Boobie chicken!

I like to cook, which is a good thing, because I live with two males who really like to eat. (I also like to bake, which is a bad thing, because I really like to eat.) Unfortunately, I get conflicting directives from my hungry males. Boy would prefer to eat the same four things every week if he could get away with it. The Spousal Unit (heretofore known as "TSU") likes to try new things. I refuse to make two separate meals, but I'm willing to leave off sauce off half of a recipe to placate Boy. (If I leave it on, he'll just scrape it off, and this way there's more sauce for me.)

I've been feeling sorry for Boy this week, though. Not only does he have to get up before 6 am to get ready for his 6:30 bus (and I'm sure feeling the same pain), he's got marching band for three hours after school. Tuesday was only a half day of school, so there was almost six hours of band practice, most of it outdoors in 90-degree heat. So I was feeling sympathetic, and asked him yesterday what I should make for dinner. My only requirement was that it use chicken, and not be "Chicken Stuff," a recipe he really likes but TSU finds bland. "Make that chicken with the cheese on it," he replied.

I puzzled over that for a minute. He was referring to a recipe I'd tried a couple of times that bakes chicken, topped by a thin slice of Canadian bacon and mozzarella. It's okay, but I found it overly salty for my taste. So I thought I'd experiment. I adapted a recipe I have for breaded chicken, and I thought I could put cheese slices on Boy's portion, and goat cheese and fresh tomatoes on the grownup's portions. (I looooove goat cheese, and baked with tomatoes is one of my favorite variations.)

So I had the chicken baking in the oven while I rooted around in the fridge for the cheesy toppings. Slices of Swiss, no problem. Goat's cheese? Major problem. I knew I had some, but I forgot it had been opened. Now it was not so much goat's cheese as penicillin-producing science experiment. Fine, I could adapt. I had more Swiss slices, or, to make things more interesting, I used pepper jack. I took my cherry tomatoes, sliced them in half, placed a couple on each chicken tenderloin, and topped it with the cheese before returning it to the oven for a few minutes. The result tasted pretty good. (Although not as good as it would have with the goat's cheese. Sigh.) Its appearance, however, was a little bit peculiar:


And so I have invented "Boobie Chicken"! Let me know if you want the recipe.

I love to ride my bicycle...

... I love to ride my bike! I love to ride my bicycle, I love to ride it where I like! (Thanks to the immortal Freddie Mercury.)

My favorite place to ride my bicycle is the Canton Public Library, which is not only a great library, it actually has a bike rack where I can park and lock my bike. You'd think with all the emphasis lately on healthy lifestyles, reducing fuel use, and saving the planet, that there would be more encouragement for people who want to ride bikes or walk to various public facilities and shops in Canton. After all, it's not a huge, sprawling metropolis. Most everything you could want is off a two-mile stretch of Ford Road; a few things might be a mile north or south, but there are many destinations within a quick bike ride. The bank? Less than a mile away. The bookstore? A little over a mile (and thank goodness we finally have one!). The post office? About a mile. The craft store? About a half mile. I've even ridden my bike to visit the doctor's office, about two miles away. But do any of those places have a bike rack where a conscientious, bike-loving shopper could park their bike? Noooooo.

It makes me quite cranky. Strip malls are the worst offenders, because not only do they not have bike racks, the building supports are too big for my chain lock to fit around. I've had to resort to locking my bike around trees or parking signs. (Actually, I take a perverse pleasure in locking my bike to a "No Parking" sign.) This doesn't always work very well, especially if the only signs are in the middle of the parking lot, or if the tree is on unstable landscaping that makes my bike keep tipping over. I can't image a bike rack is that expensive of an investment for strip mall management, and I keep asking every time I ride my bike to a shop, and I keep being disappointed. (Actually, I'm not being entirely fair. Meijer and Target do have bike racks, but I don't shop there that often.) Then there's dealing with drivers who don't understand the concept of crosswalks (they're not for you, dolts!), and construction that blocks the sidewalks (I don't ride on roads with 45 mph speed limits).

And don't get me started on pedestrian impediments. (But then, why not. I'm in full rant mode. Blame the ridiculous 7 am starting time for high school.) There is a strip mall not two blocks from my house. If it was a straight line, it would only be about nine houses away from me. It's got a whole neighborhood that backs onto it. I frequently walk there to pick up pizza, or visit the video store, or pick up the dry cleaning, as could literally hundreds of residents within a two block radius. And yet, there is no pedestrian entry into the strip mall! For me to pick up my pizza, I have to either enter the driveway, or cross the berm and then the parking lot. I'm just flabbergasted that no one during the design process, not the builder, or the township planners, stopped to say, "Hey, maybe people will want to walk into this place. Maybe we should build a sidewalk or crosswalk."

Grrrr. I think I need another bike ride today just to calm down.

Battleship Potemkin: The Official Haiku Review

As I mentioned in my last Haiku Review, I was going to put my Remedial Literature Project aside in favor of a course of film study. For one, it takes less time to watch a movie than read a book. And I have to admit that there are quite a few classic movies I've never seen, although I consider myself a film buff. At first, I considered going with the American Film Institute's list of top 100 movies. After all, I looked at their top 10:

1. Citizen Kane (1941)
2. The Godfather (1972)
3. Casablanca (1942)
4. Raging Bull (1980)
5. Singin' in the Rain (1952)
6. Gone with the Wind (1939)
7. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
8. Schindler's List (1993)
9. Vertigo (1958)
10. The Wizard of Oz (1939)

and saw that I'd missed at least three of them.* But the AFI's list covers only American movies, and has an emphasis on "cultural significance" (ie, popularity) that means that they included a film like Forrest Gump, which I consider more gimmick than story, in their top 100. Blech. Besides, I wanted to include foreign films, because as I was browsing through music videos to put in my blog last month, I saw one that was inspired by Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, which I've never seen. I've never seen any Bergman film, for that matter. Or one by Kurosawa. Or Renoir. Or Fellini ... You get the idea. I've heard of them, seen clips (enough to know when a music video is inspired by a director), but never sat through one of their films.

Then I saw that Ann Arbor's Michigan Theater was showing the 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin, complete with live organ accompaniment. I've always wanted to see a silent film with live accompaniment, and Battleship Potemkin has ranked in every Sight & Sound critics' all-time top-ten poll since 1952.** The family was game, so we toodled off to Ann Arbor over the weekend. Here is my Official Haiku Review:

The collective whole
Exceeds the sum of its parts—
So the film frames say

Now at heart Battleship Potemkin is a propaganda film, designed to inspire socialist revolution by telling the story of a 1905 naval mutiny. It is also, however, a groundbreaking work for its use of editing and montage cuts. The director, Sergei Eisenstein, believed he could heighten the viewer's emotional reaction by switching between shots of different kinds (a closeup of a face, say, then a long shot of troops, then another closeup of a face, this time with glasses pierced by a bullet). This works to great effect in the Odessa steps sequence, where he shows Tsarist troops massacring the local people, who are rallying in support of the Potemkin. (There are literally thousands of extras in this sequence. Must be nice to have government support of your art.) The scene where a baby goes careening down the steps after his mother is murdered and knocks his carriage over has been imitated countless times.

Watching this film over 80 years after it was made, I could see how could inspire emotions in its viewers. First of all, when you watch a silent film, you really have to watch the film. No looking away, or you might miss something and not be able to figure out what's going on. The use of live music also enhanced the experience; Michigan Theater's organist did a fabulous job of performing the score (over an hour straight with no break!), using martial themes and even sound effects to support the images. So I could see why the film was censored and even banned in many places (even as late as the 1970s).

Still, it is clearly a propaganda film. Every character was clearly black or white (or Red), with no shades of grey. The film ends on a high note which felt false to me as a modern viewer. (The Potemkin was allowed to pass through the Russian fleet without incident, which really happened; later, however, the crew was forced to abandon the ship and was returned to Russia for prosecution.) So as an audio-visual experience, the film worked very well; as story, not so much. Still, now I can stick my nose in the air and say I've actually seen this very important and influential foreign film.

* Bonus if you can guess which three. It could be four, but I can't remember if I've actually seen Singin' in the Rain, or just parts of it.
** The S&S poll, sponsored by the British Film Institute, is widely recognized as the most authoritative in the world. At least Roger Ebert says so, and who am I to argue with the original thumbs' up(TM) guy?

Photo of the Week--8/25/08

Another photo which proves a picture is worth a thousand words. In October 1999 my husband had a business meeting in Switzerland, so we tagged along for a long weekend. We spent most of our time in Lucerne, in the center of the country. It's located along Lake Lucerne and nestled among the Swiss Alps, so it's a prime tourist destination. We took a steam engine across the lake, then an incline railway (something that enchanted Boy at the time) to the top of Mt. Pilatus (7000 ft), and a cable car back down to the city. Here is the view from atop Mt. Pilatus. It wasn't a very sunny day, but you can still get a sense of the Alps' majesty, as well as the beauty of Lake Lucerne.

Some brain required...

... and I was running low on brains yesterday. It should have been simple enough to assemble the new chair and ottoman I bought at Ikea yesterday. (It's purty, ain't it? And comfy.) Heck, there were only four steps. Only six pieces. Only 10 screws. But somehow it didn't turn out that way. I ended up muttering and cursing to myself, ready to strangle the cat if she jumped in the box one more time.

Now, in my defense, it had been a long day. I took Boy to school to pick up his schedule. This required turning in his emergency info, getting his school ID photo taken, paying a deposit for his books, getting his schedule, turning in his internet permission form, paying for his yearbook, paying for school lunch, and picking up his books. (All 15 pounds of them. And notice how much "paying" was involved?) Since he missed orientation, we also walked around the school: finding his locker and making sure the lock worked, locating all his classes, timing how long it took to get from one building to another because he has classes in two buildings. Then we did some school supply shopping, took in a funny movie (thank goodness), grabbed lunch, picked out the chair at IKEA, got his free ice cream, and finally made it home around 3:30.

Not so bad, right? But then I started assembling the ottoman and discovered that the finish I had picked out didn't match the table I already had. I could live with it (eww), or I could go back and exchange the chairs ... and I might as well get it over. So I carefully disassembled the ottoman, tried five times before getting it to fit back in the box, taped it back up, and headed back to Ikea. I sat in the return line for 15 minutes, then got the chair with the right finish. I headed home, realized I needed food for dinner, so I stopped to go shopping. Then I realized I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning, but I had to go home to get the receipt.

I get home, put away the groceries, and by now it's after five. There was still half an hour before I had to run out for another errand, so I tried to start assembling the new chair, and couldn't figure out step one. There are two short screws, two washers, and two thingees I can't name that hold screws. But the picture doesn't show the washers in the first step, and I don't see where they go in steps 1-4, and all the other screws are in groups of four. What the ??? I look at helpful instructions, which show this:

Of course, they don't show any phone numbers for me to call. I don't feel like searching for the number, so I stomp around and grumble, stare at the instructions again, and generally feel like this:
Finally, I did what the picture said, and discovered the two extraneous washers actually appeared in step four, in such small pictures I didn't see them before. I got the chair assembled, the dry cleaning fetched, the errands run, and the dinner made. Then I collapsed in my new chair.

But I didn't get the blog updated. Or the latest chapter. I get enough frustration out of writing and the search for publishing that I didn't need any more for that day. Today will be better; a couple hours cuddling kittens at the Humane Society and all the frustration is gone, leaving me ready to write.

Walden: The Official Haiku Review

I must make a confession: I couldn't finish Thoreau's Walden. I know it epitomizes the American Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century, with its emphasis on self-reliance and individual spirituality. I know it's a classic, important work that influenced not only many writers, but future environmentalists. I know I really should finish this book; I chose it as my last selection for my summer Remedial Lit Project (pre-WWI American) because I looked at a list of writers I'd never read and Thoreau was the most glaring omission.

I also know that if I had a time machine and could meet Thoreau, I would likely find him an insufferable git. So here is my Official Haiku Review of the first third of Thoreau's Walden:

Do you own your stuff,
Or does it own you? You fool!
Go away. You suck.

I can't say I disagree with Thoreau's premises about consumerism, self-reliance, and the value of nature. (If he thought mid-19th century America was shallow and obsessed with possessions, I can only imagine how appalling he would find modern culture.) He has some valuable observations about what's really important in life, and some really poetic descriptions of his little shack in the woods by Walden Pond. Unfortunately, the overall tone of the work can only be described as smug. Now, I managed to plod through dozens of chapters on whales in Moby Dick, and wade through intelligible dialogue in The Pioneers, and I was willing to do so for the sake of a story. It wasn't always a great story, but I wanted to know how things would turn out.

However, I'm not going to sit still and be harangued at by a misanthropic hermit just for some pretty descriptions of nature. I'd rather sit out in a hammock and enjoy it firsthand, preferably while reading something that's meaningful and entertaining. So I'm taking my one pass for the summer and stopping early. I'm also stopping my Remedial Lit Project until next summer, when I will try to get to many of those foreign authors I never read. Don't despair, however; the Haiku Review will return next month as I begin my Remedial Film Classics Project.

Oh say, why can't I N-B-See?

Luckily for my sleep habits and the fast-approaching school year, the Olympics are over. No more staying up til midnight waiting for gymnastics scores or rain-delayed beach volleyball finals. All the spectacle and pageantry are over, and it was a great two weeks of sport. You'd have to be a total grumpus not to be thrilled by Michael Phelps's eight golds and Usain Bolt's sprinting records, or to be moved by the stories of the South African amputee who competed in the open-water swim, or the 33-year-old gymnast who moved from Uzbekistan to Germany to get cancer treatment for her son, and won a medal against competition half her age. The Olympics are full of great stories like these.

However.

I am still quite displeased with much of NBC-Universal's coverage of the games. I understand that gymnastics, swimming, and track score high ratings, and that's why they get the main focus of the prime-time coverage. And this year satellite users actually got a button that took them to a menu where they could choose from several channels that had coverage (something only eight years behind, and vastly inferior to, technology that the BBC used in Sydney). And yet, with all those channels, I didn't see a single taekwondo match on the air. And this, after the Today show showed profiles of the Lopez family, who are the first three siblings to all medal at the same Olympic games.

Apparently, NBC has time to show four replays of every dive in preliminary competition, and a dozen replays of Bolt or Phelps, but not even one two-minute round of a TKD medal match? They weren't even pretending this year to show most events live, so they couldn't edit the competition to give us a little more breadth of coverage? On Saturday afternoon, they figured people would rather watch table tennis, rhythmic gymnastics*, and synchronized swimming** for three hours than see a single, 6-minute TKD match. Why? It wasn't because Americans were challenging for medals in those events, because they weren't. What world are the NBC producers living in? Certainly not the one where mixed martial arts shows draw high ratings and pay-per-view audiences, or the one where 1600 competitors of all ages (and both sexes) competed at a national TKD tournament not two months ago. Sure, TKD bouts on an Olympic level can be a bit slow, because the competitors are so good, but it can't be any worse than the Olympic boxing match I saw last week where the competitors grabbed and held and threw each other to the ground instead of actually throwing punches.

NBC seems totally oblivious to this, as shown in their coverage of the athletes during the Closing Ceremonies. They showed the Lopez family again, saying they medalled, but I had no idea what medals they actually earned, since NBC didn't show them. Then they focused on Bryan Clay, the American gold medalist in the decathlon, traditionally called the "the world's greatest athlete." The announcer said he seemed to be overshadowed in these games by athletes like Phelps and Bolt, and I shouted "DUH!" at the televison, for NBC blew off the first day of decathlon competition, moving it from primetime to late night, and then devoted about two minutes to each of Clay's second-day events before showing the entirety of the last event, the 1500 meter run. But that night they showed most of the marathon live, because there's nothing as exciting as watching guys run through streets for two hours. (Hey, it was LIVE!)

So I guess I'm going to have to wait another four years to see world-class TKD on the television***. Maybe by London 2012 I can get digitally broadcast CBC, or BBC America will offer their own coverage. Or maybe NBC will give us real choice through satellite coverage. You never know, it could happen.

* I'm sure the ladies of rhythmic gymnastics work hard, but to me their "sport" looks like something better suited to the circus, not the Olympics. There's virtually no tumbling, so it's more like dance than gymnastics. (Don't get me started on the idea going around about adding Ballroom Dancing as an Olympic event.)
** And just to be totally inconsistent, I hate it when people make fun of synchro. I actually did this for a year in junior high, and it's very tough.
*** And also "Team Handball." I want to see this because I have no idea how it works. I'm envisioning a dozen guys on a squash-sized handball court. Do they tag team? Take turns hitting the ball? My mind boggles.