After going on a cooking spree this weekend, I had one overripe banana left which isn’t really enough to do much. But the from-scratch macaroni and cheese casserole I made gave me an idea that actually turned out pretty darned good. After mentioning it to Kim Dennig, she suggested I write it up on here. So, here we go. Please try it and check measurements for me, as I was kind of just messing around and so these are more or less approximate.
BANANA CUSTARD
Ingredients: 2½ tsbp butter, 1 overripe banana, 2 tbsp sugar, 2 tsp vanilla extract, 1 tsp cinnamon, 2½ c. milk, 2+ tbsp flour, 1 egg.
Preperation time: 2 minutes
Cook time: 10-15 minutes
Melt butter over low heat. Mash banana well and whip into the butter until almost all lumps are gone. Mix in sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon. Slowly add in milk making sure it completely mixes in. Sprinkle in one tablespoon of flour and increase heat. Sprinkle in another tablspoon of flour, stirring constantly. Scramble one egg and mix in. Reduce heat slightly and continue stirring until thick, adding more flour if necessary. It should have the consistency of sausage gravy when ready. Let cool in refrigerator, and garnish with vanilla wafers or flakes of chocolate before serving.
Vice-president Joe Biden wants to give Amtrak $1.3B to “improve” Amtrak’s services and infrastructure. I’m not sure why a company that hasn’t been adding service, rather cutting service in many places, deserves this funding.
What we need to do is kill Amtrak off now, and start over from scratch with a brand new company, bringing over officials from countries that actually have good rail systems, like France, Germany, and Spain. 1.5 billion will maybe buy a few hundred miles of track which will not improve service by much. Or it could buy some new passenger cars, which at the moment would be best given that trains only pass through cities once per day. Why do people fly? Because flights leave at all hours of the day to all destinations. Why do people drive? Because they can go directly to their destination. Why do people take Amtrak? Because they have way too much time and money to waste, or don’t mind waiting literally days to reach destinations. At the very least, a train should take as long as in car, but it shouldn’t take double or more (as in the case of Atlanta to New Orleans).
My proposal would be to start with a new train company featuring no former members of Amtrak’s upper management. Then, instead of its top priority being to provide initial passenger service, the first five or ten years should be devoted exclusively to creating new public rail lines for exclusive passenger use. All of these would be built at current high speed standards for top speeds of 240 mph. Imagine if we had a high speed train following the I-95 route. One could conceivably go from Miami to Augusta (New York) in just over six hours. Given airports and their securities and baggage collection, even for a nearly 1500 mi trip, a train isn’t that bad of an option. This, of course, is to not even begin to think about the benefits to the economy if we inject the roughly $2-3T over 30 years it would probably cost to realize such a project. But the time to invest in such projects is now, not 30 years from now when we realize we might need it. And Amtrak is not the company that needs to do it.
So my violently virulent stomach bug has taught me something new. The doctors put me on a BRAT diet and then told me to begin introducing chicken once things stablized. Thing is we’re out of butane so there’s no stove to use.
Don’t ask me how I came up with it, but it works wonderfully for a quickly meal that’s far cheaper and much better tasting than you’d buy in a store (can probably make it for 4 for about 2-3€ depending on the amount of chicken you want). I’ve tried a few variations but my favorite so far is a lemon pepper one. Those of you who know me know I either make food with as few ingredients as possible, or as many, but rarely in between. This is one of the few ingredients recipes. If you’ve got these ingredients try it for a midday or late night snack and let me know what you think.
LEMON PEPPER CHICKEN AND RICE
Ingredients: uncooked rice, raw chicken, lemon juice, pepper, water, salt.
Preperation time: 3 minutes
Cook time: 15 minutes
Take a bowl, and pour in some rice. Cut chicken into small (about die-sized) pieces. Place on top of the rice.* Sprinkle a good bit of pepper on top. Pour lemon juice and water into the bowl at roughly the proportion you’d use for lemonade. It should cover the rice and chicken completely with more to spare (put in more if you want a soup). Now put in the microwave for 10 minutes. Most of the chicken should be completely cooked by now. With a spoon, stir everything together, and microwave for another 5 minutes. Take out and enjoy.
* Food contamination is not really an issue here, since everything is going to be nuked for a good while.
There are plenty of discussions about the proper design of many, less common, diacritics on the internet. Enough that most people are generally able to get very good authentic, if extremely conservative, diacritics for languages that don’t use the ubiquitous acute, grave, tilde, circumflex, and diæresis.
But, this means there’s simply not as much discussion on the design of these basic diacritics. The most the average designer will find is a discussion on the different angles used in acutes and graves, mainly vis-à-vis Polish. With the diæresis, there is always the question of whether to match the height of the dots with the tittle of the i.
Since I study Spanish, the design of the tilde has interested me more than these diacritics, and more over, how other people design it.
In the sample at right, taken from page 390 the Obras Completas of Garcilaso de la Vega using the font that used at the time for every single book I’ve seen, the shape of the tilde is very distinctly rising (there also are no tittles, neither on the i nor the j, but that’s for another discussion). While for today’s use this might be a little bit too angled, it shows that the basic form is ondulating and rising from left to right:
If we look at handwriting of Spaniards, we find that actually very few people write with the squiggly shape that is always found in fonts. Most write it as a macron: sen̄or instead of señor. An unscientific sampling of my friends shows that it is either perfectly flat or slightly rising, in large part due to influence from the acute.
Spanish isn’t the only language that uses the tilde so it’s not wise to base it’s design as a macron or a hybrid of a macron and acute (unless you're Autopista. But we can take these design elements into consideration.
Let’s start by looking at a font whose tilde is essentially a macron with a twigs attached, Hoefler Text. There can be no doubt that this tilde rises from left to right, it never falls! Hoefler has a very good tilde indeed. This is not to say that ya can’t have it with an ondulating shape, but to demonstrate one extreme of the design options (which in this case, it is perfectly acceptable to be on this end.
The other extreme (and this time not acceptable) is found in Baskerville Old Face. Thanks to both its very tiny knobs and a very powerful downswoop, this tilde is looks almost like a grave. Even from a short distance the knobs disappear, leaving us with only the downstroke. 
Notice the difference in the weight-adjusted version.
Most fonts fall into a range somewhere between these two examples, so the question becomes at which point does the tilde have too much of a downward swoop. While there is no perfect guidance, as weight, angles, and the letter forms themselves can have great influence, hopefully by looking at a few more examples we can see what to aspire to and what to avoid.
While Big Caslon has high stroke contrast, it still has a successfull tilde. It solution? It places the limits of the downward swoop well in between the limits of the knobs. The more the contrast a font has, the longer these knobs will have to be to keep the effect.
Garamond Pro keeps a relatively flat swoop, with pronounced knobs. Again, the limits of the swoop is well within the limits of the knobs.
This idea of limits is not well followed in FF Mt, which though it has thick knobs, has a swoop that is a bit too powerful (strong emphasis on bit. It’s not terrible, just not a model to follow).
Let’s now compare four staples of the font community. Times, Times New Roman, Helvetica, and Arial.
One of the most visible areas in which Times and Times New Roman differ is in the shape of their diacritics (Times using rounded graves and acutes with normal angles, and New Roman using sharp edged graves and acutes with Polish angles). Neither has an outstanding tilde, but the Times is less pronounced and flatter, making it preferable to New Roman. For the Times’ tilde, the minima have the same Y value. However, the maxima do not, and the knob sits slightly higher than the top of beginning of the swoop. New Roman, in addition to having far more stroke contrast, places its maxima at the same Y-value, but pushes its swoop below the knob on the way down, thus falling more than it rises, which with its stroke contrast makes it a poor example to follow. Since Times has a generally flatter shape, it is perhaps acceptable, though again, not the best model for study.
Between Arial and Helvetica, there is less pronounced of a difference. As one would assume, the better example is Helvetica, with a smaller swoop. And personally, I feel Arial’s curves are a bit too sharp for a tilde, but that’s a style choice.
Lastly, I leave y’all, the readers, with Courier and Courier New. Which is a well-drawn tilde and which is not?
This is what a Spanish license looks like. It’s cheap as hell (notice my photo is stapled on) and certainly I expected better after all the freaking work I went through to get it. More on that later which should hopefully help out (if anyone out there is reading this) people looking to get a scooter license here in Spain.
As some of those of y’all who study Spanish are already aware of, Spaniards are somewhat-famous for their signatures. In the United States, a legally binding signature, such as for signing deeds and titles, must be the signer’s full name. I first encountered this little tidbit of information when I was doing some interpreting work for a lawyer back home in Auburn. A man’s father who could barely write was signing over land to his son. While blind people are able to simply mark X, he was not so enabled by legal standards, and so we had to patiently wait for him to copy line by line, curve by curve, every letter of his name. If you’ve ever sent a letter off to a country that doesn’t use the Latin alphabet, you’ll understand just how slow this process can be.
I mention this because, as you might now guess, in Spain such full name signatures are not required at all, and quite rather uncommon. Some have deceptively simple signatures, of a mere two or three strokes. Others have elaborately drawn names that would remind some more of Arabic calligraphic practices (perhaps there is a connection given Spain’s Arabic links). Still others sign somewhat normally like we do, except that afterwards they add several strokes, circles, crosses, etc., on top of the signature. To the typical American, this looks like they’re scratching out their signature after signing (in fact, I’ve heard stories of Spaniards going abroad and having their signature refused at point-of-sale because they thought they were simply scratching out a signature trying to void it, when in reality it is their signature). To wit, instead of getting a “sign on the line” type deal when you have to sign for anything, you either get a large open space, or a box roughly 2x3 or even 1x1.
Since it’s hard to change your signature between issuance of a passport or driver’s license (because your old signature is still on the existing one), I decided to take advantage of the fact I was being issued a Spanish identity card to design a new signature apt for use here in Spain. Although it doesn’t look like it, I swear it is actually based upon my name. The general consensus here among Spaniards is that it’s a nice, very formal signature, one that, to quote one person “shows that I really mean whatever I sign”.
So without further adieu, here’s what it looks like. I doubt you can come up with a new description for it, I’ve everything from the obvious “It looks like a ship or a mountain” to some more complex and subtle descriptions. But yeah, upon returning to the US, I’ll just have to pull out my Spanish ID to show that’s really how I sign until I get my new driver’s license come December.
Although a lot of of people in my programme only hang out with other English-speakers (which, I admit, I do at times), those in my school have actually been someone envious of my time with the water polo team here in Pozuelo de Alarcón where I live.
In a lot of ways, not much has changed from Auburn. We only practice three days a week instead of four, but Thursdays and Fridays we go out to a bar and drink cervezas and tapas. We have a coach who wasn’t actually at practice the first few days because he had injured his hand, but after that it’s been nice to have an actual coach every day.
At the bar, only those who are old enough to drink head out. Here the drinking age is only eighteen, but we have a few players who are still under the age (over all the ages are from sixteen to forty-somethings). Here is where some of my best time is spent here in Spain. The bar is nice, yes, but it’s really more of the fact that I’m there with Spaniards who know some English but not enough to old conversations. At work, every teacher I work with can speak fluent — more or less — English. This unfortunately does not lead to much practicing of Spanish and certainly not anything in a very colloquial sense and the environment really isn’t distinctly Spanish. Spanish elementary schools are indeed a little bit different but not extremely notably so, although the few differences the do exist are worthy of another post. At the bar though, I’m fully immersed in Spanish culture. A Spanish bar is fundamentally different than an American one, and being there at night, where we all order a round of beers (the cervezas) and get food to each with them for free (the tapas) and subsequently discuss any topic known to mankind, I don’t feel like an outsider. Obviously, there is the occasional joke about the U.S.A. or Alabama, but no more than any o the Spaniards joke amongst themselves about the Andalusians (Spanish Southerners) or the Catalonians (Spanish Yankees). Most importantly, I’m learning every day Spanish. Not the things I need to read Cervantes which I already know, but words that actually make me sound more native.
Beyond all this though, I’ve found a team that is a perfect match for me. I’ve already made great friends with several of the members, and hang out with them outside of practice as well. The team cohesion here is something that I’ve never seen before in a water polo team, at least not in any team that I’ve seen in the Southeast.
I’m now at my hostel here in Dublin. The flight to Newark from Atlanta was great, very quick (we arrived thirty minutes ahead of time) and all-around uneventful. However, coming out of Newark, my flight was delayed on the ground by almost two hours. I finally got to Ireland around 8:30 WET, whereas I was supposed to get here at 6:55 WET.
The passport stamp for Ireland is huge. First they stamp on a visa, and write in by hand the last day you’re allowed to stay (for me, it’s this Saturday). Then they stamp you again with the standard arrival stamp that everyone else gives you. Since it covers so much space in my passports, I can’t complain too much that I didn’t get a stamp for leaving the USA.
Oh yeah, Irish breakfasts are quite good, by the way (even the black and white pudding).
On my new computer came the new iApps, that is, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes and GarageBand. I never really use the latter to begin with so I won’t really talk about it.
iPhoto is really quite nice. One of my biggest annoyances with the old one was that I enjoyed organising things by rolls, but displaying my entire library was just too big of a memory hog. So I kept all of them collapsed which resulted in rather ugly looking rows, each row a different album. It was also a space waster. The so-called events (which to me are no different than rolls) are displayed much better, and the scrubbing is very nice. Other than that there’s no real huge change to iPhoto.
iDVD has some new themes and a slightly updated interface but that’s about it. At least, nothing hugely different that I’ve noticed.
iMovie is supposed to be the big update. There’s a lot about it that is really quite nice. For editing this past weekend’s tournament, it was great. Made it very quick. However, I have some serious issues that I doubt Apple wants to resolve. iMovie HD had no trouble handling 720p video, yet the new one it’s rather questionable. There is also no easy route to iDVD. In the old version of iMovie, you attached chapter marks and then exported it to iDVD. The same process requires you to now “Share to Media Browser”, which then took all of my 720p video and downconverted to a 540p video, that’s a 43.75% drop in pixel count, not to mention quality loss from the compression out of Motion-JPEG to H.264. But remember, DVDs use MPEG-2, not H.264. So once iMovie has the H.264 video, it then converts it again, dropping it to 480p and anamorphic at that. This wouldn’t be such a huge problem except that the MPEG-2 conversion takes a Long Time. My computer is a brand new 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Due with 2 GB of RAM. Each of the H.264 conversions took roughly as long to convert as it took to play them, and then MPEG-2 conversion took about twice the playtime. Why not just go ahead and convert to MPEG-2, or let me go straight from iMovie to iDVD? The lack of a precise audio syncing system and a traditional timeline, as well as no video filters and minimal titles and transitions irked me. The quick scrub, like in iPhoto, is quite nice and really helped speed up editing.
I just hope that Apple drops the price big time in Final Cut Express, or that they keep the old iMovie up to date. Although the new iMovie has a lot of improvements, the old one is still better for general purpose things. I know Apple says most people don’t like burning to DVD or doing in depth edits that the old one was better for, but I can say this much at least. In my lab, very few people would benefit from the new iMovie.
Just because it’s so well written and I think it’s hilarious.
Baby CD effigy
Hijack Elmo entropy
Curious SUV
www dot xyz
Now I know my Baby Cs
Next time won’t you sing with me?
Source: Wendy Nather, Friends of Elizabeth Zwicky mailing list (Quoted in Language Log by Arnold Zwicky)
