holidays are upon us.
the salvation army bells are ring-a-linging already, which, considering the fact that record numbers of people are seeking help this season, isn't surprising.

I'm supposed to bring dessert to Thanksgiving this year. I panicked last week when I realized I hadn't baked anything in a very long time, so on Sunday I did a test run of the german blueberry torte (blaubeerkuchen) I'm planning to bring. there were many nervous breakdowns along the way, especially when I realized that the oven had gone out and the bottom of the dough was still gooey and I'd ruined the cake. (well, I put it back in the oven and it turned out just beautifully, but first I had to feel sorry for myself for 10 minutes.)
I did figure out how to make perfectly lovely breadcrumbs- necessity the mother of invention and all that... I'm never buying breadcrumbs again!
and I learned that my coffee grinder prefers not to have almonds ground in it, and that my nut chopper works most beautifully, though a small, 40 dollar food processor will probably hurt my wrists a hell of a lot less...
now I'm nervous, because I have to do it all over again tonight. at least I know what not to do (like have a couple glasses of wine while I'm baking). I made the dough last night, and did everything else I could to get ready. I'm also making chocolate chip hazelnut cookies as back-up in case I drop the cake or something stupid.
Friday, I fast. but tomorrow- I eat like pig.
yum.

ah, I love the spam some days:

dear sir
now we can offer 100pcs 512M ECCRJ memory
if you want, pls connect us.
maggie

shopping for a dress today:

smarmy saleswoman: "Shopping for anything in particular today, dear?"
crabby me: "yeah, a dress that fits me."

this week's best Google referral:
muppet brandy snifters

"The Sexiest Sentence Alive"

catchy tune of the day

from Russia, with love (or something):

I want a man like Putin

I just listened to it. I'm speechless. I may have nightmares. where's the alka-selzer?

(thanks, uberspiffy.)

do we know anyone rich?

Café du Nord is up for sale.

sigh

today on Ftrain:
"Selected responses from an online petition to Wal-Mart stores, urging them to continue selling handgun ammunition."
The best of this selection is probably, "Squirrel is tasty!"

but if that's not enough, go read some of the other things folks have written- if your stomach is strong today.

"no one likes that book."

found an interview with David Sedaris via kottke.org, who referred to this little excerpt as "Sedaris/Eggers Smackdown."

In conversation, Sedaris is rather like his writing: funny, sharp-witted, but seldom really mean. Except when the subject moves to a certain young writer whose first book's back cover featured an admiring blurb from Sedaris himself. An act for which he received little thanks. “Dave Eggers is a huge pain in the ass. A huge pain in the ass,” says Sedaris. “I went on a tour last year and he had just been on one before me, so I was visiting a lot of the same bookstores he'd been to. And I would go to stores that were actively unselling his book. Like, someone would go to the counter with the book [A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius] and the staff would say, ‘Actually, that book's not very good. No one likes that book. You should read this instead.’ Because Dave Eggers would have been in that book store the week before and yelled at the people who worked there and treated them horribly. He's a horrible person…but he's a really good writer.”

porcupines?

It's an exciting Saturday night: I'm listening to Bauhaus, having a cocktail and perusing a few of my cookbooks.

from Joy of Cooking:
Puff Paste or Pate Feuilletee
"Puff Paste recipes usually start 'Choose a bright, windy, chilly day...' We stand off unfavorable weather with an electric fan, but are careful not to train it on the work surface. If you ask, 'What does a commercial bakery do about puff paste and the weather?' -the answer is: they use a highly emulsified, very impervious margarine. To become an amateur champion, keep in mind first and foremost that this most delicate and challenging of pastries must be made the way porcupines make love- that is, very, very carefully. Then shut off the telephone for an hour or two, cut yourself some paper patterns as shown on page 594 and set to work."

in the Mennonite Community Cookbook there's a recipe for "Best Ever Pickles," which calls for "300 cucumbers, 2 inches long"; a recipe for Brine for Cold Pickle called "Busy Sister"; also a recipe for Apple Butter, in which it is suggested that one use a large 30 to 40 gallon copper kettle.
There's also a recipe for "Porcupine Balls." There are no porcupines called for in the recipe, thank god.

Fields of Greens (recipes from Greens Restaurant) provides much more inspirational, though far less entertaining, reading.

for now I think I'll order some Chinese food.

Slayage.tv: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies

heute morgen zum frühstück gab's brötchen mit nutella.
my inner kid is really pleased.

somehow, I currently own 4 (four) umbrellas.
and somehow, I've managed to leave them all at work.
this pretty much guarantees that it'll be raining bathtubs tomorrow morning.

Maureen Dowd:
Meanwhile: Transparent blouses in a Saudi mall

Eli's sister Jo went to the protest in Florence on Sunday.

from The Opposite of Sex and the City,
by Paul Ford; published in The Morning News.

"Vows, which covers the marriages of wealthy people with hyphenated names, is great entertainment. I try to read it as a different person every Sunday. Sometimes I'm a 15-year-old aspiring starlet in Florida, wishing my life was as glamorous as the young couples described, with their careers in publishing (her) and finance (him), or I'm a fundamentalist Muslim condemning the godless capitalist Jews and their decorated whore-brides, or a radical animal rights activist, lamenting the likelihood of slaughtered animals at the after-dinner meal, planning to arrive and throw fake blood on the bride. But it's most fun to read as an anarcho-syndicalist with Marxist tendencies, because the Times makes it so easy:

These two people, Terence Trevor-Mills and Lauren Grape-Expury, the ignorant, self-righteous recipients of a false system of wage exploitation, will be united in April during a massive wedding spectacle funded by the profits stolen from the proletariat employed by their capitalist fathers. The union, which will culminate in the corporate-and-state-supported subjugation and sexual slavery of Ms. Grape-Expury to Mr. Trevor-Mills, will be sanctioned by a paid-for church father despite the thieving hypocrisy of the celebrants, and will be attended only by other ruling capitalists, who will be served by even more proletariat, each at chafe under the rule of their masters. The wedding will be followed by champagne, and then by revolution, as the workers arise and take what is rightfully theirs, including the beaded Mischka wedding gown and the heaped platters of canvasback duck."

last night there were several lessons learned on Valencia Street.
but the one that stays with me is: "save string."

and it's raining.

yesterday, at 7:27 am, I dropped my #@*%! cell phone on the bart platform and, together with everyone else standing there, watched it skitter away from me and finally stop less than a foot away from the edge of the platform.

fifteen minutes later, walking across Justin Herman Plaza, about 200 pigeons flew past me at about 50 miles an hour, right at head level. I stood very, very still, feeling like a wimpy little kid. I got clocked in the head by a pigeon once, and my faith in their ability to fly around moving objects isn't very strong.

my friend Catherine had her baby (Nathaniel) early yesterday morning. I'd been anxious for news, since she was due last week, and I called her partner's cell phone around noon- when he picked up, I could hear a baby's gentle gurgling. it was the nicest way to learn that he'd been born; he told me himself...

And then on my way to the gynecologist, I checked my messages and learned that my appointment had been rescheduled, since my doctor had to run and deliver a baby. lucky me, I get to leave work early two days in a row...

I was all set to be good tonight and curl up with a book, but got sucked into watching 1940s House instead. Usually I hate "reality tv" stuff. In this show, a family volunteers to live as though they were in war-time England. Crazy. Rations, building a shelter in the back yard, hungry kids, fines for insufficient blackout efforts, air raids, absolutely no luxury or detail from their former lives.
The best part was Ben, the 10 year old, being "fuel warden," and taking his responsibilities very seriously- scolding everyone, turning off lights while people are in the middle of things, and lecturing his mother and grandmother about how much water is allowed to be used for bathing- then making an aside to the camera about how no one takes him seriously.

gazeta.ru - Full-scale war declared on Chechnya

"Only you can save democracy"

Jon Carroll:
I am not going to tell you lies, but I am going to ask you to vote. I am going to beg you to vote. See me, down on my knees, rolling in the sand, whimpering, "Vote please vote, vote any way you want but vote oh oh oh."

A few weeks ago I got a ticket from my office to a fundraiser benefitting the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Center. It was my second time at Backflip in one week, which was kinda freaky, but this was a very different group of folks. These people had money, and those that didn't were pretty good at pretending they did.
The evening centered around a "celebrity pool toss", and I was pretty amazed by the sums people were bidding to have certain local society folks tossed into the pool. The whole evening was a yawn, but the drinks and food were free, and very good...
At one point, I was standing on the crowded balcony overlooking the action below, and watching the adorable group of lifeguards goofing off in the pool. One of them was a rather butch woman with huge shoulders and an incredibly muscular build. The woman standing next to me on the balcony suddenly said, "I almost fell over and died when they told me that was a woman."
I paused a moment, and managed a small "yep" instead of something rude.
but she continued: "I mean, I thought maybe it was a guy trying to be... cute, or weird, or something."
I decided again to keep my mouth shut. There was a pause. Oh, no. She'd decided to interpret my taciturn responses for agreement, and she continued:
"It's just not normal."
That was it. I turned to her with the sweetest, most saccharine smile I could muster, and said, practically through clenched teeth, hoping I sounded just like Glenda the Good Witch, "Oh, come on, honey. You live in San Francisco now. You don't get to say things like that any more. None of us is normal here."
There was a very long silence. She didn't turn her gaze from the pool, and I walked away.
Very sadly, that wasn't the worst of the evening. There was a most fabulous drag queen who got an egg thrown at her, and it ruined her cape. I only talked to her briefly on her way out, and her 7 foot tall self was totally shaken. "Honey, I've had a lot happen to me in this town, and I've been called a lot of nasty things, but I've never been egged. I certainly never expected something like this to happen here. I don't think I'll be back at this place for a long time." She was pissed, and ready to kick somebody's ass.
I got really drunk that night, and left in a really sour mood.
And there was no way I was going to venture out into the Castro on Halloween. My faith in people is pretty much shot these days, anyway.

Ignorance Perpetuates the Chechen War
by Masha Gessen
"That's right," I said. "I guess you weren't reading the papers seven or eight years ago." They laughed — of course not. They were 11 years old when the war in Chechnya started.

I did a little search for Masha Gessen, and found some pretty interesting stuff to read. here's a selection:

-Looking Back
"Back in Moscow, I stuff my boots and clothes in plastic bags and jump into the shower and rinse out my mouth, my eyes, my head, making myself back into a radiation-free properly chaste lesbian. And I wash my Geiger counter, and that breaks it."
-What Became of the Soviet Dissidents?
(an interesting correspondence between M. and her brother, Keith. I haven't had a chance to read it all yet.)
-Moscow Dispatch: Masha Gessen on why Russia can't cope with AIDS

There are a bunch of articles at The New Republic Online. again, I haven't had a chance to read most of them yet, but here are a few:
-Putin Himself First, 01.17.00
("Masha Gessen discovers that Boris Yeltsin isn't Y2K compliant.")
-Domino, 05.22.00, "about how Putin's Chechnya policy has pushed the Caucasus to the brink of explosion."

and she's the author of at least three books:
Half a Revolution: Contemporary Fiction by Russian Women
The Rights of Lesbians and Gay Men in the Russian Republic
Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism