This is based on a recipe for a rhubarb upside-down cake from the New York Times. My recipe is considerably better though.
2 lemons worth of zest
1/2 cup lemon juice
1 1/2 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 stick of butter
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
3 eggs
1/2 cup buttermilk
3 lbs rhubarb (about 8 cups)
4 tbs cornstarch
1 cup sugar
1 stick butter
1 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup lemon juce
1/4 cup sugar
1. preheat oven to 325
2. line the bottom of a 9” springform pan with parchment paper, cover sides and bottom with butter
3. mix zest and juice
4. mix flour, baking powder and salt
5. beat butter until soft
6. add sugar and vanilla and mix well
7. add eggs one at a time mixing well in between
8. add half the dry ingredients, mix
9. add the buttermilk, mix
10.add the rest of the dry ingredients, mix
11. add the juice and rind, mix
12. chop up the rhubarb
13. mix the rhubarb with the cornstarch and the sugar
14. mix brown sugar and butter in a pan over medium heat for about 2 minutes
15. pour the brown sugar mixture into the pan
16. spoon the rhubarb into the pan
17. pour on the batter
18. bake for about 1 hour and 15 minutes
19. after it is in the oven mix the lemon juice with the sugar
20. mix it periodically while the cake is baking to dissolve the sugar
21. once the cake is done let it cool for 15 minutes
22. while it is cooling, cover the top (that will ultimately be the bottom) with the juice and sugar mixture so that it can soak in
23. run a knife around the edge, put a plate on top and flip the cake
24. release the cake from the pan while it is still a bit warm or it will stick
25. serve with an ample amount of freshly whipped cream
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Why can’t lust be love and love be lust?
Up late watching slug porn, you confess
you had a boyfriend who could spin you
like that, slug grace and slug ballet—we don’t
touch the topic of slime—and those eyes
dangling from tentacle tips must be a
kind of love or lust, sighting farther and
nearer all at once. (But are those eyes?)
Slug sublimity suggests love’s a drag,
touch that lingers and leaves a wet trail of
memory and What did we do before
YouTube? Boob tube. Boobs we have none; slugs,
of course, don’t care, can’t tell girl from boy,
(being, you know, hermaphrodites), and only
want flesh to fly. Forget their infamous
languor—here’s litheness in loving, buoyant
miracles of want, one slug spiraling
on the axis of another like a globe
slapped by an insolent hand. Neither old
nor young, we’re familiar with sluggishness,
too tired to explain why nothing makes us
spin like that: a-swirl, a pirouette, a gyre!
It’s either fucking or marriage, I say,
saying more than I mean. Why can’t lust be
love and love be lust? you’re always asking,
even now as the slugs begin their sluggish
withdrawal—each complete in love and lust;
each mother and father to what they’ve made
together; each alone, content, and free.
by Jennifer Chang
you had a boyfriend who could spin you
like that, slug grace and slug ballet—we don’t
touch the topic of slime—and those eyes
dangling from tentacle tips must be a
kind of love or lust, sighting farther and
nearer all at once. (But are those eyes?)
Slug sublimity suggests love’s a drag,
touch that lingers and leaves a wet trail of
memory and What did we do before
YouTube? Boob tube. Boobs we have none; slugs,
of course, don’t care, can’t tell girl from boy,
(being, you know, hermaphrodites), and only
want flesh to fly. Forget their infamous
languor—here’s litheness in loving, buoyant
miracles of want, one slug spiraling
on the axis of another like a globe
slapped by an insolent hand. Neither old
nor young, we’re familiar with sluggishness,
too tired to explain why nothing makes us
spin like that: a-swirl, a pirouette, a gyre!
It’s either fucking or marriage, I say,
saying more than I mean. Why can’t lust be
love and love be lust? you’re always asking,
even now as the slugs begin their sluggish
withdrawal—each complete in love and lust;
each mother and father to what they’ve made
together; each alone, content, and free.
by Jennifer Chang
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
a great ride and another broken foot
I pushed up to Croton-on-Hudson this afternoon. It was hard, a lot of climbing. Gorgeous day though, perfect temperature. The part that sucked was the realization, once I got there, that my foot was broken. How did I manage to push 30 had miles on a broken foot without realizing it was broken? Needless to say, I took the train back. I'm pissed because I won't be able to race in May.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
thoughts on Going Rogue
I recently finished Going Rogue, Sarah Palin’s account of her life in politics to date. Although I of course have preconceptions about our beloved maverick, I tried to approach the book with an open mind. Going Rogue was definitely not written with my demographic in mind; it took some perseverance to make it through as Palin tried in vain to to clear her name in the aftermath of the Katie Couric interviews. Pages and pages of rhetoric were designed to resonate with patriotic gun nuts, the religious right, and the pro life anti-contraception folks. The largest goal of the book, however, was to promote a low regulation, low tax, small government as the only viable course of action for our country.
I can respect Palin’s goal, as the size of government is possibly the single biggest and most important ideological debate currently happening within our government. The size of our government has far reaching consequences, both domestic and international, ranging from health care and welfare to taxing and regulations. In econ 101, while discussing this issue, the textbooks always say something vague like, ‘if taxes rise above a certain or regulations are made more strict market forces will cause businesses to leave the economy’. This interpretation of the situation would support the conservative view on this issue, but it is in my opinion an incomplete interpretation. The missing argument is that there are benefits for businesses operating in a more highly regulated economy; if taxes are higher, businesses can take advantage of the additional services provided, such as a high quality road system or more government funded scientific research. I am by no means an economist, but I know enough about economics that I am sure hundreds of research papers have been written on this subject using fancy economic models and forecasting tools to reconcile these two extremes. Why aren’t these papers more present in the public discourse?
What surprised me about Palin’s account of this debate was how badly articulated it was. She just blabbed the usual, ‘taxes and regulations will make corporations go overseas’. The only example in the entire book she provided of a corporation that came into existence outside of government regulation was facebook. She stated that we should expect more such buisness in a small government economy. Don’t get me wrong, I think that facebook can be a force for good, but more often that not it is simply an advertising platform and a way to procrastinate. So, if facebook is the best example of a company arising from a lack of government involvement, then I don’t believe that small government is the end all be all solution.
While small government may be a viable option for our government, we need to be honest to ourselves about what that means. Namely, we will have a much reduced quantity and quality of public services.
I can respect Palin’s goal, as the size of government is possibly the single biggest and most important ideological debate currently happening within our government. The size of our government has far reaching consequences, both domestic and international, ranging from health care and welfare to taxing and regulations. In econ 101, while discussing this issue, the textbooks always say something vague like, ‘if taxes rise above a certain or regulations are made more strict market forces will cause businesses to leave the economy’. This interpretation of the situation would support the conservative view on this issue, but it is in my opinion an incomplete interpretation. The missing argument is that there are benefits for businesses operating in a more highly regulated economy; if taxes are higher, businesses can take advantage of the additional services provided, such as a high quality road system or more government funded scientific research. I am by no means an economist, but I know enough about economics that I am sure hundreds of research papers have been written on this subject using fancy economic models and forecasting tools to reconcile these two extremes. Why aren’t these papers more present in the public discourse?
What surprised me about Palin’s account of this debate was how badly articulated it was. She just blabbed the usual, ‘taxes and regulations will make corporations go overseas’. The only example in the entire book she provided of a corporation that came into existence outside of government regulation was facebook. She stated that we should expect more such buisness in a small government economy. Don’t get me wrong, I think that facebook can be a force for good, but more often that not it is simply an advertising platform and a way to procrastinate. So, if facebook is the best example of a company arising from a lack of government involvement, then I don’t believe that small government is the end all be all solution.
While small government may be a viable option for our government, we need to be honest to ourselves about what that means. Namely, we will have a much reduced quantity and quality of public services.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
first homebuilt longboard deck
I just finished my first longboard deck, it is based slightly on Earthwing's "Mystery Model". It has a red oak core with a carbon/kevlar shell. Here are its specs:
Length: 39"
Width: 9 3/4"
Thickness: 1/2"
Concave: 1/4"
Wheel base: 33", 31 3/4"
And here are some photos:
Length: 39"
Width: 9 3/4"
Thickness: 1/2"
Concave: 1/4"
Wheel base: 33", 31 3/4"
And here are some photos:
the perils of longboarding
On an average day of longboarding in the city, you can expect to almost get hit by a car a few times. That's not to bad in my opinion, it keeps your reflexes top notch. And also, dodging cars is fun. Yesterday, however, something far worse than that happened to me yesterday. For the uninformed, while longboarding it is possible for a plastic grocery bag to get wrapped tightly around a wheel. Usually the worst possible effect this can have is coming to an abrupt halt. This problem is much greater though if the the bag is filled with dog shit.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
Saturday, February 19, 2011
quality of life
I have bought two things recently that have greatly contributed to my quality of life, cycling cleats and a veritas sanding block
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Democracy and Hypocrisy
In his feb 9 OP-ED Nicholas Kristof articulately describes the big concerns of Egyptians and US citizens with regards to the Obama administrations actions regarding the recent and ongoing uprisings in Egypt. Fears that the administration is not doing enough to promote democracy and fears that they are blindly supporting Omar Suleiman who appears to be just as much of a corrupt politician as Hosni Mubarakd. I believe though that before we or anyone else get all riled up over this we need to have a conversation about what democracy means. In many ways what is happening in Egypt now is much closer to true democracy than the results of some UN enforced election that will undoubtedly be rigged. We need to reexamine not only what democracy means in Egypt (Iraq Afghanistan etc.) but what democracy means here in the US. Maybe we need to learn a lesson from the Egyptians and the Tunisians; quit our locked blog warfare (how hypocritical of me) and take to the streets when we feel strongly.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Friday, January 28, 2011
opening to our lives
Love After Love
The time will come when with elation you'll greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other's welcome and say, Sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to yourself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life who you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes. Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. (Derek Walcott)
We call ourselves homo sapien sapiens, which means "to taste," to sense," or "to know." This is one of, I think, the great tragedies of our species so far is that so much beauty, science, art, music, poetry comes out of the human mind. And so much mayhem comes out of the same human mind, same human heart. In a sense — because in some sense we don't know how to run the apparatus that we've been given and sometimes it takes over. And on good days just blinds us and we sort of make mistakes. On bad days, it blinds us to other people's pain, and we can create an enormous amount of pain in the world out of our own pain and of our own ignorance and out of our own ambitious greediness, I guess I'd call it, to want things to be different "so that I will feel better." If we're not careful, we wind up with the kind of conceit that we are the center of the universe. It's an occupational hazard of being packaged in a body, that the whole universe is outside and you are obviously the center of it, and you relate to it through all your senses, including potentially this capacity for knowing. That, to me, is kind of a working definition of meditation.
What is meditation? It's not necessarily stopping in the kind of usual way that we would think of stopping. Stopping is good and, of course, we're all going to be stopped, sooner or later the ultimate stop. We work a lot with medical patients who have tremendous suffering. Our track record with the dead is not so good. [Laughter] So one of the sort of cardinal rules of thumb is that as long as you're breathing, no matter what's wrong with you, from our perspective, there's more right with you than wrong with you.
But can we learn how to pour some energy into what's already OK with us? Which you could call health in the most profound of ways, our own interface with not only the outer world but also the interior world of our own thoughts, our own emotions, our own sensory experience, in ways that would actually have some degree of balance, some degree of interrelationality, because all the senses are actually interrelational. Also, while you're the center of the universe, OK, so is everybody else. So is everybody else. So that means in a sense there's no center. Cosmologists know this. Topologists know this. There's no center and there's no periphery.
But the question is what if we were to take the name we gave our species seriously and actually train to familiarize ourselves with the full perspective, the full dimensionality of what it means to be really human? For learning, for growing, healing, and for that matter, transformation across the whole lifespan. (Jon Kabat-Zinn)
The time will come when with elation you'll greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other's welcome and say, Sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to yourself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life who you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes. Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. (Derek Walcott)
We call ourselves homo sapien sapiens, which means "to taste," to sense," or "to know." This is one of, I think, the great tragedies of our species so far is that so much beauty, science, art, music, poetry comes out of the human mind. And so much mayhem comes out of the same human mind, same human heart. In a sense — because in some sense we don't know how to run the apparatus that we've been given and sometimes it takes over. And on good days just blinds us and we sort of make mistakes. On bad days, it blinds us to other people's pain, and we can create an enormous amount of pain in the world out of our own pain and of our own ignorance and out of our own ambitious greediness, I guess I'd call it, to want things to be different "so that I will feel better." If we're not careful, we wind up with the kind of conceit that we are the center of the universe. It's an occupational hazard of being packaged in a body, that the whole universe is outside and you are obviously the center of it, and you relate to it through all your senses, including potentially this capacity for knowing. That, to me, is kind of a working definition of meditation.
What is meditation? It's not necessarily stopping in the kind of usual way that we would think of stopping. Stopping is good and, of course, we're all going to be stopped, sooner or later the ultimate stop. We work a lot with medical patients who have tremendous suffering. Our track record with the dead is not so good. [Laughter] So one of the sort of cardinal rules of thumb is that as long as you're breathing, no matter what's wrong with you, from our perspective, there's more right with you than wrong with you.
But can we learn how to pour some energy into what's already OK with us? Which you could call health in the most profound of ways, our own interface with not only the outer world but also the interior world of our own thoughts, our own emotions, our own sensory experience, in ways that would actually have some degree of balance, some degree of interrelationality, because all the senses are actually interrelational. Also, while you're the center of the universe, OK, so is everybody else. So is everybody else. So that means in a sense there's no center. Cosmologists know this. Topologists know this. There's no center and there's no periphery.
But the question is what if we were to take the name we gave our species seriously and actually train to familiarize ourselves with the full perspective, the full dimensionality of what it means to be really human? For learning, for growing, healing, and for that matter, transformation across the whole lifespan. (Jon Kabat-Zinn)
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
from a book I'm in the middle of
there was a young fellow from trinity
who took the square root of infinity
but the number of digits gave him the fidgets
he dropped math and took up divinity
(George Gamow)
I concluded that unhappily I’d been born into a world dominated by a rampaging monster called law that was both all powerful and all stupid (Fred Hoyle)
who took the square root of infinity
but the number of digits gave him the fidgets
he dropped math and took up divinity
(George Gamow)
I concluded that unhappily I’d been born into a world dominated by a rampaging monster called law that was both all powerful and all stupid (Fred Hoyle)
Sunday, January 23, 2011
i like this
the hallmark of a civil debate is when you can acknowledge that which is good in the position of the person you disagree with. (Sidney Callahan)
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