In one week, at the time of this posting, I will have graduated from college and “commenced” the rest of my life.  

Ok.

Also, I will have hopefully had more than 4 hours of sleep.  Go essays!

-I know that I said that I would try to write every week, but then my computer broke and then I had to write an essay every week so…

-I am in the airport waiting for my 12:59AM flight to Charlotte, so there my be a few spelling mistakes (or raccoons, I tend to dream about those)

So, anyway, back to our topic du jour: The British approach to toast.  I think that our family is already fairly aware of the English people’s excellent taste in toasted, and then cooled, bread.  Somehow, we Americans never got the idea that you are supposed to cool off the heated bread, after you have heated it, but before you have applied butter and other toppings.  I personally think that toast should be hot enough to clarify butter (so get that great taste), but this is simply not correct.

In fact, you are supposed to cool the toast in ironically named Toast Rack (which does not toast at all).  The goal of this device is twofold.  

1) To keep steam from one piece of toast from condensing on another piece of toast (the horror!) and causing extreme, or at least mild, soggyness.

2) (and most importantly) to rapidly cool and de-tastify the toast.  

3) To allow hotel dining room flies to land on the toast (this is the least-known function of the toast rack)

Yup.  I think this may be my most awesome and interesting blog post ever!

So anyway, 

RA-CCOOOOOOOOOONS

(I’m really tired now)

The BBC News Is making this giant, super-fun deal about The Royal Society of Chemists attempt to revive Victorian domestic goddess Isabella Beaton’s 150-year-old Book of Household management [sic] [-no really, I'm feeling kind of sick-nevermind, I'm ok].  They want to do this in order to help Great Britain through its hard times.  Therefore they are encouraging such recipes as 

-Carrot on a stick: no tricks, just a classic wartime treat for kids (unless the raccoons have already eaten all the children)

-Beef tea (beef stock in a tea cup) wait, this is ok!

-Toast Soup (just boil 1 lb. of bread crusts in 2oz of butter and a quart of “common stock”)

-”Toast-and-Water” (take 1 slice of stale bread, toast it, put it in a toast rack to prevent sogginess while cooling, then soak in a quart of boiling water until cold)

The coup de grace, however, is the toast sandwich.  You might think that this might be a poor man’s panini, but you would have forgotten that you are eating English food. 

How to make a toast sandwich:

-Take a very thin slice of bread and toast it

-Cool toast in a toast rack to increase awesomeness and to prevent future soggyness

-Place cold “toast” between two other slices of bread, also sliced very thiny (literally, this is what the BBC website says)

-Butter, salt, and pepper are optional and to taste.

Admittedly, the people eating these delicacies were extremely hard up.  We should not discount their suffering, especially because they seem to have had a thing for cold and, interestingly, soggy toast.  

Apparently the toast sandwich costs just 7.5p a serving.  Yup.  The BBC is going absolutely bonkers about this.  I have literally read two articles on the subject.  Yes, two.  Both have spent quite a lot of time in the Most Read box on the website.  

So, I can’t remember what my point was.  It’s 12:14 in the morning.  Do you know where your raccoons are?

I don’t think that I need to say that I have been really busy, or unmotivated, or that my computer has been broken.  I have been working hard on my classwork and enjoying my classes.  When I have spare time, I am reading novels requested from the library.  The University library does not have much in the way of fiction, but you can request anything so, needless to say, I have been saving a little bit of money on my kindle.

Recent discoveries include:

Barbara Hambly‘s Benjamin January Books

Lindsey Davis‘ Marcus Didius Falco Series

Ruth Downie‘s series about the Medicus Ruso

All of these authors are excellent sources of well-researched historical fiction, but I think I will save them for a later blog.

Anyway, this blog is mostly to make up for lost time and to make a brief comment on the listeria poisoning situation.  It is an extremely serious situation and all of those affected have my deepest sympathies and prayers.  But, something the newspapers and websites have been doing is really bothering me.

They are running stories with pictures of cantaloupe.  That is not a crime, and listeria is an extremely serious problem, but I do not think that CNN or the LA Times are helping.  All of their pictures are of freshly cut-open cantaloupe (cantaloupes, cantaloupi?  Ok, I’ll just do what those journalistic cowards are doing – melons) that, honestly, look like some kind of alien spawn from another dimension.  I will admit that I do not like this particular type of melons in any way, but I never thought that they could look so disgusting.

Normally, you see cantaloupe already scooped and cubed, but these photographs show the melons with their seeds still in, often cut in odd ways or with higher contrast to make the seeds sort of dark, slimy and evil.  There is no way to tell if you have one of these bad melons, unless you confirm which farm it is from or get really sick from it.  They do not look evil when you cut them open.  They look like cantaloupe

Look at the slimy seeds and unnatural ABC news logo inside the melon!  No wonder people are getting sick.

Ok.  I will write you something better later.

Since my birthday fell on a Monday this year, we took the family to Napa on Sunday when Dad could go.  First, we stopped in Calistoga, a town famous for its mud baths, spas, and over-priced glasses of wine.  Despite the roller coaster-esque drive into Napa valley, we stopped and had lunch at a place called Bosko’s Trattoria.  It’s a pretty good little place with fresh pasta but mediocre service.  The food was good, but a little salty.

After lunch we wandered around town for a while.  We had been in Calistoga a year ago for my last birthday, although Mom was not with us then.  There were some new things and some cool things from last time.  The coolest place by far was the hardware store.  Not actually the inside, but the bronze gate for the front patio.  It was one of those custom ones with wine vines and flowers.  It also had money wrenches, saws, anvils, drills, and hammers.  Only in Napa county (and maybe Marin).

My favorite part by far was the Bale Grist Mill between Calistoga and St. Helena.  It is a 150 year-old mill with a wooden water wheel and French quartzite mill stones.  It could clean, mill, and sort corn and wheat automatically.  Also, it could create a ton of flour per hour.  Here is a video I made of it.  Sorry that it is on its side.  I do not really have the video mode on my camera down yet.

You can hear Dad in the background at the end doing mill geek math.  Incidentally, I think that they can run a lot more water through that thing if they want to.  They run it slow and also have to use a recirculating pump for get the water.  At one point, the water came from a mill pond.

Anyway.  We spent slightly more than an hour at the mill and then moved on to St. Helena.  That is a cool town.  I thought that Calistoga was cool, but St Helena (pronounced St. Hel-ee-na because St. Hel-en-a sounds less expensive) is a fun place.  Unfortunately we did not get there until about 4:45 on a Sunday.  Everything was closing, but we still made it to the chocolate shop.  Woodhouse Chocolate is a chocolate shop to end all chocolate shops.  Never have I spent more money on or enjoyed chocolate more.  Also, it was for my birthday so I got some macadamia bark too.

So I had a great birthday.  You can see my wishlist tab for updates.

The Western news media is replete with pithy descriptions of the rapid changes taking place in China: China has the world's fastest growing economy. China is undergoing remarkable and rapid change. This represents a unique moment for a society changing as quickly as China. You probably read such things in the paper every day – but if you have never been to China, I'm not sure you know quite what this means on a mundane level. As I've mentioned el … Read More

via BirdAbroad

I was recently looking at a list of the books I have checked out from the library, and I realized that I had no time to read anything unless it was for one of the many papers I will be writing before the end of the semester.  Luckily, my papers have been turning out fine so far, but I shouldn’t push it.  I do get to read lots of cool stuff though.  My professors assign lots of great research articles and even some from normal (read “less painful to read”) magazines.  Actually, I really enjoy these research articles as well, which gives me some hope for my future career in psychology.

Speaking of books, I finally gave up and bought an APA Style Manual.  Yeah.  I have my old MLA 6th edition (which is out of date, something I found out when I turned in my paper in History and Literature of Georgian England).  MLA just doesn’t cut it for psychology papers, however, so I need to have a good resource to figure out where I am required to cite page numbers and how, many, commas, should, go, in, this, sentence.  The Purdue OWL website is pretty good, but is based on APA fifth edition, and sixth edition came out (I think) earlier this year.  I am known, in my group work circles, as something of a stickler for proper style.  Now I can achieve even loftier heights of parenthetical citation quality.

Dear Dad,

We are reading an epistolary novel in my History and Literature of Georgian England, so I thought that I would write you a nice letter.  It was very nice to talk to you last weekend.  I alway appreciate a call, and I’m glad you got the chance to call be before flying off to Japan.  Hopefully things are going well there.  I watched Letters from Iwo Jima this week, which was extremely good and had a good Japanese flavor despite being directed by Clint Eastwood.  I was going to write an essay on in for Psychology of War, but I decided to instead go with Forrest Gump.  I know that this seems like an unlikely subject, but it actually worked out very well.  My essay was about training soldiers to kill, which didn’t become well-formalized until the Korean War.  Apparently prior to that, firing rates in battle were only about 20-30 percent.  For example, they found gobs of unfired muskets at Gettysburg, sometimes extra loaded.  That means that soldiers were miming firing at the enemy and so were double and triple and I don’t know what the word is for packing your musket 20 times.

I have lots of essays in the pipeline right now.  I know that all of the quality reading I am doing in English is helping out with the quality of my writing.  There is nothing like 18th and 19th century English literature to make one eloquent.  I keep writing what I think are somewhat substandard essays and getting great scores back.  For my English midterm, I received a ninety-seven percent.  In Psychology of War, I have now gotten two essays returned both with A grades.  The first was 40/40 and the second 37/40.  Given that we get points taken off for incorrect APA formatting and insufficient citation, this is extremely satisfying (Giles, 2011).  Even in Psychological Testing and Assessment, I have people who want to write group papers with me.  Joe, who has experience from last year, actually asked if he could be in my group!

If I were to follow the format of Humphrey Clinker, the novel we are reading, I would now write about some disgusting bodily functions.  One of the main letter writers in that book is an extreme hypochondriac, who visits Bath and worries about the bath water being used for drinking (scabs and puss and all manner of effluvia coming from the tap and being happily drunk down by peers of the realm) (Smollett, 1771).  It gets horrifyingly horrific.  You can actually get nauseous reading this three hundred year old book.  At least I will not have to write my essay in APA format (talk about nauseous).  In the inexplicable tradition of 18th century English novel titles, the title character does not actually write any of the letters that comprise the novel, and appears only a few times in the first half of the book.

The weather has been very fine in Boulder.  Although we were threatened with snow today, not a single flake has fallen and it was sunny.  I like to go to Starbucks on sunny days that are too cold to sit outside.  The Starbucks on the hill is the only stupid place on or near campus that has actual good sun exposure.  I guess all of the nice windows have private offices for tenured professors behind them. That did mean that I got a nice walk up past Varsity pond, where I was treated to the sight to a biology major falling into the pond while trying to collect who-knows-what with a sieve.  The pond has been frozen over until now, and I think that 1) there is nothing alive at the moment except really hardy yuck monsters and 2) that person will need to take several showers and possibly anti-biotics.

I must now leave you with this picturesque view of Spring in Boulder.  I understand that the blooming of Cherry Blossoms usually reaches Tokyo at the end of March, but are there any for your to see anyway?  Have a good trip.

Love,

Alex

References

Giles, J. (2011). Lectures on stupid APA format where you don’t capitalize titles except the names in them unlike normal people. Lecture, PSYC 4521, University of Colorado at Boulder.

Smollett, T. (1771). Humphery Clinker. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

Graduation is Friday, December 16th.

As I do frequently, I find myself looking back to my high school chamber orchestra with great fondness.  We were pretty good because we rehearsed every day, had great talent, and had a very strict teacher.  I hated him at times, but I miss that discipline and attention to musical detail.  Discussions over where to end a note or exactly when to play the upbeat make for some very tight, accurate music.  I also was playing with people who were generally much better that I was.  I still play with lots of very talented people, but we are there for more fun than work.  Additionally, my high school apparently had a much greater focus on Bach than most others.  By the time we got to the Bach double, we had the style down.  We knew how to make the eighth notes short and tight and how to finish each, short phrase.

Possibly because of this, something that has really surprised me in college is how unfamiliar people generally are with Bach.  Admittedly, he is my favorite composer, which is not something I could say for most of my high school orchestra members.  On itunes, I own 119 songs by Bach, and several different versions of some pieces, which I gathered as I looked for the best recording and style.  My favorite is Julia Fischer, Alexander Sitkovetsky  and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.  The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields makes all of my favorite recordings of Bach.  They are very clean, a little faster than others, and I like the tone and bow strokes.  Having seen Julia Fischer in Macky, I also can’t resist having her Bach Concertos album.

So, playing Bach is very fun, exciting, and satisfying, although a little frustrating because it is going to take some time before we have the style right.  Hopefully everyone is so excited that they will run out and buy a good version.  The pickings are kind of slim on itunes.  Isaac Stern has an ok recording, but I always prefer anything by St. Martin in the Fields.  It will also be hard because we will only have about 30 or 40 minutes to practice it each week.  We are doing it after regular rehearsal, which means cutting regular rehearsal short.  Unlike SYO’s beloved Verne Windham, our conductors are failing to let us out of time.  Regular rehearsal bled into 10 minutes of our first Bach rehearsal last night!

If you’re interested, here is a link to Itzhak Perlman and Isaac Stern playing the first movement, which you will probably recognize:

Bach Double

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