Ambrosia of the Devil

The shit is dangerous, people. Dangerous! We made crêpes this weekend, and someone brought the chocolaty, nutty goodness, and I've been eating spoonfuls of it for the last three days. A brilliant way to kick off the holiday gluttony--I'll gain ten pounds by Thanksgiving.

In portliness,
Bree

Not Knowing

"Becoming a therapist is a narcissistically-wounding process." This is what my supervisor told me last week, as I was crying in her office, so afraid that I would say the wrong thing to a client and cause them harm.

It's so hard for me to say "I don't know." Intellectually, I'm all about the ambiguities, the grey areas, the blurry. Unresolved chords--bring 'em! Tangential philosophical conversations that lead to unworkable paradoxes--rock on! The feelings these in betwixt ideas inspire, however, become more complex. The vagaries of life and death that I feel capable of playing with conceptually terrify me at a raw, emotional level. What should I do? Why can't I bring myself to do any solid work on my thesis? What holds me back? What if I don't find a paid internship next year? What if she leaves me? What happens when we die?

I don't fucking know.

Good. I said it, in spades. But then there's the self-flagellation. Why don't you know? You're incompetent and naïve; you really should know. Terrible things will happen if you don't produce the answers. Clients will suffer, my self worth will plummet, fathers will drop dead unexpectedly.

It's your fault, you know.

I don't know.

Limón

The gf and I ate well above our means tonight at a wonderful Peruvian/fusion restaurant on Valencia. It's been around for a number of years now, but neither of us had managed to get there until tonight. Excellent food, they got there, but spendy. We started with a salad of mixed greens and shaved fennel (we're all about the fresh fennel of late) tossed with oranges and a citrus mustard vinaigrette which Astrid called "subtle" and I thought rather "bold." Along with the salad, we ate a ceviche of raw halibut, large prawns, calamari, octopus, and mussels dressed with lime juice and fresh salsa and served with haricot beans, roasted corn, and and a yam paté. For the main event, we shared a generous (read: hella big) pan roasted pork chop with cabbage and bacon hash and mushroom ragú (uh, YUM!) and a tuna tartare, spiced with toasted sesame oil and other Asian flavors. The tartare was served with crisp wonton tips. The fusion of Asian and Latin styles was a bit weird to take in at first, but the tartare really worked. I would tweak the pork chop dish just a wee bit if I were head chef for a day: it was just ever so slightly overcooked, and the mushroom ragú was a touch too salty, even for me, a gal with a high tolerance for the sodium chloride.

The wine list at Limón is fantastic, organized by "red" and "white," but also broken down into accessible categories like "floral spicy" and "dry crisp." Astrid enjoyed a Sanoma Cutrer chardonnay from the Russian River, and I had a lovely Spanish sauvignon blanc, the name of which I've long forgotten (if I ever even knew the name--Astrid did the ordering for us this evening). When the entrées arrived, Astrid switched to a zinfandel, but I stuck with the one glass.

Yes, we got dessert, too, god help us. It was a fucking ridiculously rich--but somehow also airy--flourless chocolate cake, piping hot, with a dark chocolate sauce, fresh figs, and a scoop of arroz con leche ice cream. Holy crap!

Price tag $150.00 w/ tip
Health index: pretty abysmal
Satisfaction: through the roof

After dinner, Astrid really wanted to go dancing. She had the bug, 'cause she'd done Argentine tango this afternoon with Nan. We were both too tired to mission out in the cold evening to find a venue for after dinner dancing, so we biked home and rumba'd* in the living room for a spell.

'Twas quite a magical evening.



*"Verbification" of the word "rumba" brought to you by my nephew, Joey, an aficionado of the liberal evolution of the English language.

Pavarotti vs. The Walrus

So Google is celebrating Pavarotti's birthday today by linking him on the homepage, a custom I've quite enjoyed over the years on various birthdays and anniversaries of important people, events, yadda yadda (e.g. The Lunar Landing, Einstein's birthday,etc.) My question is: what are the criteria (if any) that Google uses to determine who and what gets commemorated in this manner?

I became curious, because John Lennon's birthday was a few days ago, and I had wondered why Google didn't acknowledge it, and now Pavarotti is being celebrated, and I'm thinking, hmm...is opera so much more culturally relevant than rock 'n' roll, particularly when "John Lennon" registers a million and a half more Google hits than "Pavarotti?" Clearly, Google can't possibly acknowledge every outstanding public figure or historical event, so there must be some sort of formula or process that determines who gets the goods.

I emailed Ube's man, who works at "the Google" (in the words of G.W.), to see if he knows the secret. Anyone out there know?

xo
Bree

Look! Giant Penises in the sky!

I fucking hate the Blue Angels.

I'm not complaining, say, about the ear-splitting sonic whir heard overhead in San Francisco for an entire week every October. I'm not talking, either, about the thousands of tourists in their polluting cars congesting the City streets all week so they can catch site of the super-dazzling synchronized cock-fest in the air (a congestion that apparently brings $4 million in tourist revenue, it will be, and has been, argued.)

I hate the Blue Angels because they make war look sexy. I hate them because we pay for this super-fast, super-loud death-defying circle jerk with our tax money. I hate them because, in addition to paying millions of dollars annually to run this air show, we are also footing the bill for what is essentially an extraordinarily expensive and environmentally costly advertisement for rampant, unremitting militarism. I hate them because they spew thousands of pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere all year traveling from city to city for no legitimate reason.

According to the Blue Angels website, the squadron is currently made up of twelve planes, ten of which are F/A-18 A jets and two of which are F/A-18 B jets. Each of the F/A-18 A planes costs, at a minimum, $21 million a piece (other military-related websites put them at $28 million each) and that basic cost does not include any of the weapons-related systems that could easily double or triple the cost per plane. The Angels also fly a C-130T, nicknamed "Fat Albert." The cost of the C-130T is approximately $65 million, though I do not know how much the Blue Angels kicked down for it in 1970 when they originally acquired it.

The Angels burn an estimated 3.1 million gallons of jet fuel every year, which means a cost of about $3.3 million a year, and fuck knows how much carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere. Add that to the 1.7 million gallons of fuel a day that the U.S. military is burning in Iraq and it's just insult upon injury upon death upon global environmental devastation.



San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly made a third attempt this year to ban the Angels, citing mainly public safety and environmental reasons. The move was blocked and didn't make it to the full board of supes for a vote, but hopefully Daly and the other progressives on the board will continue to work on it.

One of the specific reasons cited by Daly in the effort to ban the air show this year was the death of an Angel pilot in a crash last April in South Carolina. In addition to the death of 32 year old Lt. Commander Kevin J. Davis, the crash also injured eight bystanders and wrecked several homes. Apparently a minister emceeing the air show at Air Station Beaufort in South Carolina reassured the mourners that “the spirit of the pilot is in the arms of a loving God.” Fuck you.

Quit flying war machines for fun, for fuck's sake.

TMBG

Saw They Might Be Giants at the Fillmore tonight with Astrid and DJ. It was my first time seeing them, but both of them have seen the band numerous times before, DJ claiming he's seen them "more than 15 but less than 20" times. I dunno how impressive the show was to DJ, ever the malcontent, but I thought they were pretty fantastic. Highlights were Ana Ng, Doctor Worm, and Mr. Me, complete with a bitchin' horn section. In some ways, their showmanship is rather carnivalesque, which totally fits them as a band. At one point, they did this shtick where they received "phone calls from the dead," putting a mic up against a projection screen showing a cartoon cemetery. The call they got was allegedly from television's Jerry Orbach, but as the skit progressed, the caller turned out to be a Jerry Orbach impersonator, also dead, mind you, but a charlatan nonetheless. Wacky wacky.

TMBG is yet another of those bands out there that I've always loved, but never got around to following closely or owning much of their stuff. I'm only really familiar with their first three albums (the self-titled album, Lincoln, and Flood); then I stopped paying attention. But they've got a seriously large oeuvre. I'm probably not going to delve much deeper at this late date, but I'm really happy to have seen them live finally. They are some good fun.