I have not been very much near the computer today because it was my niece's sixth birthday observed. She wanted an Olaf cake, so my mother—who has never, to my knowledge, seen any of the Frozen movies—obtained reference photos from the internet and heroically made her one, employing chocolate and vanilla cake, vanilla and orange and chocolate frosting, and two different sizes of pretzel stick. It would have stood slightly above half my niece's height if it had been capable of standing. At the end of the evening, she gleefully reported that she was taking its head home in a bag. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I got her the recent reprint of Jean Merrill's The Pushcart War (1965) because it is never too early to learn about pea-pins and collective action. My father, in furtherance of her musical education and the local sales of earplugs, got her a kazoo.
For our anniversary yesterday, Rob and I returned to the Harvard Art Museums to check out the special exhibitions we had missed in October. Of the collection on border-crossing, displacement, and belonging, I especially liked the photographs of Serena Chopra and Lili Almog, but the piece I found most haunting was Do Ho Suh's "Hub, Ground Floor, Union Wharf, 23 Wenlock Road, London N1 7SB," a saffron-gold ghost-shiver of a remembered room. It was neat to discover that I had seen several of Winslow Homer's engravings for Harper's Weekly as an artist-correspondent of the Civil War without realizing they were his, but otherwise I feel the series contributed most to my understanding of the history of propaganda in America. The selection of art from early Christian Africa made me want to take the associated course and also re-read Elizabeth E. Wein. It is always a little weird to see Ben Shahn in museums when we have one of his original posters from 1968 in my parents' kitchen; it belonged to my grandparents, like the Eames chairs. We got mildly caught by the pre-Raphaelites on our way out, but we made sure to visit the Kandinsky.
And for the fourth year in a row, we returned to Waypoint, our sea-soaked once-a-year restaurant. I love their dolphin-diving neon, their jellyfish-bell lamps; I love the colatura di alici in their bread, the sugar kelp in their butter, and the squid ink in their bean dip. I don't really like fries, but I like them a lot more when dusted with thick flakes of crab. Normally we order a couple of small plates, but the smoked fish cassoulet was an entrée unto itself: white beans cooked with tomatoes and slivered garlic and fennel and chunks of pork belly, surmounted with tender scoops of cod cheeks and an astonishing sausage, like a Weißwurst, only fish. Fortunately, the uni bucatini remains so brine-sweet and melting with its chewy glaze of urchin and bottarga and smoked egg yolk that we were quite happy to have ordered it anyway, and the same held true for the cinnamon sugar donuts and the cranberry-and-pear crostata whose scoop of maple ice cream made it almost egregiously New England. I cannot currently drink alcohol for medical reasons, so I appreciated the menu including a mocktail with orgeat, lemon, and honey, but I really appreciated the bar inventing me one with smoked shishito pepper, watercress, herbed agave, pineapple, lime, and sea salt: it was green as a wave and tasted like the spray of one if it had been around the inside of a martini glass first. Rob had the actual cocktail I would have been drinking if I could drink—the Dr. Banner, whose defining characteristics were mezcal, absinthe, and ginger—and then a milk punch with star anise, kiwi, and cane-juice rum. We exchanged anniversary books: Fredric Brown's Here Comes a Candle (1950) for me, George MacDonald Fraser's The Complete McAuslan (2009) for Rob. When we came home and watched Hot Millions (1968) for its cast of Peter Ustinov, Maggie Smith, Karl Malden, and Bob Newhart, we had no idea we were watching one of the contenders for earliest hacker movie of all time.
Tomorrow I plan to be strenuously engaged in doing nothing. Have some links.
1. My heart will always belong to Dictyostelium discoideum, but I am just fine with plasmodial slime mold being declared charismatic.
2. On speaking truth to nonsense: "It's not so much holding up a mirror so that power can see what it's become; it's simply the job of creating a record, for history if nothing else, of what is actually happening." I wish the idea of recording for history if nothing else did not remind so much of, say, the Oyneg Shabes.
3. This is a magnificent dive: The Deep Sea.
4. I am very pleased to have my words combined with photography for Filomena. I am totally counting it as fanart for "The Creeping Influences."
5. I agree with the tag wanting a novel about this pastry shop.
spatch and I got her the recent reprint of Jean Merrill's The Pushcart War (1965) because it is never too early to learn about pea-pins and collective action. My father, in furtherance of her musical education and the local sales of earplugs, got her a kazoo.For our anniversary yesterday, Rob and I returned to the Harvard Art Museums to check out the special exhibitions we had missed in October. Of the collection on border-crossing, displacement, and belonging, I especially liked the photographs of Serena Chopra and Lili Almog, but the piece I found most haunting was Do Ho Suh's "Hub, Ground Floor, Union Wharf, 23 Wenlock Road, London N1 7SB," a saffron-gold ghost-shiver of a remembered room. It was neat to discover that I had seen several of Winslow Homer's engravings for Harper's Weekly as an artist-correspondent of the Civil War without realizing they were his, but otherwise I feel the series contributed most to my understanding of the history of propaganda in America. The selection of art from early Christian Africa made me want to take the associated course and also re-read Elizabeth E. Wein. It is always a little weird to see Ben Shahn in museums when we have one of his original posters from 1968 in my parents' kitchen; it belonged to my grandparents, like the Eames chairs. We got mildly caught by the pre-Raphaelites on our way out, but we made sure to visit the Kandinsky.
And for the fourth year in a row, we returned to Waypoint, our sea-soaked once-a-year restaurant. I love their dolphin-diving neon, their jellyfish-bell lamps; I love the colatura di alici in their bread, the sugar kelp in their butter, and the squid ink in their bean dip. I don't really like fries, but I like them a lot more when dusted with thick flakes of crab. Normally we order a couple of small plates, but the smoked fish cassoulet was an entrée unto itself: white beans cooked with tomatoes and slivered garlic and fennel and chunks of pork belly, surmounted with tender scoops of cod cheeks and an astonishing sausage, like a Weißwurst, only fish. Fortunately, the uni bucatini remains so brine-sweet and melting with its chewy glaze of urchin and bottarga and smoked egg yolk that we were quite happy to have ordered it anyway, and the same held true for the cinnamon sugar donuts and the cranberry-and-pear crostata whose scoop of maple ice cream made it almost egregiously New England. I cannot currently drink alcohol for medical reasons, so I appreciated the menu including a mocktail with orgeat, lemon, and honey, but I really appreciated the bar inventing me one with smoked shishito pepper, watercress, herbed agave, pineapple, lime, and sea salt: it was green as a wave and tasted like the spray of one if it had been around the inside of a martini glass first. Rob had the actual cocktail I would have been drinking if I could drink—the Dr. Banner, whose defining characteristics were mezcal, absinthe, and ginger—and then a milk punch with star anise, kiwi, and cane-juice rum. We exchanged anniversary books: Fredric Brown's Here Comes a Candle (1950) for me, George MacDonald Fraser's The Complete McAuslan (2009) for Rob. When we came home and watched Hot Millions (1968) for its cast of Peter Ustinov, Maggie Smith, Karl Malden, and Bob Newhart, we had no idea we were watching one of the contenders for earliest hacker movie of all time.
Tomorrow I plan to be strenuously engaged in doing nothing. Have some links.
1. My heart will always belong to Dictyostelium discoideum, but I am just fine with plasmodial slime mold being declared charismatic.
2. On speaking truth to nonsense: "It's not so much holding up a mirror so that power can see what it's become; it's simply the job of creating a record, for history if nothing else, of what is actually happening." I wish the idea of recording for history if nothing else did not remind so much of, say, the Oyneg Shabes.
3. This is a magnificent dive: The Deep Sea.
4. I am very pleased to have my words combined with photography for Filomena. I am totally counting it as fanart for "The Creeping Influences."
5. I agree with the tag wanting a novel about this pastry shop.
