corvi

1. Pizza with bamboo shoots
   Not unpleasant, but not actually an improvement over cheese pizza, which seems like the minimum standard required of pizza toppings. Much better "only one place does this" pizzas I've had:
   • cashews and green chiles (Dirty Dave's in Olympia)
   • pickles and peas (Oregano's in Victoria)
   • apples and arugula (the late and much-mourned Al Forno in Olympia)
   Recommend bamboo pizza only for radical pizza-eating pandas and really dedicated pizza completists. Pizza completists probably aren't a thing, since you could always top a pizza with other smaller pizzas with their own toppings; I think Godel had something to say about that.


2. Pecan-flavoured sunflower seeds
   Nuts, flavoured to taste like ... different nuts. They are sort of piney/woody and vanilla-y. Quite nice, except for the random pieces of shell in the bag. It's not pecan shell; I think it's something else in the Carya genus without a good English translation.


3. Baobab juice
   Tastes like watermelon juice with tamarind in it. Nice flavour, but hard to drink an entire cup, it gets kind of chalky


4. Cactus burritos
   Always eat cactus burrito. Especially at Javier's in Portland.


5. the C U B E
   I recently attended a conference where the meal choices were:
   • Pan Roasted Steelhead (wild mushroom pesto, topped with shaved fennel and artichoke salad, creamy potato leek cassoulet).
   • Blackened Flank Steak (with a pan jus reduction, sauteed crimini mushrooms, shredded potato, green been and roasted corn cake)
   • Vegetarian option
   "Vegetarian option" turned out to be a cube made of about two dozen layers of thinly sliced pumpkin, provolone cheese, and spinach. Topped with mushroom sauce. I ... don't even know what to call that, and I guess neither did they.
   I like pumpkin. And cubes. I'm not sure this dish will ever again appear on this planet, and I was the only one who ordered it, so my recommendation or lack thereof is kind of moot. Wish I'd taken a photo.


6. Groundcherries
   I'm guessing this is for historical reasons, like maybe Canada, unlike the US, has never embargoed Colombia, so there's a history of importing Colombia fruit? Groundcherries are available in every grocery store in Victoria, even on lowest common denominator things like premade fruit trays. People eat them a lot. It's one of those things that makes you feel like you've somehow moved to a parallel reality; everyone treats as Totally Normal And Not At All Interesting a fruit you've never seen before.
   I do recommend groundcherries, for all the good it does. Either you can't buy them where you live, or I just said the equivalent of "hey, have you ever heard of "apples"? Maybe you should eat one."

Homework question: is there a particular pizza topping unique to your local pizza parlour?

Apparently my Brilliant Image Hosting Idea wasn't, and my last post lacked this image of wonderfully ... precise ... sidewalk cleaning I saw in Olympia, WA, or at least failed to make the image visible to anyone who wasn't me.




Today I planned to experiment with stone carving. So I got a nice square rock and drew trees on it in sharpie, and then scribed along the lines, which leaves notches in the stone you use to start the chisels. But I really like the jagged graffiti energy it has just like this - ink and scribing, and haven't get got up the nerve to take chisels to it yet.



Regrettably, sharpie-and-scribing-on-stone is not yet a recognized art medium.

Just in case you were ever planning on joining that one German fencing society whose fencing mask has gaps over the cheeks so that you can acquire The Most Dashing Scar, I have found a much cheaper way to acquire The Most Dashing Scar: removing a disgruntled feral cat from the attic.

I am so dashing right now. You wouldn't believe it.

"Dashing" smells a lot like bactine, for some reason.

A terrible good terrible thing about today:

As part of a joke gone horribly wrong, I ended up in a pizza-eating contest today. I won't name the other participants so I can blackmail them laterto spare their dignity. It was a new experience. Yay for new experiences! I don't need to have this one again. Ever. Ow. Didn't even win.

A nice thingTwo nice things about today:

juli and I were at a carniceria when a song came over the intercom, and we turned to eachother and said, "Are they playing ... Flogging Molly? At the carniceria?" They weren't; it was the Spanish folk metal band Mägo de Oz, playing Fiesta Pagana, and it was excellent indeed.

juli and I bought some fresh-made tofu, and she fried it up with hot peppers and green prickly ash oil (a thing I did not know existed before a month ago) and it was even more excellent. Perhaps someday my tongue will stop tingling.

Recently hiked Ape Cave, a lava tube formed during a fluid basalt eruption about two thousand years ago. The outside layer of lava cooled quickly, but the interior of the flow was insulated enough to stay molten and flow out from under the cooled section, leaving an empty tube a couple kilometers long, full of nifty cave slime and weird waterfalls made of solid rock that you somehow have to climb up or down. It is very dark under several meters of rock. The walls are uneven and glassy, and the shadows cast by your headlamps sink unevenly into the glass and take on three dimensions.

Not much to photograph, except the two places where cave-ins have made holes in the roof, all a-green and ferny.

 I recently made this three-layer index-card papercut:

( Largeish image )
It is a cut sheet of black paper, on top of a sheet of white paper. The white paper has a few holes in it to let the bottom paper, which is red, show through in a couple of places. The holes in the white paper have to line up exactly with the holes in the black paper, so that the red is outlined by black.

It was ridiculously difficult to get the holes in the white sheet in the correct places. I would carefully  mark and cut them, and then three quarters of them would align and the last few would be off in the middle of nowhere. Took me four tries, and a special rush delivery of swears from the manufacturer. And it's still not perfect, merely good enough.

There is actually a word for the process of lining up the parts of a layered image: registration. (Used mostly in printmaking and photography.) I like that. The existence of that word says: you are not alone, others have done this and burned through truckloads of swears, others will do it after you. This is surprisingly comforting and inspiring. Jargon as the mark of shared experiences.

The problem with deciding to write one post a day is that you get behind, and then you are obnoxious and spammy. This is a repost of something I wrote on the question and answer site Quora, where I enjoy posting serious answers to silly questions. Any rumors that I am reposting this just to annoy juli cannot be proven.

Question: How would the Bulbasaur Pokemon work?

Answer: ( video game biology )

 
For this year's Midwinter Festival of Unbridled Consumerism, juli  got me a khadag! Actually, five khadags.

Khadags, which are a blue Mongolian version of the white Tibetan prayer scarf (khata), are one of my favorite things about Mongolia. You can't go anywhere without seeing one tied to a signpost or truck tailgate or doorframe. They cost about ten cents. Actual religious sites of any type (not just buddhist) frequently have so many khadags that you can't quite tell what is under them, they're just fluttering mounds of blue and wind. 

Anything you might need luck with? Tie a khadag to it!
Did a good thing happen and you would like it to happen again? Tie a khadag to it!
Did a bad thing happen and you would definitely not like it to happen again? Tie a khadag to it!

They're a beautiful color, and they are everywhere. All birds nests in Mongolia contain some blue thread, including one massive raven nest of bleached bone and blue silk we saw. Students tie them to school fences to wish for luck in exams. I loved the sense of  peering into the depths of time, of seeing reinforced hems, all that remained of old silk khadags worn by the wind, next to tattered cotton and new rayon ones. I liked the evidence that says: this place was important to someone once, for at least long enough to knot a  scarf around a tree.

juli  and I somehow returned from Mongolia without any khadags, and as omnipresent as they are inside the country, it proved quite impossible to get them outside it. Until now, when juli again used her amazing find-anything-on-the-internet skills to track some down. Hooray for blue-haired cyberpunk girlfriend! Hooray for khadags! Hooray for giftmas!

 
The second-last of the tiny papercutting suggestions on 3x5 cards. A forest, as suggested by twoeleven Forests are hard, I eventually gave up and cheated by cutting two 3x5 cards worth of forest, and stacking them with some tracing paper. It is, of course, a douglas fir forest. I didn't spend years analyzing data on douglas fir branching patterns for nothing! Woo!