Happy Halloween

Go ahead, go watch it again. You know you want to. And if you're wondering what's in the box, all I'm gonna say is that it's hot pink and takes two AAs.

Cry me a river

Yesterday Alex Rodriguez announced that he was opting out of his contract with the Yankees. The announcement happened to come during the fourth game of the World Series, and A-Rod and his agent were immediately criticized for timing the announcement to upstage the Red Sox victory.

I'm sorry, but isn't that a little Bridezilla of the Red Sox? It's as if all of Red Sox Village is collectively whining, "BUT IT'S MMMMMYYYYYYY SPECIAL DAAAAAYYYYYYYYY!!!!!" I mean, come on people, you won the World Series. Fanfuckingtastic. You're going to go home to Boston and have a nice little parade, and Boston fans are going to become even more insufferable than they already are. (Seriously, god help us all if Boston College wins the BCS and the Patriots win the Super Bowl.) Are A-Rod and the rest of the baseball universe supposed to put everything on hold to bow down before the great 2007 Red Sox? Give me a break. The world does not revolve around you.

And while we're on the subject of A-Rod, honestly, this man cannot catch a break. I am a Yankee fan, but A-Rod never got the respect he deserved from most of the Yankee fanbase. I don't blame him for wanting to go somewhere else. But of course most Yankee fans will just take this as another reason to bitch about A-Rod and will adopt Hank Steinbrenner's country-club mentality that being a Yankee is a privilege, and that we don't want anyone who doesn't want us. Well you know, maybe A-Rod would have wanted to be a Yankee if the poor guy didn't get booed every time he failed to go 4-for-5 with four RBIs and a walk-off home run. I hope he lands somewhere where he's a little better appreciated.

(I didn't think it was possible to piss off both Red Sox fans and Yankee fans in the same breath, but I think I may have just accomplished it.)

Fun for geography nerds!

Play State-tris!  Like Tetris, but with the shapes of the states filling up a map of the U.S. 

Green! Papaya! Salad!

As promised, the GPS recipe that I've devised (with a little help from the internet) since discovering that the K&S International Market here in Nashville carries green papayas.

A few notes before we get going:

1. Some of the ingredients (specifically green papaya, fish sauce, palm sugar, and tamarind paste) will not be available in your local Pathmark, or Kroger, or Safeway, or whatever. In some cases (palm sugar) you can substitute something more common (regular sugar). But the rest you really need to track down. GPS without fish sauce is really no GPS at all, and I am definitely a convert to the tamarind paste. Also, you can't just find a green-looking regular papaya. You actually need the fruit labeled green papaya, and the greener the better.

2. For some of the steps, I used a large granite mortar and pestle. What can I say?--I'm a kitchen gadget whore. I've included alternate means of accomplishing the same tasks if you don't have the same whore-ish tendencies.

3. Many GPS recipes on the internet involve dried shrimp. I didn't use dried shrimp because my husband claims to be allergic to shrimp. I'm not sure a teensy little bit of dried shrimp would actually do him any harm, but he already thinks I've tried to kill him with lobster and crab, so I stayed away from the dried shrimp.

4. A word about the chilis. Thai chilis are the little ones on the left in this picture. The chili on the right is a long hot pepper, and you can substitute that if it's easier to find. If you can't find either, just go with a jalapeno or some other hot pepper, although that will impart a different kind of heat.


That said, off we go:

2 Thai chili peppers
2 cloves garlic
1 1/2 tbsp. palm sugar
1 tbsp. tamarind pulp
2 tbsp. fish sauce
2 limes, juiced
1 green papaya
1 carrot
1 small red pepper or 12 cherry tomatoes (basically, something red)
24 green beans
1/4 c. bean sprouts
1/4 c. peanuts
2 scallions

Slice the chilis thinly, and then add them to the mortar with the garlic cloves. Smash the chilis and garlic with the pestle. (If you don't have a mortar, put the chilis and garlic in a large bowl and mash them with the back of a spoon.)

Meanwhile, prepare the palm sugar and the tamarind pulp. First, melt the palm sugar (or substitute regular sugar) in 1 tbsp. warm water. Separately, melt the tamarind pulp in 1/3 c. warm water. Mash the pulp to extract the juice, and discard the solids.

Combine the chilis, garlic, palm sugar, tamarind juice, fish sauce, and lime juice in a medium-sized bowl and let sit while you prepare the rest of the salad.

Time to deal with the papaya. First, cut that sucker in half and scoop out any seeds. Then you need to shred the meat into a large bowl. There are a few ways of accomplishing this. We have a nifty little tool that we bought in Vietnam that is designed expressly for this purpose, and creates little noodle-like strands of papaya. (See, what did I tell you? Gadget whore.) It looks like this:


But seeing as I've never seen another one of these in this hemisphere, you will probably be forced to do this with Western-style tools. The best way to do this is to peel the papaya and grate it with a cheese grater. A Cuisinart might work too, but I haven't tried it. Here's J-P mastering the papaya shredder:


And here's what the papaya looks like when it's done:


Now, julienne the carrot and the red pepper, and add them to the papaya. (If you're using tomatoes instead of red pepper, just halve them and add to the papaya. Tomatoes are actually much more common in GPS, but we use red pepper because J-P once had a bad run-in with a cherry tomato.)

Then trim and halve the green beans, give them a little mash in the mortar to bruise them, and add them to the papaya. (If you want to try adding dried shrimp, mash 1 tbsp. in the mortar with the green beans and add to the papaya.)

Add the bean sprouts and the reserved chili-garlic-tamarind-fish-lime-sauce to the papaya and mix well. Adjust amounts of lime juice, fish sauce, sugar, and chilis if necessary.

Slice up the scallions, give the peanuts a mash in the mortar, and sprinkle both on top. Here's the look you're going for:


We had this the other night with some green curry we picked up at one of Nashville's esteemed Thai eateries, and it was yummy. Very fresh, quite spicy, and super yum. And now you can try it too!

Motivated

Woohoo! I finally stopped being lazy and fixed the banner. So now you should be able to see the pretty, fall-ish picture that has been missing for the last month. Hopefully it won't go missing again.

1-6, and nothing to lose (except the next five games)

It's about fucking time. Seriously, I could be coaching this team.

Tennesseans in the news

As a fellow Tennessean, I think today's Nobel news is just great. And if you still haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth (I'm talking to you Mom and Dad), now's the time to see it.

God bless Google

After a long day spent celebrating a college friend's wedding this weekend, we found ourselves in the hotel bar, where the level of conversation amongst my friends and myself was quite degraded, which I suppose was inevitable after conquering the alcoholic universe from Bloody Mary to Margarita.

So there we were, all those advanced degrees between us, not discussing anything so important as the war, or the economy, or the election, or even the baseball playoffs. No, there we sat discussing the Diarrhea Song. You know, that little ditty that starts "If you're sliding into first, and you're feeling something burst . . . " And try though we would, we could not remember the words to the second verse. Ten or twenty years ago, we would have just accepted the fact that we would never be able to remember those words. But today? No sir. Thanks to Al Gore we have the Internet, and what a good thing it is, because now not only are all the words to the Diarrhea Song right at our fingertips, but there also is a blog devoted to the Diarrhea Song.

I don't know how anyone lived before now.

[Thanks to Kelly and J-P for digging up those links. I would've done it, but, you know, some of us WORK for a living.]

Jenna hearts Henry

Did anyone catch the ridiculous piece of schlock in the Washington Post about Jenna Bush and her new fiance, Henry Hager? It was four (internet) pages of purple prose that could easily win a Bulwer-Lytton Award if it hadn't been published in a reputable newspaper.

Here's a choice quote about Henry's dad:

John Hager was tall and hardworking. He and his older sister had grown up in Durham, N.C. His mother was involved with the city's Debutante Ball Society, the country club and the garden club, according to her obituary. John's father, like John's uncle and grandfather, was an executive at the now-defunct American Tobacco Co., maker of Pall Malls and Lucky Strikes. After Purdue and an MBA at Harvard, John joined the company, too.

Then John got the flu, which turned out not to be the flu at all. It was instead a rare case of polio in 1973, contracted from an excessively virulent dose of the vaccine with which his first child, Jack, then an infant, had been inoculated. Even now he uses a wheelchair.

The company rescinded a promotion he'd just gotten to executive vice president. John stayed on in lesser positions until he retired in 1994.

With his newfound time, he took an increasing interest in politics. His son Henry would be at his side in his unsuccessful race for governor.

Here's one about the Hager family's involvement in Virginia politics:

Their influence is of a quieter and more traditional sort, a matter of manners and knowing one's place, of sitting on the right boards and working behind the scenes.

Most likely you would never hear of these people -- unless they chose to get into politics.

This is the model for much of the Hagers' influence. They know the other movers and shakers, the other Good Families in Richmond. The Children's Hospital of Richmond, the state Chamber of Commerce and countless other groups outside the political realm have been the lucky recipients of John's prodigious energies. (And he does seem to have more energy than most people.)

But I think this one speculating on the basis of Jenna and Henry's attraction just about takes the cake:

Social anthropologists say that in matters of love, like meets like. Whatever frisson is sparked, there are also subtle evaluations of shoes and manners, of accent and ambition -- and these things become part of the calculus by which human beings can guess at a future together.

In the case of Jenna and Henry, there is much like in their love.

Please, if I ever start writing like this, stick my head in a toilet bowl until I promise to put down the adjectives and step away from the metaphors.

Down to The Wire

Since we moved in May, we've been living without cable or network TV, so we've been catching up on lots of movies and TV shows on DVD, and we've become huge fans of The Wire. As it turns out, the actor who plays Major Rawls is a fellow Quaker, and Penn's alumni magazine did a great profile on him recently.

I have to say, The Wire is TV at its absolute finest. If you've never seen it, the show is a gritty, raw, no-holds-barred portrayal of a drug investigation in inner-city Baltimore. It tells the story from both sides--that of the cops (and DAs and judges) doing the investigating, and that of the drug dealing organization being investigated. But the show doesn't rely on neat good-guys-versus-bad-guys stereotypes. There are bad-guy cops, good-guy drug dealers, vice versa, and everything in between. The show trades in moral gray areas, and does a fine job of it. And if anything, the show highlights the many weird similarities in how the two systems operate. Among both the cops and the drug dealers, for example, the chain of command is sacrosanct, and the consequences for disloyalty are severe.

One of the most compelling characters is a drug addict turned confidential informant named Bubbles, or Bubbs. Bubbs wrestles fiercely with his addiction, but just is unable to kick it. As a confidential informant, Bubbs develops a trusting relationship with a compassionate cop who is in charge of the case. One almost gets the sense that Bubbs is willing to serve as an informant, at great personal risk to himself, simply for the genuine human connection that he has shares with this cop, a genuine connection that otherwise would be completely lacking from his life.

The actor who plays Bubbs does an amazing job portraying Bubbs in every state--high, sober, jonesing, and in withdrawal. The costuming and makeup is also great; if you saw Bubbs walking down the street, you definitely would steer well clear of him. But what I find most amazing about the show, and about the portrayal of Bubbs in particular, is the impact it's had on how I view others. It's not uncommon in New York, Nashville, or frankly almost any city, to run across someone who is clearly down on their luck, likely addicted to drugs, possibly mentally ill, and definitely in need of a shower and clean clothes. Because of the sensitive portrayal of Bubbs, I have a more balanced impression of the lives addicts lead, and a newfound compassion and sympathy for people who are in a very difficult and sad situation.

If you ask me, providing unique, real, and sympathetic perspectives on people's lives what all TV should strive to do. Some shows try and fail, and many don't even bother. It is the rare show that accomplishes that feat as spectacularly as The Wire does. I couldn't recommended this show more.