Midaregami

Following the lastest weeks of hideous, nonstop comment spam, I am disabling comments temporarily. They will return, in a somewhat more robust form, requiring users to authenticate via their choice of TypeKey or OpenID—this means that most of my regular commenters, who read via LiveJournal, will be able to comment using their LiveJournal identities with a minimum of hassle, which makes a great deal of sense to me.

Comment spammers are going to go to a very special place in hell.

I don’t listen to Orange Pekoe much these days, typically because it immediately triggers acute, stabbing bouts of nostalgia, centered mostly around walking around Toyooka in the rain, trying to write a novel.

But today it seems appropriate, so here you go. (Also, this woman has pipes.)

• Orange Pekoe, Adagio

Somebody made baked oatmeal! And they took pictures!

My day is made.

Midterms have come and gone, and I am left in the eye of the hurricane that is a semester in graduate school. The classical Japanese midterm that haunted my dreams with feverish visions of maddening ambiguity is now in my past. It felt easier than I expected it to, but this could indeed be because I was so drastically under-prepared that I knew so little as to be that unable to gauge my own performance.

I swear on my mother’s bible’s grave that this is not humility or self-deprecation. Classical Japanese grammar is that hard.

Here is my PGP public key. You may use it for secure, verifiable communication with me. Also, it’s fun to send encrypted email.

Alchemical immortal, provocateur, pontificator, pulpit-pounder, novelist, 3-time Tour de France winner, and all-around good guy, P. Tuttle Starr left his sizable estate in central Tajima to his pet Canadian before the life-changing neurosurgery that fused his mind with a transcendent artificial intelligence derived from a foulmouthed Aibo named Murray. Immediately after the procedure, ol’ P. Tuttle realized that his only recourse would be to marry his longtime consort and foil, Julia the Bold, and move to Hawai’i to pursue a Master’s degree in Japanese Literature. After negotiations with the shadowy Hawai’ian underworld monarch known as “King Kona” that carried on long into the night, Mr. Starr was finally allowed to reside at an undisclosed location on the island of O’ahu. There are a variety of obscure provisions governing his visa to operate in and around the Hawai’ian archipelago, among the more interesting of which was his promise never to eat raw penguin.

Alright, I’m going to tell it straight, here. I do a lot of blustering and pontificating here, a lot of what might be reasonably termed exaggeration. At times, my hyperbole has, within it, nested layers of sub-hyperbole, which in turn have—well, you see, it is meant to suggest a pattern not unlike Signeur Mandelbrot’s exquisite creations.

What I’m getting at is that I understand if it all starts to blur together after a while—I understand that—but what I’m about to share, and the terms I am about to couch it in, exist outside such high-flown discourse. When I speak of absolutes, in this case, I truly mean them as absolutes, writ in the ebb and flow of space and time, inviolable and true as humans can only begin to comprehend.

I speak of the most delicious chocolate chip cookies ever fashioned by god or mortal. I speak, you see, of the Cowboy Cookie.

Clarissa already linked to this, but it’s awesome and I don’t want to forget about it. Here’s a guy who created his own bookcase secret door, complete with book-triggered latch mechanism.

I think the only reason I would ever want my own house would be to do stuff like this.

I don’t know if I’m going to post much in the way of recipes or cooking stuff, as I’m far, far from any kind of authority on the subject (as opposed to anything else I write about here, on which I am the final word.) What I can say is that this following recipe makes a fabulous breakfast dish, that I actually look forward to eating in the morning—and I am most assuredly not an oatmeal-oriented human. The stuff takes a little bit of doing, but is well worth it. One batch lasts us about three days, with three adults eating the stuff. Depending on the consistency, you may have to spoon it to serve, but typically it’s stiff enough that we can cut it into squares.

A note about the fresh fruit: Julia’s been using frozen mixed berries in addition to a chopped apple, and it’s fine.

My roommate and partner in ridiculousness and retardery, Jake, is famous for his AIM away messages. He kind of got me started, so for the past year or so when I set an away message, I try to make it interesting. Here’s a selection, for those of you who may be too busy living your lives to catch every single one.

Here’s a selection. Commentary is italicized.