suspiciously specific denial

Today's LivingSocial deal is $10 to get $50 worth of products from VistaPrint. I've used them extensively for both business and personal things and have liked everything I've gotten.

What's your favorite thing about summer?

I was going to post something cute about maypoles and how Rites of Spring is eating my brain, but it turns out that Osama bin Ladin is dead and my corner of the social media universe seems torn between rejoicing (a minority position, I think) and telling other people to stop rejoicing.

( So instead I get all serious on you )

It's so tempting to get into questions of death and deserving and rightness, who is more justified than whom. Answering those questions is some people's life's work, but it isn't mine. Mine is to turn back relentlessly to myself when seeking the causes of both great harm and great good, not out of some kind of crazy narcissim, but in an attempt, as Leonard Cohen said, to ring the bell I still can ring. What's yours?

From James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Your eyes have set man’s heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Our broken cries and mournful lays
Rise in one eucharistic hymn.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

While sacrificing hands upraise
The chalice flowing to the brim,
Tell no more of enchanted days.

And still you hold our longing gaze
With languorous look and lavish limb!
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

(to remind myself)

i.
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Below the cut is a start on an English translation of Bolivia's proposed "law of Mother Earth". Note that Bolivia is officially "the Plurinational State of Bolivia," which is why all the references to plurinationality!
( Read more... )

Come, come, whoever you are,
Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow

a thousand times
Come, yet again, come, come.

Did you know that April is National Poetry Month? I know, me either, which explains how it got to be April 4 without me posting any poetry.

To make up for that, here's Mary Oliver's gorgeous poem, "Wild Geese":

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Apparently March is question-asking month. Or at least, LJ thinks it is. So ask me questions! Comments screened.

regyt asks (and lots of people repost) why the world doesn't have a meme where everyone leaves screened comments with what they want to say to to the poster but haven't yet for whatever reason -- and I say, indeed, why not? So! Tell me anything you want me to know - about me, about you, about your mom, whatever you like.

Anonymous comments are enabled, and everything is screened. Tell me something you want to tell me, anonymously or not. If you say you want me to unscreen, I will, happily.

Then do the same, and I will tell you something!

This outtake from Toy Story 2 has my new favorite line: "and your angry eyes, just in case."

Here, have a tiny seahorse:

In the beginning...

The urban sustainability class that aroraborealis and I took together a few years ago is again coming to Albany on October 2 and 3. It's a neat class with a wide variety of ideas, focused on do-it-yourself-able solutions. It's also held at an extremely cool school that is doing awesome things with both sustainability and social justice. Worth checking out if you're into this kind of thing.

So it turns out that essentially all recipes for monkey bread made from scratch call for a yeast dough (like this). However, the laziest-ever monkey bread is made by cutting up biscuit dough from the refrigerator (like this).

Is there some reason I'm not grasping that I couldn't make my own biscuit dough and then make biscuit-y monkey bread? Is there some part of unrighteous nature of Pillsbury refrigerated biscuits that's essential to their success?

I submitted this today -- after a lot of file-wrangling to get it to be the right dimensions and file size! -- to the (stop laughing) DP Challenge. Expect more photos over the coming weeks; probably two a week if I submit regularly.

The NYT's Sam Sifton posted both his food and exercise log for the week* and an odd article that combines thoughts on eating and health with bonus salad dressing recipes.

He also took questions on the blog post, and has started answering them in a series of columns. The whole thing is a pretty interesting read if you're interested in thinking about both eating and living well. (As a compare-and-contrast, there's Ed Levine from Serious Eats, who has publicly chronicled his attempts to lose weight while working professionally with food.)

*The comments on this are reasonably annoying, in that they consist 90% of people berating him about what he eats.

I am looking for the least-annoying available way to get nutrition data from recipes! Everything I've been easily able to lay hands on has required me to enter each ingredient, select what I really meant from a list, select a unit of measure (if that option is offered!), and then enter a quantity. When repeated for a dozen ingredients, this is pretty time consuming! Is it still as good as it gets or is there something better I haven't found yet?

Thanks!

Poll #1543548
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 29

Serif fonts in blogs or other things you read online:

So, it turns out that in order to maintain a food blog, you have to cook a lot. And really, it's best if you cook a lot from a variety of sources. On my list of things to do is to whip out my underutilized cookbook collection, which surely has a lot of good stuff hiding in its depths, but I'm also looking for new and fabulous food blogs. Tell me about your favorites? I'm especially interested in vegetarian dishes (although I'm willing to pick through to find them) and baking, but I'll read pretty much anything excellent.

In case you're curious -- or are on a similar quest for good recipes -- I'll put my favorites list ( under a cut )