Calzone!

If you haven't checked out the blog  BrokeAss Gourmet, you really really need to. I use the site on a semi-daily basis for recipes or just ideas. They have this amazing pizza dough recipe that you can use a million ways. 

Thus far I've made pizza, bagels and donuts with it, and I intend to use it to make an approximation of these puff pastries that my mother used to make. 

But by far the best use I've put this stuff to is the calzone. I did not take a picture of my beautiful and delicious calzone, so I have stuck up the first calzone that turned up in a google image search. This one appears to be pepperoni. I'm sure it's lovely. 

Mine was spinach and mushroom. I had too much spinach left over from another thing I made, and so I shredded it with a knife and piled it with some chopped crimini mushrooms on one half of a disk of pizza dough. I threw in some minced garlic and some chopped onions and some basil (left over from making pesto), then piled on mozzarella and parmesan cheese. I was afraid that I had piled it too high and the dough wouldn't stretch enough to close it up, but it did. I brushed on some olive oil and sprinkled some sea salt and ten minutes later I had a really really good calzone. The bread cooked faster than I thought it would and I was afraid the insides would be under done, but it was perfect. 

The article at BrokeAss suggests you always have a ball of this super easy pizza dough kicking around your fridge, and I am inclined to agree. Especially since all it takes is some dough and some cheese to turn a bunch of leftovers into something elegant and delicious.

Damned Biological Accuracy

You don't have to know me very well to know that I love dinosaurs. I loved Land Before Time, I loved Jurassic Park, I didn't love Dinosaurs, but c'mon. It was terrible. I still thought it was pretty though.

One of my favorite little doodles is a raptor guy I made up after I had a nightmare (well anxiety dream, not so much a nightmare) about being stranded in the desert outside Las Vegas and being chased by raptors. In my dream they were extinct everywhere except right outside Las Vegas and when I woke up I wasn't sure if they still existed or not. It was a unsettling at the time. Anyway, this guy is the result.

Try as I might, for some reason I'm having formatting issues with him and his colors will not come out right. But this is the basic guy. Body of a turkey, hooked claw, lots of fangs. Adorable mostly. Here's his film debut...





This piece was my first experiment with soudn effects in my intro to 2D animation class. I like the stick figure version of this guy. So, everything was great. All was well with the world. Until I saw this episode of Nova. The episode surrounds the discovery of the four winged dinosaur.


Now the awesome thing about this guy is he pretty much proves (though there are still doubters, see the episode) that birds descended from dinosaurs. The awesome(est) thing about this is that it indicates that dinosaurs, at least of the carnivorous two legged variety, had feathers. Which is really cool. The downside is that it means every portrayal of raptors in the media from Jurassic Park on down to my little guy, is wrong. They should have feathers. Which means I need to do a total character redesign. Well, not total. The shape is the same, but instead of buttery leather skin or rough scales, he needs downy mostly useless chicken feathers.

So now I am toying with ways to convey this killer flamingo but still retain a little of that reptilian dignity. It's pretty hard.

But I'm working on it.

Politics; Old and New

I just watched 1776 a few days ago. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is a musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is really good, despite the fact that most of the musical numbers are tedious (the only really good ones are the one about how John Adams is obnoxious and disliked, and the first one between John and Abigail Adams). 

What I like about it is the way that it portrays the characters who made up the Continental Congress. Names we've heard of and sometimes know anecdotes about but that mostly remain shrouded in a dull textbook fog. I think (hope) everybody knows that Benjamin Franklin was a hell of a character, but what does anybody know about John Hancock except that he had a large signature? And the thing seems to be sunnily patriotic, just as you'd expect. 

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, is portrayed as a distraught lover pining for his bride. And while that's entirely believable, you can't help but think of Sally Hemmings, the slave with whom Jefferson had six children.

But the film gets to that. Because of course it would be impossible to skirt around the issue of slavery in a discussion of the founding of our nation. The turning point of the film comes when the issue is forced by the southern representatives. Jefferson included a passage in the Declaration that declared that slavery was a violation of the inalienable rights of man. Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson (perpetually tortured by the fact that he owned slaves while believing that it was a reprehensible practice that should be outlawed) were staunch abolitionists, but were forced to concede on the issue of slavery because otherwise the South would never have agreed to the revolution.

As the film ends you are infused with a patriotic pride at the high ideals of our founding fathers, and the simultaneous awareness that the issue of slavery will come to a head only a few decades later and split the country in a bloody civil war. And you sort of wish that those high ideals could have been a little higher, that we hadn't made that first concession, especially in the name of freedom.

Over the past couple weeks more and more evidence has been coming to light about the U.S. use of torture on Guantanamo Bay detainees. Remember months ago when it there was a debate about whether or not waterboarding even "counted" as torture? Then debates about whether or not torture could be "legal," Geneva Conventions not withstanding.

Most recently has been the position (usually voiced by somebody on Fox News in a spooky voice) that, "If Your Family was In Danger and you had A Scary Forgiener with Information about the next 9/11 wouldn't you be morally obliged to torture that guy?" The answer is no. Torture, like slavery, is wrong. Period. No matter what the extenuating circumstances. Plus now we have people testifying that first of all torture doesn't really work, that conventional non-illegal interrogation techniques work a hell of a lot faster, and most recently, that people were being tortured (after it had become clear that there was no link between Iraq and 9/11) for information that would tie al Qaeda to Iraq, rather than (as has been claimed) for information about other imminent terrorist attacks. And our Brave New White House, the one that has inspired so much hope and optimism, seems to be adopting the stance that we just shouldn't think about it. "Look to the future," not the skeletons in our national closet, even the ones so fresh they're still kicking.

Simultaneously, there are stories about mistreatment of our soldiers in Iraq by the companies that the government is paying to take care of them. Rachel Maddow has reported two stories recently that I found deeply disturbing. One was about servicemen being electrocuted by their tap water, because of some incredibly shoddy electrical work. The other was about servicemen (in the desert mind you) not being rationed enough water. The water they had was over treated with chemicals and made them nauseous. When they drank local water they got dysentery, and when they appealed to their superiors they were instructed to get it from the supplier, and were forced to steal it.

This is outrageous and disgusting on so many levels. I'm sick of it. And I know lots of people are sick of it. But we can't just shut our eyes and hope this goes away. We have to own this, as a nation. This war, the treatment of our prisoners, the treatment of our own soldiers, is a new national scar. We can ignore this, we can pretend that it didn't happen, but we'll be betraying the core principles on which this nation was founded. We're still struggling with the wounds left by the civil war, the repercussions of that very first betrayal of principle, before the ink was even dry. 

We're supposed to be better than this. We're supposed to be a shining beacon of truth and justice and freedom. We screwed that up, and if we're ever want to represent that again (even just to ourselves) instead of towering hypocrisy, we have to admit our own fallibility,  and we have to do what we can to make sure this never happens again.

I don't know yet quite what this means for me personally. I expressed myself through my ballot last November, and I'm doing it again now. I could buy a bumper sticker, or protest on street corners in my safe and liberal city and be reasonably sure that most everyone who saw me would agree with me and that those that didn't would ignore me, just like I do when I see protestors or bumper stickers. The only thing else I can think of is to donate money, because that's what talks. But I don't have any. So I don't know what else to do besides point these things out. There are lots of other people, more articulate and with louder voices, but my hope is that every voice helps. That if we keep shouting, "We are here! We are here! We are here!" that something will get through. 

Shoes and Ships and Ceiling Wax

I've been putting off an update for about a week. I wanted to write about my birthday, which was two weeks ago, but in retrospect I don't think there's a whole lot there to tell after all.

I went home to visit my family, and let me tell you, the drive down the Columbia Gorge is gorgeous. No pun intended. It beats the old drive from Seattle across Washington hands down. Of course every single time I drive that way (which I have many times since I was a child, but not recently enough to appreciate it) I am reminded that I have still never been to the Maryhill Museum. My mother is a huge Pacific Northwest history buff and consequently so am I, but we've never been. The museum was founded by Sam Hill, as in "what in the!" He had this crazy idea that the Queen was going to come sailing up the Columbia and he put together this elaborate museum in, what was then and is still, the middle of nowhere. That's the abridged version of the story of this guy. There's also a (non working) full scale replica of Stonehenge for some reason.

So on the plus side, my drive is exactly the same length (about six hours) and much more pleasant. On the down side...Oregon is much much stricter about enforcing traffic laws that Washington. It may be that the drive across Washington sucks, so people are more easily forgivin their agregious speeding. The point is that I go pulled over on the way down. There wasn't much I could say, I had been agregiously speeding, so I just handed over my liscense and registration and all that and was polite because cops get too much shit for doing their jobs already. But since I was nice, have a clean record, and it was the day before my birthday I got off with a warning! Hurrah! It surprised me when he wished me Happy Birthday too. I mean, I knew he was looking up all my records back there but it hadn't occured to me that he'd figure that out for some reason. Go figure.

In my hometown it was Giant Yard Sale Weekend and I bought a blender that turned out not to work, and a waffle iron that turned out to be pretty awesome except the waffles always stick to the top no matter how much butter I brush on and I think I'll try Pam next time. Sorry for the run-on. But I paid $4 for both of them so it wasn't too disappointing that the blender had to be thrown away. Especially since the day was miserable and everything got rained out and I was roped into helping my mom at her church's yard sale and by the end they were giving stuff away. I got a really cool (hideous/retro) slow cooker and assorted crockery and a rug, and a TV. The TV wasn't part of the yard sale, it belonged to some friends of my mother's who are working on starting a B&B and they had purchased TVs for the rooms but that was before everything was flat screen, so now they need to rebuy TVs. But this one is pretty new and in good shape, and while it's small, it's a free TV so I'm not complaining.

Speaking of TV. I saw the coolest thing ever. Ever. In the history of Everything. My roommate was watching Nova on Hulu and this episode was on the rotation.

Have you clicked on it yet? No?! The episode title, just to give you a taste, is Astrospies. It's about Spies. In. Space. (Can you hear the "Piiiiiigs iiiiiiin Spaaaaaace" commentary?) Apparently during the height of the cold war, while the Space Program we all know and love was going on, staring all those big names from The Right Stuff, there was this whole other thing going on.

Both Russia and the U.S. were in a race to spies into manned space stations orbiting the planet armed with high tech cameras with computers! in them, if you can imagine such a thing, that would have a high enough resolution to make out the models of cars being driven around on say...top secret military bases. Also, they wanted to shoot enemy satellites out of the sky.

Now of course we all just go to Google Earth and it seems not that impressive. I mean, if you have no appreciation whatsoever for history. But this was such an amazing story I was vibrating in my seat watching it. Also, one thing that was awesome and sad was that one of the Astro Spies in training was/would have been the first African American Astronaut (which has a ring to it) but he was killed in a practice flight which just sucks beyond the telling of it. All of this stuff has just recently become declassified, and it would make a hell of a movie for Tom Hanks to Co-Star in.

And to end on a completely unrelated note, I have opened a store on Etsy! I'm on there as seespotbitejane which is an old name that only makes sense to a friend of mine (well, her and the owner of the racehorse...) because SoupyTwist was taken. I was late to the party I guess. But I've already put some stuff up and have ideas for more, because I like making crafty things but don't know what to do with them after they're made. I'll put up art as well, as I deem it saleable. And of course Astrospies has turned my desire to do one piece about the Atomic Bomb into a series about the Space Race and the Cold War. Because Sputnik was an adorable little satellite.

Awesome. My dog just puked on my bed. And on a treasured stuffed animal from Disneyland that she was using as a pillow at the time. So. I'm done. Have a good night.