Cut the radicchio into wedges and bake them in a 350 degree
oven.
When they’re at the right degree of tenderness, sprinkle blue
cheese crumbs and balsamic vinegar on top, and put under broiler
until the cheese melts.
When I make this for myself for a main dish, I use half of a large head of
radicchio and put a layer of rice under the wedges. I like the
radicchip pretty al dente, so I only bake for 15 or 20
minutes. The broil part is only a couple of minutes.
The farm share ended last Thursday. I realized that it was
only towards the end of the summer that I was really using the
swap box right.
The swap box is a share box that’s put out so each shareholder can swap one thing that
they don’t want in their share for something they do want. I tend
to pick up my share fairly early, so I have a choice of pretty
much anything in the share; I suspect the people who come later in
the pickup period have fewer options.
What I realized was that there’s more in
the box than I can possibly eat, and I have friends who are
willing to take almost anything off my hands. So the thing to
concentrate on is what’s in the swap box that I want more of —
not what’s in the share that I don’t want any of. If there isn’t
anything that I can imagine using twice what’s in the share, I
don’t swap anything.
But usually there is. I just finished the second radicchio I
took a couple of weeks ago — they keep quite well, so since I
like them, having two instead of one wasn’t a problem. But the
parsley is quite nice, but I doubt that I would have finished two
bunches while they were still nice.
This last week I took a second bunch of mustard greens (leaving
the kale), which
work really well both in salads and with my <a href="http://serpentpublications.org/laymusic/?p=3540"rice and greens
breakfasts. They might wilt enough that you wouldn’t use them in
a salad before I finish them, but they’ll still be fine for cooked
greens.
One of my reactions to this
movie was, “They’re 41 and they think that’s midnight?” But maybe there will be another one, when
they’re really old, like 61, that will be After Midnight.
If you liked Before
Sunset and Before
Sunrise, you’ll like this one, too. It might even be a little
bit better than the others, as the actors and maybe other crew
members have learned things.
They’re all the story of a couple who meet on a train when
they’re in their early twenties in the first movie, meet again in
their thirties in the second movie, and have an emotional day
together as a married couple in their forties. They’re all very
conversational, like some of the Eric Rohmer ones from the 60’s.
(Ma nuit chez Maude was the one I discovered.)
There are three major scenes — one between Ethan Hawkes and
his son by his first marriage, whom he’s putting on a plane to
go back to his mother; one at the dinner table among the writers
and their wives and children who’ve been spending the summer
together in Greece; and a very long one between the couple, who
have been given a night together in a hotel without the
children, and with a bottle of good wine. They’re all really
pretty interesting, and the couple manage to be both very angry
and very attractive in the way we want romantic movies to show us.
The website says, “My mouthpiece dramatically improves the
tuning and makes the sound more direct and precise.” After a
day of fiddling with it, I agree about the sound, but I’m not
yet sure about the tuning. Sam warned me when he shipped it
that I would have to add some dental floss. Sure enough, as it
came from the box, it’s quite sharp, so I added dental floss so
that it wouldn’t go as far into the bocal, and then it was
flat.
So one of the things I spent a lot of time doing today was
playing tenor serpent notes into a tuner. I was originally
using the gstrings
tuner on my android phone. But it’s been telling me from time to
time that it has been superceded by something newer and better,
so I decided to look into that. The reviews complained a lot
about some features that were missing in the new version, called waves,
but enough people thought there were improvements, that I
decided to try it.
Sure enough, the tuning is much better. Gstrings was
occasionally picking up the wrong overtone, so I would be
playing a possibly out of tune E, and it would be telling me I
was playing A. It doesn’t look like Waves ever does that.
The missing feature is that if you’re asking it to play a note
for you, you can’t at the moment specify the
octave that the note comes out in. Gstrings would let you do
that, but if you didn’t have a speaker plugged in, the bass
notes were practically inaudible, so you were better off with
the octave it picked anyway. I did think about plugging the
phone into a speaker, but didn’t get around to it.
In any case, getting Waves doesn’t remove Gstrings, so if you
really want to do that, you still can.
One of the reasons to get a smartphone is to replace all the
little standalone electronic gadgets. I’ve had some problems
with things like a pedometer, which works, but drains the
battery too much to be usable. I’d say the phone does replace a standalone tuner pretty well.
This
book is billed as book three of a trilogy, but I understand
book four is already out in the UK.
LIke the first two books, it takes place in a near-future
dystopia where most of the human race has been wiped out by a
genetically engineered plague. I found it a little easier reading
than the others, partly because we’ve already met most
of the main characters. Also because the point of view stays
pretty focused on Toby, who is one of the easier characters to
identify with.
The descriptions of post-apocalyptic survival strategies are
quite interesting. For instance, figuring out what to do with
kudzu is one of their problems. There’s also a long discussion of
what you can and can’t still find in drugstores.
I wouldn’t say to start with this one, but if you’ve tried the
others and found them heavy going, you may like this one better.
The instruments used – such as lyre and reed-pipes – are known from, paintings and archaeological remains, such as this illustration from The Odyssey by Homer.
This
article is about a scholar who claims to be able to decode an
ancient greek music notation. I can’t tell from the article what
he really did, but you will enjoy listening to the recreation of
the music.
I was at the polls all day, so that’s why I haven’t posted yet,
but this gives me a chance to tell you what happened.
The results are preliminary, which means they don’t include
anything that has to be hand counted. In the case of the precinct
I worked at, that’s about 50 out of about 600 total ballots.
But preliminary
results are that four challengers have been elected, including
Dennis Carlone, whom I supported.
I tested healthcare.gov on the morning of October 1, before
I’d read any news stories about the problems,
and it worked fine for my purposes. This is because I live in
Massachusetts, so all I needed was a pointer to the Mass site,
where I wasn’t at that time able to find out my options, but I was
able to read a couple of articles about what was likely to change
for me.
Since then I’ve gotten two communications from my insurance
company. One was a “magazine” with an article stating that
everyone would have to go on the health care exchange because all
the current policies were ending on December 31. This was a
little alarming, but I decided to ignore it until the deadline was
closer.
A week or so later, I got a letter addressed to me personally,
informing me that I did not have to do anything to keep
my current coverage — that if I did nothing my current plan would
be replaced by one with a different name, which would be no more
expensive and might have better coverage. So I only needed to
shop for a new plan if I didn’t like the current one.
I still don’t have the details about the new plan, but since
I’m quite happy with the old plan, I’m not worried about it.
But I’m glad I’m not in a state where I have to depend on
healthcare.gov to find out my options. Apparently the decision to
make shopping impossible without registration was made about a
week before the site went live, and it was known before October 1
that registration didn’t work in major ways.
I live in the eastern part of my time zone, so the end of
daylight savings always means that it’s dark when people leave work. This
article wins this year’s prize for best complaint about
daylight savings time.
Here’s part of the argument:
Daylight saving time ends Nov. 3, setting off an annual ritual where Americans (who don’t live in Arizona or Hawaii) and residents of 78 other countries including Canada (but not Saskatchewan), most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand turn their clocks back one hour. It’s a controversial practice that became popular in the 1970s with the intent of conserving energy. The fall time change feels particularly hard because we lose another hour of evening daylight, just as the days grow shorter. It also creates confusion because countries that observe daylight saving change their clocks on different days.
I missed a Sunday afternoon train in Brussels once because it
didn’t occur to me to think about whether they changed time. But
the real point of the article is that not only should a given
place not change time twice a year, but that there should be fewer
time zones. Specifically, the continental US should have only
two — Eastern and Western.
In reality, America already functions on fewer than four time zones. I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8 am instead of 9 am, restaurants were packed at 6 pm instead of 7 pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. But for the last three years I lived in a state of constant confusion, I rarely knew the time and was perpetually an hour late or early.
It makes one wonder whether the world needs time zones at all
— maybe it should just be like the northern and southern
hemisphere — in some countries, Christmas is in summer and in
some it’s in winter. In some countries, you could go to bed at
midnight and wake up at 7am; in others, you might go to bed at
noon and wake up at 7pm.
Gary Lydon and Conor Lovett as Estragon and Vladimir in the Arts Emerson/Gare Saint Lazare production of “Waiting for Godot”
It’s apparently “GAH – doh”, not “goh – DOH”. I had always
pronounced it in the French way, but the Irish troupe I saw play
it last night englished it.
It was the Arts
Emerson presentation of the Gare Saint Lazare players doing
it. It was riveting, although I can’t explain exactly why.
Peter Hall, who directed the first London production in 1955,
apparently wasn’t sure it would be until it opened.
One critic (Vivian Mercier) said “Waiting for
Godot is a play in which nothing happens, twice.” With
good players, it turns out that that can be really funny,
especially the second time.
It looks from the audience I saw last night that theater is
doing better with young audiences than early music.
![[radicchio]](https://i0.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e8/RadicchioNL.jpg/220px-RadicchioNL.jpg)
![[tenor serpent mouthpiece]](https://i0.wp.com/www.samgoble.com/Serpent_Mouthpieces_files/IMG_0949.jpg)
![[Greek Musicians]](https://i0.wp.com/i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/10/28/article-2478381-190A754F00000578-7_634x318.jpg)
![[map of time zone proposal]](https://i0.wp.com/cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/proposed-time-zones.png)
![[Estragon and Vladimir]](https://artsemerson.org/ArticleMedia/Images/godot_header_new.jpg)
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