Carrot Peanut Soup

Another one of those things that didn’t look like much, but tasted delicious.

  •  5 large carrots
  • 1 medium onion
  • 1 red bell pepper
  • 2 tbsp butter
  • 4 cups chicken broth
  • 1 cup powdered milk
  • 4 tbsp peanut butter
  • salt, pepper, chili powder, cornstarch

Grate the carrots and cut the onion and the pepper up finely.  Put all of that in the bottom of a big soup pot, along with the butter, and sauté until the onions are nice and limp.  Add chicken broth and let it come back to a boil.  Then mix in the powdered milk and peanut butter; add salt, pepper, and chili powder to taste.

To thicken the soup, dissolve about a tablespoon of cornstarch in some cold water.  Add that to the soup and stir for a minute or so.  Repeat until it’s thick enough to your liking.

Then it’s ready to eat!

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Also known as just plain Hugo, in the movie version.

Hugo Cabret is an orphan who lives in a train station in Paris.  After his uncle disappears, he has to keep all the clocks in the station running himself or else somebody will notice something is wrong and drag him off to the orphanage.  When he tries to steal clock parts from the old man who runs a toy shop in the station, he gets tangled up in the mystery of the man’s past.

The movie Hugo is an adaptation of one epic of a weighty book.  It’s 533 pages long and more graphic novel than straight-up text, full of lavishly rendered charcoal drawings.  The visuals in this movie live up to that book.  Go see this film if only to check out some of the fly-through shots.  Did I mention that most of the book takes place in a train station?  In Paris?  With lots of giant gears and automatons and clock-y things?  Eee!

… oh, right.  The story.  It is also quite good.  The scriptwriters tried to keep everything that was in the book and add in a few more things besides, so the plot is a bit involved.  Christopher Lee makes a delightful cameo as a train station bookseller.  “Hello, I’m a benevolent old man with a sephulchral voice.  Would you like a book?”  Another highlight is the guy who is ostensibly the bad guy, the station inspector.  He is much more fleshed out in the movie than the book, where he was not much more than a pair of prying eyes.  What with all the inspector’s hapless attempts to bring Hugo to “justice,” he’s too adorable for anybody to take him seriously as a villain.

Also, this movie got a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.  Go see it.

Dragonsong

I remember the incident – venturing out of the little kids’ section of Whittier Public Library into the real kids’ section, where they had books with chapters and stuff in them.  I picked a book out of the shelf that looked interesting.  It had a crinkly plastic jacket and there was a dragon on the cover.  Dragonsong.  That sounded cool.

And so I was introduced to the world of Pern.  The story was about Menolly, who wanted to be a dragonsinger even though her freehold wouldn’t let her, but I confess I don’t remember much about the plot.  That world!  That creepy-ass Threadfall.  Those dragons who could teleport Between.  And the dragonriders who could telepathically communicate with them and keep the world safe.

Anne McCaffrey, you introduced me to fantasy novels.

Mine!

After starting at #47 on the hold list at Saint Paul Public Library, I have finally worked my way to the head of the line!  I went in there this evening and the hold was in.  I’ve got my hands on a copy of … Game of Thrones.

Expect a detailed analysis and comparison to the miniseries when it’s done.

Foods that you will never, ever convince me to try: Fugu

No.  I don’t care how much money you offer me.  I don’t care about high-minded principles that it’s good for you to try new things.  I won’t.

What brought this rant on?  In Cell Physiology class, we’re learning about how action potentials work.  To do that, we’ve been playing around with a simulated squid axon called Nerve.  Here’s what a normal action potential looks like in the program:

Now, here’s what happens when you add a 4nM concentration – yes, you got that right, that’s nanomolars – of tetrodotoxin into the solution:

Sorry, bud, you don’t get an action potential.

And just FYI, 4nM of tetrodotoxin is 0.00000127676 grams of per liter.  What this stuff does when it gets into your body is it blocks the sodium channels in your nerve cells so you can’t get action potentials.  You need action potentials to do things like breathe.

I think I’ll have the salad, thanks.

A Tale of Two Poetry Anthologies

There’s a beat-up copy of Perrine’s Literature on my bookshelf.  It’s a 1998 edition, a hand-me-down from my older cousin.  She used it to get through IB English and then let me do the same.  And though we never used it for class, there’s a chapter in there on poetry that I read on my own.  This is by Wallace Stevens:

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall?  Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

This is hot stuff!  But if I want to read some more of the really good poetry, where do I find it?

The Best Poems of the English Language seemed like a good place to start.  It’s by Harold Bloom, a professor at Yale University and a prolific critic and writer of his own.  And to be sure, there’s a lot of good poetry in there.  There’s also this little gem:

… by reprinting only half a dozen poems published after 1923, I have largely evaded our contemporary flight from all standards of aesthetic and cognitive value.  Since there are no poems in this volume that are not among the best in the language, I will have to cite some bad or inadequate work not reprinted here in order to discuss how and why we legitimately should choose among poems.

I mean, the guy is a professor at Yale.  He knows what he’s doing.  But lordy!

Now contrast Good Poems, edited by Garrison Keillor.

Stickiness, memorability, is one sign of a good poem.  You hear it and a day later some of it is still there in the brainpan.

All the poems Keillor selected to go into this book are short.  They were meant to be read on the radio to an audience that had just barely woken up.  And all the poems are about real people.  There’s joy, grief, and lots and lots of poems about snow.  Well, he is a Minnesotan.

Minnesota is getting into the Occupy Wall Street movement

Today, at 9:00 a.m., protesters are going to gather in downtown Minneapolis in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

And I just wanted to say that I agree with a lot of what you have to say, in terms of frustration with inequality in our society and uncertainty about the future.  I hope it stays nonviolent, and civil, and that the protest goes well.