Nice Site: I

A friend of mine introduced me to Last.fm last year. As if Facebook was redone by Pandora, it is a social networking site based on music.

But oh, it is so much more.

Last.fm's coolest feature is called "scrobbling." Their free plugin tracks the music you play on your computer and, if you choose, the music you play on an MP3 player that you sync with your computer. Tag or love the songs you scrobble. The data, neatly tracked and charted, matches you up with "neighbors" who have similar taste in music--a good place to find new music.

The site offers personal radio stations according to artist or song, à la Pandora.com. Look up concerts, neatly organized by region and date--and record that you're attending for extra cool points. Search artists on the site, and you'll get not only a profile, but lots come up with full tracks that you can listen to--some with free downloads of their music. Make playlists, and send messages to other members. The Last.fm brain also offers your profile free downloads of music it thinks you might like, according to what you already listen to. And yes, you get to post a profile picture.

My profile name is Teganomen. Look me up.

Colored Snow

Snow is beautiful. It also lends an amazing amount of information. Like how much precipitation actually fell. And how cold it is outside. I was walking up to a trailhead near my apartment today, and saw deer prints along the sidewalk that crossed through a housing development. Later, on that trail, I saw blood on the snow--two spots a few yards apart. I don't know if it was some animal dying or a hiker who slipped, but it made me start listing in my head the other things you find out about because of the snow.

I thought about how you can tell where dogs relieve themselves, and how many people cut across the lawn, and what streets are traveled more than others, and just how much exhaust gets pumped out along the road. And what sidewalks aren't used, and where there should be one.

Sometimes, on my way home, I see my own footprints going the other direction as I walk home. Snow makes this weird time warp. Seeing the deer prints in the snow today, it was like the snow made everything happen at once.

The other day there was a couple kissing on campus, where a year before someone was passing out chocolate and a year before that I was walking with some friends to the choir class we all had together. I thought about how it would look with the kissing couple and the hot chocolate and the three of us. A movie in my mind, where everything happens at once.

The Middle East, Rap Music, and Movies

A few weeks ago, I was reading about J. K. Rowling in Time magazine. Speaking on how global Harry Potter has become, the author reported that a teacher in Pakistan asked their students to look at the books politically. The students called Pervez Musharraf Voldemort, and labeled Benazir Bhutto as Bellatrix Lestrange. Bellatrix Lestrange is evil, which didn't fit with what the press was saying about Bhutto after her death (the photo is from the Academy of Achievement).

William Dalrymple was the exception--and solved the Lestrange-martyr mystery. In Time (Jan. 14, 2008), he writes things like: "Amnesty International accused [Bhutto's] gouvernment of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, abductions, killings, and torture."

I went to a Sundance film yesterday. Slingshot Hip Hop. It was a documentary about Palestinian rappers in occupied Israel. And after the showing--woah, five of the rappers were there. They were sitting right behind us, and went up and fielded questions and did a little free-style.

It was an interesting way to look at the conflict--how rappers from the different groups can't all get together for a concert because visas to leave the occupied territory are so hard to come by--and because the issue and honoring of visas is so arbitrary. Where some of them live, it takes eight hours to travel fourteen miles, because of all the checkpoints set up.

That surprised me. They can't move around. They don't have mail and electricity gets cut off. They aren't free. The rappers more than once in the film called rap their reason to live.

I think, though, an equally sympathetic story could have been told from the Israeli side. During the Q&A, someone asked what they could do to help the occupied Palestinian cause, and one of the rappers essentially said, "don't support Israel." Both sides of the conflict are unyielding--it is all black and white, so no one can win.

I saw Juno this weekend. It was the best movie I've seen in a long time. I liked it even better than the fancy Sundance flick. Fox Searchlight owns the image.

Poetry About Cannibalism

French lit assignment: Write a poem (two verses of four lines of twelve syllables, ABAB rime scheme, etc). Topic: food.

L’anthropophagie

Le mâle d’araignée survive pas la veuve

Et un têtard (parfois) mangerait son voisin

La version animale ce n’est pas la preuve—

Le cannibalisme, c’est aussi pour l’humain.

En Nouvelle-Guinée, ils ont la pratique

L’expédition Donner, ils l’ont fait dans le froid

Quoiqu’on préfère un cœur, le cerveau, j’explique :

C’est anthropophagie—et dangereux parfois.

Figgy Pudding

I have started a couple of posts...but haven't finished any of them. Things have been busy, busy since starting the new semester. My sister got home from 18 months in Brazil over the break--and got engaged a week later. I am important enough to help with the wedding plans--which, along with school, has been taking precedent over blogging. I wanted to write a post about my winter break creative projects. Here's one at least. Figgy pudding.

On Christmas Eve, one of my two sisters was still in Brazil, and the other was with her in-laws. So my parents and I celebrated with some extended family. I got put in charge of roast and dessert.

It was quite the roast. My dad picked it out. I used a recipe from Williams-Sonoma. It was lovely. And rare. But that's okay, because roast can be eaten rare.

As for the dessert, my first inclination was Christmas pudding. A little research, though, revealed Christmas pudding needs to be started weeks in advanced, and that half of its mass appears to consist of brandy--you have to keep feeding it brandy, like some strange holiday version of Audrey II.

So, thinking of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," and realizing I had never in fact seen a figgy pudding, I decided that would be our dessert.

I spent about four hours working on it--and that includes the modern convenience of a food processor. (Four hours sounds impressive, but really I'm slow at just about everything. So it was probably max three hours at normal-person speed.) There are a lot of figs in figgy pudding, and all of them have to be chopped up--so do the nuts and the apples, after they've been pealed and cored.

There was also lemon and orange peal to be grated, eggs to beat...I found the recipe on Wikipedia. The Joy of Cooking, that fantastic Bible of a cookbook that could stand alone for recipes and reference, didn't have a word on figgy pudding.

The result? Figgy pudding tastes kind of like a fig newton dipped in orange juice. It tastes better with ice cream.

The Year's Picks: 2007 in Photos