My Quiet Life

Today's entry in "random history tidbits I found while nursing a crippling sinus infection headache":

A doctor advertising the cure of onanism (masturbation) practiced on "North Cherry Street" -- now 4th Ave:

Onanism or Self Abuse.

How many parents have seen the reason of a gifted son go to ruin; have seen him fade away from their homes, their hearts, and their hearths, like a shadow of evening from the hills, and have turned in tears to the tomb to which he has gone down, in the bloom of, beauty and the meaning of existence, without. once suspecting that the darling hope of their declining years was a victim to a solitary habit, which, alas ! is so common among the young. Let those thus afflicted call on DOCTOR COLEMAN, No. 64 North Cherry street, or address him by letter. Post Office Box 502, Nashville, Tenn.

Now that's what I call ad copy.

Dear Google,

I love gmail. It helped me regain control of my inbox at a time when I thought it was a lost cause. Labels, starring, priority inbox -- tools that helped revolutionized the way I filter information.

It's 2012, now, and I'm sad to say that I'm losing control of my inbox. The problem is spam. Every day, it fills to the brim with messages from vendors -- some of which I've used, and some of which I haven't, who think they have a legitimate reason to be emailing me. It's not your fault -- it's theirs, and mine. It's theirs, for operating under the assumption that my doing business with them is implicitly giving them permission to e-mail me every fucking day. It's my fault for doing business with companies that operate like this, but such is the world we live in. I know you have the "Spam" button, and while perhaps those messages do wind up in some deep, dark basement of Google somewhere where they actually analyze them, most people are hip to the fact that it basically does nothing. It's a placebo. Pushing it will make you feel better for a short while, but eventually you realize that it's doing nothing. I've been trying to unsubscribe from the AFA's newsletter for around 5 years now.

Sure, I could take some time, every day, to go and "change my e-mail preferences" or "opt out" -- most of which only serves to confirm for the spammer in question that you're getting their e-mail. I could painstakingly create filters for each of these vendors/messages in the klunky filters interface.

What I want is a "spam" button that actually does something. Give me a button to push that says "you will never see mail from this company ever again". I ran a spam-filtering service for years -- I know how hard it is to filter junk from mail without false positives. What's not hard is filtering out mail based on a certain sender or keywords. The functionality is already there, but the interface is useless. I realize that attempting to manually filter out unsolicited messages one by one is a futile gesture, but at least give me a futile gesture that works. It's like being caught in a zombie apocalypse and being armed with a pistol full of blanks. Sure, I'm gonna die anyway, but at least give me the satisfaction of taking down a few zombies before I go. The "Spam" button is a joke.

Give me control of my inbox! I'm a big boy. I can handle it.

Sincerely, cwage.

PS: to anyone else reading this, if you know of a google marketplace app or chrome extension or anything, really, that makes this process easier, please let me know!

UPDATE: So, while I still believe most everything I wrote here to be true, I will say that I recently did a side-by-side comparison of some of the coffee that I roasted: one cup from a pot I made in the Chemex, and one cup made with the Keurig. The Chemex coffee was unmistakably better, and the Keurig coffee tasted like ass. So apparently the Keurig method (despite its relative simplicity) does still have its faults. If I were to guess, I'd say the water is too hot, the steep time is too short, and the cups allow for too much sediment. Not undrinkable, but not great. So there's that. I maintain that the coffee is the most important variable, but apparently the Keurig is a little worse than I gave it credit for. At least I TRIED to be even-handed!

---

Yesterday, someone asked me about my Chemex coffeemaker. Whether or not I liked it, how it works, etc. In the course of this and other such conversations, I've realized how much gravity (and baseless snobbery) people put into their coffee maker, while giving little (if any) thought to the coffee they put in it, which is easily the most important part. Coffee brewing, when you get right down to it, is not that complicated: pour hot (195-205F) water over ground coffee beans. There are legitimate subtleties, of course, but by and large it's not a complicated process. So, while I like my Chemex, I hold no illusions that there's anything magical about it: it's a carafe with a thing on the top to hold a coffee filter. I am not sure the Clever coffee dripper thing was around when I bought it, but had I been aware of it, I probably would have considered something like that instead. The Chemex works fine, though, and it looks pretty. I like pretty things.

This is also why I have no snobby objections to the Keurig brewers in theory -- they are also just another method for pouring hot water over coffee grounds. (I have heard that the default Keurig water temperature is a bit too hot, but that it can be adjusted.) The real problem with the Keurig machines is that 100% of the K-cups I've tried for it taste like dirt mixed with bird droppings. Seriously, if you own one of these machines, do yourself a favor and buy some of these, and never use those shitty K-cups again. The coffee is awful, and they're bad for the environment and stuff.

So, if you find yourself angsting about what coffee maker to get, don't sweat it. A freakin drip machine does a fine job of making coffee (albeit they are prone to mineral deposits/gunk/funk that's hard to clean). If you're going to exert energy in pursuit of coffee snobbery, shift it away from the coffee maker and back towards the coffee.

Which brings me to a second common source of misplaced snobbery when it comes to coffee: roasters. Roasting vendors, that is. "Micro"/local coffee roasters have sprung up all over, lately, You'll hear a lot of people proclaim loyalty to one coffee vendor or another, heaping effusive praise on the merits of this or that roast/blend. Many (most, even) of them do a fine job, however, in my experience over the years, consistency and reliability fluctuate wildly. Lots of these vendors rise from hobbyists that had a knack for roasting and started marketing and growing like crazy. Starting a business is hard, and ensuring consistency and reliability in the face of such growth is tough. There was a time when Portland Brew's coffee was some of the best you could get, around here. Skip forward a few years of their own growth (pains and all), and .. well, not so much. I remember a specific moment when I was drinking some of their coffee I had bought and realized that, basically, it was terrible. And then I realized I had just bought it at the coffee shop where it was sitting by itself, lonesome, in a prepacked bag on a shelf -- for who knows how long. And that there was no real evidence of any recent roasting activity at the coffee shop at all. I was drinking old coffee. Oops.

But I digress. My point is not to disparage local roasters having a go at making a business out of roasting. It's to emphasize that, again, by and large, the biggest discriminator between "good" and "bad" coffee is not who's doing the roasting: it's the source of the beans and how fresh they are. My suggestion? Roast your own. It sounds daunting, but I assure you, it's not. It's trivial, even. I started doing it around a year ago, and it's been the single best (coffee-related) decision I've ever made -- and it made me realize how truly bad much of the coffee I had been drinking really was. Certainly there are roasters that do a much better job of roasting and blending than I do. But I do a job that is good enough, consistent, and reliable (and cheap!).

Someone at Barcamp in a few weeks is giving a session on roasting your own coffee with a popcorn popper, which is the method I use. I initially joked that it seemed like the entire session was in the name: "step 1: roast your own coffee with a popcorn popper. step 2: there is no step 2". But I do think it'll actually be an informative session -- so if you're interested, check it out. At the very least, I'm guessing there will be some tasty coffee.

There's a world of opportunity for snobbery (er .. connoisseurship) with regards to coffee, but don't get distracted by irrelevant details. Coffee at its core is pretty simple: quality beans + recent roasting + hot water = good coffee. Start there.

So, I've been playing a lot of minecraft lately. It's funny; when I tell people this, so far I have mostly gotten one of two reactions:

The first is a sympathetic or disinterested eyeroll and "Oh, man, I so don't have time for that."

I totally get this. I appreciate this reaction -- it was mine for a long time. I've spent years avoiding games that I knew would wreck me. But, in a moment of weakness, I recently let some coworkers convince me to give it another try and now I'm hooked and my life is ruined forever. But I digress.

The other is from parents: "Oh man, you play Minecraft?? My kids play minecraft! I don't get it."

I am not sure why Minecraft elicits this response where other games wouldn't. "I've been playing chess a lot lately." "Oh, man, you play chess?? My kid plays chess. I don't get it."

As if I'm some drooling cretin because I play a game that children also play. Here's the thing: kids like Minecraft because kids like fun, and they haven't had the last morsel of joy beaten out of them by the drudgery of everyday life yet. I know plenty of people that play Minecraft with their kids and have a blast.

So here's what I'm forced to conclude when you give me the "my KIDS play minecraft! lol I don't get it" response:

1. You hate fun.
2. You're stupid.
3. You don't love your kids and you are a bad parent.

Now if you'll excuse me I gotta go enchant a new pickaxe so I can finish the last floor of my totally sweet underwater dome base.

WARNING: SPOILERS (AND EXTREMELY LAME NERDERY) BE HERE!

So, Cait and I watched the second episode of the new Doctor Who season last night. It was good, but there's something that, yet again, bothered me. I had a whole conversation a few months ago that was spurred by a teaser trailer for the new season that contained a brief clip of Rory (?) asking "Who killed all the Daleks?" and Doctor Who responding "who do you think?"

I'll just paste what I wrote on facebook about it, originally:

doctor who is supposed to be a good guy, right? yes, he's fallible, and yes, i realize that the doctor has murdered in many incarnations in the past. and yes, the 10th doctor and the story arches were supposed to be a very sinister (and emo) trip down a dark alley where the doctor becomes a slightly vengeful maniac, but even in those cases, any overt acts of violence or murder were USUALLY hedged by either subtleties or his hand being forced. IN GENERAL, he's supposed to be a good guy and abhorrent of violence as a means to an end. even his notorious destruction of the ultimately-evil daleks has been hedged by saying that.. welllll he didn't ACTUALLY kill them, he just locked them away.

SO .. that said: in this preview i didn't like the ballsy swagger of the "who killed all the daleks" "who do you think" line in the teaser. doctor who is not supposed to be james bond. he's supposed to be a relatively moral figure that we can look up to that uses violence as an option of last resort. MAYBE there's something i missed or in the actual plot line of this next few series it won't be so overt and they're just playing it up for the teaser, but if so? ... don't. stop. that's stupid. we already had the 10th doctor little trip down sadsack asshole alley. let's not do that again so soon.

...

I guess I should really amend all the aforementioned comments and substitute "the doctor and his companion" for "the doctor", since it's an overarching reinforced point that he needs and keeps a human companion to rein in his impulses here and there. but the combined protagonist that they represent is not supposed to be a killer, and i don't like the continued implications and swagger

My friends responded: I'm willing to bet that "Who do you think?" doesn't actually answer the question of "Who killed all the daleks?" in the way that the trailer makes it seem for precisely all of the reasons that you described. They do stuff like that all the time in trailers as misdirection or suspense-building or whatever.. Turns out? Yeah, not so much. In that episode, he just killed them. And, now, in this second episode: the bad guy? Yeah. Killed. No big woop. Even Cait, who is not as uh.. passionate.. about Doctor Who as I am, turned to me and said "I thought the Doctor didn't kill people?" INDEED. I am glad to see, at least, that I am not the only one noticing and being put off by this:

The dinosaurs, of course, were not the baddies here, with the tearjerking triceratops death scene reminiscent of The Land Before Time. But in David Bradley's Solomon we had one of the most unpleasant villains in recent memory. And as funny as the episode was, the whole thing was undercut with a darkness that was almost disturbing enough to ruin everything. The line about "breaking in Nefertiti", for instance, was laced with a dark sexuality that felt completely inappropriate.

Perhaps it was intended as some justification for the Doctor's merciless decision to leave the old letch for the missiles. But that was a hugely un-Doctorish move, and I'm not sure how I feel about that, either. Could it be intended to feed into the themes revealed in the trailer for next week's western episode – with the Doctor getting emo over the question of his mercy?

I totally agree, but as I said above -- even if they are merely allowing this as a setup for some emo retrospective, I'm not happy. Because, didn't we .. already do that?

While I have been on hot chicken kick lately, my one true love is the hot wing -- preferrably, traditional buffalo. However, a recent contender for my favorite wings ever are the "extreme heat" wings at Ghot Wingz. Despite not being buffalo (they are more of a saucey sweet/hot barbecue-ish type wing), they are easily my favorite, and are hands-down the best wings I've ever had in Nashville. So good, in fact, that I have yet to even try their buffalo wings because I can't forego the extreme heat.

I had them today, actually, and it got me thinking: we can all agree that the sauce is a key factor in what makes good chicken wings. But what about the chicken itself? This is clearly a huge part of the quality of the final product. To me, Knockout Wings is a great example of this. I really wanted to like Knockout Wings. They came highly recommended. They are located conveniently right down Jefferson from my office. Service is fast and friendly. But their wings just aren't good. I wrote in my yelp review that the sauce itself is good (although my opinion even of that has gone downhill lately), but that the chicken itself just tastes.. gross. The bones are small, and the meat, clinging desperately to the bone, has that sortof dehydrated and withered look, and the taste is much the same. Ghot Wingz' chicken, conversely, is excellent. Large (but not too obscenely hormone-induced huge like you find some places), flavorful, juicy wings.

So what is the difference? I realize that in this wide world, there are myriad ways to raise, butcher, brine, and season chicken meat that will all vastly change the end result. But I find it hard to believe that all of these local hot wing places in question aren't all just buying the same Sysco bagged frozen chicken that everyone uses. But maybe I'm wrong. Does anyone know? Are there different sources for worse/better chicken? Is it possible Ghot Wingz isn't using frozen chicken? Does Sysco offer different grades of quality that you can buy? Is it all the same chicken but different methods (e.g. baking before frying versus not)?

So, I will freely admit that this dish had its genesis purely in the amusement I derived from the name: what possible dish could have a nest of more confusing terms than "hot chicken fried steak"?! I'm sure I'm not the first person to be amused by the concept, or even try it. Its construction was pretty straightforward. I took a basic southern-style chicken-fried steak recipe from Cook's Illustrated. I made it, and then I made up a traditional Nashville hot chicken style paste. Et voila.

So how was it? Uhm. Not very good! I mean, not bad. It was basically about what I expected. This may be, in part, a symptom of the fact that I am not a huge fan of chicken-fried steak to begin with. There's something about breaded beef that just doesn't work as well as chicken, or even pork. Beef stands out too much on its own, and it gets in the way of the flavor of the breading or the heat. Something about chicken and sweat-inducing heat just really works in ways that it doesn't with other meat.

I would make hot chicken fried chicken, but then you're basically back to what Bolton's makes and slaps on a stick.

And for all the northerners reading this and going "what the fuck", here's how it works: Fried chicken, you've had. "Chicken fried steak" is a process by which you take a cheap cut of beef, tenderize it rigorously and fry it "in the style of fried chicken", hence: chicken fried steak. And "chicken fried chicken", then, is a chicken breast cooked similarly: tenderized flat and fried in the manner of chicken fried steak. Simple, right?

All in all a fun experiment, but I wouldn't add this one to your classics of southern cooking anytime soon.

Posting a recipe for marinara is admittedly silly, since few things are probably as well-documented, and marinara is not exactly brain surgery. But, for the sake of documenting what I did, here it is. What good is the Internet if we can't endlessly analyze and document the most trivial of processes? Also, pictures.

1. Ingredient 1: a bunch of heirloom tomatoes from the farmer's market, peeled and (mostly) seeded.
2. I used the method for peeling and seeding where you score the tomatoes, blanche for 15-20 seconds and then chill in ice water bath. Peel them, and then put the tomatoes in a colander over a bowl (to save the precious, precious juice) and use your fingers to pierce/seed the tomatoes. Strain the seeds, saving as much of the juice and meat as you can, toss the seeds, combine with the tomatoes. Don't sweat getting every little seed, but try to get the bulk of them, as they can add bitterness and they get stuck in your teeth.
3. Ingredients 2 and 3: garlic and onions.
4. Ingredient 3: basil.
5. Sauté garlic and onions in olive oil and high heat until soft/translucent.
6. Cool/deglaze with white wine and/or water. I used some leftover sauvignon blanc, but typically I'd pick something less sweet. Add tomatoes/juice. Add water to cover as necessary.
7. Season with basil and oregano (I had no fresh oregano, so I used dried.). Oooooor, do this at the end, closer to serving time. See notes below.
8. Bring it all back to near a slow boil (I never let it get too hot because I was paranoid about burning the basil/bitterness). Simmer on low. I let this simmer for around 20 hours, covered, and then removed the cover to start boiling off water content.
9. The result after around 24 hours.

Notes:

• The heirloom tomatoes I got had the "green shoulders" or whatever the term is -- a much more fibrous/green stem area at the top. Rather than meticulously trimming it away, I just dumped the tomatoes in whole and worried about the stems after it cooked down a bit (fished out each top, trimmed away most of the meat, and tossed the stem). Tedious, but not a big deal. Worth it for the flavor of these tomatoes, in my opinion.
• Only after I got everything stewing did it occur to me that I've heard that basil can get bitter if you cook it too long. I rolled with it anyway. After around 24 hours of total cooking, I didn't notice any bitterness imparted. Possible theories: I don't notice or don't mind whatever bitterness it imparted? Maybe basil only gets bitter when cooked too hot, and not necessarily long? Maybe the whole thing is bunk. I don't know. But it seemed fine. Add the basil at the end if you're worried about this.
• It was pretty damn good. Anyone have any suggestions for improvement?

Jezebel has a decent article about the whole Daniel Tosh thing. (The aforementioned link will explain it if you have no idea what I'm talking about, but long story short: Daniel Tosh made some jokes about rape, got heckled by someone saying rape is never funny, and then made a "joke" about her getting gang-raped.)

I think the Jezebel piece is more or less spot on, but I think the entire article could have been more succinctly written as "be funny". Yes, "only make jokes about rape if they are mocking rape culture and not victims", but that's only one way to go about it, and it's just another way of saying what's important. Which is: be funny. Simply riffing on rape for shock value is not funny, unless you're a developmentally-disabled 13 year old misogynist in the making. They especially whiffed on their justification of Louis CK's joke, which basically boiled down to "well, Louis was making jokes about rape here, but he's funny, so we know he doesn't mean it."

Daniel Tosh's crime wasn't that he made a joke about rape, it was just that he wasn't funny, which is forgivable. Beating the dead horse of the bit and being hostile to a heckler? Maybe less forgivable.

"People are strange." -- Jim Morrison

Note #1: I fucking hate the Doors. But I had the above song stuck in my head all day yesterday. I have no idea if Karsten liked it or not, but it always reminded me of him.

Note #2: I hate writing about loss, and grief. I thought about just posting a bunch of photos, but that's easy, and it's lazy. I know I won't feel better until I write about it.

Note #3: The above photo is not a picture of Karsten Soltauer. But it is a portrait of him, in a way. It's a complete stranger at a party -- one of many that he was enticing to chug from a bottle of Bulleit (of course) whiskey we had brought. Lest I paint his portrait as that of a mere drunken enabler, let me reassure you that his goal was that of the instigator, for the sake of sheer absurdity and the ensuing fun. And we had a lot, that night. Fun, that is. Bourbon, too, no doubt. He had a way of enabling fun. I had brought a date along with me, that night. It didn't work out between us, but she was enamored with Karsten, and he with her. He was crushed when I told him it didn't work out, as he often was after the termination of every brief relationship during my dalliance with single-mandom. He saw things in people that other people didn't look for or care to see, and was quick to form fond opinions of people, one way or another. Sometimes I think my breakups were harder on him than they were on me.

"Were you close?" The question you get asked most when someone you know dies. The question that made me choke up when I was asked on Monday. I've never been good at answering that question. I've never been good at bucketing relationships. How close are any of us? How well do I really know any of my friends? With Karsten, it was even harder to know, for sure, or to describe to someone else. Most people I work with seemed surprised I knew him at all, or closely at any rate. Kate and Karsten both were there for me during a (relatively) darker time in my life when I needed friends most. I hadn't known him as long as many, or as intensely. But through a turbulent (for me) couple of years, we became friends, and wound up spending many a night sipping whiskey and talking long into the night. About anything -- everything: art, music, philosophy, the Meaning of It All. Karsten had a uniquely charming sort of nihilism about him that manifested, ironically, in a sort of intense curiosity. He was one of the few in this world that had not lost the art of conversation. When you spoke with him, you knew he was listening and not just waiting for his turn to talk. When he asked you a question it was because he genuinely wanted to know the answer. He listened. Whether it was about my stupid, chaotic love life, the foundations of individualist anarchist/mutualism, his art, my photography, whatever -- he listened. Lurking beneath the surface of these talks was always the question "why?" No one I know had a keener sense of the absurdity of our existence on this rock, and no one I know had more curiosity about it. He'd ask questions with a wry grin/smirk that seemed designed to elicit a response, or to put you out of your comfort zone. Sometimes I think he did it on purpose, but most of the time I think it was just because he genuinely wanted to know the answer. Probably a little of both. For an artist, he had a beautifully scientific mind. Most of the good ones do.

How close were we? I have no idea. We were close in our own weird little way -- and I think Karsten was that way with many. "Who's that weird guy with the blue soul-patch?", I'd get asked at just about every mixer. "That's Karsten," I'd reply. "He's awesome." Any further defense wasn't necessary. I don't think he'd take any offense at being called "weird". He embraced it. He was weird, and he was awesome. And if they got the chance and took the time to talk to him, they'd learn this for themselves. Many people were closer to him, and know him better than I. But we were close enough. "Close enough", in fact, was the answer I managed to choke out. Close enough.

He hated having his photo taken (resulting in many successful dodges, and more than one Johnny Cash moment), but he was one of my favorite subjects. He complained about getting his good side. If he had a bad side, I never figured out which one it was.

He was my friend, and he was a good friend -- often a better friend to me than I was to him. I'll genuinely miss spending time with him. He was a talented artist and a great man. He will be sorely missed.