Continuing my tradition of absolutely not seeing what was coming — I remember thinking that the word “blog” would never catch on and that nobody would put up with seeing ads in their Instagram feed — I am baffled to see Twitter’s blue badge being positioned as the cornerstone of their subscription efforts. I could easily see paying to avoid ads or being able to make edits to tweets, but to get a badge next to your username? Not so much.
Salt & Fat’s Butter Tomato Sauce
The day ten years ago this recipe for tomato-butter sauce was posted on Salt & Fat was the day I started to cook. Until then I had prepared plenty of food and certainly thought that I had been cooking, but all I had really been doing was warming a few disparate ingredients enough to be edible and adding a bunch of salt at the end.
This, however, was the first time I had taken a few ingredients — tomatoes, an onion, salt and butter — and created something that tasted entirely different. I still remember the jolt I got from my first taste of this sweet, salty, jammy sauce. It was like alchemy.
Salt & Fat is a blog by Neven Mrgan and Jim Ray that ran from 2010 to 2014. It’s been on hiatus for a few years, but its archives are a treasure trove of ideas that massively expanded my food world. Food is food, after all, so it’s not as though any of this is going to go out of date anytime soon. A few highlights off the top of my head are —
- 707 Fried Chicken
- A treatise on salads and the vinaigrette
- Roasting a chicken
- Quinoa
- Turkey, Brie, and Cucumber Sandwich
- Patate Lesse
That last one is for boiled potatoes, and is a particular favourite. Nothing could be simpler, but few things are as tasty in their simplicity. I no longer make any of these exactly as described, but I use the techniques described every single day.
Posted in Food
Missing Japanese Input Sources
I ran into an unusual Mac OS bug this morning. I hit the kana key to type an address in Japanese, but it came out in romaji. I hit it again — same thing. When I looked in the input menu, I saw that all the Japanese and Korean input options had disappeared. I attempted to add them again in system preferences but they didn’t appear as choices. The Chinese options were also missing. Oddly, when I logged into another user account on the same machine, everything was where it should be. Multiple restarts did nothing, nor did changing my main language to Japanese.
I finally found a mention of something similar relating to High Sierra in a blog post that recommended doing a safe boot to set things right.
I tried it and it worked. Phew! I have no idea what triggered it, though.
Posted in Technology
Tagged Japanese
Not Quite My Own C64
My first computer was a Commodore 64. Way before I had my own though, I had access to one at the local public computer lab—aka, K-Mart. The local library had a few C64 magazines full of BASIC programs ready to be typed out, but magazines, for some reason, could not be loaned. I can’t clearly remember, but I think there was also a rule against them being photocopied. Otherwise why would I, as I clearly remember, have spent hours copying these programs by hand into an exercise book? Maybe I just didn’t have enough money.
After I’d got one down and more or less checked, I rode my embarrassingly non-BMX bike to K-Mart, where I stood for hours typing away on the display machine. It seems strange now, but I don’t remember anyone ever asking me to move on or stop what I was doing. The majority of the programs I tried out threw up a SYNTAX ERROR, caused either by my hunt-and-bash typing, poor copying, or the frequent flaws in the magazine text.
Sometimes, though, they worked, and when they did it was like hitting a home run. I had no way to save these programs, though, so when I was done I had no choice but to just walk away, leaving them to be wiped when the power was shut off for the night.
Exhalation
Ted Chiang’s Exhalation is one of my favourite short stories. Its centrepiece is a meticulous description of the protagonist’s self-dissection of his own brain. It’s a mechanical being (although the word mechanical seems too crude) so rather than blood and bone, it’s an assemblage of intricate mechanisms. Reading it takes some concentration — you really have to pay attention to each word and try to hold the image in your head as each detail is added — but it’s well worth the the effort.
When I was done, my brain looked like an explosion frozen an infinitesimal fraction of a second after the detonation, and again I felt dizzy when I thought about it. But at last the cognition engine itself was exposed, supported on a pillar of hoses and actuating rods leading down into my torso. I now also had room to rotate my microscope around a full three hundred and sixty degrees and pass my gaze across the inner faces of the subassemblies I had moved. What I saw was a microcosm of auric machinery, a landscape of tiny spinning rotors and miniature reciprocating cylinders.
You can find the story online at the Night Shade Books site, or in Chiang’s recent collection, also called Exhalation.
Posted in Culture
Tagged Ted Chiang