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NOT The Norwegian Blue

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , , October 5th, 2009 @ 2:08 pm

wild parakeet

A couple of years ago, there was a very charming and somewhat wistful film called “The Wild Parrots Of Telegraph Hill” that documented the flock of feral parrots that live in that section of San Francisco and Mark Bittner, the man who had devoted his energy, time, and effort to feeding and caring for the birds. I watched it when it aired on PBS in 2007 and recommend it if you have the chance to see it (some Googling leads me to believe that it is not viewable in its entirety on the web, but is readily available from movie rental services).

Similarly, there’s been some attention given to the flocks of feral parrots living in the New York boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens (though no movie, yet), and apparently there are flocks of escaped and feral parrots in Chicago and other American cities as well.

Now London joins the list of major cities with established populations of parrots. Unlike the American cities, though, the Brits are taking a tougher stance on the spread of the birds, since the number of birds seems to be exploding and parrots are popping up all over the English countryside. The British government made plans earlier this year to start culling the birds, which drew a lot of criticism from the very animal-friendly public. The birds are a protected species, but farmers are now allowed to trap and/or humanely destroy the birds and their eggs in areas where the birds threaten local fruit crops.

Here in Boston, there’s not much to speak of in terms of feral tropical birds, but we’ve already got our hands full with the Canada geese and the wild turkeys lurking everywhere.

P.S. The Monty Python reference in the title reminds me that I would be a bad blogger indeed not to mention that today, October 5, is the 40th anniversary of the premiere of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”.

original python

Comestible

By Brian Filed in Food, Life Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , July 27th, 2009 @ 1:13 pm

nigella english muffin

Since Tuesday of last week, I’ve been laid pretty low by a bout of food poisoning, so it might seem like a weird moment for me to be posting about food, but in my semi-delirious state it makes perfect sense to me. Oh, and it does seem that I am mostly over the food poisoning, which I blame on a bad shrimp (bad shrimp! bad! bad!). I spent a couple of days talking to Ralph on the big porcelain phone, but my only remaining symptoms are a bit of dizziness and lassitude, which, honestly, could describe my condition most days even without the Shellfish of Doom.

A sure sign that I have weathered the storm is that last night Our Intrepid Trio went to our favorite Vietnamese place for dinner and I consumed the contents of a bowl of pho.

pho1

Okay, I cheated a little bit by getting the smaller bowl, and I left some noodles in the bottom of the bowl, but I swear I could feel myself getting better with each mouthful of broth. Basic beef pho also features five or six different cuts of meat including tripe and tendon, which are not typically high on the list of things people like to eat. I have grown to adore the tendon pieces, though, for their silkiness, and eating tripe lets me feel all sanctimonious and superior to people who are afraid of “weird food”. But seriously, tripe is also the prime ingredient of a Mexican soup called “menudo”, which the Mexicans eat as a morning dish as a hangover cure.

So I would like to go find a nice authentic Mexican restaurant that makes its own menudo. Hey, no problem, say my SoCal friends, all of whom have more authentic Mexican restaurants than they can shake a stick at. Sadly, about the best we can do in the Boston area is some not-too-shabby burrito joints, one or two places that really are about Mexican cuisine, and then the range of crap “drown it in sauce and cheese and no one will notice” places. Oh, I know I could invest a day in making my own, but neither of the ladies of the house would go anywhere near something like that, and I just want to eat. Local readers who have insight into potential hidden gems are encouraged to SPEAK UP!

banhmi

And every time I go to have a bowl of pho, it aggravates me that I can’t get banh mi anywhere near home. As it is, my pho hookup is almost half an hour from home, which is why I only eat there once every two or three weeks, and every time I go I think to myself “it would be AWESOME if these guys would add banh mi to the menu.” They do an enormous lunch business as it is, and I could see them making a killing on adding the sandwiches at lunchtime. Banh mi, if you’ve never had one, is the Vietnamese variation on your basic submarine sandwich, but using stuff like spicy pork pate, hot peppers, and pickled daikon instead of the run-of-the-mill Italian cold cuts. A good banh mi sandwich also comes on a particular type of baguette that the Vietnamese borrowed from the French.

At least in the case of banh mi, I know exactly where to go to find a good one: Dorchester. The majority of the Vietnamese immigrant community settled there after the war, and as you drive along Dot Ave there are banh mi shops every other block. It’s just waaay too far to drive for a sandwich without some other reason for going to Dorchester, and, honestly, I don’t have any reason to go there ever. But I’m going to have to make an effort to take a “road trip”, I can see that, especially if I wan’t a friggin’ sammich. Maybe I’ll go to the Franklin Park Zoo and see the new baby giraffe before they euthanize him (Okay, seriously, Zoo New England people, that was a REALLY slimy thing to say to get some money).

For reasons I cannot quite explain, I have started watching the Food Network again in small doses. There was a time when if there was nothing else worth watching on television, I always knew I could turn to the Food Network and see something good, but those days are long gone. Personally, I blame Rachael Ray, but I think it was inevitable given the slim margins of cable networks and the fickle tastes of viewers. But I think the pendulum might be swinging back to more shows about cooking and about cuisine, and less about cake dropping…er, decorating competitions. I also predict some big swing to old-fashioned cooking if the “Julie & Julia” movie does well, and it’s obvious that the Food Network is thinking the same.

Which does not explain why I spent an hour last night watching Jeff Corwin eat various bugs and grubs straight out of the Mexican desert, but does explain a show they’ve got called “The Best Thing I Ever Ate”. This gets to the heart of the matter — there’s a ton of bullshit about “passion for cooking” and “caring about food” that the chef-wannabe craze laid on top of a very difficult and demanding job which really all belongs in one place: on that table. If you don’t love to eat, how can you love to cook? I have always thought of cooking as a means to an end because when I am done in the kitchen I want to sit down and eat what I just made. So this show helps strip away a lot of that romanticism about cooking and lets people who do cook tell you what they like to EAT.

The last episode I saw was the one about barbecue, which is one of my favorite indulgences, and now this show has me hankering for a trip to New York to check out Daisy May’s Barbecue. This food blogger, who lives in NYC and is just a cab ride away, did in fact make a visit and came away a little bit disappointed, but I definitely have Daisy May’s on my list of places to eat for some future NYC trip.

Now, finally, here’s something I can have for lunch. Those in the know are aware that there are only a very few good barbecue places in the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area, but they do exist. The sleeper among them is a place just on the other side of town from where I live, right on the town line that divides Burlington and Billerica. It opened several years ago and struggled enormously in the beginning — the food wasn’t great, the ordering system sucked, and it just did not seem like it would last. However, because it’s the only barbecue place for miles and miles around, in a place where there are roving packs of hungry men seeking new lunch holes every day to escape the drudgery of their cubicular worklives, it hung on. Now, in my opinion, it’s even better than the well-regarded restaurant it was based on. The last couple of times I’ve had their brisket, it has excelled. Before this week is out, my friends, I will be lunching there.

Wagyu

Oh, and here’s another thing I want to look into the next time I visit New York: a butcher shop in Manhattan that sells American-grown Wagyu beef. Their original plan was to export the beef, which is produced in Oregon, to the Japanese market, but Japan doesn’t allow U.S. beef into the country due to our scandalously lax screening for BCE. So instead they are selling this ultra-premium quality meat direct to the only people in the world who can buy it by the pound: New Yorkers overburdened with too much money but perilously little common sense.

Actually, Wagyu beef must be tasted to be believed, and I have only had the opportunity to try it on two occasions. The marbling of the meat and fat makes the meat insanely tender, but without taking away from the central beef flavor. You probably would not really want to eat an entire steak, and at $50/pound you probably couldn’t afford to except as a rare treat, so the thing to do with it is to serve very small portions, typically simply seared. The butcher shop sells it sliced for shabu shabu, which is a Japanese style of fondue, and that would be just about perfect. On the list.

Finally, I keep thinking to myself that I’m going to go pay a visit to Wilson Farms but haven’t been able to get out of my way enough to do that. But I think that’s exactly what I’m going to do on Wednesday. The wet, cold summer we’re having has probably been hell for local tomatoes, but Wilson’s will undoubtedly have something of their own. I promised Charlotte we could make a real bolognese sauce, and I want local tomatoes if at all possible. Since I stopped doing any serious cooking, I haven’t gone produce shopping at Wilson’s for a long, long, long time, but it’s reassuring to feel the urge.

Pale Male

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , , February 26th, 2009 @ 2:21 pm

Do you remember the excitement a few years ago about a pair of red-tailed hawks named Pale Male and Lola who were found nesting on a high-rise in Manhattan?  It was a bit of a cause celebre for a while as various famous people like Mary Tyler Moore, who lived in the building where the hawks were nesting, raised a fuss about letting them stay.

Pale Male has apparently lived in Manhattan since at least 1993, and now, 16 years later, he and Lola still fly over Central Park hunting for prey. This website posts tons of pictures of the birds as they are sighted all over the Upper East Side, and the most recent pictures, from February 15, are really fabulous. The hawks have bred several broods of chicks, and now there are lots of red-tailed hawks to be seen in New York City. Urban Hawks is another blog devoted to detailing the lives of the assorted raptors and other critters one can find living in Central Park and environs.

Since we here in Massachusetts simply can’t stand to be outdone by New York, I think its only fair to note that there is a red-tailed hawk that lives in Boston Common, too. I have actually SEEN this hawk up close and personal. One chilly autumn day in 2007, we were in the playground in the Common, over by Frog Pond, and instead of watching Charlotte climbing on the equipment, I was just looking around the park. Suddenly, I heard this otherworldly WHOOOOOOSH!! a few feet from my head, and this enormous hawk swooped out of nowhere, trying to pounce on a clueless squirrel. The squirrel was apparently not so clueless, as he zoomed up a nearby tree before the hawk could get him, and the bird had to make a very abrupt landing on the dirt. He stood there for a good minute or so, readjusting his feathers as if to say “I meant to do that”, and checking things out quite calmly. I cursed myself for not having a camera with me, because I have never been so close to a wild raptor like that. He didn’t fly off immediately, even as people started to notice him. Finally, when he was good and ready, he flapped his massive wings and flew away just a couple of feet off the ground, no doubt hoping to spot a pigeon or another squirrel along the way.

Linkapalooza – Food

By Brian Filed in Food, Links Tagged with , , , , , , , , February 5th, 2009 @ 1:50 pm

And lo! On the Sixth Day there were links to post! And Jeebus looked down and said [this is good].

We begin with “A Mystery Solved”: For several years now, the valiant citizenry of New York have been driven to distraction by the occasional but powerful aroma of maple syrup wafting through Manhattan’s concrete canyons. The times being what they are, the initial reaction of many Gothamites was to lose their freaking shit that it might be a bioterrorist attack cleverly concealed by a delectable aroma. That’s what you get for living in a city that smells like a sewer — the immediate assumption that anything that smells good MUST be evil. (One can only imagine the level of shit-freaking that would happen in Boston, which smells like a sewer AND low tide, AND went ballistic over those LED signs a couple of years ago). But this very morning, sayeth the Gray Lady, the source of the smell of mapley jihad has been identified: a processing plant that makes additives for food and fragrance products, which has been processing fenugreek seeds for the perfume industry. Fenugreek is well known to anyone who cooks Indian cuisine, and is apparently a significant ingredient in artificial maple syrup flavorings (who knew?). It also has a variety of beneficial health effects, and is recommended to breastfeeding mothers to increase milk supply. Expect Michale Bloomberg to take credit for improving the health of New Yorkers in 3…2…1…

Next, we ask the musical question “Coffee, Is There Anything It Can’t Do?”: If you’re like me (and if you’re not, you really should be), every morning you have to dump the previous morning’s used coffee grounds prior to making your daily pot of America’s Favorite Drug. Wouldn’t it be great, you think (okay, you probably don’t, but play along with me), if there were some planet-friendly thing you could do with coffee grounds other than make compost. Via Slashfood comes a link to this product concept that was submitted to a conference on “greener gadgets” being held later this month in New York City (presumably WITHOUT the death-wielding maple aroma). You put your coffee grounds into a little cartridge doo-dad that connects to the top of the printer, then wiggle the doo-dad back and forth as the paper feeds through the device, and the day-old coffee is magically transformed into “ink”. Anyone who has ever dumped their morning joe on their shirt can speak to the near-indelibility of coffee stains, so it’s a perfect medium for quick, cheap, environmentally-conscious printing. Plus, your documents will have the rich, luxurious aroma of freshly-brewed coffee…although this may mean that they will be classified as Weapons of Mass Destruction in New York City.

Speaking of the Devil’s Brew, the United States Army takes its coffee pretty damn seriously, maggot! American military action in the 20th Century was fueled on nothing but strong black coffee and unfiltered cigarettes, because that’s how fucking tough we were back then. Hitler didn’t stand a chance against the G.I.s and their cuppa joe. The blog Entropic Memes recently offered this excellent post about the Army’s 1951 in-depth analysis of the essential facts about coffee: it’s preparation, it’s storage, the type of beans to purchase, anything and everything about it. Illustrated with many of the tables and graphs from the report, the post tells us that the Army bought 8.5 million pounds of coffee per month back then, and that’s a lotta beans to count.

Our next subject is one last “fuck you” to France from George W. Bush: Among the assorted last-minute bits of fuckwittery enacted by the outgoing Bushies was the imposition of punitive tariffs on a variety of imported food products as retribution for the banning of American beef, particularly in the EU. The most outrageous imposition was increasing the tariff on Roquefort cheese to 300%, essentially destroying the market for Roquefort in the United States. Luckily for the makers of Roquefort, exports to the U.S. only account for about 450 tons out of an annual export market of about 3,700 tons, but still represents more than 10% of the total exports. I am a total fanatic for blue cheeses in general, and I adore Roquefort, though on a daily basis I am much more likely to buy the locally-produced Great Hill blue, but I do love me some Roquefort. Thanks again, George.

Finally, in Tuesday’s Food & Wine section of the New York Times there was this article which almost reads like a bulletin from the Department of Duh: Americans don’t know how to cook for themselves, which contributes to the national epidemic of obesity. Nowhere is this more evident, says Julia Moskin, the article’s author, than on the NBS series “The Biggest Loser”, where obese people compete to see who can lose the most weight, but have to be shown from the ground up not only how to incorporate exercise into their lives, but how to prepare basic, nutritionally sound meals. Not surprisingly, they also need to be taught WHAT to eat. Oh, and, quel suprise!, many of the participants on the show balloon right back up just as soon as they don’t have someone forcing the broccoli down their throats.

Of course, you can’t generalize too far. Speaking as someone who loves to cook but also loves to eat and as such passes a pretty good resemblance to the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, I can attest to the counter-argument that knowing how to cook doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not going to overeat. Indeed, knowing how to cook is a pretty good way to insure that you WILL overeat. Nevertheless, the trend away from regular meal preparation to more and more consumption of restaurant food (primarily fast food, but not entirely) and the lack of awareness of basic nutrition go hand-in-hand with the excessive weight gain that is so prevalent in this country and in the U.K.

Fuhgeddaboutit

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , , May 20th, 2008 @ 2:06 pm

Journalist Joan Acocella, who usually writes for The New Yorker, has written this article in the latest issue of Smithsonian Magazine, in which she offers her own theories and explanations for the behavior of people in New York City. New Yorkers, she says, often get a bum rap from people from other parts of the United States for being rude or brusque. What they’re really about, she says, is a sense of shared survival that is necessary for living in such an overwhelming place, and a sort of forced intimacy that comes from that “we’re all in this boat together” sensibility. New Yorkers usually have no problem telling you exactly what they think, but that’s because they’re trying to be helpful, not angry. And if sometimes it comes across a little too bluntly, well, you’d be crabby too if you had to live there.

My take on this is that anyone who has ever called a New Yorker “rude” has obviously never been to Boston. New Yorkers do not even scratch the surface of rudeness compared to the way people treat each other here. Even people who are PAID to be nice to you, like salespeople in department stores or, even worse, small independent businesspeople are far more likely to tell you to go fuck yourself here than they are in New York. I can’t tell you how many times I have been made aware by some retail clerk or cashier or person standing in line that I am interrupting their day with my stupid and worthless insistence on being helped. And we won’t even begin to talk about the driving.

If New Yorkers are united by a sense of being in it together, we here are segregated into thousands of tiny cells of privacy that are squished together like soap bubbles, yielding as little as possible even as we are crammed tighter and tighter, so that when the bubbles inevitably pop we are unwillingly thrust into some new bubble not entirely to our liking. The prevailing attitude here is “hooray for me and to hell with you”, and people will stop at NOTHING to prevail in even the pettiest encounter. Which is not to say that you don’t run into this sort of thing with New Yorkers. I think it’s a behavior common to people in general, but taken to a whole new level by Massholes.

Though I have lived most of my life in New England, I lived for nearly eight years in Chicago during the 1980s while attending college and grad school, and Chicagoans are several orders of magnitude nicer than people in Boston or New York. There’s still enough general assholery to go around, but the level of congeniality is high. So high that at first I, the dyed-in-the-wool New Englander, found it off-putting to deal with so many nice people every day. Eventually I got used to the difference. People in Chicago are just as rushed and hustling as New Yorkers, but they deal with the pressure without feeling like they need to be in your face. My wife and I also lived in Bloomington, Indiana for about 18 months while I started my doctorate, and we had to adjust once again to the slow-and-easy style of that area. Coming back to uptight-and-tight-lipped New England was a culture shock.

When we finally settled in the Boston area about a dozen years ago, my wife, who grew up in Newton, had no trouble reverting to her in-born Masshole self. She is particularly in her element when driving — honking if the car in front of her doesn’t react to the green light within seven nanoseconds of it changing, swearing a blue streak all the time, slamming the gas pedal so she can cut people off at the slightest sign of an open space on the road. It took me quite a while to learn the ropes of driving on 128 or I93. Even now, I am still intimidated when I have to drive on the surface roads of Boston itself. But I have also taken on the necessary public persona of willful disregard one needs to interact with ones fellow Bay Staters.

Tech News Link Dump

By Brian Filed in Tech Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , March 10th, 2008 @ 2:16 pm

The title says it all…

The science journal Nature reports that this company in nearby Concord, NH has announced that they were able to produce the largest single sheet made up completely of carbon nanotubes. The sheet, which measures about 2 meters in length and 1 meter wide and is about as thick as a sheet of paper, has almost half the breaking strength of a similar-sized sheet of aluminum. The company says that they expect to find markets in companies that make EMI shielding, electrical conductors, and thermal dissipating devices. There’s probably some future use for materials like this in the space program, I would imagine.

Meanwhile, this story in EETimes says that a California company has announced that they’ve perfected a manufacturing process to make catalytic nanoparticles that could be used in place of metals in hydrogen fuel cells and other things that use electrolysis to produce energy. They claim that due to the vastly increased surface area created by using millions of nanoparticles, the efficiency of the electrolysis can be improved to 85%, besting the Department of Energy’s 75% efficiency 2010 goal for hydrogen fuel cells, and holds the potential of reaching an unheardof 96% efficiency. Efficiency of energy production is critical in taking alternative fuel technologies beyond the experimental stage, and the relative inefficiency of standard electrolysis has been a serious stumbling block for hydrogen-based fuel cells.

I recently received an Apple iPod Touch as a present. On one hand, it’s a serious fun gadget to have; we took it with us on our recent trip to New York City and used the Google Map location feature to find our way around all over Manhattan (thanks to all the unsecured wireless networks people have in NYC), as well as looking up restaurants, bus schedules, and other points of interest. On the other hand, the limitations built into the iPhone/iTouch by Apple are sometimes infuriating (no Flash player, no Windows support, etc). I will undoubtedly go the route of “jailbreaking” my iTouch in the very near future so that I can make use of some of the third-party apps that work when you wrest control from Steverino’s icy clutches.

I read this morning that Apple says it won’t prevent VoIP applications from working on the iPhone/iTouch, which means that I should be able to install Skype or some Skype-like application and add the ability to make phone calls from my otherwise phone-less iTouch. I purposely did not want an iPhone because I wasn’t interested in having to sign on for a 2-year contract with AT&T (or to have to try getting it to work with some other provider), but if I can use Skype, I definitely would give that a go.

I also came across this post at OpenCulture that says that all incoming freshmen at Abilene Christian University in Texas this fall will receive either an iPhone or an iTouch and be able to use the school’s online services via the device to check food service accounts, class schedules, look up faculty/staff directory information and eventually even register for classes and purchase textbooks. They’ll also have access to podcasts of their lecture classes, be able to submit homework, and potentially even participate in class by submitting questions in writing (though I think this means the professors need to brush up on their IM-speak to be able to read the questions). While most colleges and universities have computer requirements these days, and many of them give their students a computer, this is certainly an interesting step up from those kinds of programs.

Remember the satellite that the Navy shot down a couple of weeks ago? Space expert James Oberg posted this article at MSNBC debunking some of the rumors that have already emerged about the shootdown and clearing up some other technical misconceptions that were widely mentioned in the MSM.

Lastly, Science Daily reported that researchers at the University of Alberta have found that humans have a gene that is capable of preventing HIV from assembling inside cells, effectively shutting down the disease. However, the gene is “turned off” by default in our DNA. They don’t expect to be able to turn that gene “on” (might I suggest some soft music, flowers, and dancing?), but they do hope to be able to develop drugs that mimic the effect of the gene and could indeed halt the progression of HIV. If you’re the sort who likes to read this stuff for yourself, the full report can be found here. (I read the abstract, but gave up after that)

The Endless City

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , March 10th, 2008 @ 1:32 pm

Going on sale this week is a new book edited by London School of Economics professor Richard (Ricky) Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, director of London’s Design Museum, entitled “The Endless City”. The book consists of essays by urban planners and specialists examining the similarities and contrasts in the growth of six major world cities: New York, London, Shanghai, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin.

Writing in yesterday’s Manchester Guardian, Sudjic considers the pressures on modern cities; 50% of the world’s population now lives in metropolitan areas, and by the middle of this century that number will rise to 75%. He also speaks in this podcast in Newsweek’s series on innovation.

From the descriptions, the book sounds a bit more aimed at the serious academic community than a popular audience, but would undoubtedly be interesting reading for anyone who has an interest. The Guardian piece seems like a good top-level summary if you just want the basic idea of it.

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