From Streetcars To Spaceships

The correct way to eat cabbage.

I just LOVE sauerkraut. But afaic, to be appreciated properly, it must be taken to Version 2.

Slice yellow onions thin and brown over low heat, ideally in butter, generously adding caraway seeds as you go.

Take conventional sauerkraut and add to onions.

Add large dollops of Kosciusko mustard (there is no substitute) and a sweet white wine.

Cook over low heat, keeping liquid down. If necessary, reduce the liquid in a separate saucepan.

If desired (and it should always be desired) brown small randomly cut chunks of a sharp sausage over medium heat with more caraway seeds. Add this sausage to the rest of the transcendent mixture.

Serve over egg noodles that have been generously garnished with chopped parsley. If desired, cook the noodles with a small amount of fresh-ground black pepper added to the water. Butter can also be added to the noodles before they are served.

Eat with gusto.

And with more sausage.

Repeat.

Stride purposely in cold, windy weather for miles under a heavy load so as to burn off meal and be ready to do it again as soon as possible.

Repeat.

 

About all those "Portland" lifestyle trends…

So I see that yet another group of "New Yorkers" is getting snotty about these "new" more sane and sustainable ways of living by calling them just "college life in the pacific northwest".

Pissants.

Here's where the stupid has now gathered.

Normally this is a wonderful web site. But on this one the idjits have risen to storm levels and well overflowed the levees of reasoned analysis. These people are so deep into the depths of the Sea of Moron that they are citing Portlandia as a way to figure out life in Portland. Television, kids. Fiction. Really.

So I wrote a simple little response. Note please that being a REAL native New Yorker, raised by real New Yorkers, I had the discipline to take out all the curse words that I kept wanting to include. I would like to think that the ghost of my cigar-smoking, fiercely political and analytical grandfather (yes, he really did typically say "toity-toid and toid") would have thought all the same monosyllabic additions and been enough of a German intellectual to take them right back out again.

My post:

Speaking as a one-time fourth generation Manhattanite (over 35 years in NYC) who now lives in Portland, folks, some of us were backing NON-gentrification forms of this right in New York's poorer neighborhoods back in the freaking SEVENTIES. So would you please stop, catch your breath, and accept that urbanism, density, and "edge" are in no way contrary to "green" ideas, sustainability, or inexpensive craft/DIY business.

The Gaia Institute was doing rooftop plantings in Morningside Heights in the 80's. A few blocks from the pioneer greenmarket on Amsterdam and 103rd. Which wasn't too far from the "rooftop beekeeper" whose honey was being sold locally well before any such ventures got going on the left coast. Local chickens from known sources? We always had those. Local eggs, too. My mother always bought both at a place in Harlem. Though she had them kill and butcher the bird, unlike many of the other customers, who having grown up in places like Jamaica and Puerto Rico, wouldn't even consider buying a dead bird, let alone one chopped up and wrapped in plastic.

All, mind you, surrounded by community gardens, locally run, low cost theater and micropublishing, and "world fusion" cuisine. I could find all of this near my apartment at 97th and Amsterdam while Carter was president so, if anything, I was sad to see it fade away. And moved west mostly to be part of the next round.

I still miss the smell and vibration of the printing plants of the west 20's and east 50's where I used to work and where many New Yorkers had their short-run printing done cheap and fast. And the "artisan" midtown leather shops like the one my uncle Abe worked in. And the "scratchbuilders" I used to hang out with at Polk's on 31st. And later at the machine shops and supply shops on Lafayette and Fulton and Canal who were always so helpful to us young, self-taught prototypers and craftspeople.

If denigrating these trends by calling them "too Portland" gives y'all such joy then, hey, have a day. I'm sitting here in a $500 a month, 800 square foot, 12' ceiling loft space and somehow enduring the pain of all this "Portlandness" even if I do have to tolerate "nice" people, clean sidewalks, and visible sky. And I can see how that offends you. But I'll keep thinking of these trends as things I first saw and became part of on the 70's Upper West Side and wonder just when you out-of-towners evidently new to the city will buy yourselves some clue.

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So that's it. That's what I wrote. What I didn't say (much) was how predictably this kind of chowderheaded trash is typical of ignorant dingbats, fresh from some expensive liberal arts college somewhere in Ohio or wherever and eager to show how now that they've been in "the city" for a few months they are real New Yorkers and have that appropriately "real" new York contempt for things like civility, plants, a visible sky, or anything else that wouldn't get ample screen time in the cop shows and gang life fantasies that they eagerly and religiously studied for years to "learn all about" NEW. YORK. CITY.

Well, let me tell you clueless little dipshits how it is. New York is harsh and expensive and difficult. And oh, by the way, teaches those of us smart enough and strong enough to be able to handle it a very sophisticated sense of esthetics and appropriate behavior. And those of us who are really good at it find ways to live such lives without vast salaries or slavish adherence to whatever trash the fashion magazines are trying to sell this hour.

It's a shame that you're not up to the job yet of seeing how things like rooftop gardens are actually very New York and always have been. Most of you are probably too microbrained to ever figure this out. But I look forward to the day that some of you grow up (five or six years in New York should be a good start) and I enjoy the knowledge that you will then look back, remember the childish contempt you had for these things before, and be ashamed.

Punks. 

On screen keyboards should be "plastic" in every sense.

On-screen keyboards should be user-scaleable and user-configurable. Not just in size but in proportions of, say, the space key relative to the shift keys. And even to complete redesign of key position. Not just remapping. Redesign.  I've written about this before. And I don't understand how this isn't obvious to everybody. And how can all these millions be getting spent on tablet designs and even special tablet-optimized OSes and not have this be a gimme?

A virtual keyboard is just a skin. Why aren't they treated like skins? Does anybody have a virtual keyboard that provides a toolkit for creating your own layout? Because I've been looking for years now and I haven't seen one. If I want a keyboard sized for a stylus so most of my screen will be free for text, I should be able to have it. If I want my keyboard to be a double row of teeth in a glowing skull, I should be able to have it. If I want a script to automagically swap my keyboard design out once a week, I should be able to have that, too.

Not to mention that a keyboard, ideally, should be able to be set to slowly but dynamically shift proportions to optimize for usage. If I use the number keys all day long for weeks, then those number keys should become a bigger percentage of total keyboard area the longer I keep doing that. Perhaps even bringing up a dialogue box eventually asking if I want a numerical keypad to come up instead or as well. Swype is a great technology. It helps. But not enough.

The first company to sell such a virtual keyboard will make buckets of money. And everybody will say that they knew all along.

Almost all of this could be done with the tools that came with Hypercard back when Reagan was president and OSes fit on floppies. So why aren't we doing it now?

About this whole "we killed Osama" thing…

Okay, it looks like the tumult about the claimed assassination of Osama Bin Laden and raiding of his compound has moved past the initial reactions and on to at least slightly more considered responses.

For what it's worth, I give a lot of credit to this Washington Post article for having provided a considered, detailed, and level-headed view of all of this early and in a high profile place.

So, what do I think? Well, first of all, I'm still not certain of anything but that something big happened in Abottabad, that our military was involved, and that there was plenty of shooting and almost certainly dying. That Al Qaida and their supporters look to have been thrown into turmoil. And that our government is saying an awful lot of things, some of which look to contradict each other.

I'll also say that from the looks of it, the SEALs did a fantastic job of some kind of assault deep in a very unsafe location and made a clean break back for home.

But even given that the fundamentals being stated by the U.S. government are true, I agree with this article right down the line.

- Every terrorist or terrorist group we treat as a military rather than police issue legitimizes those we attack and terrorism as a political tool overall.

- Given that Osama Bin Laden was, in fact, buried at sea, our military has a long history of burial of enemies at sea with the full requirements of that enemy's culture. A notable example would be the sailors of a Soviet nuclear submarine who we brought to the surface and then buried, complete with a U.S. military band playing their national anthem and suitable religious observances. If we could do that decades ago and swiftly provide film of the burial to the Soviets then we could have done the same and provided film within hours today. Whatever may be going on, "we're working on it" is a bullsh*t answer and is not only weasely, it undermines the reputation of America and particularly of Americans in uniform and reduces the chances that our soldiers whose bodies end up in enemy hands will be treated respectfully or that their loved ones will ever be informed of what occurs.

- Whatever scale of threat Osama Bin Laden and his people may have been, they pale compared to people like the Nazis or even the Serbian government. If bringing them in alive for trial was the right approach them how can we see him as an exception?

- Given the logistical difficulties there look to have been, I say again, now that we've spent over a trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives (at the very least) on the "War On Terror" we should have been capable of finding Pakistani factions to back who could have gotten us Osama Bin Laden alive.

- imprisonment without trial and torture as interrogation technique did NOT get "validated" by this.

- And last but not least, this is yet another brute force attack that would have been far less necessary if we had goddamn well had responded on September 12th, 2001 as many of us begged at the time, by making an absolute full court effort to train as many Americans as soon as humanly f*cking possible to speak foreign languages very, very well and learn foreign cultures and not crippled what expertise we *did* have in right-wing "Bible"-fueled attacks on crucial military and intelligence personnel because of their sexuality and/or beliefs.