On Matters Cromwellian

I am lately reading "Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel, which won the Booker Prize in 2009.

I am finding it difficult to keep the characters straight.  I just looked up Thomas Cromwell to more properly assess his place in history around Thomas More and the whole treason and execution thing.  This will blow some surprises in the book, but will help me dispel some conflating I think I've done around the various Cardinals, Lords Chancellor, et. al.

Thomas was instrumental in fighting the Pope on behalf of Henry VIII's desire to occasionally divorce his wives.  This lead to the formation of the Anglican church and ultimately to his own execution--a beheading with his spiked head displayed on London Bridge.

A fun discovery and relevant to a brief exchange I had last night with my mother-in-law: Oliver Cromwell is his great, great grand nephew (maybe some more greats in there, they were born 115 years apart).  Oliver is more famous currently, as he's seen as the great butcher of Irish Catholics (and Scottish Catholics, but I hadn't known that since Scots tend to write fewer drinking songs detailing their historical grievances).  He ruled England briefly as a kind of king/non-king.  He was hated enough that having died from malaria, he was dug up three years later to be executed posthumously!  Subsequently his severed head spent 30 years on a spike atop a pole over Westminster Hall and then changed hands for 250 years before being laid to a kind of rest in the 1960s.

Cromwells apparently rest uneasily unless a mob of angry Britons has rent their corpses.

Nature or Nurture?

Nature:

We're also each wearing a shirt from a school the other one attended.

So this sign actually and really exists on Route158 along the Outer Banks in North Carolina (either in Nags Head or Kitty Hawk).  I didn't go into the small store, so I can't report on what this really is about. 

It's not a weirdly specific sign, but it's certainly weird. 

How many feet?

Another weirdly specific sign.  No rounding and think fast!

Weirdly Specific Signage

I've been passing this sign for six months, and I finally just had to post it.  I find it so odd... not only is it weirdly specific (you couldn't just round up to half a mile?), but they also didn't reduce their fraction to 2/5 of a mile.

So strange.

And specific.

Showing Great Respect

Mesa Prep is a charter school near Phoenix, AZ.  Their baseball team is really good, and incidentally their starting 2nd baseman is a 2nd basewoman.  Twice this year they played Our Lady of Sorrows, a school of kind-of Catholics for whom the actual Catholics are just far too liberal.  Both times OLoS refused to play Mesa Prep if they fielded their starting 2nd baseman.  They apparently have a rule prohibiting co-ed sports.  So Mesa prep didn't play their best player at 2nd and won both games.

In their league championship Mesa Prep decided that they wouldn't sit her, and OLoS forfeited.

Here's a fun couple of paragraphs from the Washington Post article about the game:

The [OLoS] statement also said the school teaches boys respect by not placing girls in athletic competition, where “proper boundaries can only be respected with difficulty.”

Our Lady of Sorrows is run by the U.S. branch of the Society of Saint Pius X. The group represents conservative, traditional priests who broke from the Catholic Church in the 1980s.

So these boys are learning to respect Paige Sultzbach by refusing to play a game where they will never be forced to touch her.

Mesa Prep remains undefeated, and in every single measure of success, Our Lady of Sorrows just couldn't be more defeated.

Purity

From the food52 blog:

Himalayan Salt: Hand-mined from ancient sea salt deposits from the Khewra Salt Mine in Pakistan, Himalayan salt is rich in minerals and believed to be one of the purest salts available 

How can salt (NaCl) be both "rich in minerals" and "one of the purest salts" at the same time?  "Pure" means not having stuff in your substance that isn't the substance itself.  If you are talking about salt, than then minerals other than salt in your salt makes that salt impure.

Impurities might be good, but they are what they are.

I've been hearing about Himalayan salt now for several years, and it's always hyped as a miracle medicine that can cure you of essentially any ailment, and it can do it in a variety of ways.  When some substance that is purported to actually exist somewhere is said to be able to cure you of anything, then it is helpful to ask about the health of the people living near the miracle substance.  Nepalis who mine this salt do not, despite all the claims for this miracle drug, live forever.

And, by the way, most Himalayan Salt is mined in Pakistan hundreds of miles from the Himalayas.

God Bless Marketing.

Release the Piecooken!

This is very likely to be the longest post of my blogging career. But sometimes things just work out that way.

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I would rather have banished myself forever from my native country and wandered a friendless outcast over the earth than have consented to this miserable marriage. -- Victor Frankenstein, "The Modern Prometheus"

Not terribly long ago, Fred Clark, The Slacktivist, posted on his blog about an amazing creation. It came from pinterest, or facebook, or somewhere. Wherever it came from, it became a kind of fascination for me, and was a topic of conversation between me and my friends. It was the Piecaken. An unholy child of pie and cake, and cousin to the turducken. The Piecaken is a pie baked into a cake. And it is amazing! I finally decided that I had to make a piecaken.

My fascination grew into an obsession, and then my obsession grew into... well it grew. And from that mighty something-greater-than-an-obsession came the idea of making something greater than a piecaken. What could possibly up the ante on a pie baked into a cake? Well cookies, baked inside of a pie, which is baked inside of a cake! After some thinking, and some considering, I decided that I would make a double-layer cake, with a pie baked into a cake on one layer, and cookies baked into a cake for the second layer. I would call my creation: The Piecooken!

This weekend I brought this creation to life. This is my story:



First, I started with a the pie:


This is my basic, trusty pie dough recipe, easy to make, and serviceable for any pie. This recipe was taught to me by a wonderful friend of mine from south/central Illinois. Her pies are indescribably delicious. I spent a great weekend with her almost 15 years ago learning the craft.

I had a day to myself, with family gone, so this was a project almost entirely driven by whim. There was also a golf tournament on TV so I didn't want to go to the store, so I had to make do with ingredients I already had in the house. I thought about a top-crusted fruit pie, but instead I made a custard:

This was a basic custard from the classic Better Homes and Gardens (1993 edition, in my case) cookbook.

It's a wonderful custard. I decided to do a chocolate custard, but at the moment in the recipe that calls for adding the cocoa Rory McIlroy sank an eagle putt to pull to within 2 shots of the lead and I lost my head. So with a fully-thickened vanilla custard, I had my pie.

One reason to go with a chocolate custard was that my cookies were going to be vanilla wafer cookies. But with my custard gaff already in the bag, I marched forward with vanilla wafer cookies anyway. Creaming the sugar and butter is always the happiest moment in a cookie baking day.

It didn't matter much to have uniform-sized cookies:


Here is the vanilla cake batter, the custard pie, the vanilla wafer cookies and the springform pan. I really felt that the springform pan was critical to extracting the layers. I only have one, so it was a two-stage baking process. Well... four-stage if you count the two batches of cookies.


I poured half the batter, layered some cookies, then poured the rest of the batter over the cookies.

And after 45 minutes and a mini-collapse by McIlroy, the first layer was out:


I needed a strategy for the second layer. I was worried about the pie layer being harder to bake than the cookie layer. I was also dangerously under-caffeinated, so I made a cup of coffee.


I sipped coffee while figuring out the pie-layer cake type. Caffeine helped me decide on a strawberry cake for the pie layer.


Here I made a critical decision with the pie. I decided against a top crust. Looking back, this was a real mistake, but Tiger went out with a knee injury, which seemed to point out that I was running out of day. No top layer. Into the springform pan when a layer of strawberry cake and the pie on top of it:


The first problem with the topless custard pie came 40 minutes later when I went to check for doneness. When inserted into a pile of custard through a layer of cake, a toothpick always comes out wet!!

I had to just bake the crud out of that layer and hope for the best.

You can see the slight crater in the center. I theorized that the wetness of the custard never allowed the proper crumb to form in the cake layer above it. But it was reasonably solid after a cooling off period. I was encouraged that the pie layer did not ooze out when I removed it from the pan.

Here are the companion layers side-by-side. You can see the pie layer is substantially taller than the cookie layer.

Next came the frosting. My wife found a marvelous buttercream frosting recipe a few weeks ago, and so I tried my hand at it. It went well. In the picture, if you look behind the mixer to the left, you can see the brain-mold I use to make a pretty plausibly-colored brain jello every halloween.


The frosting begins. I decided to take advantage of the divot in the pie layer, so I inverted the slightly convex cookie layer over the slightly concave pie layer and it was a perfect match.




After the best bit of piping and scraping, I had the best-frosted cake I have ever made:



And now... the moment of truth.

You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been. — Victor Frankenstein, "The Modern Prometheus"

The strawberry layer had indeed suffered from a poorly-set area above the custard pie, so it was not perfect. But it was perfectly fine.

The taste was pretty good...

For next time, and there will be a next time, I will plan ahead, I will turn off the golf, and I will make a true piecooken--cookies baked inside a pie which is then baked inside a cake. But for now, I bid you good night.

20 Years Ago

I cleaned out a closet this weekend and came across an old piece of art from my friend Jim. I laughed as hard about it today as I did 20 years ago:

Uncrossable Barriers

I do not get dance.

I don't hate every dance I see, and I've successfully not hated some dance performances, but I am dumfounded that it exists in such abundance and in so many forms.

I love music, and over the years I've been introduced to music I didn't like, or didn't get, but mostly with the venerable forms I come to appreciate or even love it. I definitely didn't get opera when I was a kid, but over the years and with my mother's influence, I have seen the light. I have a favorite opera singer, even. One of the great birthday presents of recent years was when my wife got me tickets to my favorite opera singer at Ravinia.

I've gone through such transformations with various forms of classical, jazz in a few forms, cubist paintings, and many others.

But not dance. I have seen the Bolshoi ballet, the Bolshoi academy, and the Hubbard Street Dance group. I have tried, and I can appreciate the athleticism for sure, and occasionally there's a bit of a dance, or an individual performance that is just amazing, but unless it's essentially tap dancing from the 1940s or '50s, I just get so bored so fast.

I kind of want to love dance as much as I love most other art... I just don't seem to be able to.

Dear Gen, Bolden

I wrote the following to General Bolden, NASA's current administrator:

3/28/2011

General Charles F. Bolden, Jr.
Administrator
NASA
300 E Street SW
Washington D.C., 20546-0001

Gen. Bolden,

My family and I are members of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, IL. As I’m sure you know, the museum is one of the great institutions in the city of Chicago, and also holds a special place as one of the United States’ great museums dedicated to space exploration.

My family would love to see one of the shuttle orbiters retired to the care of the Adler. It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate place in the country. Adler houses the oldest piece of space exploration equipment outside of Europe—an Italian telescope from the early 1600s. I imagine taking my daughter, an 11 year-old space enthusiast, to visit this telescope at the same time she can see the most important tool for 20^th century space exploration, and I quite literally get chills.

Please consider the Adler’s bid to house a retired shuttle, you won’t find a more fitting or caring institution.

Regards,

Matt Dick

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The unstated PS to this letter:

Seeing a shuttle on the shore of Lake Michigan would be so cool!

Baldness

A few years ago I was planning for a St. Baldrick's even and told the group I was working in at the time, "In a few weeks, I'm going to go bald."

My very bald manager paused, then said, "Matt, I don't think you understand how this works."

A few weeks ago I went bald, as most of you know. Here's my beautiful scalp in all its glory.



When all donations are in, I will have raised over $4,000 and you all have helped raise more than $30,000 in my time with St. Baldricks.

But the big number is what our team, Nathan's Network has raised. This year we topped $25,000, which is spectacular!

Since 2005 we have raised $127,724 largely thanks to you who are reading this.

I can't thank you enough.

NPR and Public Insanity

I have this issue.  I don't care for NPR (National Public Radio).  My issues with it are on a number of fronts, and here's a partial list:

1) It's boring.  I know people just love "car talk".  I have never heard it, but almost nothing interests me less than talking about cars.  There are things I'm sure I'd like, but there are whole sections of it that just can't possibly be worth anyone's time.

2) It's sooooooooo Liberal Correct.  It obviously makes people feel good to say they listen to NPR.  Maybe it does and maybe it is good to listen to NPR, but it definitely makes people feel good to say it.  That bugs me.

3) It's partially federally funded and it's obviously liberal in it's bent.  Not the worst offense, but hardly objective.

4) My libertarian feelings are bothered by funding a radio station.  I just think the government needs to fund things that aren't public luxuries.

Okay.  So that all having been said, I'm hearing lots of conversation about defunding NPR because of, and I (almost) quote a real, honest to goodness smart guy Howie Kurtz, "I don't know that we need to fund this during this time of real economic hardship."

Maybe I got the words wrong, but this was his message, and the message of at least two or three other pundits I've heard on the subject.

Really?!

Here is what the federal budget spent in 2010:

$3,552,000,000,000

Here is what NPR cost the federal government in 2010:

$25,440,000

Not kidding, that's the actual number.

If you subtract the entire NPR budget from the US spending, US spending will be relieved of 0.0007% of its budget.

Whew!  Let's get right on that!

Seriously, is NPR even worth the conversation?  The federal deficit last year was 49% of revenue. 

49%

Killing NPR would make that number:

48.9993%

I am not advocating that we waste $25 million, I do have libertarian leanings.  But I'm also a realist.  Do we really need to waste time talking about 0.0007% of the federal budget in this time of real economic hardship?

And the circle is closed...

As of last night, humans are unnecessary in my house.

Margot found a song clip on her phone to use as a ringtone. She liked it enough that she wanted to get the full song to put on her iPod. Typing the lyrics into google didn't seem to be doing any good, so I used an app on my Droid (Shazam), to listen to the clip and identify it.

It didn't work... Shazam didn't correctly identify that clip, but as Margot and I stood over our phones, I was struck by the fabulous realization that my phone was listening to her phone and Margot and I were something less than strictly necessary.

Disgusting

So we have people in Mississippi who want to put Nathan Bedford Forrest on a license plate that people can buy.

In this CNN video clip we have a Greg Stewart arguing that Forrest was a brilliant Confederate general and so deserves this honor on some level.

There is so much to say about this kind of thing, but I'll confine myself to just a few points. In this clip the men debated whether or not Forrest was the first grand wizard of the KKK. Of course if he was, even Stewart would have to back off the endorsement of the license plate. What wasn't in dispute is that Forest was a slave trader and owner. This, apparently, is not a deal-breaker for the reprehensible Mr. Stewart.

But what wasn't really touched on was why Gen. Forrest should be honored at all. If he was an undisputed slave trader, what is the actual point behind honoring him? I agree that not every confederate soldier should be condemned for his part in that revolt, but why go out of our way to honor them? What good did any of them perform? It is an obvious attempt at glorifying a racially divisive figure. And that glorification is horrid and disgusting at worst, and stupid and ignorant at best.

Albion

2/14/1994 - 1/20/2011

We brought Albion home as a 6-week old rescue. She was being nursed along with a dozen other kittens--her mother having had a litter of her own, and also having saved another motherless litter. We bought her and her litter-mate, a pure black cat we named Baghira.

Albion was chosen out of a pile of siblings, she broke off from the group and found my coat and climbed the inside lining to the collar. She was a climber all her life, even climbing the ladder (hand-over-hand, human-style) to the loft in our daughter's room.

She had a hyperactive thyroid and the medication sent her into renal failure. We had her put down last night. It was good timing, there wasn't much suffering, really.

I didn't realize I would love cats so much. Baghira is still doing fine. She also has a bad thyroid, but is holding out and is as hale and hearty as a 17 year-old cat is likely to be.

This Gouda is too Damned Cold

I was searching for something, a solution for a problem, at work. I am using google, of course.  So I started to type:

"Can you move document stores in Confluence"

When I's just gotten through "Can you" google's auto complete turned on and showed me the top searches that start with "Can you".  Good feature, I've found.

The top choices under "Can you" in google, which I imagine is a *very* common way to begin a search, are:

"can you run it"
"can you feel the love tonight lyrics"
"can you get mono twice"
"can you freeze cheese"

I really don't know what "can you run it" might refer to, but when I click it, I see lots of questions about whether browsers can run things like flash or stuff.  So now I get that as the number one choice.

Lyrics to a really popular song, I get that.

The thing about mono is interesting, it's hard to imagine it's *that* big a concern on earth, but I do know that medical questions now out rank porn for google searches, and teenagers dominate the internet, so on some level I get it.

"can you freeze cheese"--really?!  This is the fourth most popular search starting with "can you"?!  That is just bizarre.  Prior to this morning I would have laid money down that "can you blow up an earthworm in a microwave" would have outranked "can you freeze cheese".  How often does that come up?

Generations

"Two ways to produce electric power without greenhouse gasses."
(caption provided by Barton Nuclear Consulting Services)

Hitch on Beck

As usual, Christopher Hitchens is smart, funny and incisive.  Regarding the Glenn Beck affront to intelligence and human decency, he writes:

And these [various] insinuations [of Obama as Muslim or illegitimate] are perfectly emblematic of the two main fears of the old majority: that it will be submerged by an influx from beyond the borders and that it will be challenged in its traditional ways and faiths by an alien and largely Third World religion.

Which is exactly why I have been unwilling to call it plain racism.  It's more about losing power than fearing foreigners for the leaders like Beck.

And of course you get a Hitchens insult, which for my money are the best insults being peddled today:

The numbers were impressive enough on their own, but the overall effect was large, vague, moist, and undirected: the Waterworld of white self-pity.

I just don't think anyone's doing it as well right now.

I'll recommend that you go read the article, it's more than worth it.

When Worlds Collide

Two South Asian co-workers just passed my desk, chatting breezily.  One of them was riffing from the old "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" lyric: "What does it matter? 'tomato', 'tomato'..."

Which is perfectly common except that neither of his two pronunciations of "tomato" were particularly close to two canonical pronunciations from the song.

They were different from each other, so the point would be clear to anyone listening I guess, but it kind of bent my brain a little bit.