House of the rising Moonglum

My lovely wife sent me to a great page on vanilla beans, what they are, how they came to be used, and how to cook with them. Very cool!

Ali, one of the bloggers I read, finally put his name in for the upcoming elections. They are the “Iraqi Pro-Democracy Party” and the way that elections work in Iraq they might actually get a number of seats. His article is very interesting and hopeful, looking in particular at how impossible this would have been in the past. There are the guys that make me think we occasionally do some good over there.

Thanksgiving was great this year. My family was in town, and I have been correspondingly busy, so haven’t had a chance to blog about Thanksgiving until now. We all (20 of us) went over to my brother’s house and many of us brought over food for 20. The interesting thing about making food for 20 is that you are actually making food for 40. We barely made it through half of the food. 20 sounds like a huge number, but in the end it just isn’t that much bigger than 12 or 15 which I have done in my own apartment in the past. With one turkey. We had three. My brother deep fried them which was much fun to watch and very tasty to eat. Also everyone brought over yummy food. But this is my blog, so I will talk about what I made.

I made 5 pounds of cranberry sauce which was a bit much. I am still working on the two remaining pounds. More importantly I made ice cream. Four batches of vanilla which gets real boring real fast. In order to spice it up I used this as an excuse to finally make the “real” vanilla that I have a recipe for. It requires a vanilla bean.  I used this as an excuse to really look around and actually find one.  I had looked around for a while, including places like Whole Foods and Trader Joes. In the end I actually found them at Jewel where they had just stocked up on a new brand of fancy spices. It cost $8! But this is something I have wanted to make for a while now, so I figured what the hey. (I have been making Ice Cream rather than buying since I have been married, and it is not cheaper to make than just buy which was a depressing realization. Bread is also not cheaper to make than buy which really shocked me.) So, for this $8 you only get one bean. They are more like saffron or coffee than real beans.  They are the fruit or an orchid like flower, about two inches long with oily stuff inside that you scrape out.

End result though? Gooooood vanilla ice cream. There are a couple other recipes that require the vanilla bean as well, but before I make those I will need to find a cheaper place to buy them. I’m thinking some of the ethnic markets around here might have better deals.

Mmmm, Ice Cream. (I also made a sweet cream without any flavor, which none of my ice cream books consider ice cream, but it was shockingly good! Basically vanilla ice cream minus the vanilla.)

I’ve been thinking about loyalty a lot lately. In particular because of a conversation I was having about Powell leaving office. I was thinking that he was a great person to have on board because he voiced his concerns, but then when the decision was made, ended up backing up the person in charge. I was thinking that that was the ideal of loyalty. You are honest with the person in private, but then in public you are loyal.

It was pointed out to me, that while this may be valuable in most cases, there are some cases when loyalty is screaming from the rooftops that something has gone horribly awry. If you know, to the depths of your soul, that something is wrong, and the person in charge is not listening, it is time to take drastic measures. Not just for you, but for the thing you are being loyal to. In the case of Powell, it would be for the country, so we aren’t led into a horrible mistake, but if he really did feel that loyalty specifically to Bush, then it should be for him. He should have resigned back when he was asked to lend his authority to the decision.

The reason is two fold. First, his authority would then have not been backing it, and the policy might have been changed. That is to say, by taking the drastic measure of resigning, he could have stopped the things he saw going wrong from happening. And second, by lending his support, but then letting leak that he opposed it, he no longer sounds like the loyal man that he wanted to appear. Not only did he let the person (country) he was supposed to be loyal to fall, he makes it sound like it wasn’t his fault. e.g. he did “everything he could” to avoid it.

I heard a very similar argument from Ginmar about the marines protecting that guy in Fallujah, “Loyalty is a concept that will fuck you up every time. Blind loyalty will not just hurt you—it will hurt the thing you love, the people you love, and the principles you hope you hold.” It is an interesting problem. We want to back those we love, but blindly backing every play they make is not loyalty. And the more I think about it, the more I think that it was disgraceful on the part of Powell, because in his case, he has the option to resign in protest to a decision, whereas the troops in the field don’t have that same option. See, the twelve guys who opted not to go on the lightly armored fuel convoy. This is an interesting problem at both the national and personal level.

Just saw the remake of the Stepford Wives last night with my wife. It was a truly disturbing movie, but if you can make it through it, you are rewarded with a very interesting twist ending which makes it a rather “feminist” movie. I put that in quotes because the beginning is so odd, and the behavior of the men in it so poor, that by the time you reach the payoff, it is almost hard to walk away with the correct message. But the fact is, the acting is superb, there are some really funny points, and the twist ending is (IMHO) worth it. It has a lot more comedy than I was expecting, so while, no beckets, it has real social commentary, and I would recommend it if you want your brain messed with. (I kept expecting oompa lumpas to pop out.)

I was walking back from picking up some lunch today, wind blowing and cold rain pouring, when with a sudden change of pressure the rain turned to snow and the wind stopped. This was especially terrifying because I recently saw “The Day After Tomorrow”. I was warned off the movie, “Because [I] know too much about science”, but the person who warned me missed the point. I loved that movie. My brother has a theory about sports movies: they are Kabuki theatre. I buy the theory. It’s not what the story says it is how they do it. In much the same way I am coming to believe that disaster movies follow the same rule. Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, The Core, Armageddon. Just leave science at the door, and be careful to listen to that wacky scientist that no one believes until it is too late.

So, what did I learn from this movie?

• New York has about 400 people.
• Dick Cheney doesn’t care about the planet.
• The vice president actually controls the US. (OK these two I already knew, but man that actor looks like Cheney.)
• Arctic scientists can do a standing long jump that breaks world records.
• Global climate change can happen in seconds.
• Animals have to be deep frozen in a manner of seconds in order to be frozen in the tundra with food in their stomachs.
• A drafty building with big windows will stop a column of air that drops helicopters out of the sky, shatters glass and freezes people in seconds.
• When said weather conditions appear, DON”T get in a helicopter. (moron.)
• Homeless people are the best people to have around in the event of the end of the world.
• When the entire US is being destroyed we will negotiate for entry to Mexico rather than just invading.
• When the end does come, you better be in NYC if you have to be north because only those 600 people are getting saved. (Remember there are only 600 people in NYC.)

and finally:

• Global warming is good for the environment.

Two and a half beckets. Getting rank, but still fun.

“We are the auto mechanics of this generation, with a little bit of Dragnet and Ghostbusters, but this is not revenge of the nerds.” Ghostbusters indeed. Maybe I should call them up to get my PC to stop hitting the disk for the first hour that I turn it on.

There is a lot going on at work today, so one of my coworkers decided that using IM would be a bit more efficient. So today for the first time I actually got an e-mail that said, “Do you yahoo?”

Now I can’t get yodeling yahooligans out of my head.

The other day I posted a blog about a man who lived in Baghdad blogging about Iraqi resistance putting up some roadblocks on his street. His son(?) just posted his own account of that day, and how he managed to take his exam anyway.

I can’t even imagine what kind of bravery it takes to walk out to a band of armed men a second time to ask if you can go to school!

Only one day until the new album hits the stores! It is probably a good thing I wasn’t in NY today, though. U2 played their new album as they drove down broadway to a free concert in Brooklyn. Too cool.

You know, there were so many jokes in poor taste to be made about this article, but really five people getting killed is pretty ugly. I mean, really, it sounds like there were 10 or so heavily armed people, and one of them does all the killing? I guess you just don’t expect someone to be shooting at you, but the 7th person? The point at which you see a pile of bodies is the point at which you start shooting back. And they are hunters, it’s not like they were just bad shots. It sounds like the sheriff’s office is also a little confused about what happened.

Update: Well CNN has more details, and it is looking a bit different than that first article. For one thing: “There was just one gun among the eight people killed or wounded” which helps explain how one guy could have shot so many. Also he was out of ammunition when the police caught him, recognizing him from his license number on his back.

Sounds like he just snapped to me.

If you think the SEAL teams are tough, check out the dolphin teams. I still want to know how they use the dolphins. “Detecting mines” is what they say, but how? It’s not like they can just blow them up. That is very hard to train for. That’s a show I’d like to see at Marine World. Only here they get the whole ocean to swim around in. Best quote:

“Citing security reasons, Frey would not say how many dolphins were deployed or how long they will be in the region.”

So it passed the house earlier, but seems to be stuck in the senate. It would be nice to have a firm system of regulations in place, but the fact of the matter is that sub orbital space planes in their current incarnation will never be able to live up to current airplane standards. Much like the airplanes when HTA flight was first invented, this will be dangerous for a while. But I really don’t think that should stop us from doing it.

Mmm… excessive government regulation killing an industry before it starts. Actually that’s not true. It is misplaced government regulation, and this bill would fix that, so I guess the regulation is reducing the regulation. Here’s hoping it passes.

Zeyed seems to have a number of terrorists taking over a street right in front of his house. He reported on the latest happenings and his son (cousin?), a high school student Nabil (also a blogger) can’t get to school for his test. Scary.

It looks like NASA just had its second success and third shot at producing a functioning scramjet. Not much news yet, but the engines turned on and off at the expected times, so things look good for the mach 10 flight.

Why is there so little mainstream news about what is going on in Fallujah right now? Part of the reason that I have been following this story so closely lately is because I have been reading some about the invasion of Hue in Vietnam. They aren’t the same at all, but that invasion was very closely watched by Americans back home and it certainly contributed to the anti-war feeling in the country. I am shocked that this hasn’t garnered more attention in the news. I don’t watch TV, so it might all just be there, but when I look at the online resources, BBC and the NYT are the only sources that have this fight as the continuous headline. CNN, the Trib, FOX, the LAT, etc, all tend to have it lower down, with Laci Peterson beating it out. It is so frustrating to know that the largest battle of the “finished” war is going on right now, and the country doesn’t seem to notice or care.

The Beeb does a really good job, but I have to wonder how many Americans read it? One of my favorite things they do is translate some comments posted by their Iraqi readers. Some of the bloggers do that to, but for some reason I trust the Beebs translations a little more. The interesting thing about the Iraqi comments is that while they are upset with the US, they seem more upset with the insurgents. That is the only way for us to get out of this mess, but that means that we can’t keep doing things to piss of the Iraqis, and that means that we (the American public) need to know what is going on, and yell when we get upset by certain actions. So why isn’t this the headline of every paper every day?

(n.b. today is probably a bad day to do this post since with the additional troops in Mosul is actually is the headline of every paper today, but this has been going on for a week.)

Now that the XPrize is over, there is not much day to day fun in launch vehicles. Sure, Armadillo is still going, but the pace is way slowed down. Cassini and the Mars Rovers are still doing great things, but I want cool launch vehicle stories! That is where Space X comes in. If you go to their news page, you can see that they erected their mobile launcher for preflight checkout. They will have their first launch sometime early next year. They are more than just another independent ELV provider like Orbital though. Their Falcon I rocket is actually a RLV. The rocket parachutes back to earth and is collected to be checked out, refueled and sent up again. This should drastically reduce launch costs once they are up and running. Also, because their costs are so low, Bigelow Aerospace is their fourth customer, putting an inflatable hotel in orbit. No I am not making this up. Bigelow is working on making orbital hotel with the assumption that once there is a place to go, people will figure out how to get there. And at the worst, he can always sell them off as prebuilt space stations to NASA.

So there is a serious horror going on in Fallujah right now. The fact that the fight is as easy as it has been is worrying not satisfying. It means that most the people who they were trying to get already left. More importantly though is what happens when the fighting stops. We need to spend a huge amount of money on rebuilding the place as quickly as possible so the populace can see on the one hand terrorists who kidnapped them and limited their movement and on the other hand Americans who get rid of the check points and fix the city. As opposed to the guys who come in and kill everybody. Fortunately some people recognize this (from the LAT): “In addition, tens of millions of dollars in reconstruction funds may be spent on projects once the fighting stops. Marine lawyers are traveling with combat units, ready to handle compensation claims for battle damage.” Send in the lawyers!

That is just messed up. And they are going to need a lot of money (BBC): “So you see a fleeting glimpse of one of the militants in the back of a room or jumping across a rooftop and then literally in the two hours I was out last night, thousands of rounds of ammunition are expended, tanks fire and the place is left in ruins.” They have a Fallujan who reports for them and it looks grim. (Though I find it odd that he would have seen “bodies of dead american lying in the street.”) I just hope they fix the place when they are done, and fast, not slow like last time. They have had five months to figure this out.

Music: Send lawyers, guns and money.

Just finished “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes”, the first one of the collections of Strand stories. Finished up A Study In Scarlet and The Sign of the Four earlier, but the Adventures are very interesting and have quite a different flare to them. The first two books have a lot more description and background to them in terms of motivation and whatnot, while the adventures are more bite sized and therefore necessarily shorter on flavor. The really interesting thing about them though, is that even though they stick much more closely to the cases, they are presented in such a manner that you get a real sense of character development and who Holmes is at the stories go along. There are a couple self referential points in the books where Holmes talks about how Watson is focusing on the cases and not “the method”, though he does admit that the cases he chooses are ones where he used his reasoning to its fullest. Of course he missed the real point which is that Watson is focusing on the person rather than the case or the method, but when he is reasoning at his best is when you can find out the most about the person. These stories are much more interesting than I would have thought, and hold together as a book really well.

“The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes” is next, but I should probably finish that Kerry book I am half way through first, or it will end up like the Powell book and only be half read. (Though while Powell’s childhood was interesting, IMO Kerry had a much more interesting story to tell about Vietnam than Powell did.)

Just read an interesting editorial in the Trib about how to keep the city running. Gives me some hope for a smaller city government and if enacted might even make some of our libertarians happy, but given that da mayor is in charge, I somehow doubt that it will be. OTOH, he has made budgets work in the past so we will see.