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Monday, May 5th, 2008
The Youth Orchestra of Essex County ended its spring term today with a concert at Daughters of Israel rest home, in West Orange. This was Sylvia's second semester playing with the orchestra and her fourth concert. It went very well, I thought -- the Overture Strings played "Ashokan Farewell" (which Sylvia and I are going to be performing together at the end of the month, when Gladney is holding a talent event at the Chinese Consulate) and Vivaldi's "Spring", and sounded very pretty. The Junior Symphony played a lovely piece which I thought was called "Slovenian Legend", but I'm not getting any hits for that. Maybe something else. And ECSO played the overture to "The Magic Flute", and sounded like professional musicians. Sylvia sat by herself (I mean with other kids, separate from me) through the Junior and ECSO performances, and paid attention to the music. I kept an eye on her from the back of the room and felt good that she was into it.
posted evening of May 5th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, May second, 2008
I said yesterday that I wanted to reminisce some about starting the blog. Well: I think I've written most of this before, but here goes. In 1999 or thereabouts, I decided I wanted to have a website, and that it should consist of a notes about what books I am currently reading. I cajoled my then-employers to give me some space on their server, I bought a domain name from Network Solutions, I wrote a couple of pages. The site went live the same evening Ellen's writing group held a reading of their work at Cornelia Street Café; we announced the site's launch, fun. Over the next couple of years I wrote sporadically for the site; occasionally came up with some really interesting pages. (My notes on reading Faulkner's The Hamlet are one of the most popular pages in all of READIN -- nearly every day brings a couple of Google searches for "The Hamlet by Faulkner", which I guess must not have a lot written about it on the web. It is probably my favorite Faulkner book, largely because the process of writing notes on it went so well.) The technology supporting READIN at this point was Notepad to compose posts and a Visual Basic™ program to compile them into nicely formatted HTML. In 2002 I started noticing blogs (I think the first one I read was Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World, which I found while searching for an online publisher of his comic), and getting interested. I didn't realize for a while that blogging was what I wanted to do -- I was hardly maintaining READIN at all anymore, and I didn't make the connection between my web site and this new technology. (I'm slow that way.) But after about a year of reading blogs I decided to give it a try, and in the space of about a week hacked together an ASP script to render pages. And this journal was born. And, well, this is one of the main things I do for fun nowadays. It gets more and more interesting as I learn new ways I can use the technology. Hope to keep it going for a long time.
posted evening of May second, 2008: 3 responses
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You want to know what is a really nice feeling? Thinking of a recipe while you're at work, for which you have a couple but not all of the ingredients; coming home, taking a walk to the (new! good!) market in town;* finding exactly the ingredients you were thinking about; bringing them home and making dinner and having it come out just like you had planned. Shrimp and scallops, with saffron cous-cous(to serve 2)
- ½ lb. small shrimp
- a few scallops
- 1 head basil
- about ½ lb. snow peas
- 1 can baby corn
- 1 cup dry cous-cous
- 4 cloves garlic
- a pinch saffron
Prepare all ingredients beforehand as this is a quick dish to cook: wash the peas and basil, drain the corn, chop the garlic. Peel and vein the shrimp.Heat 1 cup water in a small saucepan, with a bit of butter, about half the garlic, and ½ tsp. salt. Heat about a Tbsp. canola oil in a wok over high flame. Stir-fry garlic, shrimp and scallops with a pinch of salt until shrimp turns pink, about 2-3 min. As water comes to a boil, remove from heat and stir in cous-cous and saffron. (I was going to put a little nutmeg in, but I forgot.) Cover pan. Add snow peas, basil, and corn to wok and stir until everything is hot and wilted, a couple of minutes. Toss cous-cous with a fork. Serve immediately. Boy, this is tasty.
For dessert we had fruit salad with chocolate and crème fraiche, which is not really worth writing out as a recipe because it's pretty intuitive. I recommend such a dessert highly.
 * South Orange has a market! This is something new. It is Eden Gourmet. They have close to everything I want in a market. Prices are high but what can you do -- they are competitive with Whole Foods, the other grocery option around here; their produce looks to be better and cheaper than Whole Foods. Their grocery selection is absolutely better and wider than Whole Foods; on items that both carry I think the prices are roughly similar.
posted evening of May second, 2008: Respond
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 I like it.
posted evening of May second, 2008: Respond
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This week I have been making an effort to add illustrations to my posts and to my sidebar links. I'm pretty happy with how it's looking and intend to keep doing that -- it seems to make the page a lot more visually engaging. Also thinking of trying to find a graphic that would fit nicely in the upper right-hand corner of the page, where there is a lot of empty space.* Somewhat related, I've been doing a lot of work on the interface for adding new posts and editing posts, so that I'm able to see how the post will render as I'm adding it. Would like to do something similar for adding/editing the daily "Of interest:" links, but that is going to be a bit more involved.
 *Update: Found one! How do you like it?
posted evening of May second, 2008: Respond
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 Ragebunny has discovered a new photostream on Flicker; one which purports to be maintained by [presumably some person working at] The Library of Congress*. It is a fantastic thing: tons of archival photos, right now from the 1910's and the 30's-40's, and I'm assuming more decades will be uploaded soon.
 Also on LJ today, Gertrude Crumlift Sturdley links to a NY Times article about smutty archival recordings. Good stuff!
* Confirmed: Here is the LoC's FAQ regarding the Flicker project.
posted afternoon of May second, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, May first, 2008
 I totally forgot to note the passing of another year blogging, which happened last Friday. I have been keeping this journal for 5 years, now! (At roughly 240235 posts/year.*) That is a long time.
I feel like writing some reminiscences of starting this journal, but not right now. Maybe on the weekend I will. (In the meantime, here is an early post about my motivations in starting a blog.)
*Forgot: the id number of the latest post is not quite the same as the number of posts, since there have been a couple of deletions here and there. (It's very front-loaded though: in the first four years the average number of posts is 176, in the fifth year there are 473 posts. I wonder what the sixth year will bring?)
posted morning of May first, 2008: Respond
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 Oh boy, another month! This one is going to be the month of my birthday and the month when our garden really starts looking garden-y. (April hasn't been too bad -- some nice flowers -- but in May you start getting the lush greenery, the azaleas and the mountain laurel are going to come out in force, I need to start mowing the lawn.)
posted morning of May first, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
I wrote in comments to Dr. Waterman's post at The Great Whatsit, that the first two stanzas of "To Brooklyn Bridge" had me anticipating a story -- maybe I should try and explain what I mean.  How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty --
Then, with inviolate cure, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
-- Till elevators drop us from our day... So: You see the seagull flying across the bay in the dawn in the first stanza -- and I think this stanza is really the most beautiful bit of the poem -- and the second gives a feeling of dropping, as if we are taking our eyes from the gull to look at the events below it. Great! We're going to have a poem describing some events on the lower Manhattan waterfront! But no; the lens never focuses after it leaves the gull. That's my complaint. "Till elevators drop us from our day" totally makes me think, "Till human voices wake us, and we drown."
 Update: Waterman suggests that at least some of the images in subsequent stanzas could be interpreted as transformations of (or references to) the seagull. This is an interesting idea.
posted evening of April 29th, 2008: Respond
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The University of Utah press will be publishing Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk: the Writer in his Novels, by Michael McGaha, in July. It purports to be "the first book-length study of the life and writings of Pamuk", a claim which is born out by the searching I've been doing online. So, exciting! Can't wait! It is an excellent, promising title for a book about Pamuk's novels.
posted morning of April 29th, 2008: Respond
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