kevinbelt @ 2008-11-26T20:34:00I know I'm getting the hang of this cooking thing now because I'm getting to be able to improvise. I didn't want to make a big dinner tonight, because I'm driving back to Springfield and I still have to pack. I didn't want to spend my night in the kitchen. Besides, whatever leftovers I have would just sit in the fridge for a week while I'm not here. And I didn't want to get takeout, because I'm going to eat a huge meal tomorrow, so I wanted to keep it light. So I grabbed all the cheese in my refrigerator and made fondue. It's pretty damn good. I have the leftovers of a block of cheddar, some shredded cheddar, some Swiss and provolone slices, some gorgonzola crumbles from the fail-steak, and a Laughing Cow wedge. I threw all that in a saucepan, added the usual seasonings (garlic powder, hot sauce, etc.), and stirred until it formed a semi-liquid. Then I transferred it to a bowl and dipped a loaf of French bread I had originally gotten to make sandwiches. The end. Time: about five minutes. Cost: nothing, I'd already bought everything for other purposes and this was leftover. And it's delicious. It tastes a lot like cheddar, with the punch of gorgonzola. (That's funny, because there's more Swiss than anything else.) It's pretty mild, which I assume is the Swiss at work, since my cheddar was extra sharp. The best part is, it pairs astonishingly well with Dr Pepper. I'm not the kind of person who puts a lot of stock into pairing, especially with pop, but damn. The punchiness of the gorgonzola really complements the fruitiness of the Dr Pepper. The only downside is that I didn't really watch as I put stuff in the pan, so I couldn't recreate it if I tried.
kevinbelt @ 2008-11-23T18:17:00The Fail-Steak
or,
Maybe God Wanted Me to Eat Something Else for Dinner
by Kevin Belt
__________
Once upon a time, there was a handsome young man named Kevin, our hero. Our hero was a man of many talents, but he always wanted to learn more. Shortly before the events of our story took place, our hero decided he wanted to add cooking to the many skills he had already mastered. For the most part, he was successful. He made roast beef, pork chops, irregular meat polyhedrons, pancakes. All were delicious. Until our hero decided to make steak.
Our hero had been given a grill when he moved into his new residence, but since his culinary tastes did not often involve grilling, he did not use it until the steak-making adventure. Our hero took his grill outside and filled it with charcoal, then doused it with lighter fluid. Little did he know, this was magic charcoal. He lit a match and threw it onto the heap of coals. The match went out as soon as it hit the coals. Our hero, a fervent adherent of the scientific method, decided to experiment. Perhaps, he reasoned, throwing the match was the problem. Instead, he would set the match on the pile of coals, and this approach would yield success. So our hero struck another match, and this time set it gently amid the charcoal. Again, the match went out on contact. Although flummoxed, our hero did not panic. He lit a piece of paper and set the flaming paper on the pile of charcoal. The paper burnt up slowly, and yet when it had been reduced to nothing more than ash, the charcoal remained jet black, completely unaffected by the flaming paper. At this point, our hero grabbed his lighter fluid and sprayed a great deal more onto the charcoal. He struck another match, and dropped it into the grill. The lighter fluid ignited immediately, and our hero smiled triumphantly. His celebration was interrupted when he noticed the color of the flames: blue. The fire was burning the lighter fluid, but did not seem to be catching the charcoal. Eventually, to our hero's dismay, the lighter fluid was exhausted, and the fire immediately died.
On the advice of his mother (herself known for her culinary prowess), our hero decided to cook his steak inside, in a frying pan. Per his mother's advice, he put a small bit of olive oil in the bottom of his skillet, seasoned his steak, and dropped it in the pan, putting the lid of the pan on afterward. Success! In only a few minutes, our hero was able to cook his steak to preferred doneness. It was time to repeat the process with the second steak. Our hero seasoned the steak, put it in the pan, and put the lid on the pan. Shortly thereafter, it was time to turn the steak. Our hero took the handle of the lid and lifted. Crisis! Crisis! The handle of the lid came off in our hero's hand, but the lid itself remained atop the pan. The two had been attached by a screw, which had apparently come loose before our hero had begun his adventure. Remaining calm, he slid the lid off the pan onto another pan on the stove and resumed cooking his steak, never breaking a sweat.
Because the lid could not trap heat, the second steak was not to our hero's preferred level of doneness. Nonetheless, he persevered, covering it in Gorgonzola cheese crumbles and A-1 steak sauce. Our hero's cool head and excellent instincts saved the day from what could have been tragedy. After a delicious meal that also included dinner rolls and roasted red potatoes (a specialty handed down to him by his dear mother), he progressed to his next culinary adventure: steak sandwiches for the following day's lunch.
kevinbelt @ 2008-11-21T22:06:00True or false: this is the hottest picture in the history of photography. kevinbelt @ 2008-11-21T20:42:00As you may have been able to tell from my last post, I've been rather unhappy at work recently. I tried to ease my mind a little bit by cleaning up my desk. I actually did this more than a month ago, but I've been forgetting to take pictures. But today I did, so here you go.
I don't have a good "before" picture, although you can get an idea of what it looked like from this picture. The key thing is that there was crap everywhere. I had piles of catalogs, piles of paper, random broken clippies, a bunch of cheap plastic trays, an enormous bottle of lotion, and untold other things laying on the desk surface, not to mention a bunch of post-it notes that had fallen off my monitor. (Amid the piles of paper, I found a memo announcing our first company softball practice. That was in early May. The cleaning happened in late October.) The first priority was to get rid of that. Most of it was trash, so that was easy. Nonetheless, those of you familiar with my trash habits understand how difficult that was for me. Most of the stuff that wasn't trash was actually classified as trash anyway, and so out went the catalogs. I kept a handful from vendors we deal with a lot, and as for the others, well, that's why Al Gore invented the internet. I moved the rest of the non-trash stuff into drawers, which had theretofore been filled with, as you may have guessed, meaningless trash. Then I got rid of the hutch that had been on my desk, with the idea that less space will make my use it more efficiently.
After the creative destruction, it was time to rebuild. Here's the result:
The first thing I did was head down to the Pottery Barn outlet, where I picked up a desk pad and some wooden trays to replace the cheap plastic ones I'd had.
After that, I got some picture frames at Target to realize an idea I had over the summer.
I went for a walk around my neighborhood and picked some leaves, then I took some resume paper I had and printed the common and binomial names of each species of tree. Then I put the leaf against the glass of the frame and slid the paper behind it.
From left to right when you're sitting at the desk, the leaves are the Red Maple, Northern Red Oak, Sugar Maple, American Sycamore, and the King of Trees, the Silver Maple.
From there, I filled in the rest of the desk. I added a corkboard with an OSU pennant and a glass vase to hold pens.
After Halloween, my mom gave me an apple paperweight and I set the plane from my costume on top of my CPU.
This is my favorite detail. The bronze thing is a coat hook. It's made by 3M, and it mounts using their Command strips.
It's not perfect: I still have the crappy flourescent lighting (not much I can do about that) and a pretty uncomfortable chair (the big thing this one had going for it is that it had the fewest visible stains of any chair in the building). If anyone would like to donate $600, I can rectify the latter problem . But overall, I think it's a much nicer atmosphere. And God knows, I need a nicer atmosphere.
kevinbelt @ 2008-11-20T13:44:00I've been rather unhappy at work recently, so I thought it might help to make a list of things I like about my job.
There, that's all I can think of. kevinbelt @ 2008-11-18T19:22:00Leave it to Christopher Hitchens to get to the essence of the current situation: This is an almost perfect metaphor for Third World conditions: a money class fleeces the banking system while the very trunk of the national tree [for those of you who don't click through, he's referring to our infrastructure as typefied by 1-35W in Minneapolis. -kgb] is permitted to rot and crash. ---Now ask yourself another question. Has anybody resigned, from either the public or the private sectors (overlapping so lavishly as they now do)? Has anybody even offered to resign? Have you heard anybody in authority apologize, as in: “So very sorry about your savings and pensions and homes and college funds, and I feel personally rotten about it”? Have you even heard the question being posed? ... O.K., then, has anybody been fired? ... To ask the question is to answer it. kevinbelt @ 2008-11-14T23:11:00MacGyver time!
You can make a day planner.
Backstory: I've been reading a lot of life-hacking stuff recently, and I came across the Muji Chronotebook. I had been planning on buying another Moleskine when payday came around, but this seemed much cooler. But in the spirit of lifehacking, I didn't wait. I made my own.
The pages are regular 8.5x11 copier paper, folded in half. I found a clock face on Google Images and incorporated that into a layout I created in Excel. For a cover, I cut a manila folder down to size, and attached it to my pages with two rubber bands. The last step was to make it more presentable, so I bought some corduroy fabric. I actually bought some fabric adhesive as well, but as it turns out, scotch tape works better (this is why those of you who read Andrea's journal are seeing my comments about fabric adhesive). I taped the flyleaves to the folder, then taped the fabric over it. I could have had a steadier hand with the scissors, and I'll eventually find a better adhesive. But in the meantime, I kind of like it. Total cost: $2.99, for the fabric. Everything else, I "liberated" from work.
This is my favorite part. I set it up so that each book is one month (in this case, November), and I printed on the back flyleaf "Have a happy December!"
I like it.
kevinbelt @ 2008-11-09T19:00:00I need some advice. The past two years, I took a January vacation. In 2007, Andrea and I went to Phoenix for the National Championship Game, and last year we went to New Hampshire for the primary election. I want to take another trip this upcoming January, but I'm not sure where. This is where you come in. Here are the options:
A) Baltimore/Washington. The purpose of this trip would be twofold: first, to see the Poe Toaster in Baltimore on 19 January, and the next day to be around the Presidential Inauguration. Several people have expressed interest in coming with me, one of whom (Jed, my cube buddy) has access to free lodging (Jon: it's in Columbia Heights). The downside is, my brother's wedding is 17 January. I don't want to jet out of the celebration to go on a vacation of my own, especially since they're not planning a honeymoon immediately. Plus, Tim is the best gift-giver I know, so I hope to get them something fairly impressive, which will leave me financially drained.
B) New England, probably southern Vermont. I would avoid conflict with Tim's wedding because this trip would be later - mid-February. I've been on a huge maple syrup obsession recently, and that's the early part of the season. I absolutely loved New Hampshire last year, and I think it would be fun to go back and explore without the hectic schedule we had last year. The downside to this one is the cost in getting there. If Skybus were still around, I wouldn't worry, but it's a ten-hour drive just to Albany. Not to mention the cost of gas.
C) New York City. Readers with memories long enough to recall my infrequent postings will remember that I've recently watched a lot of "Mad Men", re-read Catcher in the Rye, and re-watched "North by Northwest". I also re-watched "Scent of a Woman", walked by the Tiffany store at Easton, and watched some election coverage on NBC, which showed the scaffolding-counters on Rockefeller Center. Consequently, I've got a bit of an urge to go Uptown, stay in a nice hotel, and wander around. Several downsides, though: most importantly, I didn't really like New York the last time I was there. Andrea and I both agree that part of the reason we didn't like it is because it was at the end of our trip, and we were tired (and arguing). That said, I don't see how some of the things that bothered me (the incessant advertising, the crowded streets) would be much different. Second, even crappy hotels in NYC are expensive. I'm probably looking at $150/night. I could make up some of the costs by taking a train or a bus there, since I wouldn't need a car in the city, but still. It would probably be a weekend trip instead of a whole week. Third, my imaginary scenario (also informed, it should be noted, by "Home Alone 2") actually takes place in December. I wouldn't have enough money in December, and work would probably want me to give them more notice that I'm asking off. I suppose the only thing I'd lose by going later is the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, but that's what I've always imagined.
D) Niagara Falls/Toronto. Considering one of the main criteria for where I want to go is "being really freaking cold", Canada seemed an obvious choice. I went to Niagara and Toronto in high school and loved it. Going in winter, I could see a Leafs game, which would be awesome. There's no real downside that I can think of. Just not a whole lot of upside like the other options.
E) Mackinac, Michigan. Another kick I've been on recently is bridges. They scare the crap out of me, and for that reason I'm strangely attracted to them. Kind of like roller coasters, I guess. But Mackinac is a big ass bridge, and it's not far to the Soo Locks, either, which I'd also like to see. But what else? It's kind of in the middle of nowhere.
F) Minneapolis. I've wanted to go to Minneapolis for a long time. Minnesota was one of the places I applied to grad school. It sounds like a pretty cool city, what with the Walker Art Center, Guthrie Theater, and whatnot. The downside is the same as New England. It takes forever to drive there.
G) Seven Springs, Pennsylvania. This is the fall-back option. My great-aunt owns a condo at Seven Springs, and she lets my family stay for free when we go up. So that would be cheap. The only thing is, what do I do once I'm there? I could ski, but that's fairly expensive. I could sit around and chill, but since I'm planning on going by myself, that would get pretty boring pretty quickly.
Please let me know which option sounds best. If any of you have any other ideas, let me know. My only real criteria are 1) really cold, and 2) fairly cheap. kevinbelt @ 2008-10-31T17:08:00Here's my Halloween costume.
Cf. this.
While we're on the subject of costumes, this is noteworthy. This is from our costume day at work earlier this month. I have to say, Jed has never looked sexier. Also note that we did not coordinate: I was completely unaware of his plan, and this is just how I normally dressed. kevinbelt @ 2008-10-26T21:37:00I have a problem. I can't get those FreeCreditReport.com commercial jingles out of my head. They're driving me crazy. So I'm going to blog about them.
Here's the first one:
This is the most sensible of them. The premise is sound. Abridged: "we can't get a loan for a home because my girl defaulted on some credit cards." That's a good reason why you wouldn't be able to get a loan. No problems yet. But then, "if we'd gone to FreeCreditReport.com, I'd be a happy bachelor with a dog and a yard" (emphasis mine). Really? You're gonna kick the ho to the curb because of her credit? That's some cold shit. Also, why do her parents live in the hood? ("Instead of living in a pleasant suburb, I'm living in the basement of her mom and her dad's.") I suspect this relationship has more issues than FreeCreditReport.com can solve.
And that's the good one. Then there's this:
"When the bike store saw my credit, they said this [referring a vintage clunker] was all they had." Who takes out a loan to buy a bike? Bikes actually aren't very expensive. I spent a lot more than I probably should have on my bike, got a pretty nice one new, and only dropped $800. Even at my meager income, I was able to pay it all at once in cash. And the bike the guy is riding is not nearly as nice as mine. If he needed a loan to cover that, his finances are in trouble. Not to mention, he said he traded in his car. Even if it were in terrible shape, he still should have gotten at least $500 for it. It sounds like his credit issues are part of a larger money management problem, and again, I'm not sure FreeCreditReport.com can help with that.
And then the nonsensical one:
"The party's not for me because some punk opened a credit card with my ID." This is a complete non-sequitur. Imagine if the punk in question had not opened said credit card; would the spokesguy then be the guest of honor at a rock star party? Unlikely. Credit issues, as far as I'm aware, have no bearing on rock star status. (Indeed, as "Behind the Music" viewers know, rock stars often have less than perfect finances.) Even assuming they do, though, that doesn't mean the spokesguy would be a rock star. There are other, more important factors, such as lack of musical talent, that would also seem to have an impact. But he ignores his own shortcomings and blames circumstances beyond his control for his fate. Insecurity: not something FreeCreditReport.com can help with either. I think this guy might be better served by FreePsychologicalConsultation.com. Or FreeShotgunPointedAtHisLeftTemple.com.
I wish they'd stuck with this campaign:
For the record, that jingle is stuck in my head as well. kevinbelt @ 2008-10-21T22:00:00ELTON LIVES!
 kevinbelt @ 2008-10-21T13:01:00Every once in a while, I come across articles like this and let out a big WTF? I don't think it's possible to talk about college anymore without complaining about class sizes, grad students teaching classes, or disengaged students, and I'm not sure why. I wonder what kind of colleges the people in these surveys mentioned in the article went to. It certainly wasn't Ohio State (or, I guess to be more specific, it wasn't the OSU departments of History or Political Science).
My college experience was, in short, nothing like what's described in the surveys the linked author cites. I obviously had classes with more than 30 students, or classes taught by TAs, but those were the exception, not the rule. To some extent, that's inevitable. Take a class like Psychology 100, for example, which nearly every OSU student takes at some point. Assuming that, let's say 30,000 students take it over the course of their careers, and enrollment is equal every quarter, you'd need about 70 professors teaching each quarter to handle the load. That's obviously impossible. And it's unnecessary. I don't think having 30 people in a Psych 100 class would help anyone learn more about psychology, for the simple reason that it's a survey class - the syllabus just skims major topics in the discipline; you don't have time to acquire deep expertise even if there are only 10 people in the class.
Nearly all of my classes with more than 30 people were 100- or 200-level classes taking during my first two years at OSU. I can think of two or three upper-level classes in the History department with around 75 people (not so big as to impair discussion, note), and I can only think of two in Poli Sci (and one of those only had about 40 or 50. The other, for the record, was with John Mueller, who you may recognize from the Daily Show or NPR. He's kinda famous.). I don't think I ever had a 300-level or higher class with more than 100 people.
As mentioned above, 100-level classes are where you'd expect huge classes to be. There are some classes that every OSU student takes. Psych 100, Sociology 101, Econ 200 and 201, Stats 135, History 111/112 or 151/152. The cost of additional professors isn't worth the marginal benefit students may not even experience.
And it should be noted that not all 100-level classes are huge. OSU does a good job of keeping classes that need individual attention from the professor (such as English 110 or foreign language classes) at 20-30 people. And this is to say nothing of less popular classes like History 181 or Philosophy 150, which fulfill the same requirements at significantly smaller class sizes. In other words, you could probably get through your entire career at Ohio State in classes smaller than 50 students if you wanted to.
I don't understand the outcry over grad students, either. In most departments, grad students leading their own classes are ABDs - they've completed all their coursework, and just need to defend their dissertations. I don't see how that would magically transform an unqualified teacher into a qualified one, considering that the Ph.D. is a research accomplishment. For example, one of my Poli Sci TAs got her Ph.D. the year after I took her class, and she now teaches at Dartmouth. Obviously, not every TA goes on to that kind of success, but took a class from an Ivy League professor at state-school prices. That's a good deal, to me. Note, though, that I only had a few TA-led upper-level courses in Poli Sci, and none at all in History. (I don't think I had any adjunct professors in either discipline, either.) Nearly all of the TA-led classes I had were 100- or 200-level survey classes. (Side note: I can only think of one TA-led class I had that had more than 50 people. Interestingly, I thought that TA was one of the best teachers, and that class one of the most interesting, during my entire time at OSU.)
Was my college experience that unusual? Did I have the experience that most students daydream about while struggling to stay awake in huge lectures halls listening to grad students? Are History and Political Science just awesome? Did those of you in other departments at OSU have similar experiences? Or did these complaining students attend third-rate, glorified community colleges? kevinbelt @ 2008-10-14T09:45:00The other day, I had a brilliant idea. I live close enough to campus to walk, and I don't go into work until 11am. Perhaps I could start sitting in on classes in the morning before work? Big lectures, I mean, in rooms like Hitchcock 131 or Independence 100, so the professors won't actually notice me and wonder what I'm doing. After all, even though I don't leave for work until 10:30, I usually wake up around 8 or so and just sit around reading, or run some errands if I need to. It wouldn't disrupt my schedule a whole lot. I figure, it takes about 45 minutes each way (very conservative estimate) to walk to a West Campus bus stop and then ride the bus into Central Campus, and it takes about 20 minutes to get to work from my apartment. So as long as I sat in on classes ending before 10am, I should be able to pull it off. Most would start at 8:30, which means I'd have to wake up an hour earlier, but that's a minor concern. I get plenty of sleep.
So yesterday, I looked at the Master Schedule of Classes, and my plans were dashed. As it turns out, OSU doesn't schedule a lot of huge lectures early in the morning. I looked through pretty much every department in the Colleges of Humanities and SBS, plus some Arts classes and Plant Bio, and all I found were Econ 200 and 201. There were small lecture-recitation all-in-one classes meeting that early, but I'm not sure I'd want to do that. And I didn't look in some of the other Bio departments or at any of the MAPS colleges. But it certainly seems that the vast majority of lectures are scheduled mid-day. It makes sense, if you think about it: would anyone really attend an 8:30 History 111 lecture (besides me)? Some departments (Poli Sci) didn't seem to schedule any lectures. And that makes sense too. Small, intimate classes help rankings. But I don't care about rankings, do I?
Poop. I had grand dreams of sitting in on new classes every day, experiencing a variety of different subjects and professors, and having a good time doing it. Don't get me wrong, Econ lectures aren't a huge disappointment. But I wanted more. Maybe I'll look into some of the LR classes. My History 111 class was an LR, and there were like 120 people. Who knows? Any suggestions? kevinbelt @ 2008-10-13T12:29:00Quote of the day at work:
"This entire episode reminds me of Jurassic Park - right before the Dinosaurs started eating people." kevinbelt @ 2008-10-10T09:56:00On 3 February 1959, a plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper crashed shortly after taking off from the Mason City, Iowa airport, killing everyone on board. You know that. The Day the Music Died and all that. It's a cultural touchstone for a generation and a half. But think about it for a minute: what the hell were they doing in rural northern Iowa, anyway?
Clear Lake, home to the Surf Ballroom and ultimately the last stop on the ill-fated Winter Dance Party tour, has a population of roughly 8,000 people today. (For reference, that's roughly the size of Orrville). It's about halfway between Des Moines and Minneapolis, two hours to either. In other words, the middle of nowhere. And yet here was Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper, all of whom had top-ten singles in the previous year. (Dion and the Belmonts were also on the bill, although the highest they'd reached on the charts to that point was #19. They would hit #5 the month after the crash.) Try to imagine that today. Do you think Kanye West AND Colplay, for example, would play a show together at a venue roughly the size of the Newport in a town the size of Orrville in 2008? It seems unlikely on several levels. First, multi-headliner tours like the Winter Dance Party are uncommon now, and when they do occur, they tend to be billed as festivals (e.g. Linkin Park's Projekt Revolution tours). Second, small clubs generally host more obscure acts - indie rock bands, aging bluesmen, etc. When chart-topping bands play clubs, it's generally a one-off thing, and a really big deal. Third, there are only about 25 cities that top acts play anymore. Even Columbus, the 15th-largest city in America, struggles to book top acts at huge venues like Polaris or the Schott. Things were different, then, it would seem.
And it wasn't that Clear Lake was an anomaly. The other stops on the Winter Dance Party were similarly remote. Have you ever even heard of Fort Dodge, Iowa (population 25,000)? Mankato, Minnesota (population 32,000)? Moorhead, Minnesota (population 30,000)? The "bigger" cities on the tour are still fairly small: Kenosha, Eau Claire, and Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Duluth, Minnesota are around 100,000 people - slightly bigger than Canton. Only two stops on the tour (St. Paul, MN and Milwaukee, WI) would have any hope of attracting such a tour today.
The whole Buddy Holly story seems foreign these days. Holly grew up in Lubbock, Texas (population 212,000) and cut his first records in early 1957 in Clovis, New Mexico (population 42,000). The Lubbock thing isn't so weird - kids in every city form garage bands, and many are good enough to move beyond their hometowns. Moreover, Lubbock is a college town, so it's not quite as surprising that kids there were exposed to new genres of music fairly early. (Keep in mind, rock and roll was only a couple years old at the time Holly recorded his first songs.) It's nonetheless still rather hard to imagine fairly cutting-edge music coming out of semi-rural northwest Texas and eastern New Mexico. Even harder to imagine is that up-and-coming young musicians in northwest Texas would shoot to the top of the Billboard charts the way Holly did. It's certainly not unheard of (Three Doors Down comes to mind, although they toured for several years before releasing an album), but it seems unlikely.
Making it even more unlikely is the primitive distribution technology of the 1950s. Obviously, there was no internet or MTV, but the differences are even more striking. The extent of music on TV was pretty much "American Bandstand", and FM radio was still a new and rare innovation. Music distribution in the late 50s was a tiny fraction of what it is now. And yet small-town acts flourished at a scale not seen again until the post-Nirvana college rock boom of the 1990s.
There really isn't a way for the Buddy Holly story to occur in 2008. If somehow a kid from the middle of nowhere did manage to get a record contract in a brand-new genre of music only four or five years after the genre was first developed, reached #1 on the pop charts a year after starting to play the music, and then died a couple of years later, Behind the Music wouldn't even believe it. Times were different then. And the great irony is that, to a large extent, rock and roll music is at fault. The erstwhile music of teenage rebellion has created a culture more centralized, homogenous, conformist, and corporate than could have ever been imagined when Holly, Valens, and J.P. Richardson boarded that plane for Fargo, North Dakota almost fifty years ago. kevinbelt @ 2008-10-04T13:19:00I broke. I've had the Big Ten Network for five weeks now, and I thought I could hold out. But no. Today, I bought some Ro-Tel. You really can't resist. kevinbelt @ 2008-09-29T22:03:00By request, I present Farfalle Marinara with Irregular Meat Polyhedrons:
The irregular meat polyhedrons (their irrepressible spirit prevents them from conforming into balls) are ground pork and ground beef, with bread crumbs, Romano cheese, balsamic vinegar, and what I've taken to calling "Kevin seasoning" (because I put it on everything): Frank's Red Hot, worcestershire sauce, garlic powder, cayenne pepper, crushed red pepper, and seasoning salt. I mixed all that up in a bowl, rolled the respective meats in it, kneaded the two meats together, and rolled the resulting polyhedron in the bowl again, then fried it on my griddle.
The sauce is tomato sauce with all of the aforementioned ingredients (minus meat), plus oregano and lemon juice. The ratios are a little different, as well. I used half the thing of Romano in here, and the Frank's Red Hot is pretty prominent as well.
As they say, all human effort against me is useless, for I succeed in all I undertake. kevinbelt @ 2008-09-26T21:53:00So I got an answer about the owl. It was who I thought it was. After hearing the story, though, I'm kinda relieved that smashing my owl is all that happened. On the other hand, some of my neighbors are really cool and I'm very happy about that.
If any of you see a small owl that looks like this, please buy it and I'll reimburse you. Thanks. kevinbelt @ 2008-09-25T21:34:00A correction to my previous post: apparently, nobody took my owl. Someone smashed him. Parts of Elton are still in the hallway. The larger chunks of debris were apparently cleaned up.
I posted notes on both doors asking for Elton's return, and someone wrote a note back under one of them saying she (it was female handwriting) had seen the broken pieces laying in the hallway. The good news is, this narrows down the suspects to the person I'd suspected all along and two other rather unlikely scenarios.
So, congratulations, guy. You beat up an eight-inch-tall piece of wood and plastic. You must be proud.
"That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write 'Fuck you' right under your nose." kevinbelt @ 2008-09-25T00:07:00You remember that last post about how I don't like my neighbors? One of them stole my owl. Allow me to reiterate: I do NOT like my neighbors. kevinbelt @ 2008-09-23T00:08:00Sorry for the posting spree; I've got a lot on my mind.
Yesterday I started feeling dissatisfied with where I'm living. I really like my apartment, but it's getting to where I just like my little unit and I wish everything around it would just go away. My neighbors, in particular, are irritating me. I'm in the middle of a laundry war with one neighbor. I do laundry once, sometimes twice a week, and I've lived hear almost exactly four months, so maybe 25 loads of laundry. There has only been one time that I've gone downstairs to do laundry, and the dryer was empty. (Interestingly, that was the first load I did here.) Ever since, the dryer has been full every time. Most of the time, I wait about a half hour or so, give him time to get his stuff in case the cycle just ended or something. After that, I put my laundry in the washer. By the time my wash cycle is up, he still hasn't come down to empty his dryer, so I take out his clothes and put them on the folding table. Often, they're not gone by the time my dryer cycle is done. That's two hours, man. How can you forget about your clothes for that long in a common dryer? There are like nine units in this building, and some of them have more than one occupant. It's almost certain that somebody will need to use that dryer. It's the same guy, too. Not only do I recognize his clothes, but he's admitted he left his clothes downstairs multiple times to me.
Last night was the most interesting. I had three loads to do, a busy day. As usual, when I went down, the dryer was full. I washed my first cycle, and when that was up, removed his clothes from the dryer and put them on the folding table. When I went to put my second load in the dryer, I noticed the old load had been moved, and there was a new load of stuff on the folding table. I took this as a sign he needed to do a load, so I put my third load on hold until today. So today, I went downstairs, and the dryer is full. But here's the kicker: it's not the same stuff that was waiting to be done last night! WTF man? How much laundry do you have? I wonder now, does he do laundry every single day, or does he have a sense of when I'm going to be doing laundry, and beats me to it?
I would be able to dismiss the latter scenario out of hand as paranoia if not for the bathroom habits of my upstairs neighbor, who has exactly the same bladder as I do, except two minutes ahead of me. Literally every time I'm taking a crap, I hear the toilet above me flush. The creepy part, though, is that our shower schedules coincide. About halfway through my shower, the water pressure increases as my neighbor turns off his/her shower. This happens with just enough irregularity as to dismiss the possibility that I'm hallucinating.
This was getting me down a little yesterday, but today I realized I've always had really weird neighbors. At the Spiritual Home of the Revolution, there was walking-around-all-the-time guy and Third Eye Blind guy. At the Penthouse, there was the girl who kept asking me to apply for a job with her company (some financial advisor place), and "Happiness is Being Retired" guy, who I nicknamed "Happiness is Being Retarded" guy. He had a license plate holder that said "Happiness is Being Retired", and he would use his non-working hours to stake out the parking spot directly underneath my window, despite the fact that his apartment was nowhere near either that parking spot, or my apartment. (I think he even lived on the other side of the building.) Toledo was probably the worst. Below me were these two UT undergrads who smoked pot seriously like seven times a day, and listened to techno really loudly as they did so. There were times when I'd take naps just to avoid the techno. Then they'd call the apartment manager on me during football games.
So yeah, maybe laundry wars aren't as bad as I originally made them seem. kevinbelt @ 2008-09-22T21:46:00I've been watching "Mad Men" on AMC a lot recently. I'm not sure whether I actually like the show or not. The tempo of the plot makes "The Wire" seem relentlessly fast-paced, and most of the scenes seem to set up as in-jokes between the writers and the audience - the viewer laughs because the characters cannot anticipate the upheavals of the late 60s, while the viewer has the benefit of hindsight. But the modesty and lack of ostentation in the characters' personal lives is striking. There's not a middle class like that anymore. Don Draper certainly has flaws (indeed, that's the entire premise of the show), but at least he doesn't eat arugula, or live in a McMansion, or wear a Bluetooth headset, or name his child "Nevaeh". Those are trifles, but I'm being serious when I say that I'd take the adultery and alcoholism of the Mad Men period over the trifles of today. I suppose you might accuse me of being elitist for saying so, but I delight in the irony of being called elitist because I lament the disappearance of casseroles from American dinner tables. This used to be a middle class country, and I rather liked it better when it was. kevinbelt @ 2008-09-22T21:20:00From time to time, I'm reminded of how unusual my high school experience was. What brought this to mind tonight is this obituary. I didn't know Carl Berg very well, and he probably didn't know me at all; he was a couple years older than me and we didn't have any reason to interact. I knew him like I knew John Legend, the way a younger kid knows an older kid who's involved in a lot of different things. But that's what stands out: "he was a member of the basketball team and the award winning drama team". Perhaps I am entirely off-base, but it would seem to me that this is not common. This is not the Hollywood high school stereotype, at least. And yet, what distinguished Carl "Ice" Berg was not the diversity and seeming incompatibility his interests, but his skill. It was fairly normal for North students* to be both athletes and scholars. Guys who were fairly jock-ish were not only good in the classroom, but many had nerdy hobbies like theatre or writing poetry. I recall a real emphasis on intellectualism, and it's difficult to overstate how much that has influenced me.
*I'm over-generalizing here. North was a highly fragmented student body, and there were certainly many who were conventional "jocks" or "nerds". But by "North students", I'm referring to the fraction of the student body I spent most of my time around, in class and out. kevinbelt @ 2008-09-16T20:59:00I've been thinking. The USC thing pisses me off, obviously, but let's keep it in perspective. What do you really expect? I mean, we played the #1 team in the country, on their home field, without our best player. It would have been a huge surprise to win that game, realistically speaking. We probably should have played a little better, but come on. Imagine, for example, Florida going to LA without Tim Tebow. Or Missouri without Chase Daniel. Nobody questions those teams' top-five credentials.
On the other hand, realism is overrated sometimes. I can't help but think that part of the reason we looked so crappy is because we were just meeting expectations. It's one thing when the media predicts you'll lose, but when your own fans do it, it's depressing. Everybody I talked to in Columbus this past week would hang their heads and mumble when the subject of USC came up. It's hard to believe some of that attitude didn't wear off on the players. That's not the way for fans to behave. We should expect to kick ass, even when it's optimistic to do so. We will kick Troy's ass next week. And if we don't, then we'll kick Minnesota's ass the week after that. We're Ohio State. That's what we do. When did we become Indiana? The fight song doesn't say "acknowledge the team across the field and eventually they'll realize Ohio's here". RAH RAH! Come on! We are still going to beat Michigan, we are still going to win the Big Ten, we are still going to go to the Rose Bowl, and we are still going to finish the year ranked in the top five. You feel me? kevinbelt @ 2008-09-13T15:22:00After flipping between Iowa-Iowa State and Michigan State-FAU, I have to say: I love old school, I-formation Big Ten football. You might disagree. I don't really care.
And also: Go Irish. Play like a champion today!
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