1,500 on a new MacBook. That said, I really like the cleanness of the site. I spent a while trying to figure out the right array of fonts to use, before I decided to visit a million different design-oriented websites and blogs. There, I realized that you just can’t go overboard with web-fonts, since it leaves the reader in the lurch if he doesn’t happen to have the right ones on his computer. So it’s Arial and Helvetica for you!

I may update that a little, or come up with some alternate fonts for different stylization purposes, but I’m pretty satisfied with the legibility of this layout. I’ll add a “change font size” function in the next few days, and will probably use a few more neat little WordPress add-ons, once I get that third column going.
Let me know what you think.

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Unrequired Reading: Nov. 24, 2006

It’s the Black Friday edition of Unrequired Reading, dear unreaders! Amy & I are skipping out on the shopping chaos, since we took care of a bunch of it during our Paris trip. Plus, what with these here internets, we can get plenty of holiday shopping done from the comfort of the old fainting couch! Without further ado:

Here’s a BW piece on how the Analog Meat Market is performing. No, it’s not an article about offline dating services, it’s about The Rise of Tofurky!

* * *

Michael Kinsley has decided that, because “the market” doesn’t set “the right price” for a share of stock in a company, capitalism is inherently flawed.

* * *

Poor Kinsley. If only the state could become more involved in determining how companies do business. Well, actually, there was significant legislation passed during the Clinton administration to “shame companies” into doing the president’s idea of the right thing:

Clinton’s brainstorm: Use the tax code to curb excessive pay. Companies at the time were allowed to deduct all compensation to top executives. Clinton wanted to permit companies to write off amounts over $1 million only if executives hit specified performance goals. He called [Graef Crystal, author of a book on corporate greed] for his thoughts. “Utterly stupid,” the consultant says he told the future President.

Now, 13 years after Clinton’s plan became law, the results are clear: It didn’t work. Over the law’s first decade, average compensation for chief executives at companies in Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index soared from $3.7 million to $9.1 million, according to a 2005 Harvard Law School study. The law contains so many obvious loopholes, says Crystal, that “in 10 minutes even Forrest Gump could think up five ways around it.”

* * *

Even when people try the old Robin Hood routine, it goes awry (thanks, Faiz)!

* * *

Charles Krauthammer doesn’t like Borat.

* * *

When I first saw the Beth Sholom Synagogue designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, I called it “Battlestar Judaica.” Here’s a piece about the architecture of houses of worship, which seems to be an excuse to post a sldeshow of neat photos.

* * *

I really need to sit down and read the Aeneid sometime.
* * *

I’ve long contended that Paul Allen has the anti-Midas touch, but I had no idea that his Portland Trailblazers have the most incredibly messed-up business situation in professional sports. This one’s long, but it makes for pretty entertaining reading, if only to find out that a man worth $22 billion should never come along with you to negotiate buying a car.
* * *

I don’t have any pity for car salesmen, esp. after the guy at the Mini place tried scamming Amy into buying a $550 stereo system. Looks like they’re under plenty of pressure.

* * *

And, in honor of Black Friday, a Christmas display you won’t forget (thanks, Tina).

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Thanks!

To all my American readers out there, happy Thanksgiving! Amy’s already started with the cooking, while I’m engaged in the traditional parsing of database structures of WordPress blogs. I plan to have the new look for the site up by Sunday, but I think Amy’s bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with goat cheese will turn out better.

Have a great day, and if you’re celebrating with family, show ’em some love.

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You know how I know YOU’RE gay?

On Friday, I said these things:

a) “Madonna’s new album is pretty good!” (except for the talking parts)

b) “I really need to get that new Scissor Sisters record!” (sorry I didn’t get to them sooner, Tina)

Anyway, I’m out of the office till Monday, so it’s time to get about 10 million things done around the house. I’m hoping to give this site a facelift, so if you have trouble logging in during the next few days, try back later.

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Too marvelous for words

In the new City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple lays a whomping on Steven Pinker’s theory of language development. Dalrymple being Dalrymple, he draws out the moral implications of Pinker’s theory:

The contrast between a felt and lived reality — in this case, Pinker’s need to speak and write standard English because of its superior ability to express complex ideas — and the denial of it, perhaps in order to assert something original and striking, is characteristic of an intellectual climate in which the destruction of moral and social distinctions is proof of the very best intentions.

Given that Dad’s english isn’t among his top two languages, and that my first writing influence was Stan Lee, I’m pretty amazed that this site isn’t filled with pages of fragmented alliteration. Fortunately, I had Mom (and Chris Claremont).

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Cat, cradle, spoon, etc.

Yesterday at lunch, I read some more of Kaddish. The book doesn’t focus too heavily on the writer’s father — I mean, it’s not a Mitch Albom schmalzfest or anything — but it does get me thinking a lot about Dad and what went through during his heart surgery in spring 2005.

I gave my dad a call after lunch, and we shot the breeze for a little while. He filled me in on the Premiership soccer package he gets on satellite, his cardiologist’s advice that he get a defibrillator installed, and how he’s getting his gutters cleaned for $70.

I let him know about some of the goings-on at home. One piece of news that he didn’t know about was that Amy bought a new car. Dad lent us his 1993 Cherokee last spring; Amy drives it down to the bus stop and back each day, a 2-mile round trip and, while it’s not quite on its last legs, it is getting pretty old.

“Now that she’s saved up,” I told Dad, “she’s getting a Mini Cooper S.”

“That’s great!” he said. “How much did you get for the Cherokee?”

“What? The Cherokee? . . . Pop, we didn’t sell your car.”

And that’s when it struck me: my brother & I are going to have a tough time keeping a straight face reading that mourner’s kaddish someday.

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Underworld evolution

If you’re like me (fate worse than etc.), you revel in the amazing subway stations in foreign countries. Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best intro to this article about making art from metro stops:

Building beautiful metro stations isn’t just a chance for cities to show off. It also provides valuable exposure for up-and-coming local artists and architects, giving them a chance to bring their work to the masses. “Artists have a captive audience,” says Edward Barber, director of programs at the London College of Fashion, who has been involved in the city’s Platform for Art initiative.

The accompanying slideshow has a pic of one of my faves: the Arts et Metiers stop in Paris, which looks like Jules Verne’s Nautilus.

(Bonus: my pics of the metro stop in Brussels decorated with a massive mural by Herge)