Waffle

Andrew Sullivan on why Sarah Palin still matters. Because somebody needs to be held to account for selecting the worst vice-presidential candidate in history. (via Lawyers, Guns and Money)

Michael Lewis on the End of Wall Street's Boom. This long article by Michael Lewis, writer of Liar's Poker is financial porn: It explains in lurid detail just how complex some of the financial instruments used on Wall Street are, and just how poorly the financiers themselves understood them. You'll be amused and outraged at the same time. (via Naked Capitalism, but I can't find the link anymore)

While I'm on the topic of food, I heart Kale looks like an excellent resource if you like the bitter winter vegetable, kale, and want to do something other to it than use it in a mash. I like kale mash, or stamppot boerenkool but I always end up buying more of the vegetable than I need.

The blog has a lovely, upbeat tone, simple recipes and photos of the finished product as made. I'll forgive them their occasional adulterous escapades with other seasonal vegetables.

I've spent far too much time in thepast day reading the website of journalist Michael Pollan, writer of In Defense of Food and a range of books, essays and journalism about the food (mostly) Americans eat. I particularly recommend his piece on Animal rights, which despite the obnoxious provocation at the top is one of the best-written pieces on the issue I've read.

I've added In Defense of Food to my Amazon Wish List in case any of my readers here want to give me something nice for my birthday on Sep. 14. Pollan's website has the introduction online for free.

I lost all my bookmarks over the course of not one, but two emergency software migrations. So I'm going to post more interesting links on the blog again. This is how I made lamb vindaloo during my stay in Tennessee, only I added tomatos and potatos to it. There's apparently some kind of factional schism about whether adding those ingredients is the One True Way to make vindaloo; I'm on the side of adding them because it makes the meal tastier and more nutritious.

I should find a vegetarian alternative though. I love lamb (and it's just not the same with any other meat), but lamb is pricy and in any case I don't like eating meat every day. Keeping the dead-body-eating down to once a week makes me appreciate it more, especially when I buy really good meat.

Edited to add: Just remember that this is a two-day recipe, because the meat has to marinade. I had to improvise something else to eat tonight while the meat was soaking up the tamarind and vinegar..

John Scalzi has a great post up in which he gives Unasked-For Advice to New Writers about Money. Read it if you're in any free-lance profession, and read the comments and the Follow-up post as well (via). You'll thank him, and his commenters, later.

Update: The original photo-essay this was from is here
(Hat tip Sara Robinson via Amanda Marcotte).
Families from around the world, posing in or around their homes, surrounded by their weekly groceries. Prices of the weekly food intakes mentions under the pictures.

Quite a contrast. Perhaps surprisingly, the German family spends the most, though a lot of what they spend their budget on is beer, which is perhaps not so surprising.

This seems to have been going around in an email, but I missed it. I recall there having been a book of family homes around the world, that I kind of regret not buying at the time. In any case, these pics are likely to be part of a much larger series.

On a semi-related note, this year I'm thankful I don't have to celebrate Thanksgiving, which frankly sounds like a bit of a drag for me, not to mention a stressfest if you're the one stuck with having to prepare that dinner everyone's going to be stuffing themselves with.

Fewer pieces of plastic crap may indeed not kill you:

Reader and frequent commenter MAJeff sent me a copy of Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, and I finally had a chance to read it this week. The book came out a few years ago, but all the trends she details in it are still going strong, namely the hyper-commercialization of childhood by marketers hungry to have a non-jaded audience that constantly replenishes itself. I found the book to mostly be fascinating, especially the second part where Schor conducts a research study on two populations of children, one in the city of Boston and one in a suburb, to see what kind of effect this increasingly commercialization had on the well-being of children, and found strong evidence that kids who watch excessive amounts of TV and otherwise engage in excessive amounts of participation in marketing to children suffered strongly for it both physically and mentally, and more to the point, that the engagement with the commercial culture caused the depression, anti-social behavior, excessive weight gain, lowered grades and other ill effects on children.

It’s an important book for this research, and I felt bad for parents because it seems that there’s really only one choice when faced with the hard evidence—limit TV-watching, exposure to fast food, toy collecting and other engagements with the mass media that markets to children. Which will cause fights and could cause your child to be unpopular and the target of bullies—seems like a real dilemma in a lot of ways.

Posted so I'll remember to read it again when I need to.

Still working a lot, exercising a lot and trying to get comics done. Battling computer problems in two places at the same time (again), though in the case of the studio PC, I've asked Calvin to do the battling in my place. Still not a lot of energy left to write in this here blog, though I could think of a few things to write about.

Quickly then: Have some cartoons attacking creationism, some of which I hadn't seen before. (Via)

The Stupidfilter. Mith says this won't work as you can't apply Bayesian probability to non-stochastic variables, and anyway, it doesn't even work all that well for spam because spammers defeat filters like this using precisely the sort of thing that this filter is going to check for (i.e. egregious violations of grammar, spelling and punctuation rules). (Via)

This is a load of bloggocks. You're not going to save journalism by buying an iPod or letting the comments on YouTube turn your brain to pea soup. Fuck off. (Via)

When I have a bit more time, I'd like to do a longish post about the state of exercise writing - er, that is, writing about exercise. It seems to be that there are a number of common tropes and linguistic markers (including the I Hit A Plateau And This Proves That Conventional Thinking About Exercise Is Wrong Trope, the The Fact That I had Painful Illnesses At An Early Age Proves That Conventional Thinking About Exercise Is Wrong Trope and the Caveman Ancestor Trope With Added Biology) that readers could use to easily identify quackitude (see The Case Against Cardio which contains all three tropes mentioned). But I'd need to study on it, and long-time readers know what happens to those ideas I have for posts to write in the indeterminate future, so don't wait up for that post. In the mean time, I'm tossing this out just to get the notion into public view. Maybe someone else will pick up this ball and run with it. (Via)

Starship Stormtroopers, an eminently readable essay, or perhaps a transcripted speech, by Michael Moorcock from 1977, about authoritarianism in Science Fiction and Fantasy literature:

There are still a few things which bring a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I experience them -- a church service in which the rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants -- a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeois decadence -- a radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein. If I were sitting in a tube train and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn't disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkien or Richard Adams. All this visionary fiction seems to me to have a great deal in common. Utopian fiction has been predominantly reactionary in one form or another (as well as being predominantly dull) since it began. Most of it warns the world of 'decadence' in its contemporaries and the alternatives are usually authoritarian and sweeping -- not to say simple-minded. A look at the books on sale to Cienfuegos customers shows the same old list of Lovecraft and Rand, Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so many people who would be horrified to be accused of subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the Monday Club and yet are reading with every sign of satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune.

Some years ago I remember reading an article by John Pilgrim in Anarchy in which he claimed Robert Heinlein as a revolutionary leftist writer. As a result of this article I could not for years bring myself to buy another issue. I'd been confused in the past by listening to hardline Communists offering views that were somewhat at odds with their anti-authoritarian claims, but I'd never expected to hear similar things from anarchists. My experience of science fiction fans at the conventions which are held annually in a number of countries (mainly the US and England) had taught me that those who attended were reactionary (claiming to be 'apolitical' but somehow always happy to vote Tory and believe Colin Jordan to 'have a point'). I always assumed these were for one reason or another the exceptions among sf enthusiasts. Then the underground papers began to emerge and I found myself in sympathy with most of their attitudes -- but once again I saw the old arguments aired: Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov and the rest, bourgeois reactionaries to a man, Christian apologists, crypto-Stalinists, were being praised in IT, Frendz and Oz and everywhere else by people whose general political ideals I thought I shared. I started writing about what I thought was the implicit authoritarianism of these authors and as often as not found myself accused of being reactionary, elitist or at very best a spoilsport who couldn't enjoy good sf for its own sake. But here I am again at Stuart Christie's request, to present arguments which I have presented more than once before.

Read on and take notes. And get yerself some John Brunner novels. They're good. (via)

Note: misspelling of "Tolkien" in the quoted section corrected because I'll have no part in spreading it around.

(Photo macro by LJ User Tiny_Monster)

A Lolbees community Exists On The Internet. I repeat: a Lolbees community Exists On The Internet.

... It's started by a Webcartoonist by the way.