Accelerated Decrepitude

Entropy, in case you didn’t know, is the default state of the universe. It means that, left to its own devices, any state will tend towards decay, randomness, and ultimately dissolution into the building blocks that formed it.

Ice will melt, the lettuce will rot, you’ll get fat.

Well, my kitchen has been hewing mightily to the entropic paradigm for nigh on thirteen years, and recently I decided to arrest its rapidly devolving development on multiple macromolecular fronts by clearing its entire innards to another similarly-afflicted entropic sinkhole of the house and just, well, starting the process all over again, this time from the Organized end of the spectrum.

That meant clearing every item out of every cabinet; every glass off every shelf; every decade-old box half-full of couscous; and then, the rampant, semi-vigilantic debridement of any physical object in the kitchen that I did not deem essential to its holistic welfare.

And boy, does that all feel good!

I cleared out all the cabinets. Amazing what piles up, and amazing what you think you will need someday. I found probably 50 hard taco shells in various forms of preservation, for one thing. It’s Old El Paso’s fault, not mine. Who eats 15 fucking taco shells at a sitting? And who eats tacos two nights in a row? Well, I do, but I vary it with flour tortillas the second night.

Then there were the pastas. Half-filled boxes of Barilla penne lisce and rigate, masking-taped incomplete boxes of spaghettini and linguine fini, soup macaronis, farfalles, rigatonis, manicottis, tortellinis. Most of which had only marginally seen the light of day since 1997. See, when I get a great culinary idea and the thought of using what's in the cupboard versus what's fresh at the store today comes up, guess which choice wins.

Then came the mismatched cutlery. This stuff is heavy in a garbage bag, but the crockery is worse. I threw out cups and glasses that I have been staring at every day, mutely, for ten years, without ever lifting one to my lips.

Oh, I could blame my ex-wife, but really, it’s me who just couldn’t deal with getting around to dealing with it.

But wonders never cease when entropy is repelled. Newly-wiped clean shelves are now lined with minty-fresh shelf padding. There are dark corners which never saw the light but are now pregnant with anticipation for what will be lined up in their parking spaces.

The kitchen has a new lemon-yellow coat of paint and ceiling-sunken halogens and screams Look At Me Now. I am whole again, I am new, and just watch me fry to the four corners of the universe.

Sharia Lite

Why do fatwas have to be fat? Couldn’t we have thinwas? Instead of being stoned to death with rocks, perhaps we could be pelted with kebabs. Beef, preferably. A good, lean cut of beef would make a decent thinwa.

WayBack When

There's a treasure trove of stuff that's lost from the montrealfood site but that exists in Cyberspace at the WayBack Machine.

Back in the early days, it really was a blog. I just didn't know that's what you called it.

Get Me Away from This Guy at a Party

"The system they set up claims to be an adiabatic quantum computer with sixteen qubits.

"It has a Hamiltonian which is made up of ising interactions plus a single qubit term which is along the direction of the ising interaction and a transverse field.

"The idea, of course, is to use this for adiabatic quantum algorithms.

"Finding the ground state of a two dimensional ising model with a magnetic field (where each of the field values of the ising terms of magnetic field terms is a problem instance) is NP-complete.

"So the idea, I guess is to start with all transverse magnetic field, and start in the ground state of this system, and then drag the system to the new groundstate of the Ising model on your sixteen qubits.

"Sounds fun."

LEI

Has anyone given any serious consideration as to how to produce light-emitting ink? Think of the possibilities.

Dough, the Humanity

You pizza lovers make me sick. Have you ever seen what dough goes through on its way to its final demise? Just imagine being wrapped in cling film, not being able to breath, knowing that your end is near, if not in human terms, but by pure instinct.

And imagine being a pepperoni, brutally sliced away from your brethren, inhumanly meeting your maker being broiled alive in an 800-degree oven. And all this while hearing the cries of olives, plucked pitilessly from the groves in which they spent their languid, sun-drenched childhoods to face a multi-bladed pitting-and-slicing machine, then to be entombed in their own bodily fluids until being slowly baked to death.

But the cheese — the cheese is what is clearly the victim of the most diabolically inhumane treatment here, just to satisfy the whims of a few pizza-lovers across the globe. Just imagine your tranquil beginnings next to your mother, who grazes happily in meadows of grass, only to be mercilessly snatched by suction into steel containers, then spun, wrung and sieved as you scream and cry for your parents, then to be carelessly tossed into vats where you will be slowly crushed. But you won’t die there.

You’ll be encased in shrinkwrapped plastic and shipped thousands of miles to a restaurant, where you will suffer your untimely end, quite possibly on the rusty blades of an indifferent box grater, to be added to the horrorshow awaiting a hideous roasting death on some uncaring person’s pizza.

But what makes the heart truly weep is for the tomatoes, those forgotten victims of countless vegicides, the ones who died so that others, including broccoli rabe, might live.

Crushed, puréed, sautéed, juiced, mixed, minced, seeded, roasted, diced, mashed, grilled, broiled and skinned alive, it is they for whom our hearts should weep.

All innocent victims for your careless love for an inhuman pie.

A Root Canal for Humphrey Bogart

Okay, I’ve had it. I’m not an engineer, and will never be one. But you practically need an engineering degree in order to figure out how to attach a high-definition television for the best possible output.

And it’s bloody expensive—still. The purchase of the TV is just the beginning.

In almost two weeks of researching how to install and set up a plasma TV, I’m not much closer (but my wallet’s a lot lighter) to understanding what’s going on.

What I do know is, it is definitely in the stereo manufacturers’ interest to keep us confused. That way, we buy more useless stuff in the hopes that it will make our TV look better.

Here’s what I’ve found out so far: number one, if you want the absolutely best possible picture, you have to buy an HDTV. Not an HDTV-ready or EDTV; it must be an HDTV. (Otherwise you’ll spend a year looking for the boxes that make it an HDTV.)

Number two, if you want the absolute best picture, you have to have HD programming (not just digital.) This involves buying a special box called an HD terminal, although curiously if you do a Web search for this you will find that most references to it are Canadian. That alone will set you back around $250 for the box. Subscribing will run you about $6/mo, at least in my case.

Fine. But now you want the TV on the wall. If it’s any bigger than 36 inches, you’re probably going to have to call a pro. I got one quote at $400 for installation of a 42” Plasma.

You will need a mounting bracket. These will run anywhere from $20-$100 online, but shipping will be a major blow.

They will most likely have to tear your wall apart. This is if your wall doesn’t have conveniently placed “studs” (metal or wooden pillars holding your house up.)

They will have to put in their own studs. And now is the time to decide how to hook up the TV. And God, is that difficult. You literally have about four choices: HDMI, which is 100% digital, component RGB, which is the next best thing, COMPOSITE RGB, which basically turns your TV back into an analogue TV, and coaxial, which is how your grandfather hooks up his TV.

Component and composite. Could they make it any more confusing? They both use RCA jacks. But are they made by RCA? Who knows. Do you need a special RCA jack to make it a component jack and not a composite jack? Do a search—I guarantee you will find precious little on the subject.

Then there’s S-Video. But there’s no S-Audio. And I haven’t even gotten around to the home-theater speaker system. How do you hook it up? How do you hook up your trusty VCR to be able to record from the cable box, yet still deliver a digital signal to the TV? Guess what? It’s not possible.

If they wanted to make this more complicated, they’d have to go to a lot of effort. Because it’s so complicated that I would prefer to train to be a thoracic surgeon rather than have to plow through all these acronyms and euphemisms.

Seriously: I repeat that I’m fairly well acquainted with technology, but this whole thing has been worse than a multiple root canal. All so I can watch Humphrey Bogart in all his 1950s splendour.

Cooks and Shnooks

I love cooking shows. I love to watch cooking shows while I’m cooking. Okay, let me amend that. I love MOST cooking shows.

I pretty much signed on to cable TV to get the Rachael Ray Channel (Food Network). Since then, I’ve regretted that decision somewhat. Because now, there are cooking shows on every channel (not to mention Wretchel Ray).

It used to be that cooking shows could only be found on PBS. I remember watching Julia Child and Martin Yan back in the 80s. And that incredible goofball, Graham Kerr.

In the 90s, I would be glued to PBS most Saturday mornings and afternoons—Carlo Cooks Italian, Biba’s Kitchen . . . the Old Reliables of food shows. And that pervert Frugal Gourmet dude, who was a practicing minister who liked to practice on children. The list goes on, and grows tiresome, but I want to focus on what’s up these days—notably, America’s Test Kitchen and the Gourmet show.

Now, Cook’s Illustrated is a magazine that gets a lot of respect from me. I would qualify it as the best recipe source on the market today. That, coupled with their no-ad policy and scientific/practical approach to food and cooking just makes them head and shoulders above the Bon Appetit crowd.

The editor/founder, Christopher Kimball, writes very well (although most of his pieces, in the front of every issue, are in the aw-shucks-Elmer the Farmer vein) and his love of all things food is obvious.

Does that mean he’s a good TV host? Jesusgoddamnchrisis, GET HIM OFF THE STAGE! He’s this combover aging Boomer-type with large, inappropriate glasses, his voice is a high-pitched babble and his arms flail almost spastically every time his mouth opens. I suspect he has Parkinson’s and is trying to work it out of his system. The guy is so grating, so annoying, that you just want to SHOUT. And the rest of the crew is so dumpy, so earnest, that you just wish they’d all just crawl back into the magazine and WRITE for god’s sakes, not PERFORM like the hand-puppets they imitate.

And Gourmet? Sooo cool. So bloody cool, if you’re like, in 1993. The shaky camera, the blur-to-sharp-to-blur, the pulsing background music, the titles swishing in and out of the frame, the insanelyclosecloseups . . . it’s about as tiresome as ploughing through those “Advertiser Supplement” pages that usually make up the bulk of their magazine.

Give me Julia’s bleat or Jacques Pepin’s hyper-exaggerated French accent any day.