When Pavement played the first show of their recent reunion tour, they finished off with this cover of Native American jazz pioneer Jim Pepper’s Witchi Tai To. Such a lovely and positive vibe with which to end the show and start their awesome year-long tour.
I will forever wonder why Bob was left out of the band intro. Nothing sinister, I reckon — probably just Malkmus forgetting what he was going to say. Bloody slacker.
Like all other Pavement covers they make it sound like their own song.
Some things I like and don’t like about making gyoza —
Chopping Chinese cabbage is my least favourite part, mainly because my chopping board is a bit too small, as is my knife, so I end up with bits of cabbage all over the kitchen. It seems like I chop for an hour or two without making much progress then suddenly it’s over and I have a large heap of finely chopped cabbage. Nice.
Salting and squeezing the cabbage is probably my favourite part. Basically you take the chopped cabbage, put it in a bowl, stir through a couple of spoonfuls of salt, put that into sieve over a bowl and wait for twenty minuets. The salt will draw water out of the cabbage so there’ll be quite a bit in the bowl. Most of the water will need a bit more encouragement, so you put the cabbage in the middle of a tea towel and wrap it up and squeeze it as much as you can to extract as much water as possible. I don’t know why I find this so satisfying. Maybe its because there’s nothing like this in any other recipe I make. Anyway, it’s fun.
Bonus second favourite part — getting a nice deep dark crust on the underside of the gyoza. Without it, I’d consider my gyoza a failure.
If you haven’t made gyoza and want to give it a try, go for J. Kenji López-Alt’s recipe.
From Elle on Mastodon:
whenever my boss says “think of the big picture, elle” I’m immediately an astronaut floating silently in space tethered to my ship looking down on earth, and nothing he wants seems important or even relevant really so this strategy has backfired on him more than once is what I’m saying
I want to get a new non-phone eReader — although I love my iPhone Mini’s size I’d like to see more than seven words on a page — and the main feature I care about is that it have page-turn buttons. Seems like that’s a high end feature these days. The two choices are the Kobo Libra 2 for $300 or the Kindle Oasis for, ahem, $420. On all the more reasonably priced options you have to tap the screen to turn the page. I know from years reading on a phone and some time with a Kindle Paperwhite that I hate tapping the screen.
So, should I spend $120 more to be able to read my fairly sizeable library of Kindle books? Should I throw my hat into the ring with the non-Amazon crowd? Most likely I’ll end up deciding, as I have in the past, that I could buy a lot of books with even the $300 that the “cheaper” option would cost and that reading on my phone is not really that bad.
Anyway, back to Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. A terrible thing has happened to Marx and I hope he pulls through.
From Louie Mantia’s Yesterday Is Not Today:
Everything has to change, every day, forever. That’s how it has to work. If not, we have determined we were smarter yesterday than we are today.
The New Pornographers is a band I never listened to mainly because their name made me think they were a kind of sleazy Strokes ripoff. Turns out they aren’t. Since getting my AirPods Pro I’ve actually started to listen to music outside of my car and I’ve been really enjoying a lot of the stuff the Apple Music Discover station has been surfacing. I’ll always give more weight to the recommendations of an actual person, but maybe there is a place for algorithms after all.
Anyway, one of the songs that popped up was The New Pornographers’ Really Really Light from their newish album Continue as a Guest. It’s catchy, has those obscure lyrics I can’t resist, and features a wonderful interplay of male and female vocals. Can’t wait to dive deeper into their sound.
I finally got around to trying Obsidian and, with the Things theme installed, it seemed to do everything I wanted. Mainly, I really like the way it displayed checklists and dimmed the text if you checked something was done. And being able to add little icons to the mobile toolbar to move items up and down is also great.
One thing I didn’t love about the theme was that on my iPhone it put a big blue dot in the bottom right hand corner to let me change from one kind of view to another but also got in the way of the words I was trying to write.
After a bit of head scratching I worked out how to turn it off. You have to install a plug-in called Style Settings. Once you’ve installed and enabled it, there will be an option in the general settings to allow you to make the dot disappear along with a bunch of other little tweaks that you can make.
Things seemed great until I tried it out on my Mac using Voice Control, my preferred text input method at the moment. And for some reason, unlike almost every other app on my computer, nothing happened — no text appeared. I’m not sure why, but there is some kind of disconnection between Voice Control and Obsidian. This seems to be something of a known issue with some people reporting that it works about 10 per cent of the time and fails the other 90 per cent.
So, back to Bear it is.
If you use MarsEdit and its media manager is showing hardly any of your photos, the problem is most likely your setting in the Photos app for iCloud Photos.
You have two choices: “Download Originals to this Mac” or “Optimise Mac Storage”.
If you have it set to download originals, all your pictures will show up. If you have it set to optimise Mac storage, you’ll just see a random smattering of images.
While troubleshooting this with Daniel Jalkut, the author of MarsEdit, he mentioned he was looking at ways to address this including, perhaps, using a newer Apple facility to access the Photos database. As SSD space on Macs remains limited and image resolution on iPhones expands, I hope Apple will make it easier for developers to deliver what users expect.
This is a great point. So much coverage of tech focuses on the wrangling of aristocrats.
This is not a fully formed thought, but I have a visceral reaction to seeing coverage of Altman’s firing treated as a top-left news headline. It feels part of the hagiography of these dudes, that we cover them like kings and we cover their companies like nations, but somehow we don’t cover what their tech is going to do to real people.
What kind of monster, when meeting their brother’s ex-girlfriend at the pharmacy, would casually mention that he’s got that new love glow?
I have accidentally left cleaning up the garden to the day before our rent inspection and now it’s raining. Looks like I’ll be living a real life version of that early REM song “Gardening in the Rain”.
Although Mastodon is the social media thing that feels most like home to me, I’ve been dipping my toe a little into the slightly murky waters of Bluesky and Threads.
One thing that has surprised me is the primitive implementation of the mute feature. I use muting to temporarily make my feed a bit quieter and stop it being dominated by people who are being particularly vociferous. It’s more of a “shush” than a “mute”.
Neither Threads nor Bluesky lets me do that. I can’t just remove someone’s posts for a day and have them start showing up tomorrow, which is pretty much all I want to do. You can mute someone, but you have to manually unmute them to see their posts again. It’s more of a way to quietly unfollow someone without them knowing. Maybe that’s what people want or maybe they’re planning on adding more granular controls.
Oh, and neither has keyword muting yet either. So if you’d like to take a break from hearing about the Cybertruck or whatever, they can’t help you there either.
I love the soft thunk you get when you drop the kettlebell on the grass at the end of a set.
So if you buy your daughter some super spicy chicken wings at the Taiwanese chicken place whose supposedly non-spicy chicken is too spicy for you, it’s a bad idea, when you put the super spicy chicken wings into the oven to heat up, to plunge your hand into the bag, bring out an assemblage of crunchy chicken bits and the super-spicy spice mix and put it in your mouth. You will not be happy. Lesson learned?
This was great — just so full of great scenes and much less straightforward than I’d expected. After just one watch I don’t really feel I have a handle on what this film is about or trying to say. But I do know I’ll watch it again.
Some things that stood out for me:
Nine out of ten times when I turn on the Playstation I have to change the interface language from Japanese, my daughters’ preference, to English, which is mine.
Why can’t I set the preferred language at the user profile level rather than it be a global preference? For families like mine it would be a huge benefit and it doesn’t seem like it would be difficult to do. Maybe Sony thinks there just aren’t enough multi-lingual families to make it worthwhile.
Second watch. The first two episodes of this three-part anthology seemed just as off as before — odd casting for the first and too much of a contrived structure for the second.
But the third episode was even more moving than before. Just wonderful performances from the two actresses as they wrestle with regrets and doubts. I love that it is shot in a very flat and uncinematic way. For forty minutes you get to share this wonderful day without anything getting in the way.
There’s so much to love here: the moment the mistaken identity is discovered, the In the Mood for Love-ish role-playing, and calm, but deeply emotional tone.
In the last few weeks I’ve made the long drive down to Busselton or Bunbury and back about ten times. Today, on my last drive back to Perth for, I think, a week or so, noticing my eyes were getting that droopy feeling, I stopped at one of the roadside service centres to get a coffee. I decided to pass on the coffee, which I knew would be either too milky or too bitter. A splash of cold water in my face did the trick to snap me out of highway fatigue.
But I was feeling peckish. Against my better judgment I went for one single piece of KFC original recipe chicken. KFC is one of my most reliable disappointments with Australian fast food. I should add that I judge all fast food by Japan standards — a very high bar. It’s either too soggy, too oily or too dry. But I just needed some calories to keep me going.
When I got back to my car (air-conditioning and good music) I opened the little one-piece pack to find the platonic ideal of KFC — crispy, flavourful and perfectly cooked inside. My faith in the fast food gods have been (temporarily, I’m sure) restored.
We decided to swing by the Bunbury Dolphin Discovery Centre on the way back from Busselton so got up early and headed off to get there for eight o’clock.
I am still haunted by our first visit, when I failed to take into account that the dolphins are wild and don’t just hang around the whole time the centre is open. They come and go as they please, which I’d have realised if I’d given it even a moment’s thought. So we turned up late, after they’d been in, and waited for a fair while hoping they’d make a rare second visit. They did not.
So we got there a little after eight this morning and just as soon as we got our stuff out of the car, ready for an indeterminate wait, the bell rang that signalled there was a visitor. We got to spend about twenty minutes as she swam about just in front of us. A very nice anniversary (plus one day) present.
I lived in Japan for close to 20 years and, after 10 years of living in Australia, there are still many Japanese words that are part of my mental language — you may never hear me say them, but they are the ones my mind goes for to describe certain things.
My favourite is probably mendokusai. Unlike some others, like fuinki or natsukashii, which don’t really have straight English equivalents, it translates pretty easily as What a bother! or It’s a hassle.
But there’s something about mendokusai that I love and that makes me prefer it. I think it’s the hard consonant sounds that do it for me — and that I can draw it out into three distinct parts: men doku sai. That doku means poison also helps add the feeling that something is such a hassle that it is toxic.