I’ve started blogging at Care2.com, “Care2 make a difference”. A good clearinghouse for progressive causes, news, petitions, and such. I’ll be writing on education, environment, things of that nature. I’ll link to my posts from here as they go up.
Of course writing on other topics, reviews, arts and culture, and such, will go elsewhere, and will also be linked to from here.
First post: Girls Can do Math Just Fine, Thanks.
I’ve just stumbled upon a complete ranking of all the Disney Classic/Disney Masterpiece animated features on Rotten Tomatoes, the film rating aggregator website. Supposedly they use some formula based on ratings from the site, box office performance, and I don’t know what else. Of course it goes without saying that a slew of people have left comments disagreeing with the ranking.
50 movies are included. Everything from the first full-length Disney feature, Snow White (1937), to the second-most recent, Tangled (2010). Not included are sequels (Aladdin: Return of Jafar), Pixar flicks (Toy Story), or any other Disney property that isn’t marketed through the Disney Masterpiece Collection label (or the Disney Classics Collection label until the mid-90s).
Anyway, no point in arguing about it. However, we happen to have been doing a fair bit of Disney viewing hereabouts of late. Thus, I will provide my own top-ten list, as follows:
If you don’t like it, feel free to make your own list.
I think it’s fair to promote myself from novice to apprentice home chef. I’ve absorbed enough of the basic principles of cooking to be able to play around in the kitchen and put something together without relying on a step-by-step recipe. One recipe I’ve recently come up with is this Latin-fusion breakfast.
Huevos rancheros, or ranch-style eggs, is really a Mexican dish. Essentially, eggs with some salsa and other toppings (refried beans and guacamole, melted cheese possibly). The particular version that inspired my own dish is here. However, I knew even as I was skimming it that I would be doing a very different spin on things.
The one local dish I really like in Costa Rica is the bean and rice dish, pinto de gallo. I’ve been eating a lot of it and have not gotten sick of it. I prefer black beans, V prefers red, but it’s also completely fine to mix them together in absolutely any proportion if you don’t have enough of either kind.
I knew I wanted to use pinto de gallo as my base for the huevos rancheros, and that’s why I call this dish Huevos Rancheros de Costa Rica.
Ingredients (see the end of the post for approximate amounts):
1) Here’s a good rule of thumb: unless you’re baking, 99% of recipes start with frying some onions (and probably garlic). And so it is here. Throw some chopped onions in a saucepan with a little oil (your choice what kind) on high heat. Include some minced garlic at the same time (crush the garlic before mincing it to release more of its flavour). After a minute or so, add the peppers.
2) Once they’re decently seared (a couple more minutes) add some beans with their water/juice and turn the heat down to medium.
[A note on the beans: you can take them from a can and they’re good to go — those are cooked black/red beans. However, if you buy them raw in a package they’re cheaper. All you have to do to get them like the ones in the can is boil them on medium-high for two or three hours until soft (check every 20 minutes or so to replace the water that has evaporated away). Do this the previous day and keep in a container in your fridge to use for all your Latin cooking. If you’re in a rush or don’t want that many beans, buy a can.]
3) Around this same time, you can get the rice started, since it has to be cooked before you add it to the pan.
4) You can also pre-heat the oven to around 400 F, and throw in some corn tortillas (as many as the number of people being served) to bake when it’s hot enough. They’ll only need about five minutes, depending on how crispy you want them.
5) Add spices to taste as the beans start to reduce/become less watery. There are many variations on pinto de gallo depending on what you’re using it for. The one I’ve described here is a nicely savoury, not overly spicy take on it that is good for making burritos. When pinto de gallo is the main dish (rather than a component in something else), I’ve been making a Cuban-inspired version with vinegar and chipotle peppers. I’ll give the recipe for that another time.
6) Before the rice is done, start making preparation for your eggs. I think soft-boiled works really well, but you can prepare your eggs literally any way you want. When soft-boiling, I found half an egg per tortilla (per person) was plenty.
7) Cook, tasting regular and adjusting spices, until much of the water from the beans is gone ( you don’t want it overly dry, however, just no loose liquid). Add the rice when it’s ready and mix it in well. You probably want a little less rice than you have beans, but there’s quite a bit of margin for error. Stir it in, keep checking for taste. When you’re satisfied, you can turn off the heat.
8 ) Put it all together. Spoon and spread some pinto de gallo on each baked corn tortilla, then put the egg on top. I shelled my soft-boiled egg, cut it in eighths, and put four pieces each on the two pinto de gallo-covered tortillas. A little yolk ran out over them and provided a nice flavour.
Lastly, top with some salsa, as spicy as you like it. I used chunky medium salsa, but then added some drops of chili sauce for additional heat. Eat and enjoy, no utensils necessary.
Notes: There’s no butter and only a dash of oil in this recipe (for the onions, garlic, and peppers). You could cut even this out by using a spritz of low-fat cooking spray. If you’re watching cholestorol, you could use egg-beaters or just egg whites, and poach or scramble them (again with cooking spray rather than butter or oil).
On the other hand, you could make this (reasonably) healthy and very filling recipe a little more fattening by frying the corn tortillas in oil instead of baking them, frying the egg instead of boiling or poaching it, add some slices of avocado or worse, guacamole. You could also melt some cheese on top.
I think you’ll find that this is very hearty and filling as is, however.
I didn’t give any specific numbers in the ingredients list because I measure everything out by eye. But here are some approximate quantities:
For eight servings, use one good-sized pepper, one whole onion (medium to large), maybe three or four cloves of garlic, four to eight eggs (if you want to give everyone their own fried egg, for example, but half an egg each should be plenty), maybe a cup or a little less of cooked beans, less still of the cooked rice (maybe half a cup to three quarters, depending on how ricey you like it), at least one tablepoon each of cumin and allspice, and half a tablespoon black pepper (to start, add more of everything as necessary based on tasting). Eight corn tortillas, about half a jar (about 250 mL) of salsa.
What happens when a human being tries to create a random sequence of ones and zeroes (on and off, yes or no)?
Similarly, what if you wanted to randomly place objects around a room? Would they all be equally spaced? No, because if it’s truly random, each object isn’t thinking about the objects that are already there and trying to find its own spot.
In reality, random distribution of objects will also include (random) clustering. If a person tries to distribute objects on a two-dimensional plane and make them seem random, the lack of clustering is a clue that it was a person trying to be random rather than truly random.
I’ve already mentioned Asimov, whose most important works I’ve read, excepting his Robot series. He published over 500 books in his lifetime, however, so I’ll never really be done Asimov. When I see a second-hand copy of an out-of-print story or essay collection, I’ll always pick it up. But what about the other two writers comprising the “Big Three of Science Fiction”?
I think I can equally say I’ve read Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s most important stuff. The entire Rama series (the original works as a stand-alone but the later sequels are also minor gems, I think), the entire Space Odyssey series (which is solid enough, but of course the original, 2001, is the only must-read), one of his most well-known stand-alones, Childhood’s End.
Missing from that list is The City and the Stars, The Fountains of Paradise, and I’d like to read his last published book, co-written with Frederik Pohl, The Last Theorem. It started with Clarke’s outline but he got so sick that Pohl pretty much did all the heavy lifting himself. He finished a final draft, Clarke took a look and was happy with it, and died days later. So all three of those are on my list.
Robert A. Heinlein is possibly less prolific than Clarke, and certainly much less so than Asimov. But I have the most catching up to do with him. I’m definitely considering reading every single one of his novels, which is probably why I’m much further behind than the other two.
His work is generally broken into early-, middle-, and late-period Heinlein. Early Heinlein includes the Golden-Age short stories in Astounding and other magazines (a good chunk of which I’ve read), and his juvenile novels for Scribner (plus a few non-juveniles written under pen-names during the same period). I’ve read about half of the juveniles, leaving perhaps five or six to go. His last book of this period is Starship Troopers, and also the most influential, but there’s a lot of good stuff in this period and it’s worth reading almost all of it.
Middle-period Heinlein includes what are generally considered his greatest works: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land were both written during this period of the 1960s and early 1970s. I plan to read all of these (excepting possibly his fantasy novel, Glory Road), but having read his two most important works, Moon and Stranger, the ones I really need to read next are Farnham’s Freehold and Time Enough for Love.
After a period of ill health, Heinlein began writing again in the ’80s. These last few novels generally aren’t considered his best work, tending to meander and proselytize a bit on his political beliefs. That said, while his plotting was less tight, some of those flashes of brilliance that make Heinlein great still occurred, at least by some accounts.
I haven’t read any late Heinlein, but plan on reading at least The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and we’ll see where I go from there. Job: A Comedy of Justice was, apparently, flawed, but also important, so we’ll see.
I should note, though, there have been far more than three important SF writers the last 70 years. I’m familiar with Pohl but not Bester, Silverberg and Haldeman but not Niven or Ellison, Bujold but not LeGuin. There’s still a lot of catching up to do.
. . .Let’s hope it’s a prosperous one. I didn’t get as much done in the last week as I wanted to. I was hoping to bang out four or five pieces. If you count book reviews, I ended up writing about three and a half. I’m going to keep at it, of course, but also try to enjoy the time we have left in Central America. We’ll be heading back next month (albeit, not until the very end of the month).
In 2002, the British government agency, Military Intelligence, Section 5, also known as the Security Service, or simply MI5, advertised for a part-time historian to write an official history of the Service, in time for its 100-year anniversary in 2009. The paperback edition, released December, 2010, included some small corrections and improved details, particularly on more recent terrorist activity, which previously, for security reasons, could not be published.
It’s a far cry from just a few decades ago where Service staff often could tell no one where exactly they worked, and even the appointment of the Director General was not publicly announced. In order to complete this monumental task, Christopher Andrew, a leading authority on the history of intelligence had access to tremendous amounts of declassified along with still confidential records. No doubt there were occasional clashes between the desire to detail a complete history and the need to avoid compromising national security.
The story of British intelligence dates to the first decade of the 20th century, precipitated by several years of increasing public hysteria and popular novels about “the Kaiser’s spies” operating in England. It all culminated in October, 1909 with an army captain named Vernon Kell and a navy commander named Mansfield Cumming running a two-man operation, trying to build an intelligence organization from the ground up. It wasn’t long before the two men parted ways to head their own organizations. Kell was first Director General MI5, whose province would be espionage and subversion within the Commonwealth, while Cumming was first Chief of MI6, responsible for collecting intelligence about foreign powers outside British soil.
This hefty history seems both thorough and objective. Broken into sections on “The German Threat”, “Between the Wars”, “The Second World War”, “The Early Cold War”, “The Later Cold War”, and “After the Cold War”, the individual chapters nevertheless cover much of the same period from different perspectives. For example, one chapter in the section of “The Early Cold War” covers some specific decrypted Soviet communications that would eventually lead to the uncovering of the famous “Cambridge Five”, enormously successful Soviet spies who had penetrated British intelligence.
Then another chapter is all about the lesser-known but simultaneous period in history of the early negotiations for the state of Israel. The major security threat of that unstable time was Zionist terrorism. (Andrew also tells us that the extremist Jewish Nationalist groups of this time were the very last in history to self-describe as terrorists for their cause.)
It’s interesting to see how priorities have changed throughout the history of the Security Service. Though originally conceived of as defending British Commonwealth from agents of foreign powers inside its borders — essentially spies, saboteurs, and a potential fifth column in case of war – MI5’s authority over all state enemies within the realm also put it front and centre in all instances of domestic terrorism as well.
The significance of this became clear during the Troubles of Northern Ireland, starting in the late 1960s. Actions by the Irish Republican Army originally catalyzed the creation of Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police almost a century earlier (previous to the existence of any military intelligence service), but the Security Service took a leading role when violence re-erupted in the later 20th century. In more recent decades, Muslim terrorist groups have been a major concern to both intelligence officials and the general public in the West, and this, too, has fallen firmly within MI5’s operational scope.
By far the biggest focuses of the Service throughout its history are the enormously successful “Double-Cross System” used to mislead the Germans by false information in the Second World War, and the 40-plus years of espionage and counter-espionage against the Soviet Union, including the uncovering of the “Cambridge Five” and the famous “Atom Spies” who passed on the secret of the bomb. But as noted, it’s interesting to see that even while lesser-known threats are in the background as far as the public is concerned, the Service still has a smaller team quietly collecting information. During WWII, only a small amount of energy was devoted to Soviet intelligence (not enough, it later turned out), but analyzing what intelligence was collected became a priority during the Cold War. Similarly, glimmerings of Muslim terrorism are foreshadowed in the latter years of the Cold War, though they were not considered a priority at the time.
This is not a weekend read. Andrew could probably take some of the highlights and cut this 1000-page behemoth into something much more digestible, but if he did, it wouldn’t be a history anymore. Objective, fact-based (with an endnote for nearly every sentence to prove it), and detailed, Defend the Realm really packs it in. The density of information is high, the amount of filler is essentially nil, and the type is quite small.
Andrew also does not speculate as the writer of a general audience work might. He’s a professional historian and this is a professional piece of historical scholarship. I’ve been reading this book on and off for six months, and some casual readers might have given up before then. It’s not narrative and we know only what definitely happened; he does not tell us about the emotional states of the principal players or speculate on the dramatic tension at some of the events.
On the other hand, the material sometimes speaks for itself. This is the real-life story of war, foreign spies, secret political meetings, terrorists, and narrowly-evaded disasters of all kinds. For hard-core history/military/intelligence buffs, this is a goldmine of carefully collected and organized material. The shadowy realm of military intelligence is a rarely thought about but inescapable part of our modern world.
(Vintage Books, 2010)
Article first published as Book Review: Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 by Christopher Andrew on Blogcritics.
Just a quick note that I did indeed make it back safely from Panama last week, but have had very little time for writing since then. It’s been a busy month, lots of touring around both in Panama and here in CR. I did manage to squeeze out a couple quick reviews, one of which I’ll post up here later (another hasn’t been placed yet), and I also finished up an author interview I’m polishing up today for a potentially-interested outlet.
I’m also pleased that I’m officially caught up on all my assigned reviews. I have a pile of books that I’ve requested myself, which means I am not beholden to any particular editor or publication to review them for.
But I do have to make up for lost time. Before New Year’s, with any luck, I’ll get through a good five or six of the features and reviews that I’ve been meaning to start, or have half-finished, as the case may be. I do wish I wrote faster — it takes me a solid two or three days for a decent feature article.
And of course there’s the ongoing chore of placing my finished work, which means pitching, pitching, and pitching. Anyway, I normally try for three updates a week on the site, but I’m giving myself permission to do less than that from now until the New Year. Let’s call it a holiday schedule.
Science fiction writer Karl Schroeder’s intriguing answer to the Fermi Paradox, which basically asks, the universe is so big, so where are all the aliens at?
“If the Fermi Paradox is a profound question, then this answer is equally profound. It amounts to saying that the universe provides us with a picture of the ultimate end-point of technological development. In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies, until our machines approach the thermodynamic equilibria of their environment, and our economics is replaced by an ecology where nothing is wasted. After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals.”
Read the rest at Karl Schroeder’s blog.
P.S. Back from Panama today, but this is still an auto-scheduled post from before I left.
Still in Panama. Having a good Saturday?
Back in (I think) 2001, I made a little humour site for myself. I did some Googling (actually I probably used Yahoo or Metacrawler way back then) and found five one-hour lessons on basic HTML (it’s not a difficult thing, even for those who don’t care much for computer languages). I spent a couple evenings on it and then starting editing source code.
WordPress is user-friendly enough that I rarely edit the HTML manually anymore, but I still find this comic hilarious.