signandsight.com has some good writing, a cross-section of writing by European journalists. Not surprisingly, Europeans have a lot to say about the whether the religious and cultural values of Muslim immigrants, including their intolerant approach to other religions, their defensiveness of their religion’s approach to symbols and feminism, can be allowed to supersede secular values. Dutch writer Margriet de Moor’s essay “Alarm Bells in Muslim Hearts”. There is a strong, thoughtful debate under the title of “The Multicultural Issue”. There is recent feature called “Blind Exorcism in Poland”, which reflects on the work of Ryszard Kapuscinski, the great writer, who made promises to the secret police in order to travel and write, but always managed to tell his stories, subverting the regime in the process.
Olive Oil Weekend
My bottle of olive oil became dangerously depleted this weekend. I had run out of burger patties and had spied a box of what I took to be bison burger patties in Thrifties. It was a solid frozen block of ground, and has been in the freezer for 8 months since that regrettable purchase. I thought about using it in a chili, but inspiration took hold on Saturday. I have a venison cookbook by A.D. Livingstone, the food writer for Gray’s Sporting Journal, a magazine for upscale rednecks (think Cy Tolliver in Deadwood). Livingstone had a recipe for venison Moussaka. I used at least a cup of olive oil to sauté two eggplants. Livingstone’s recipe calls for making a sauce with 1 and half cups of milk, and a couple tablespoons each of flour and butter, seasoned with a pinch of nutmeg. If he had said it was a bechamel sauce, I might have passed on the dish as too pretentious, but Livingstone just plugged it into the recipe. Livingstone believes in good food more than redneck values, obviously. My only mistake was using a liberal sprinkle of nutmeg in the bechamel instead of a pinch. It was fair bit of work – slice, dry and sauté eggplant, a cooked meat sauce, a bechamel, and baking it, but not more than baking lasagna.
That started a Greek theme. I haven’t had a Greek salad in ages, and the idea of a salad without lettuce was appealing. I found a recipe called Dad’s Greek Salad at Elise Bauer’s Simply Recipes site. Elise is also a resource for Movable Type fixes. The recipe is larger than I need. I made full recipe of sauce (two tablespoons of lemon juice is the juice of small lemon) and put about 2 thirds in a jar in the fridge, and then used only about one third of the vegetables.
On Sunday I made a simple pasta dish, with chickpeas. A few cloves of garlic, minced, sautéd in olive oil, a can of chickpeas, rinsed and drained, a pile of chopped parsley, fresh ground pepper, all simmered on low heat for half an hour, served on ditali – short macaroni style pasta. I got the recipe from Joseph Orsini’s Italian Kitchen – a nice find in Russell’s (Used) Bookstore.
Everything had left overs – two thirds of the moussaka went in the freezer. Cooking with wine is fun too, if I put the sharp knives away before I open the wine.
Dawkins talks nonsense
Last Sunday, I drove to Ladysmith. I have had a cold, and I didn’t have the energy to ride, so I took a short trip up island. On the radio, Michael Enright and The Sunday Edition, with Enright interviewing Richard Dawkins. The interview is accessible as a Real Audio file – it runs to a little over 36 minutes. The interview was mainly devoted to Dawkins’s identity as a public atheist and his arguments against religion, presented in The God Delusion. Enright gave Dawkins a chance to cover the main themes of the book, challenging him mildly on a few points. Dawkins was consistently polite in his tone, but he lived up to his reputation as an intellectual Rottweiler because he just doesn’t back down or let go.
Thumbnails
I learned how to create thumbnail links to the photos in my Gallery site. I loaded the photos that I had used in this blog into the Gallery, and then edited the articles, replacing the photos with links to the Gallery versions. This works better. The blog loads faster, the pictures are visible in the blog, and then scale up to 2 viewable sizes. The Gallery program is nicely supported collaborative freeware. I upload the full image file to Gallery, and let Gallery create thumbnails and two prints. Gallery can process several images on one upload, and then I just past the links into a block of text. I have a couple of old stories left, but the process is largely done. I have started to shoot more pictures and to load them to my Gallery.
Update: June, 2010. Administering Gallery turned into a chore. With the upgrades this year MT got better for saving and managing photos and other “assets”. It now has a convenient way way of uploading and saving images and other “asset” files. It makes thumbnails to embed into entries. I started to remove the links to my Gallery installation and install the images in this blog, with a view to deleting the Gallery database and removing the installation.
Spring paddling
I spent the weekend at the VCKC on the Sea Kayak Level One course, and this past Saturday (May 5, 2007) I paddled with the club from Agate Beach to Glencoe Cove.
The course was a certified Paddle Canada course at the VCKC clubhouse. (This picture was taken from Kinsmen Park, directly across the Gorge. The clubhouse is in Saanich, on Gorge Road, the park is in Esquimalt):
I had taken some courses when I first bought kayaks in 1999 and 2000, and more last year and I had been on some club paddles, so I was able to take the Level One without first going through the more basic kayak course. Level One was useful in identifying the areas in which information from reading had not translated to practical knowledge. The course information and several wet exits and rescues in the Gorge underlined the fact that all the salt water around Victoria comes from the bottom of the North Pacific, and is cold all year. I had bought some immersion gear last fall but I did not use it well. I went out after the course and got a neoprene farmer john – cheap, prone to getting damp and sticky, probably smelly, but effective.
The instructor, Dave Giuliani was a great teacher – enthusiastic about the sport, knowledgeable, experienced as a a guide, a paddler and an instructor. He also did a talk and slide show at the club last Tuesday on the subject of the wildlife visible along the shoreline and in the water around Victoria. He doesn’t seem to Google up except in Club’s newsletter and a paddling magazine site.
The club paddle was a blast. We went into the wind on the way out and pulled out in a little cove just north of Glencoe cove. We had lunch on a beach surrounded by cliffs with cliff-top houses.
Pictures & Spam injectors
Over the couple weeks, I have had three web projects: fixing the email contact function in the sidebar, getting a cycling log, and finding a better way of getting digital photos published. The latter two ideas were vaguely connected.
Critical Theory
The British publisher Icon Books has a series called Introducing …. The books are heavily illustrated, and tend to present in the style of graphic novels instead of conventional texts. I checked out Introducing Critical Theory, by Stuart Sim, illustrated by Borin Van Loon.
Are We Happy Yet?
Another new article on happiness studies, linked by AL Daily, from the online magazine Cato Unbound, called Are We Happy Yet? The Cato Institute, from its own Web page, seems to be a libertarian, probably right-wing body, which partially explains their disagreement with Richard Layard’s book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. Layard is a New Labour academic, whose book advocates the idea “Happiness should become the goal of policy, and the progress of national happiness should be measured and analyzed as closely as the growth of GNP.”
CTS
Last Friday, at some point after I had dressed and started walking to work, my right hand went strange. I had no strength, and I could not bend my fingers and hit the keys on a keyboard, or manage mouse buttons. I couldn’t double-click, and my attempts to single click turned into spastic clenches of all the buttons. The diagnosis seems to be carpal tunnel syndrome, and it has improved.
Does Dawkins Exist
This story starts with The Dawkins Delusion, a parody, which I found in Edge 202.