Grilled Cheese Sandwiches

This isn’t something you need a recipe for, but I just made a
minor adjustment to the way I make them, so I thought I’d blog
about it and maybe it would inspire you to make an adjustment to
yours. (Or to comment about how you do it instead.)

Short of incinerating the bread, there isn’t much you can do
wrong, after you’ve bought or baked the right kind of bread and
cheese.

The bread should be sliced, or sliceable, into even,
sandwich-depth slices. The cheese has to be the hard kind that
can be sliced with a knife, and the kind that melts. Some
people think it’s more fun if it’s the kind that elongates into
a string when it’s melted and you pull on it. Otherwise, just
make sure that both the bread and the cheese are something you
like eating — if you don’t like them raw, they aren’t going to
get any better cooked.

These days, I’m using When Pigs
Fly New York Rye bread, and whatever sharp
cheddar cheese was on sale the last time I shopped for cheddar
cheese.

Take a slice of bread out of the freezer. You do keep your
bread in the freezer, don’t you? Unless you have a large family
that eats toast for breakfast and/or sandwiches for lunch every
day, your bread usage is probably small and erratic enough that
you should.

Turn the heat on medium under your favorite skillet or frying
pan. Butter one side of the bread and put that side on the
skillet.

Slice enough cheese to cover the bread, and put it on the
unbuttered side of the bread in the skillet. (If you’re adding
something like slices of apple or onion, put them on before the
bread, but I usually make grilled cheese when I can’t stand the
idea of cooking complicated enough to need slicing things.)

Here’s my new innovation: put the cover on the skillet. Before
I started doing this, I often had a fair amount of burned
surface on the bottom of the bread before the cheese
melted.

Leave it until the cheese is melted, maybe 5 minutes, but keep
checking. If you smell the bread burning, it’s gone too far.

You will notice that this is an open-faced sandwich. I decided
a few years ago that it was a lot easier to get the right ratio of
filling to bread that way, and I make all my sandwiches that way
these days. I would change this if I needed to pack them, but
nobody packs grilled cheese.

Condo for sale


[for sale sign]

This is good news, because one of the owners of this one is the
crabby neighbor who called the
police about the barking dog, and probably the person who murdered
the angelica plant.

He definitely hasn’t been happy here for some time, and I hope
they both find places they like better.

So if you know anyone who’s looking for a condo in Cambridge,
let them know about 235 Broadway if you think they’d be good neighbors.

Concert Announcement

It looks like we are going to be able to repeat the concert we worked up for December 17 at the Boston Public Library for the ALL Gallery in Lowell. I’ll have more details later, but it will be early afternoon on Saturday, January 30. The Gallery is at 246 Market St.

The length of the concert is not as constrained as it is for a middle of the day concert, so we’ll probably put back some of the stuff we dropped for length reasons. We may drop some of the carols set, although that wasn’t really very Christmassy (more “Life of Jesus” than “Birth of Jesus”), and was among the audience favorites in December.

Addition: the Concert will be at 1:30 PM. Here’s a flyer.

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and blog statistics

When I was setting up the new site, I though about how to have a list of other things people might want to look at if they’d stumbled on the site and found the first thing they read interesting.

What I came up with was to list the most read posts, using the Most read in XX days plugin.

For a while, this worked well. There were a couple of old posts that were being read pretty often, most notably the Bread machine brioche recipe. But in general, the things that were popping up on the list were the better posts I’d made in the last couple of months, so I got feedback on what people were reading, and they got to look at the other interesting things on the site.

Unfortunately, now the “most read posts” sidebar is pretty fixed, and it isn’t clear what I can do to get a new post onto that list, because although people read the new posts, they then go and look at the old posts that are on the “most read” list, so those get more readers than the new ones do.

One thing I can see I should do is put things that are of only temporary interest up as pages, and when they stop being interesting, take the pages out of the navigation menus via the exclude pages from navigation plugin.

For instance, the post that would be on the sidebar list if I allowed one more post is the flyer for a workshop that happened last August. I’m glad 200 people read that post last August, and 40 people came to the workshop, but I’m not sure it matters if nobody ever reads it again.

I’ve thought about having a “most read in the last 6 months” sidebar as well as the “most read ever” sidebar. But that starts cluttering things up.

So I guess I’ll just keep thinking about the problem. Let me know if you have any good ideas.

Note: this post was originally titled “Schroedinger’s Law and Blog Statistics”.

Report on the January 12, 2010, meeting

We played:

Schedule

Enough people said they’d like to meet next week that there will be a meeting at the usual time (7:45 PM) and place, although I won’t be able to join you much before beer time.

Most of what I do, there are other people in the group that can do at least as well as I can, but I am better than anyone else at finding the music in my house. So if there’s something special you want to do, either print it yourself off the Serpent Publications site, or let me know and I’ll make sure to leave it where someone can find it.

After that, I don’t know of any reason to modify our usual schedule of dropin meetings until we start working on the Walk for Hunger program, probably in April or late March.

But of course, who knows how many more special elections there will be.

Publishing on the web

I’ve been sending a lot of email lately to people who
transcribe music the way I do and are wondering whether and how to put it on
the web.

Putting other people’s transcriptions on my site is addressed briefly in the SerpentPublications.org
FAQ, but of course there are lots more details than a two
paragraph answer can deal with.

One person who’s also a student of my recorder teacher
transcribes in Sibelius. She gives printouts to anyone who
asks, but seems to have decided putting it on the web is
impossibly complicated. My teacher has been really excited
about being able to point workshop students to the music he’s
going to be using on the web, so that they can look at it
beforehand, and has been encouraging her to get hers up, too. She discussed it with the Sibelius
support people, but her eyes glazed over when they said “install
a PDF writer”. Apparently she has an old wreck of a computer
that breaks when you install pretty much anything. So if she
hadn’t figured out how to do it in 2003, that computer is never
going to be able to do it, and she doesn’t like computers enough
to want to spend $200 on a better one.

Another person is doing transcriptions from Petrucci’s
Odhecaton. He’s quite capable of putting his own site up, and
had decided to use a wordpress
blog for his transcriptions. We have an ongoing
conversation about how to provide the kinds of transcriptions
various kinds of players want. I thought about the blog
solution when I was setting up the Serpent Publications
site, but was having too much trouble using the WordPress
media stuff, and I already had the database set up. I suspect
that when he has a few dozen transcriptions, he’ll find the blog
solution clumsy, but it should work fine until then. I would
probably have used if it had been available when I was starting
out.

A third person has essentially transcribed all of Dowland’s
part songs, including the lute tablature, and converted the lute
tablature to notation suitable for guitar players. This would
actually be a really good supplement to the Dowland
that’s on my site, and I’d be happy to have it, but he hasn’t yet
done any thinking about licensing, so I pointed him to some
reading matter, and haven’t heard from him since. There is a
lot of stuff to think about. I also suggested lulu.com if what he really
wants to do is sell his work.

It’s quite exciting to be in touch with so many people
doing the kind of thing I do. I hope they all get what they
want out of doing it.

Family History Sagas

One thing I kept thinking about while reading Cryptonomicon
is that the model Neal Stephenson is using for family history is really
different from the standard model in mass-market
fiction.

The standard model is that you write one book describing three
generations:

  • The Grandparent Generation makes a major life decision
    (immigrating to America, starting a business…) and makes it
    work.
  • The Parent Generation is constrained in its choices by the
    expectations of the Grandparent Generation, and ends up a bit
    colorless.
  • The Child generation has lots of choices, because of the
    success of the preceding two generations. The plot can either
    have them striking out in a different direction entirely, or
    ending up taking over the original business with new energy and
    insights.

So this model says that your personality is determined by your
circumstances, which may be very different from those of your
parents and grandparents.

Stephenson’s model is that your personality is determined by
your heredity, so if your grandfather was the sort who was a good
sergeant (the Shaftoes), you’ll likely end up as a sergeant or
in a similar role in some non-military enterprise,
too. If your grandfather (or great-great-great grandfather) was a
scientific researcher, you’ll fall into some kind of research
activity, too.

Probably neither model works very well in real life, and both
models can produce good fiction. But I have to say that for
analyzing the dynamics in my own family, I more often find the
mass-market fiction model useful.

Cryptonomicon

I assumed when I started reading this
book that it was a sequel to The
Baroque Cycle, but it turns out that it was
actually published four years before Quicksilver,
the first volume of the Cycle.

Stephenson says about the project:

The series will incorporate many characters and
stories, tied together by a few common threads. For example,
certain family names keep popping up. Crypto, money, and
computers seem to find their way into all of the
storylines.

I was sure I enjoyed Cryptonomicon more for
having read it after Baroque Cycle, but then I
reread the first chapter of Quicksilver because it
was provided free at the end of the Cryptonomicon
ebook, and I realized that I’d probably have enjoyed it more if
I’d already met Enoch Root and Daniel Waterhouse’s descendants,
too.

So if you want to read long novels with topics to do with
history and science and technology, start wherever you like.
Probably the best guide is which period you’re more interested
in the history of: the 17th and 18th centuries or the 20th
century.

I was amused that a book about the wonders of modern
cryptography would have the boilerplate DRM at the end:

By payment of the required fees, you have been granted
the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the
text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be
reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse
engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information
storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means,
whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter
invented, without the express written permission of
PerfectBound.

I’m running late today, so I’ll reserve the right to discuss
this book more later, but consider this a recommendation.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0060512806&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

I read Tom Stoppard’s play in college, and had never had a
chance to see it, so I put this
movie on my Netflix Watch Now queue when I noticed it. It’s
directed by Stoppard himself, and has a cast with some notable
stars in it.

It was one of the high points of that course in college — we
read a lot of good literature but most of it was stuff I’d read
already — this was an example of something I wouldn’t have read
on my own but really enjoyed.

The memorable scenes are all really good. There’s some less
memorable stuff that doesn’t get too tedious in between. As you
would expect, the parts that Shakespeare wrote are pretty
conventionally acted, except for bringing out the conceit that
nobody, including the two characters themselves, can remember
which is which. I gave it 3 stars.

If you don’t know the play and want to know whether you want
to, here are the parts I remembered fondly from reading it:

  • R. and G. play a game of “Questions”, where you have to
    always ask a question and it can’t be a non-sequitur or a
    rhetorical question. Then after their first encounter with
    Hamlet they score it by those rules.
  • They try to decide whether Hamlet is mad today based on his
    “when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw,”
    speech, and fail to determine the direction of the wind, where
    North is, or the time of day.
  • The statement that toenails never grow.

You can see some of these quotes out of context at imdb.com,
but it really isn’t one-liner humor.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000777I88&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Kombucha


[kombucha]

I talked to someone yesterday who’s been brewing Kombucha. I’d
heard of it but never tasted any, so I picked up a bottle at the
grocery store last night.

I just had some, and enjoyed it. It’s a pleasantly sour
taste. The bottle I bought is a bit sweeter than I would aim for
if I were brewing my own.

So I might just try brewing some. Brewing beer is really a bit
strenuous and space intensive for my current way of life, but I do
like having living things to watch in my kitchen.