Monday, December 29, 2008

Doubt - a review

Philip Seymour Hoffman gave an incredible performance; he always does. But he didn't hold a candle to Meryl Streep. She was amazing. She nailed her character perfectly. If she doesn't get an Oscar for her role, well, then there is no justice at all in the cinematographic world.

The film was well written, too. The characters were convincing; multilayered; complex. There was moral ambiguity. And the film ended without resolution; it ended with a question that is not comfortable to ask and is not easily answered.

Summary: Go see it. Now.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Season's Greetings

Attentive readers will note that the tonight's subversive baking experiment has been in the planning stages for a very long time:



O, the pink background... I'm a little disappointed with that, but unfortunately the only sheets I could find to use as backdrops were white and pepto-pink, and it looked even worse on the white. Well, the gingerbread outhouse is all about the flash-in-the-pan shock value anyway, so maybe bright pink was a good choice.

Monday, December 22, 2008

Pumpkin Pie

Response to NoR's Pecan Pie post:



For the near pie, I used a plain old sugar pumpkin; for the far pie, I used a cheese pumpkin. Both pumpkins were from my (summer) CSA. I've never made a pie with a cheese pumpkin before. I'm itchin' to do a taste test.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Physical education

Well, I'm long since back from Oregon, as all readers of this blog already know, I guess. What can I say about my trip? Well, like the Dave Matthews song says, I ate too much, I drank too much. Too much! Saw sea lions and elk. It was a good trip.

In yoga class last week, I was reminded of a PE class in high school. I was sitting on the bleachers with my friend Travis who, for reasons to this day unbeknownst (or anyway forgotten), reached over, grabbed my nipple, and twisted it. Hard. It was brutally painful and he wouldn't let go, no matter how much I begged. He just kept saying, "The pain is not there." And eventually, it wasn't anymore. I stopped attaching to the sensation, and only then did he let go.

I wonder why he did that? I suspect that he was trying to show me the difference between pain and suffering. He was reading a lot about Buddhism at that time.

Alternatively, perhaps he was just being an asshole. The memory of the lesson on pain versus suffering is what remains, though.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

"...the cradle of escape"

Quoted from a poem I wrote years ago while sitting at the Bakery on a ridiculously warm December day; the full line is "Her solitary Mecca is the cradle of escape," if I remember correctly.

So... I feel totally burned out by work, and in a feat of remarkably good timing, I'm going to Oregon tomorrow to spend a few days on the coast with my siblings and some of our friends. I may or may not post while I'm there. I don't know if we'll have access to the interwebs.

I wanted to post something about statistics and science and democracy and how I generally trust their results because they are fundamentally messy processes and the messiness tends to cancel itself out when averaged over large scale experiments, but I just don't have time to put it into words right now. Oh wait... I just did.