OF A GOLDEN AGE

As a direct result of spending my formative years in a cultural desert (even that misleading website makes me want to hurl), I now read, think about, and watch shows about food quite a bit. And now that I live on my own and have shed a lot of the collegiate junk from my diet — though not all, by any means — I eat more fresh and less pre-prepared.

Grocery Guy recently linked to this New York Times piece (published four days before my graduation, serendipitously) on stocking your kitchen. Mark Bittman humbles boomer foodies eager to drop thousands on kitchen tools. In the article he also gives this glorious list of unnecessaries:

“YOU can live without these 10 kitchen items:

“BREAD MACHINE You can buy mediocre bread easily enough, or make the real thing without much practice.

“MICROWAVE If you do a lot of reheating or fast (and damaging) defrosting, you may want one. But essential? No. And think about that counter space!

“STAND MIXER Unless you’re a baking fanatic, it takes up too much room to justify it. A good whisk or a crummy handheld mixer will do fine.

“BONING/FILLETING KNIVES Really? You’re a butcher now? Or a fishmonger? If so, go ahead, by all means. But I haven’t used my boning knife in years. (It’s pretty, though.)

“WOK Counterproductive without a good wok station equipped with a high-B.T.U. burner. (There’s a nice setup at Bowery Restaurant Supply for $1,400 if you have the cash and the space.)

“STOCKPOT The pot you use for boiling pasta will suffice, until you start making gallons of stock at a time.

“PRESSURE COOKER It’s useful, but do you need one? No.

“ANYTHING MADE OF COPPER More trouble than it’s worth, unless you have a pine-paneled wall you want to decorate.

“RICE COOKER Yes, if you eat rice twice daily. Otherwise, no.

“COUNTERTOP CONVECTION OVEN, ROTISSERIE, OR ‘ROASTER’ Only if you’re a sucker for late-night cooking infomercials.”

Hellboy 2 is what Indiana Jones 4 should have been.

And Ironman completely blows The Dark Knight away in every way except Heath Ledger as the Joker. Seriously, people.

For the last half hour or so I’ve been browsing Wikipedia’s featured pictures pages. They’re definitely worth a look.

In your mind you have capacity to form
And transmit thought energy far beyond the norm
(the Carpenters)

My classically smirky friend Genghis directed me to the blog of a former classmate of ours at Beloit College, wherein this person describes a new-age (Genghis says it newage, rhymes with “sewage”) belief in angel therapy and the rise of indigo and crystal children. That was a few days ago.

But before dismissing anything out of hand I decided to read up on some of these theories. Admittedly, I am biased, in that I love tellurian logic and do not love religion or spirituality.

The truth about so-called “indigo children” is even more depressing than I expected, basically an elaborate rationale for A.D.D. Yes, I agree that this disorder is overdiagnosed. I’m not totally certain I believe in A.D.D. or A.D.H.D. at all, and if I might borrow Michael Savage’s insanely misguided, insensitive comment on autism:

“In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out.” (Slate, reacting to Savage, asks how we really diagnose autism.)

Indigos are described in the vaguest terms, to the point where I and most everyone I know could self-diagnose. People clinging to this designation sound pathetic and desperate, as evidenced by this “special report” from a Houston television network, in which parents bow down before their seemingly misbehaving children.

Your kid is bossy and impatient? Your kid does not play with others or respond well to authority? Sure, send him or her to a “self-directed” alternative school. Seriously, I can’t even believe this is a real discussion. Parents of America: Your undisciplined children represent a sea change in American parenting, not the next step of humankind’s evolution.

There’s a decidedly smug tone to all of this documentation, as if the rest of the world is missing out on the obvious truth, most pointed at “skeptics” who don’t believe indigo children are an evolutionary step. What all of these supporters forget is that evolution does take place over thousands or millions of years, that there’s virtually no way for a ten- or twenty-year gap to create a new kind of human unless that kind is radiated for the worse by a Chernobyl-style disaster.

It all reminds me of this Ellen DeGeneres bit from her book The Funny Thing Is:

  “Earthspirit said, ‘You need some wheatgrass juice.’
  “‘Wheatgrass juice! Do I need a sprout wrap too?’
  “And Earthspirit said, ‘Your aura’s brown.’ And I said, ‘Your aura’s brown! What a stupid thing to say to me!’”

. . . Thank god.

My dear friend Tony is in a far northeastern Chinese city for the next several months. He is a brilliant fancypants and Washington gave him a Fulbright for it. I delight in the irony of using U.S. government money to research and better understand the Chinese!

The province of 黑龙江省, Hēilóngjiāng, is one of China’s least densely-populated, though of course that’s relative. Reasons for this include harsh northern temperatures and, well, not a whole lot happening. It sits in an odd cultural place for China, smushed up against Russia (sharing its architecture and people) while also the original home of the Manchu people.

Way back, the Manchus descended into China proper and took over. They were the royal lineage for many, maaaany years, but remain a tiny minority (2-3%) of China’s population, with an even smaller number speaking their pretty-much-dead language. They had unique customs and a totally different culture, and are even considered a different race in China’s demographics. When the Manchu royals vacationed, they went back to Manchuria, which was annexed to China but retained its unique cultural identity.

Of course, as Tony recently explained, all of China is in the same time zone even though it geographically spans four. This means Manchuria and Tibet and all points in between say the same time of day, when it’s pitch black on the east side and afternoon in the west. Interesting!

Last night my roommate and I circled our block three times looking for a parking space after some rousing Montrose Beach sand volleyball. Finally I found a spot, in fact a really GOOD one after all the shenanigans, and we started toward our building.

A dirty, drunk-smelling man approached me. He was holding a stack of records under one arm, the top of which was Humble Pie’s Rockin’ the Fillmore . . . Dang. A fantastic album.

“Do you like classic albums?” the guy said to me.

“No thanks,” I said.

My roommate caught up and asked, “What was that all about?”

“He asked if I liked classic albums, and he was holding Humble Pie at the Fillmore. That’s a really fucking great album,” I said.

“What’d you say?” my roommate asked.

“I told him no,” I said.

My roommate laughed. “That’s maybe the biggest lie you’ve ever told!”

I promise the bad play-on-words titles will stop. Actually, I don’t promise that at all.

Did You Know . . . *

Capital and lowercase letters are formally known as majuscules and minuscules, respectively.

This history of typeface gives a great walkthrough of eras and the subtle changes made to common type over the years.

And the difference in readability based on character descenders (the tail on a p) and ascenders (the tail on a b) is explained in this tongue-and-cheek criticism of Roman characters in Japanese fonts.

* I should just adopt this as a disclaimer when there are really, really nerdy things on the way

In an outrageously prudent (and somewhat sly) move, Ohio’s state government gives all G.I. bill veterans in-state tuition at Ohio’s public universities. Ohio is the seventh-most populous state and has 13 public universities with an additional 24 regional campuses throughout the state. With nearly 500,000 public-university students enrolled at press time, Ohio seeks to swell that number to 700,000 or more. The state’s dilemma, the article explains, is that college students attend in Ohio and leave for other places.

Ohio has a notoriously strong private liberal-arts sector, but for perspective, the total enrollment of the state’s 55 private campuses is about 135,000. (Oberlin College is one of the top liberal-arts colleges in the country and has fewer than 3,000 students.) Private universities do not differentiate in-state and out-of-state tuitions because they have far fewer tax dollars in the mix. My alma mater, Beloit College, drew three-fourths of its roughly 1,300 students from outside Wisconsin, and highly selective schools like Oberlin or Grinnell College in Iowa draw even higher ratios.

According to the state of Ohio’s website: “Ohio is Committed to Ensuring that Our Nation’s Veterans and Their Families Receive the Services and Support that They Deserve. Ohioans recognize and celebrate the sacrifices that all veterans have made in serving this country. We believe that these veterans and their families should have the greatest possible access to the benefits that they have earned and Ohio is eager to do its part in honoring veterans’ dedication to their country.”

I say sly because Ohio is being patriotic and fiscally responsible in one fell swoop. President Bush recently signed a huge increase in the G.I. bill and for the state of Ohio that means enrolling any number of guaranteed paid-tuition students. The money never passes through the hands of veteran students; it’s merely funneled from federal to state government, with no opportunity to default on loans or spend beyond means.

In a time when our homecoming veterans are struggling to find support for alcoholism and other drug dependencies, I wonder how the combination of civilian life and college life will play out. In that article, the reporter makes a really compelling point: today’s U.S. military is much more strict about the troops’, uh, recreational habits. To some extent I understand that when a man is military age but not legal drinking age, it forces the military’s hand. At the same time, as the men of M*A*S*H 4077 taught us, the hardest jobs require the hardest unwinding.

Many universities, especially public ones that are scrutinized and bureaucratized*, crack down on drinking and force students into hourlong dorm-room binge sessions. This is, of course, dangerous and counterintuitive. Welcome to public policy.

* As a side note: Firefox’s spellchecker recognized “bureaucratized” but not “military’s.” Those pesky possessives.

In unrelated Bowie news, this weekend I finally saw The Prestige, one of 2006′s two victorian-magician pictures. Bowie cameos as (no shit!) Nikola Tesla, a desperate creator who laments and celebrates the unpredictability of science. More and more, Bowie starts looking like Brian Setzer, the most ironical doppelganging I’ve ever noticed.

Prestige has a fantastic cast including Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Michael Caine, the everwooden Scarlett Johansson, and a charming Piper Perabo. It’s seamlessly acted (again, except Miss Scarlett) and a well-done period piece. In these ways it’s strikingly similar to The Illusionist, its contemporary in the theaters and part of the topical pissing-contest nature of big movie studios.

Illusionist is a great movie too, don’t get me wrong, but Prestige absolutely blows it out of the water. If only we could attach Edward Norton, Paul Giamatti, Jessica Biel, and Rufus Sewell to the better movie. Besides bonus points for casting Bowie as a complex, dark intellectual, Prestige has pure gosh-wow on its side: false narratives, competing traps, lost fingers, murder, and all manner of other mayhem I can’t describe without ruining it. I read the ending on Wikipedia while I was watching the movie* and thought, “There’s no way that can work,” and goddamn if it didn’t still stun me.

Luckily The Illusionist is saved on my DVR because I can watch it again and shake out the cobwebs. The bottom line might be as simple as this: two magicians are better than one.

* This is something I do frequently and it never, ever detracts from my joy in watching a movie. I even sometimes read the plot synopsis of a movie I’m going to see in the theater. Don’t ask, I don’t know why I do it. Maybe it’s because I like seeing the difference between the product and the way someone boiled it down into print. It’s like Cliff’s Notes versus the real thing: not even close.

(NOTE: This title bastardized from Walt Whitman’s lascivious, overly-sharing mind. Just whose body electric is he singing? Best not to ask; it could be his own.

From the New York Times:

1. Snowboarding is more dangerous than “boating, camping, fishing, hiking, mountain biking, swimming, and water-skiing — combined.” For some reason, no data on skiing. I’ll take that as a good sign.

2. Starting guns favor closer competitors. “The study found that runners in the first lane, next to the starter’s pistol, reacted more quickly. The differences were slight, but they occurred in races where a few hundredths of a second can make a difference.”

3. 2008 Olympic swimming trials are over. Dara Torres, who is 41 and hasn’t been seen at the Games since 2000 (WHEN SHE WAS STILL 33), is going in two individual events plus relays. My friend Anne-Marie’s brother Bobby, who is 18 and hasn’t even started at Stanford yet, competed and showed well next to the absurdly dominant Michael Phelps. Phelps is slated to compete for eight gold medals total, which would, should he succeed, surpass the charming and mustachioed Mark Spitz’s 1972 performance.

Spitz, of course, also broke world records in all of his individual events.

And swam with a mustache.