how now brownpau
Okay, you know it’s cold when you look at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and see parts of it completely frozen over, so solidly that a beer bottle sits atop it, rolling placidly with the waves that rock beneath, while seagulls walk on the sheet, picking at bits of food that tourists have thrown to see how hard the ice is.
Or if you want colder, Dave Nat went to Montauk Point and got photos of frozen sea foam. Of course, if you want even colder, there’s always Antarctica.
I’m listening to Rach’s Vespers, performed by the Choir of King’s College, and it just blows me away how low the basses are able to reach at the end of the Nyne Otpushchaeshi while still being able to project, even at that pitch. Whoa. WHOA.
Nyne otpushchaeshi raba Tvoego, Vladyko, po glagolu Tvoyemu s mirom: yako videsta ochi moi spaseniye Tvoye, ezhe esi ugotoval pred litsem vsekh lyudei, svet vo otkrovenie yazykov, i slavu lyudei Tvoikh Izrailya.
Every Thursday, we have our “Crisis Century” class, an overview of modern media and culture in the feverish, fast-paced world of the 21st Century. Our professor, writer and curator Tim Druckrey, usually begins the morning with a reading from Harper’s (yes, definite left-leaning bias there ;) and a show of links to modern art resources and other sites of interest to the subject matter. I think that every week, I shall blog a sample of links from class, just to share a bit of the new media millieu which I am currently immersed in:
Information Awareness Office. Innovating new ways to intrude on your privacy from sea to shining sea! I love their slick, clipart-enhanced, MS FrontPage designs, as well as the effective use of corporate jargon. Our taxes are paying for a lot of alarming stuff, such as the EARS program, which aims to develop ways to transcribe eavesdropped phone conversations into rich text format. Ooohh. Scary high-tech money sinks.
Illegal Art. “On the legal fringe of intellectual property.” Art made to challenge and address issues of copyright and creativity through subtle and blatant duplication and reproduction of existing work.
The Zgodlocator. A giant, elaborate technological installation piece: whole computers and computer parts are destroyed and crushed into a fine metallic dust, which is then thickly strewn over a pattern of powerful electromagnets. Pressing buttons in the installation triggers the magnets, creating abstract sculptures from the “granulated landscape” to explore the raw physical manifestation of stored information.
386 DX and the Leningrad Cowboys. Russian bands respond to the influx of Western culture with their own form of parodic postmodern cut-and-paste techno-Dadaism. 386DX plays reprised rock music on a 386DX PC with customizable text-to-speech and MIDI synthesis. The Leningrad Cowboys reinterpret classic American rock into bombastically Russified masterworks, complete with stentorian men’s choruses and harmonized Cossack dances. Their reprise of “Stairway to Heaven” is even better than the original. Good stuff.
A few nights ago, when temperature was still up in the 20’s, I tried running to the grocery in jeans and a t-shirt. (It’s only a block away, and I was too lazy to put on all those layers just for a bottle of milk.) I will not be trying that stunt tonight, as any protruding part of my body that I stick out the door will most likely snap off within seconds.
It took a year and three months of on-and-off reading, but I’ve finally finished Bleak House, Charles Dickens’ tragicomedic tale of bittersweet lives and loves in a protracted court case whose legal costs ultimately outweigh the value of the assets in question. Some people die, some people marry, some people discover they are Lady Dedlock’s illegitimate daughter by a derelict ship captain who meets his unfortunate drug-induced end while transcribing court documents in a dingy apartment, a dark past discovered by an aloof lawyer who is later murdered by the crazed French maid who seeks revenge on her secretive mistress.
Afterward, I took a break from the heavy reading with a quick hop through Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, which I finished in a couple of days. (Fulltext in Palm DOC .PDB format here.)
Now I can finally start on Piper’s exceedingly hedonistic Desiring God.
maalat: (Tagalog, adj.) Salty.
With the grocery closed and the refrigerator lacking any fresh or frozen ingredients for a decent dinner, Paulo decides to eat tonight what he was planning to have for breakfast in the morning: two hotdogs with rice and a boiled egg. He boils the hotdogs in a pot with the egg while simultaneously reheating rice in a tupperware, then drops the boiled hotdogs into the tupperware with the rice, and pours a small mountain of salt (for the boiled egg) onto the overturned tupperware lid. He carefully balances the overturned lid atop the plastic vessel, then places the freshly boiled egg beside the small mountain of salt.
Wrongly balanced under the weight of the egg, the lid promptly flips upright into the tupperware, scattering salt all over the hotdogs and rice.
Paulo proceeds to eat the newly salted meal anyway. He will no doubt notice the aftereffects of his increased sodium intake at his next date with a sphygmomanometer.
Update: Okay, a bit of explanation. As with most Asians, Filipinos eat lots of rice, and one of our preferred quick-cooking meals is any kind of processed meat served with steaming hot white rice. Hotdogs and ketchup are an old classic, but longganisa (linked sausages), beef tapa (cured fried beef), tocino (fried sweet pork) Ma Ling (pork luncheon meat with toxic lead and mercury additives), spam, and bacon are also popular favorites. When combined with a fried egg, the suffix “-ilog” is added to the name of the dish, a play on “itlog,” which is Tagalog for “egg.” Hence you have dishes called tapsilog, longsilog, tocilog, spamsilog, dogsilog, bacsilog, malingsilog, and so on. (Okay, I made up the last four three two.)
Beep beep!
From: Mom
ive sent u mango jam. keep d nice plastic containers, will get it from you when i go der coz will refill them. strong kasi my ilocano blood.
Yup, I’m part-Ilocano. This text message explains why I’m so obsessed with washing and keeping even the smallest disposable plastic food holders. Utensils, too.
For the MLK holiday, I hopped on the MARC and the Metro with a friend* and headed down to the National Gallery of Art to look at Trompe l’Oiel paintings and works by Vuillard, Vermeer, and Ingres. Then we went to other Smithsonians to look at spaceships, skeletons, and bugs.
There was also a Bible Bus (that’s a school bus decked out with bible verses) going around the Mall, with a loudspeaker on top telling “evil warmongers” President Bush and Billy Graham to repent of their sins and stop killing unborn babies before God “burns America like he did Sodom and Gomorrah.”
(Oh, and the coffee at the Museum of Natural History takes about as long to prepare as it took the dinosaurs to evolve.)
Cringe-inducing figures of speech. (Googled from an an entry by Sara.)
My personal favorites:
The red brick wall was the colour of a brick-red crayon.
John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left York at 6:36 p.m. travelling at 55mph, the other from Peterborough at 4:19 p.m.at a speed of 35mph.
Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.