Haircuts and the Sickest Mac & Cheese

So last Sunday, after several weeks of bemoaning my increasingly wild and wavy hair, I grabbed a pair of scissors and decided to give myself a little flapper bob.

I was hoping for a little something along the lines of Dorothy Gish, a little Bernice Bobs Her Hair kind of action.

However, I ended up channeling Emo Philips.



ps: is this dude my real dad or what?

Now I'm not complaining. I think the cut is cute I don't mind the comparison. In honor of finding my coiffure soul mate, I want to give you all my recipe for truly sick out-of-a-box mac & cheese.

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EMO PHILIPS MAC & CHEESE
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ingredients:
1 box shells & cheese (I am a hippy and eat that Annie's stuff)
1 can of black beans
1/4 cup milk/soymilk
1/2 tb butter
3 slices of cheddar cheese
at least 3 tbs of Tabasco chipotle sauce

1) Drain and rinse the beans and set aside.
2) Boil and drain the shells as usual.
3) In a saucepan combine the prepackaged cheese powder, milk and butter.
4) Add in everything else, including the beans and shells.
5) Stir and warm gently until everything is creamy and delicious.
6) Eat half of it out of the pot.
7) Take two tums and lay down on the couch.




At my lemonade stand I used to give the first glass away free and charge five dollars for the second glass. The refill contained the antidote. - Emo Philips

a good weekend

As I stare down the end of my twenties I've found that my criteria for a good weekend have undergone a definite shift. I no longer count quality in hours spent away from my house, the number of people met or shows played. My pursuits have taken a turn for the quiet, the mindful, the small events warmed with the comfort of home.

I have a lot of kitchen weekends. Every two weeks I bake bread, one loaf for the breadbox and one for freezer. At least once a month I make a stock pot worth of vegetable broth to keep in the fridge. I also like to take advantage of the longer evenings to make more complicated meals, or try out new recipes.



This weekend I filled my kitchen with creative anarchy. I brewed 8 cups of veggie broth and baked my usual loaves, but I also put together some wonderful meals.

Friday dinner: tofu simmered in homemade BBQ sauce, served with roasted cauliflower

Saturday dinner: chickpea-seitan cutlets and mashed potatoes served with mushroom gravy and a spinach salad

I invented a lovely vinaigrette for the salad which I suspect will become my go-to dressing for the foreseeable future. I also gave more thought to my off-again-on-again daydream of putting together a little booklet of recipes I have devised. It might be a good winter project.



I love to cook for a million different reasons. I love the creativity. I love recognizing the harmony in a dish, and learning to taste for what is there and what is lacking. I love knowing how to do something that is both a necessity and a luxury at the same time. I love to feed my friends and family. I love to eat. But most of all I love the quietness of the activity, the solitude and quiet mind it affords me, the chance to remember, or plan, or just look out the window and watch the juncos gathering on my neighbor's eaves.

Fall has definitely come to Tennessee. The trees are giving up their leaves reluctantly, one by one. Each day the ginko outside my office blushes with a little more yellow. The mornings are cold and I shiver at the bus stop, unsure if I will be carrying my jacket home or puffing icy breaths at 5:30pm. I have begun looking forward to the holidays. I bought two sets of airline tickets: one to visit my family for Thanksgiving and the other to stay with Matt's family for Christmas. Riding a bike now requires gloves. Hot tea sounds good but wine sounds even better. When the cat curls up she buries her nose in her tail like a little fox.



The only dark mark on the weekend was Daylight Savings ending with the usual floating discontent. It's hard to leave work in the darkness, to feel the cold creep in a little earlier, but the darkness heralds more then just the specter of winter.

It means cozy afternoons in the kitchen.

It means sharing body heat and a collage of blankets on the bed.

It means crisp walks from point A to point B and hoisting a pint with our winter coats hanging off the back of chairs.

It means seeing family I don't see enough.

It means turning another year older.


It means many more good weekends.

In which I admit my ignorance

There are a few subjects in which I consider myself an expert: rat and mouse fancy, the life and times of P.T. Barnum, and script inconsistencies in 1992's Batman Returns. In a broader sense my trivia knowledge seems to be clustered into the green pie wedge: Science and Nature. That is why what I have to share with you today has rocked me to the very core.

I'm sure you are all familiar with a certain scene from the movie Big, in which Josh Baskin, in his new 30-year-old body, has his first run in with the phenomenon of 'baby corn'.



We saw that and we all laughed. How silly! He was eating baby corn like it was regular corn! Baby corn is not regular corn! Laughing! Laughing! And yet, a sinister question perched in the back of our minds...




What exactly is baby corn?



Somewhere between 1988 and now I got the idea in my head that baby corn, despite its appearance, is actually a distinct species. It is some kind of exotic swamp plant like a water chestnut, found only in Asian groceries and Chinese dishes, with only a superficial resemblance to good old 'merican corn-on-the-cob maize. The same plant? Pah! No way! It would just make too much sense.

Well, I think you know where I'm going with this.

Sunday evening, to my utter bewilderment, I learned that baby corn is actually nothing more than literal BABY CORN. It is immature corn harvested as soon as the silk starts to peek past the husk, just as the little niblets have begun to form. You can learn more about baby corn and its weird powers with this downloadable pamphlet from Washington State University.

I hope that by admitting my shameful ignorance of baby corn, I can help those that read this to life fuller lives, free from embarrassing gaffes regarding tiny vegetables. So please, never forget,

Halloween Recap

Matt and I threw a little Halloween party last weekend. The day started out with an auspicious omen: a double-yolked egg!



It went into the kitty-litter cake I baked for the party.


Here I am in my costume as 'Little' Edie Beale:



For those playing along at home, this was the scene from Grey Gardens I was inspired by:




Here is Matt and Dave chatting before the main event. Matt is dressed as himself circa 15 years ago. Dave is dressed as a dead cosmonaut, as inspired by a certain blog post.




The party was a lot of fun and the witching spirit was all around us. I wish I had action pictures, but whenever stuff gets cooking I'm the first person to throw the camera into a drawer and forget about it.

However, below is the sign I posted on the back door. I think it proves that "the devil is in the details", particularly when it comes to party planning...

Maybe I'm off base but...

...just sayin'.

it makes the blood run cold

There is a certain attraction to that which terrifies. Nothing chills me to the core like learning about something so twisted, so heart-breakingly bleak and appalling, and then finding out that it is purportedly true.

Over the years I have collected tidbits of this nature, stories and rumors and theories that have make the pit of my stomach drop out. Many fall under the realm of outlandish conspiracy theory, like The Philadelphia Experiment. Some are bone-chillingly true, like Vladimir Demikhov's experimental head transplant surgeries (highly disturbing video here and here). As shocking as these ideas can be, after some time the brain becomes inured to them, and one begins the search for something novel.

A came across the article Lost in Space via longform.org. The article outlines how, in the late 50's, two Italian brothers built an amateur "mission control" station to track the beeping of satellites during the space race. However, one day they intercepted a different kind of message:

Then, on 28 November 1960, the Bochum space observatory in West Germany said it had intercepted radio signals which it thought might have been a satellite. No official announcement had been made of any launch.

“Our reaction was to immediately switch on the receivers and listen,” said Achille. After almost an hour of tuning in to static, the boys were about to give up when suddenly a tapping sound emerged from the hiss and crackle.

“It was a signal we recognized immediately as Morse code – SOS,” said Gian. But something about this signal was strange. It was moving slowly, as if the craft was not orbiting but was at a single point and slowly moving away from the Earth. The SOS faded into distant space.

That is not the only mysterious communication they intercepted:

At 10.55pm on 2 February 1961, the brothers were scanning Russian frequencies as usual when Achille picked up a transmission from an orbiting capsule. They recorded the wheezing, struggling breathing of what they thought was a suffocating cosmonaut. The brothers contacted Professor Achille Dogliotti, Italy’s leading cardiologist and recorded his judgement. “I could quite clearly distinguish the clear sounds of forced, panting human breath,” said Dogliotti.

Two days later, the Soviet press agency announced that Russia had sent a seven-and-a-half-tonne spaceship the size of a single-decker bus into space on 2 February, which had burned up during re-entry. No further information was forthcoming.

Just as a reminder, the first manned flight was still several months away at this time.

Over the years the Judica-Cordiglia brothers recorded several transmissions that did not correspond to any publicly known flights. These included a female cosmonaut, with strain and anxiety clear in her voice, stating "I feel hot... I feel hot... I can see a flame! thirty-two.... thirty-two... forty-one...am I going to crash?... I feel hot..." This was recorded, once again, two years before Valentina Tereshkova became known as the first woman in space. The recording can be heard here. For a rundown of all the supposed "lost cosmonauts", take a little trip to wikipedia.

It is easy to dismiss the whole idea as an exaggeration of leaked information, a play for attention on the part of the brothers, or even as bald-faced anti-communist propaganda. However, pause for a minute to consider:

1. Would a government struggling for respect resort to dangerously experimental flights in order to win the space race?

2. What impetus would a government have for publicizing a failed flight? Particularly a government with a history of making troublesome people disappear?

3. What would it be like to sit in a metal capsule, careening through space, as you realize that you overshot your orbit and the signal from home gets fainter and fainter?

Spotted on the Vanderbilt Campus

Sorry the first picture is blurry. It's hard to shoot while you are giving devil horns and headbanging.