Parabasis

Everybody, Everybody Get Footloose

by 99 Seats

Here. Enjoy this blatant disregard for copyright laws.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

by 99 Seats

I didn't watch the Emmys last night. I've largely given up on giving a shit about awards shows. This paragraph explains why pretty succinctly:

"The Daily Show," really? We like it and all, but it already has a shelf full of Emmys. And in a show desperate for a "wow" moment, we can't believe Emmy voters deprived us of what could've been a historically bitter acceptance speech from ousted "Tonight Show" host Conan O'Brien. Plus, he deserved it: That final stretch of shows was Conan at his absolute peak.

Ugh. So consistently having a good show, year in and year out, well, that's just bo-ring! A bitter, angry acceptance speech would have been DRAMA! And that's what it's all about, right? That kind of sentiment reminds me of those political writers who want to keep the Senate as a non-functioning body because it's better for their stories. Who cares about the health of the nation if we're all on tenderhooks to see what President Ben Nelson decides is going to help get re-elected in Nebraska? It makes for better copy!

Lord knows I love television, but it's essentially a delivery system for advertising. And these kind awards orgies are advertising for the delivery systems for advertising. If they do award some quality along the way, it's lovely. But let's be clear: quality isn't the only thing winning statues out there.

A good friend of mine, when he was younger, used to rush out and buy the newest album for his favorite bands, just so they would have a good showing on the Billboard Top Ten. That meant they were good, was his reasoning, and no one could make fun of him for liking them. When I was younger, I used to get heavily invested in the Oscars. When Anna Paquin won for The Piano was practically jumping up and down like a Filipino beauty queen's fans. It conferred some legitimacy to these weird, quirky "indie" movies I liked so much. Now...I don't care. I just don't care if the movies or tv shows I like get some nice statuettes for their mantles. They do the work I like and I'm happy to watch them while they're on.

For me, hands down, the best drama of the year was Lost and the best comedy was Community. I'd kick Danny DeVito a nod for his willingness to be utterly disgusting on a weekly basis. Jane Lynch was definitely the only good thing on Glee, so kudos. And, yes, I'd still be handing hardware to Jon Stewart, Team Coco or not. What would you have voted for?

Letting Freedom Ring

by 99 Seats

For the obvious reasons, I wanted to look this up on YouTube and found this terrific video of the full speech. I highly recommend watching the full speech. We have all heard and read his closing, the thundering, powerful last two minutes, but the full speech is equally amazing.

Watching it puts the awful, sorry spectacle that is Glenn Beck in sharp relief. A friend of mine raised a very good question on Facebook the other day: if good, decent liberals are saying that Ground Zero isn't "Hallowed Ground," then why are they upset about Glenn Beck making a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial? It might have been a little tongue-in-cheek, but the point stuck with me. I thought about it and thought about it and then watching this, I realized that I don't care about him making the speech on the step of the Lincoln Memorial. He has every right to make any and every speech he wants to make, no matter how much it offends me.

But. Watching Dr. King's speech and think about this country in 1963. Black people were literally being killed in the streets, fighting for their human rights. A large number of state and federal officials had openly declared their hostility to giving those rights. The Civil Rights Act was a year off and would cost both LBJ and the Democratic Party dearly. This was the backdrop for Dr. King. This was what he was facing.

I'm an open-minded person enough to say that the concerns of wealthy, white people are in someways legitimate...but I haven't heard of any police officer turning a hose on any of them, I haven't heard about lynchings of white businessmen because they opened a store in a black neighborhood, I haven't heard about any white boys murdered for ogling black women. Fine, you're angry that the people you like are out of power (sort of). That doesn't add up to a civil rights movement.

Hearing Glenn Beck say that he wants to reclaim the civil right movement because for the people who did it in the first place...It makes me want to vomit. And then cry. To think that somewhere, some middle-aged white person is thinking, "Yeah, the civil rights movement was about me," fills me with a kind of existential sadness. I won't be watching any of the spectacle today. But I might watch Dr. King speak a few more times, to remind myself that true honor is possible.

Ebert On Park51

By Isaac Butler

(alternate post title: Against Reasonableness)

Roger Ebert, in his new position as Mute Sage of American Culture, pens a pretty excellent column called "Ten Things I Know About The Mosque".  You can read it here, it's great. Except he gets one thing really, really wrong:

3. The choice of location shows flawed judgment on the part of its imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf. He undoubtedly knows that now, and I expect his project to be relocated. The imam would be prudent to chose another location, because the far right wing has seized on the issue as an occasion for fanning hatred against Muslims. It has also narrowly reframed the project as a mosque, rather than a community center with a prayer room, which is what it would be. To oppose it on the grounds that it is Muslim is religious prejudice and nothing else. The Muslims who attacked the World Trade Center are not the Muslims who are building the center.

The reasoning here is kind of tortured into an accidental blame-the-victim post.  The Park51 location choice is flawed because the Right Wing is using it to whip up prejudiced anti-Muslim hysteria.  But that shows flawed judgement on... Feisal Abdul Rauf's part?  That doesn't make a lot of sense.  Ebert is saying here that it was flawed because a bunch of hysterical people have shouted loud enough that it was wrong.  But the burden then falls on the hysterical reactors, not on Imam Rauf, doesn't it?

This also gets at something that's been bugging me lately, and that's the liberal tendency to concede major parts of an argument in an effort to appear "reasonable".  I think there's something hardwired into our DNA that makes us do this.  A good example is in the abortion debate. I know plenty of people who don't think abortions are particularly tragic or unseemly, but just a fact of life but still feel the need to nod their heads reasonably and stroke their beards and say "well, yes, of course abortion is tragic, but it should still be left up to the woman and her doctor to decide". 

We preemptively give up this ground, I think, because we want to be understanding genuinely and we think if we extent our hand, it will be shaken. But you can be understanding of and respectful of someone's viewpoint without having to concede your own.

Lately, with the whole Park51 Project, the liberal thing to concede is that it is in poor taste to build a Muslim community center four blocks away from the WTC site.  Let us set aside, of r a moment, the rank stupidity of claiming that anything four blocks away from Ground Zero could be called "The Ground Zero Anything" (which, come on, that's fucking idiotic) and let's just focus on this bad taste concession.  What that concedes is that there is something distasteful on a DNA level about Islam that links it in all of its forms, whether moderate or fundamentalist, with terrorism. This is given over so that the oh so reasonable liberal can then say "but religious freedom is a fundamental american value".

Why would you ever want to make that concession, though? That's the very thing we should be arguing about in the first place. We seem to want to have an argument about civics, but that sidesteps what we should be talking about, namely that there's nothing in bad taste about Park51, that innocent muslims died in the WTC attacks too, and that our war is with a handful of specific terrorist organizations, not the Islamic faith. We should be able to have that argument respectfully without needing to concede 50% of our point at the outset.

Wait... What?

The musical workshop covered in this week's Michael Reidel column really must be read in its entirety to be believed.

Where No Man Has Gone Before...

by 99 Seats

This is strictly for my nerds:

This is an actual casting memo for Star Trek: The Next Generation, showing us what might have been. I'm intrigued by Wesley Snipes as Geordi, but downright fascinated by Reggie Jackson as the frontrunner for Geordi. Imagine watching that show...

Painting A Pretty Ugly Picture

by 99 Seats

My battery mate, Isaac, highlights this Washington Monthly article below. It's good strong stuff and definitely reminiscent of the Courtney Munna issue from a few months back. If you want to understand how Courtney wound up where in her situation, look no further:

The GW institutional model—embracing high tuition, excessive construction projects, and massive undergraduate debt—has become the dominant one in higher education, and every university president seems to want to be Stephen Joel Trachtenberg. American University, for instance, another second-tier school just four and a half miles from GW, does exactly the same things GW does, only more so. The average borrower leaves American about $41,000 in debt. Some 84 percent of American’s operating budget is funded by undergraduate tuition. A whole host of second-tier national universities operate in the same manner: they spend on the things that U.S. News measures, and they pay for them with practices that U.S. News doesn’t care about, like student loans.

The toxic combination of the overinvesting in the physical plant, desperately craving prestige measured by outside sources and plain old greed and ego sound pretty familiar, don't they? And they lead to the individual getting rogered but good.

And how rogered? Well, the Washington Monthly has another piece up, covering what they call "dropout factories." These are the lower tier, community colleges that, when you can't afford the second tier on a policeman's or secretary's salary, you go, too. And find a dysfunctional mess.

Nearly everyone considers it scandalous when poor kids are shunted into lousy high schools with low graduation rates, and we have no problem naming and shaming those schools. Bad primary and secondary schools are frequently the subject of front-page newspaper investigations and the backdrop for speeches by reformist mayors and school district chiefs. But bad colleges are spared such scrutiny. This indifference is inexcusable now that a postsecondary credential has become virtually indispensable to anyone hoping to lead a middle-class life. If we want better outcomes in higher education, we need to hold dropout factories like Chicago State accountable in the same way the Obama administration proposes to hold underperforming high schools accountable: transform them—or shut them down.

So, if you want to go to college, and gain access to a middle class life, you'd better start off with a leg up. Otherwise, you're going to go to a school that promises a lot and leaves you with unmanageable debt or simply lets you fall between the cracks.

So for all the handwringing about the aimless, "lost generation" of twenty-somethings who can't seem to cut the apron string there might be more a class issue than it appears. As Jamelle Bouie says:

A generation or two ago, you didn't need luck and a college degree to get a job with decent pay and benefits; with a high school education -- or less -- you could get a union job or learn a trade. You wouldn't be rich, but you could start a family and a build a stable life. The absence of those jobs goes a long way toward explaining the purported rise of late-onset adulthood.

Humpday Reading

By Isaac Butler

(1) Many of my liberal friends say they kinda enjoy reading David Brooks, and think he frequently makes some interesting points.  Personally, I feel like Brooks is one of the sneakiest writers in the pundit game.  Take, for example, this column this week, which purports to be about having the mental strength/courage to question your own beliefs. Pretty innocuous-- if sentimentally nostalgic-- stuff. But then at the very end, he sneaks in an equivalency between thinking Barack Obama is a secret Muslim and thinking the Surge failed.  These are not equivalent.  One is factually incorrect. The other is far more complex.  While the surge played a part in reducing violence in Iraq, the reduction in violence was meant to be a means towards several ends it failed to achieve.  For more on this, here's Conservative Iraq war opponent Daniel Larison with the appropriately titled "By Its Own Standards, The `Surge' Failed".

(2) Uh, there's a traffic jam in China that looks like it could last for weeks.  When life starts imitating Roy Andersson's brilliant Songs From The Second Floor (netflix it today, people), you know we're in trouble.  

(3) The Times' video game reviewer really, really, really hates the Scott Pilgrim movie. I think the review is a bit harsh, particularly as he comes down hard on Edgar Wright's direction, which is the film's saving grace.  Whenever I read these online hateathon's about SPVSTW I just want to shout READ THE BOOKS.

(4) Cue Scott Walters.... here's the Washington Monthly with a really great article on "The Prestige Racket" in higher education. It uses George Washington University as a case study in a number of factors plaguing second tier colleges.  

(5) You know it's really sad when Hezbollah shows more religious tolerancethan today's Republican Party.  Meanwhile, Mark Williams unveils a new epithet ... "Judenrat" to describe Jews who support the Cordova Center.  Stay classy, tea party!

Is The Fringe Bad for Off-off Broadway?

By Isaac Butler

That's the question raised at the end of this excellent (if grouchy) Jason Zinoman piece in the Times about his recent Fringe fest experiences.  I feel like the two places where I differ from my theatrospheric colleagues are on the Fringe (I'm lukewarm to negative) and showcase code reform (I'm against it, for the most part) and this provides me a good opportunity to talk about the first of these two.

Jason's piece lays out some audience-member focused frustrations about the Fringe. The productions on offer are frequently not only bad, but lame.  They're not spectacularly daring failures, they're instead tepid, safe in their own way.  The venues are diffuse, the programming done in a way that lacks vision. He contrasts the NYC Fringe with the Edinburgh fringe where each venue curates its own offering and thus has its own kind of aesthetic. If you went to Aurura Nova (back when it existed) you knew you were going to get a piece of physical company created work. All Wear Bowlers, for example, played there.

Anyway, you should RTWT. Jason's seen a lot more fringe than I or probably most of my readers ever have, so I'm going to trust him on this one. 

I'm interested in the point he makes at the end:

Waiting in lines, I would often overhear conversations between audience members who were excited to finally see a show away from the bright lights of Broadway. Reaching those people is important. What I worry is that while Off-Off Broadway throbs with energy, ambition and the finest low-budget experimental theater scene in the world, you would likely never know that from attending the New York International Fringe Festival.

The raises the question... do we really need a Fringe Festival anymore in NYC? And I'm prepared to tentatively answer that question in the negative.  It's a problem of success.  The Fringe Festival has helped create a kind of Off-Off 2.0, the Off-Off I entered when I graduated from college and that grew significantly from there.  Now there are festivals all year round all over town that do Fringe-ish work.  There's the Brick, which is like a year-round Fringe festival in one tiny, awesome venue.  There are the Horse Trade Theaters, which offer a better deal to producers than the Fringe.  And there's already more low/no budget theatre in New York City than anyone could hope to take in. Minneapolis, where I now live, has a Fringe festival that works as its Off-Off crammed into one month. Portland, Oregon, which has 110 low budget companies producing off-off type theatre, doesn't have a fringe festival because it doesn't need one.

What the Fringe offers are low cost space (which is still hard to come by, I know) and a lot of press/audience attention for many of the shows on offer, particularly if they have exciting titles like Ratfucker Rapeface or whatever. But here's the thing... there's more off-off Broadway coverage than ever before. Not only are their tons of websites that do a lot of Off-Off coverage, but the Times covers a lot of off-off offerings now, and of course there's Time Out New York.

So this raises the question... Is it a good thing that shows that wouldn't normally be getting Times and TONY and Voice (etc.) coverage get it?  And my answer is, probably not. Many of the shows at the Fringe that couldn't get that coverage normally probably don't deserve it, and they're put on by artists who haven't earned it and may not be ready for it.

Before you set Phasers to Flame, let me back up and qualify this. There are three types of shows, roughly, that produce at the Fringe.  The first are ones put on by folks like Gideon Productions or Nosedive. People who regularly produce in New York, who know what they're doing, who have an existing company and following and know how to make the Fringe's good-art-unfriendly producing and staffing policies work for them.  That's not who I'm talking about. 

Nor am I really talking about the commercial producers who are using the Fringe to try to launch the next Urinetown.  I don't like that phenomenon very much, but that's not what I'm talking about either.

I'm talking about the third group. The unseasoned artists and producers who think the Fringe is a pretty good ticket to getting some attention.  They're right about that, they just don't deserve the attention yet. I've been them very recently,  so let me just talk about myself now.

When I first moved to NYC from Vassar, I thought my shit smelled like roses. I was at the time of graduating one of the stars of my department. I was one of the few directors in my class, had a good rep, people came to me for advice the whole bit.  So I took one of the shows I directed while at Vassar and remounted it in a double billing with another director's show. And here's the thing.  It wasn't good. Oh, I thought it was good at the time. I was upset no critics came to see it based on my hastily typed and unproofed press release. But it wasn't.

The next show I directed, Clay McLeod Chapman's redbird was a huge learning experience, and it got a respectful but not enthusiastic review from Time Out, which was more than I deserved at the time.  I hadn't really been around long enough to earn a TONY review, but Clay had, so I rode his coattails like a ramora clinging to a shark.  The show had its moments, but it was uneven, and there was some really boring directing on my part. I was learning how to be a director. And not in the "you learn with every show" way, no, I was learning about how to marshall and manage the resources behind a $15k show with little time to tech in a found space, how to make good work come out of that. Which isn't easy, t's something you have to learn.

The next show I directed was a disaster. I don't think a lot of people think of it that way, but for me it was a disaster. It was a show I waited years to get the rights for, and I had nearly $30K at my disposal and, thanks to a mixture of inadequate producing, an actor rebellion from the leads over interpretational differences on the show, and some tentative leadership on my part, we fucked it up.  There are things about that show I'm proud of, but hoenstly, it still hurts to think about like a bad break up. Some of the performaces.  SOme great design moments. There's one scene whose staging I think was really great.

After this, I realized I didn't know how to work at that level. It had been thrust upon me too early. So I went to work on much smaller piece.  I directed a show that cost $900 to do and slowly worked my way up, refining my management skills and my staging craft by having fewer toys to play with. Not everything was a triumph, but I got much, much better.  I could go on about this process, and I will some other time, but the point is, by the time bigger reviewers started coming to my work, i had enough experience good and bad (and had been through the Lincoln Center Director's Lab) that I had swiftly become a much better director. 

When Terry Teachout came to see the workshop of In Public, and Helen Shaw came to The Amulet, I was operating at a level that deserved that attention. This is regardless of the quality of the actual shows themselves (although I'm proud of both). The job I did was good enough. Or to put it another way, in each case I was guiding productions so that in the end they were the productions we intended to put up.

I've never been reviewed by The Times. I was supposed to be once, but the review was spiked for reasons not getting into right now (although that lead inadvertently to StageGrade, so I'm okay with it).  And I'll say this, regardless of the quality of other work I did, the full production of In Public (which is when the Times was supposed to come) was the first time I was actually ready for it. 

If I had done one of those first few shows at the Fringe, there's a good chance I would have gotten the Times and the Voice to see it.  But here's the thing: I wasn't ready yet. Which would've meant one of two things. They would have trashed it, or they would have gone soft on it because who wants to shit on the new kid's dream? Neither or those would have been particularly helpful. 

As frustrating as I found it when I was twenty four, I think it is okay to make people wait and work some shit out before they get the kind of attention the Fringe can end up giving them.

That Reminds Me...

By Isaac Butler

Speaking of TNC's guest posters... what is the Atlantic's vacation policy like, anyway?  Andrew Sullivan appears to take roughly the entire summer off every year. Back when I thought he actually wrote his blog made a certain kind of sense, but now that it seems he just reacts to news items other people find him and edits ghost written posts and puts his name on them, seems perhaps undeserved. Sullivan, for example, doesn't appear to work nearly as hard as, say, Ezra Klein, who takes far less vacation and does substantive original reporting.  TNC is, quite simply, the best blogger I read, but I seldom care that much about his guest bloggers, which makes the constant recent stream of other voices on his blogs somewhat irritating.

I just hope all those guests get a cut. They deserve it.

/Grumpy.

Good Questions

Over at the Atlantic, filling in for the irreplacable yet often-replaced Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chris Jackson talks about Jonathan Franzen, The NY Times and the white maleness of the literary field. He wraps up with some good questions to ask, both yourself as a person and the field as a whole:

Anyway, there are ways that our reading is shaped and limited by the biases of the dominant literary gatekeepers--maybe without realizing it, we've only read books by people of a certain race, or who write in a certain language, or who follow the conventions of a certain genre (including the unnamed genre of Anglo-American Serious Fiction).  To some people this is the great opportunity in the coming bookquake, the chance to disintermediate some of those gatekeepers and their peculiar, ossified biases. But the real bias may be inside of us, as readers, and we might have to force ourselves out of them to take advantage of these new opportunities.  How exciting is it to consider that there are worlds of literature out there that you may not have tapped into, undiscovered countries of books to explore that might yet tell you something new in a new way?

Sounds pretty familiar to me. I think Mariah MacCarthy would agree.

What, Mea Culpa?

by Ben Owen

 

I did James Stokoe's book Orc Stain a disservice when I wrote about it a couple of months ago, specifically when I claimed that: "The book evinces an apparently uncritical longing for that kind of sex and drugs and gross sexism of the 1970s (it’s unclear whether there are female orcs, but apparently successful orcs want to sleep with creatures called “Love Nymphs,” who look pretty much how you’d imagine), which is kind of interesting because some of those comics were wild and beautiful—asOrc Stain is in its best moments—but also slightly sad, because many of those comics were also loathsome in their sexual politics." It turns out that in the very next issue, number four, Stokoe introduces Bowie the Poison Thrower, a smart and self-sufficient woman character, who is openly disdainful of the "Love Nymphs" and and has a her own plans at odds with those of the hero, One-Eye. Later she poisons three guys with darts that make them swell up until their heads pop off. It's grossly fascinating to see, and the kind of biologic detail Stokoe excels at. So I was wrong, and the sexual politics of Orc Stain are more complicated than I gave them credit for being. Please check it out if you like gnarly psychedelic filth in a fantasy vein. 

Friday Recipe Blogging: Coconut Risotto

Since moving and trying to save money and eat less meat, I'm cooking a lot more than I did in New York.  I thought I might do a regular recipe sharing feature here on Parabasis. We'll see if I can stick to it when grad school officially starts.  Anyway... I improvised this one last night after looking at a couple of recipes, trying to eat through some leftovers.  It was damn good, so I thought I'd post it here.

The recipe below has three ingredients you probably don't have lying around, and I've included work arounds below for them so that you can make the recipe anyway.  Curry Leaves and Asefoetida Powder are available for purchase at most Indian or South East Asian grocery stores and are totally worth picking up to experiment with.  Curry Laves can be used either chopped up like herbs or if making a sauce you can use them like bay leaves.  The flavor of curry leaves is hard to describe, but hot damn are they delicious. You can also get them both from ishopindian.com. Refrigerate curry leaves immediately after purchase, keep them on their stalks to preserve their flavor. They should last in the fridge for up to two weeks.

Curry leaves do not taste like curry powder. They are just called curry leaves because they are frequently an ingredient in curries. They're the fried leaves you see floating in a delicious indian dish, they are also frequently minced up and fried with spices at the start of cooking. If you've ever had the Malaysian curry noodle dish Laksa (aka the greatest thing created by man) cury leaves are an important ingredient.

Anyway, it's not the same flavors at all, but if you don't have curry leaves and are worried about the dish tasting a little too one-note (with coconut being that note) consider adding a 2 teaspoons of garam masala (available in the spice aisle at most supermarkets, it's a more cinnamon and pepper heavy curry powder) when you throw in the garlic and shallots.

The third ingredient is fresh coconut.  Coconuts are kind of a pain in the ass to break down, but their flavor when fresh is way more complex and interesting than dried.  To break down a coconut, hit it along the groove with a hammer in your sink until it opens.  Let the liquid drain and then hammer it further until it breaks down into manageable sized pieces.  Separate the shell from the flesh using a paring knife.  You basically wedge the knife in between the flesh and shell, and then shuck the meat like it was an oyster.  Be careful though, and cut/pry with the edge of the knife away from you, I recently stabbed a paring knife into the webbing between my thumb and pointer finger.  Not. Awesome.

The brown skin of the coconut the layer between the white flesh and the hard shell) will come off with the flesh. It is edible. In Southern India, there are specific recipes that call for the skin. Save yourself some trouble and don't bother to cut the skin off, you'll be browning the coconut anyway.

If you don't want to go to the trouble to do this (understandable) just use 1/2 cup dried unsweetened coconut in the recipe.

Okay, here we go:

INGREDIENTS:

4-5 cups of stock

3/4 cup of minced fresh coconut or 1/2 cup dried unsweetened

2 medium shallots, sliced thin

6 cloves of garlic, minced

6-10 curry leaves, minced

1/4 teaspoon of asefoetida powder

salt and pepper to taste

1.5 cups of arborio rice

one can of unsweetened coconut milk (the stuff in the stir fry aisle, not the dessert or cocktail aisle)

four carrots, medium diced

one cup of frozen peas, thawed

cauliflower (i used 1/3 of a head), broken into small florets

2 long cinnamon sticks, broken into pieces

(1) Combine the stock and can of coconut milk in a pot along with the cinnamon sticks in a pot. Simmer.

(2) Meanwhile, take your favorite large pan that has a lid (preferably nonstick) and coat the bottom of it in olive oil over medium heat

(3) A minute later, add the minced coconut if using fresh. If you're using dried, add the coconut, garlic and shallot at the same time.  If using fresh, wait until the coconut just starts to turn light brown and add the garlic and shallot. Season.

(4) When the coconut turns golden brown, add the minced curry leaves. A little bit later, add the arborio rice, another glug of olive oil and salt and pepper.

(5) Stir the whole mixture together for a couple of minutes, until the rice begins to turn slightly translucent.  When this happens, add the asefoetida powder and then add two ladlefuls of the stock/coconut milk mixture.  Stir frequently in a figure eight motion like you're folding egg whites into batter.

(6) If you haven't made risotto before, basically you add liquid to the pan a ladleful at a time and then you stir the mixture to make sure it cooks evenly. Eventually the liquid you add will be absorbed / evaporate and you'll add more. I've never really had trouble knowing when to add more, it just generally looks like it needs to be wetter.  My dad says how he judges is that he runs a spatula down the middle and the risotto pauses before filling in the gap. If you use a teflon pan, that may not actually happen, so just use your better judgement.

(7) After a couple of rounds of adding liquid (I'm gonna say 15 minutes of cooking), add the carrots.  After a couple more rounds (maybe 5-10 minutes later) add the cauliflower.

(8) As you start to run low on stock/coconut milk, you should be tasting the risotto for doneness.  When it feels nearly done, add the peas. Once it has a pleasant porrigey risottoy consistency, add a little more liquid, stir it, turn off the heat and cover it.  Do not touch it for at least 15 minutes.  Use that time to make a salad.

(9) Enjoy!

Quote of the Day

by 99 Seats

Matt Yglesias edition:

I was 21 years old and kind of a jerk. Being for the war was a way to simultaneously be a free-thinking dissident in the context of a college campus and also be on the side of the country’s power elite. My observation is that this kind of fake-dissident posture is one that always has a lot of appeal to people. The point is that this wasn’t really a series of erroneous judgments about Iraq, it was a series of erroneous judgments about how to think about the world and who deserves to be taken seriously and under which circumstances.

Congress Shall Make No Law

by 99 Seats

I have talked shit in the past about Yahoo! News and the news media in general, but this article gets it really, really right. I've seen some other folks throw around the First Amendment in the context of censorship lately and it's just patently dumb. If the government isn't doing it, it isn't infringing on your First Amendment rights. Pure and simple.

What's even more frustrating about the Dr. Laura/Tweety McMoose thing is the underlying idea: if I say something dumb or racist or bigoted and someone calls me on it, they're "infringing" on my rights. Say what? You have a right to say stupid shit. I have a right to say, "Hey, that's stupid shit. Maybe you shouldn't have a radio show." That's how it works. Bringing your First Amendment rights into it is literally making a federal case out of it. And that's just lame.

Well played, Yahoo! News. Well played.

Today in Cognitive Dissonance

Countdown to Sarah Palin Head-Explosion

by 99 Seats

I mean, it's going to happen, right? Somewhere in there, there has to be some cognitive dissonance left, right?

When last she twatted, Dr. Laura using the N-word was just a good use of her First Amendment rights. But now Jennifer Aniston's gone and busted out the R-word, which the Thrilla from Wasilla just hates. But...isn't she just using her First Amendment rights? But...R-word bad! But...N-word...okay?

I mean, she couldn't possibly just be a hypocrite? Right?

*Sigh*

And yes, this is pretty much celebrity gossip. Haven't you heard? Celebrity gossip is the new culture. Get used to it.

From The Mouths of Teens

(Via Facebook Chat):

My Niece: Sooooo what ru doin?

Me: Checking my e-mail. About to get breakfast.

My Niece: Cool.

Me: What are you doing?

My Niece: Nothing, I'm on Facebook!

My mea culpa for an extended absence...

In my defense, I spent the weekend pretending I was 20, driving fellow Parabs-er Ben Owen to Columbus, OH, where he will undergo his pheonix-like transformation into a PhD candidate in English Lit. One that has a bachelor pad and a new bed and a bunch of furniture from Big Lots.

So--by way of apology, here's an awesome video I found that talks back to Sarah Palin's execrable "Mama Grizzly" ads...

You Know Which One Gets Me?

32. Czechoslovakia has never existed

Beloit College does this thing every year where they list the things that an incoming college freshman (born in 1992!) has never really known. It's a great way to make yourself feel really old.

Enjoy!