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That’s Mean…

As you may know from a previous post, I collected records in middle and high school. In fact, it was something I was known for. When a friend would bring a new friend I didn’t know to my house, they’d want me to show the new guy my records. And, believe it or not, it was such a common thing that I had a sort of “presentation” ready to go:

“This is a Japanese Duran Duran album… and this is a German Duran Duran single… and this is an Italian single from The Police … and this is a Venezuelan Madonna album.”

It may (or may not) surprise you to learn that people would often ask if the artists sang in Japanese on the Japanese records, or German on the German records, etc. Almost always I’d just say “of course not.. that’s silly”.

But there was this one time… I was trying to date a girl from Dacula, GA (and back then, Dacula was “the sticks”). The girl came to my house one day, and she brought a “friend” with her. This friend wasn’t a “real” friend, in that she hadn’t sought out this girl for her friendship. Instead, the friend was a girl from next door she’d grown up with. So while the girl I was trying to date was cool, but a little bit country, her “friend” was as REDNECK as the day is long. I don’t think she’d ever seen incandescent lighting or indoor plumbing before, because she looked at everything in my house and was like “GOAH! GOAH! GOAH MAN!” [Editor’s note: You know how Gomer Pyle used to say “Gooollllyyy”? “Goah” is the author’s attempt at spelling the first syllable of that word. “Gaw” or “Gaahh” also work, but don’t have the “redneck flair” that “goah” seems to.]

The girl I was trying to date told her friend about my records, so I gave “Redneck Girl” the presentation. Of course, she asked about Duran Duran singing in Japanese. I don’t know why, but I looked at her, and with absolute sincerity I said “Why yes, they do sing in Japanese. In fact, the reason Duran Duran are so popular worldwide is because Simon LeBon speaks 191 languages!” Redneck girl was like “Goah! I just though he was a purty boy British faggit, but he must be SMART!”

I wonder if the poor girl still thinks Simon LeBon speaks 191 languages.

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Top 10 Tunes

As always, from the home office in London, here’s the Top 10 song chart for the week ending March 11, 2012:

1) Saint Etienne – “Tonight”
2) Two Door Cinema Club – “Something Good Can Work”
3) Marsheaux – “Thirteen/True”
4) Lynda Kay – “Jack & Coke”
5) David Bowie – “Golden Years”
6) Serge Gainsbourg – “Ballade de Melody Nelson”
7) The Stranglers – “(Get A) Grip (On Yourself)”
8) Bobby Womack – “Across 110th Street”
9) Killing Joke – “Love Like Blood”
10) Cab Calloway – “Minnie the Moocher”

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-03-11

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Spaghetti alla Puttanesca

It seems like every Italian dish has a story behind it. Alfredo sauce, for example, was supposedly invented by a man (named Alfred, naturally) whose wife was having trouble producing milk after childbirth. And panettone (“Toni’s bread”) was allegedly invented in Milan in the 15th-century when a nobleman named Ughetto Atellani fell in love with a woman named Adalgisa, the daughter of a poor baker named Toni. So the story goes, Atellani sold all his prized possessions to buy exotic ingredients like raisins, lemons and oranges. He gave the ingredients to Toni, who made a cake-like bread that was so popular that it made him rich, thus allowing Ughetto and Adalgisa to marry.

Spaghetti alla Puttanesca has a decidedly less wholesome story. Depending on who you ask, the dish was invented by prostitutes who either needed something quick to cook between clients, or who needed a dish they could quickly cook for clients. One way or the other, this simple, easy to prepare, dish it’s one of my all-time favorite pastas!

spaghetti_alla_puttanesca

HARDWARE

1 large pot
1 large sauce pan
1 colander
1 knife
1 cutting board

SOFTWARE

1 pound dried pasta, preferably spaghetti
¼ cup olive oil
3 garlic cloves, chopped
1 28oz can plum tomatoes
1 tablespoon capers
15 black olives
1 small can of anchovy fillets
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried oregano
2 tablespoons fresh chopped parsley

1) Prep the ingredients by draining, seeding and chopping the tomatoes, draining, rinsing and measuring the capers, slicing the olives, and chopping the anchovies.

2) Put the oil in the sauce pan over medium heat. Add the garlic and anchovies and saute until the garlic is golden but not brown and the anchovies have liquified.

3) Add remaining ingredients except for parsley and cook for 12-15 minutes.

4) Meanwhile, cook the paste until it’s al dente.

5) Drain the pasta and add it to the pan with the sauce. Toss or stir to combine.

6) Put pasta in individual bowls to serve, topped with chopped parsley.

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Wednesday’s Roundup

I forgot to mention this, but I updated the Links page last week. I got rid of a bunch of dead links, axed some abandoned sites, added some new ones, and re-organized the whole thing. And now… on to the news!

– Apparently the US government has decided that any and all .com domains can be seized.

– I guess at this point we’re little better than Russia… where voter turnout for Vladimir Putin was 107% in some parts of the country.

– I’m a fan of neither Rush Limbaugh nor liberal columnist Michael Kinsley, but Kinsley has this great op-ed piece about the shallowness of the attack on Limbaugh after his Sandra Fluke gaffe:

People have the right not to buy a product or service they don’t wish to buy. Limbaugh’s advertisers are free to transfer their loyalty to Glenn Beck if they wish, and Limbaugh’s critics are free to deny themselves the rapturous comforts of Sleep Number beds.

Nevertheless, the self-righteous parade out the door by Limbaugh’s advertisers is hard to stomach. Had they never listened to Rush before, in all the years they had been paying for commercials on his show? His sliming of a barely known law student may be a new low — even after what he’s said about Nancy Pelosi and Michelle Obama — but it’s not a huge gap.

– And here’s an interview with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson from The Atlantic. I’m a Tyson fan, and generally like his view on American science education and NASA funding. But it’s also hard to argue with this rebuttal of the interview.

– And here’s a GREAT op-ed piece by Philip K. Howard about the need to “clean house” in Washington DC. No, not by “throwing the bums out”, but by overhauling the millions of pages of federal law on the books. For instance, a law have been passed in 1935. Instead of simply removing the old code and replacing it with new code, random amendments to the law were passed in unrelated laws in 1953, 1966, 1973, 1987 and 1998. Trying to keep track of it all is a nightmare. As Howard says, “[r]unning government today is like trying to run a business using every idea every manager ever had.”

– Click it here to read a short piece about the “10 Tech Laws that define our modern world”. It’s interesting!

– Speaking of “interesting”, my homeboys (and homegirls!) at Georgia Tech have converted the seismic readings from last year’s Japanese earthquake in to sound files. It’s cool to actually “hear” an earthquake and all the resultant aftershocks. GO JACKETS!

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Ketchup vs. Catsup

We’ve all done it at some point in our lives. Maybe you were at a restaurant that had an unfamiliar brand. Maybe you were looking in the fridge at a friend’s house. Most likely, you were standing in the condiment aisle at the grocery store. And you asked yourself: what is the difference between ketchup and catsup?

mr_burns_ketchup

The sauce we know today as ketchup originated in China around 1690. And the original Chinese recipe contained no tomatoes. In fact, it was more like a soy or Worcestershire sauce. The first ketchup recipe in the English language, published in an English cookbook called The Compleat Housewife in 1727, lists vinegar, white wine, shallots, anchovies, cloves, ginger, mace, nutmeg, pepper and lemon peel as primary ingredients.

Things quickly get complicated, however.

This sauce was supposedly known as ketsiap in China. According to some Internet sites, the sauce became popular and made its way to Malaysia, where the recipe was changed slightly and became known under the Malay name kecap. Some Internet sources say that it was the British who found the sauce in China and the Dutch who found it in Malaysia. So the Brits pronounced it “catchup” in imitation of the Chinese, and the Dutch pronounced it “ketch-up” in imitation of the Malaysians. There is evidence for this. In a 1690 book called Dictionary of the Canting Crew, English author Charles Lockyer spells it catchup, while Dutch sources from the same period call it ketjap, supporting the different origin theory. Incidentally, it was Jonathan Swift who almost single-handedly changed the English spelling from catchup to catsup. Why he preferred that spelling is not known.

On the other hand, some Internet sources say that the Dutch weren’t involved in the “ketchup vs. catsup” debate at all. These folks say that the sauce was known as both kôe-chiap and kê-chiap in China, and the resultant confusion comes from different British traders who discovered the sauce in different places under different names.

Still others say that ketchup comes from the French word escaveche, which itself comes from the Spanish escabeche, which comes from the Arabic iskebey. Frankly, I’m not at all convinced. Although the Arabic term does mean “pickling with vinegar” and the Spanish term means “sauce for pickling” (which is how the first ketchups were made), I think anthropologist E.N. Anderson and food historian Karen Hess are reaching. The two claim the word was Anglicized to caveach. But most other food historians think that caveach was a short-term English word which was replaced by the Spanish ceviche, as early recipes for caveach are suspiciously similar to ceviche.

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Top 10 Tunes

As always, from the home office in London, here’s the Top 10 song chart for the week ending March 4, 2012:

1) Marsheaux – “Thirteen/True”
2) Madonna – “Girl Gone Wild”
3) Saint Etienne – “Tonight”
4) Two Door Cinema Club – “Something Good Can Work”
5) Ashbury Heights – “Smile (Marsheaux Remix)”
6) The Ultrasonics – “Perfect Girl (Marsheaux Remix)”
7) Sleigh Bells – “Crush”
8) Marsheaux – “New Life”
9) Marsheaux – “Summer”
10) Marsheaux – “Stand By”

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-03-04

  • Not hungover, but I feel like I got into a fistfight in my sleep. Anyone else ever feel like that? #
  • @DaleMurphy3 Well, you don’t have to have a license AT ALL to drive in NASCAR, so not sure there’d be an age requirement. #
  • @DaleMurphy3 A NASCAR driver was busted in CLT doing 100+mph on a public road; the news said he didn’t need a lic. for races. (more) #
  • @DaleMurphy3 So it didn’t matter to him (career-wise) if his license was suspended or not. #
  • @heyred704 Gluten-free stuff (hurry, 12 hrs.left): http://t.co/1A05IsY9 #
  • @heyred704 Not autobot spam, by the way. It’s me! 🙂 #
  • OMG! The countdown to Gay Super Bowl LXXXIV has started! #
  • @AveryHutchinson Tylenol PM is just Tylenol + Benadryl. Save your liver & money and just buy generic Benadryl. #
  • @FillmoreNC I’ll watch static on the TV before I’ll watch the NBA! #
  • Bittle and I are on the sofa, eating ice cream and watching the Oscars. I love that cat. #
  • @AveryHutchinson Yeah, Lisa buys the generic stuff at Sam’s for sleeping. I could swear it’s like $3 for 400 tabs! #
  • Still have fingers crossed for the #MadMenParty #
  • My Top 3 #lastfm Artists: Marsheaux (27), Roxy Music (4) & The Ting Tings (4) http://t.co/6xmXsQXb #

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Friday’s Roundup

– You might have heard that the FDA was planning on requiring tobacco companies to include large and graphic warning labels on cigarettes. On Wednesday, a federal judge declared the rule unconstitutional, as it interferes with the tobacco companies’ first amendment rights to commercial speech. The tobacco companies argued, perhaps correctly, that no other product for sale in the United States was required to dedicate 50% of its packaging to graphic images of the consequences of using the product. However, I think it might be cool if all products were required to use such images. Imagine if table saws and nail guns were required to have pictures of severed hands and nails in skulls on the box! It sure wold make Home Depot trips much more interesting!

– Neowin is asking the question we all have: is Google+ a ghost town? Sure, G+ can claim to have over 100 million users to Facebook’s 845 million… but according to digital business analytics company comScore, Facebook users spend 7 hours a month on the site, while Google+ users spend (wait for it!) three minutes a month on the site.

– Speaking of Google’s failures… how’s Google Music working out? Not very well at all, which is shocking given that Google has a ready-made user base of over 200 million Android users. Google has a long history of starting a dozen half-baked projects, waiting several months, then keeping only the few that stick. This won’t work in the Big Content game, and Google has to know that. The Big G is reportedly working on Google Music specific hardware (uh, don’t you guys have 200 million tablets and phones already?), but analysts think Google may have to pull the plug on Music before the devices (whatever they are) are ready for market.

– Is it possible that the first Native Americans came from Europe instead of Asia? A group of archaeologists seem to think so. They’ve discovered European-style stone tools dating back 19,000 and 26,000 years at various sites on the east coast of North America. Dennis Stanford, of the Smithsonian, and Bruce Bradley, of the University of Exeter, have released a new book called Across Atlantic Ice, which might re-write the history of North America.

– NASA snapped a cool picture of an underwater storm. It looks a bit like a hurricane, but it’s all happening under the surface of the water. A boat traveling across the water wouldn’t even know the storm was happening. Properly called an “eddy“, such storms are common where two currents meet.

– Ever wonder why progress bars suck so much? It’s because your computer is pretty crappy at predicting the future. Because that’s what progress bars really try to do. Read this blog post at Popular Mechanics for more.

– Guess what, Skype? Vonage is coming for you!

– Ever heard of the “Fan Cost Index”? It’s a survey done every year by sports information company Team Marketing Report. The FCI is the cost of “four tickets at average price, two small beers, four small sodas, four hot dogs, parking, two programs and two adult caps” at each NFL stadium. Guess who “wins” for the most expensive fan experience this year? The New York Jets, whose FCI is a whopping $628.90. I’m turning 41 in a couple of weeks, and I’ve caught myself thinking or saying the old “candy bars were a quarter and concert tickets were $15 when I was a kid” chestnut… but DAMN! $629 to take a family of four to an NFL game??? I know it’s Noo Yawk and all, but back in 2002 I paid $100 less per month to rent a nice 1BR apartment in Alpharetta! Incidentally, the New York Giants, who play in the same stadium as the Jets, have an FCI of “only” $592.26. Read more here.

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Category Maintenance

Just a heads up: I’ve done some pruning to the categories. The “Time Warner” category is gone, and all posts that were in that category have been moved to “Geek Stuff”. I also killed the “Life On Mars” and “Hotel Babylon” categories and moved those posts to “TV”.

– Jim