Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Indeed, one of the hallmarks of this grand experiment of democracy in America has been its vigilance over the rights of minorities. Evangelicals should appreciate that, for they were once a minority themselves. Evangelicals need once again to learn to be a counterculture, much as they were before the rise of the religious right, before succumbing to the seductions of power. The early followers of Jesus were a counterculture because they stood apart from the prevailing order. A counterculture can provide a critique of the powerful because it is utterly disinterested -- it has no investment in the power structure itself.

"Indeed, the most effective and vigorous religious movements in American history have identified with the downtrodden and have positioned themselves on the fringes of society rather than at the centers of power. The Methodists of the 19th century come to mind, as do the Mormons. In the 20th century, Pentecostalism, which initially appealed to the lower classes and made room for women and people of color, became perhaps the most significant religious movement of the century.

"The leaders of the religious right have led their sheep astray from the gospel of Jesus Christ to the false gospel of neoconservative ideology and into the maw of the Republican Party. And yet my regard for the flock and my respect for their integrity is undiminished. Ultimately it is they who must reclaim the gospel and rescue us from the distortions of the religious right."

-- Randall Balmer, "Jesus Is Not a Republican", The Chronicle of Higher Education 2006-06-23 (Volume 52, Issue 42, Page B6; section "The Chronicle Review").

I want to get some random post-fodder out of my head, then I'll try to get back to finishing already-started topics and maybe even finally try start to catch up on comments and reading my friendspage ... So for the moment, some random snippets:

I need an OS X machine. Oh, for quite a while now I've known how pleasant they are, and have thought about how nice it would be to have one, but I could do most of what I wanted to do using a combination of Linux and Windows and once in a while Mac Classic, if somewhat less niftily.

But now there's a tool that I want to create (if it doesn't turn out to already exist), and I want to make it for a couple of Mac users, and the level of transparency I want to build into it will require my learning a lot more about the behind-the-scenes aspects of the OS X environment and access to OS X for trying out ideas.

I want to make a magic music container which will, when accessed, produce sheet music in the most apropriate format for the application of the moment, without the user having to keep track of five files per tune or worry about whether the JPG was regenned the last time the PDF was updated or the Finale file was edited. The less the user has to think about choosing the format or dealing with archive-maintenance tasks, the better, and adding tunes to the library has to be nearly as easy as getting copies out. For myself, I'd probably continue putting a Makefile in each sheet music directory under Linux, but I want to create a more end-user oriented solution, and the more magically Macish the UI, the better. Easily using the clipboard to paste tunes into a word processing or DTP document to create sets will be a very important feature. OCR'ing scanned pages of sheet music will be extremely useful as well -- I don't want to try to write that part, so I'll want to invisibly invoke some other program that already does music OCR.

This would be in a "really big, long-term project" category. It's going to take me a while to get it just right.

It was probably mere coincidence, but this startled and amused me nonetheless: A few days ago I was lying naked in bed and Perrine leapt up on me. "Jeepers, cat! Your paws are like ice," I exclaimed. Perrine jumped down straightaway and left the room. Two or three minutes later, she returned and jumped up on me again. This time her paws were not just warm, but hot. I'm not sure what she did in those few minutes.

Two errors while making yesterday's breakfast, the first being the classic mistake of picking too small a bowl to start with when improvising in a new direction, and winding up having to get a larger bowl as the list of ingredients grows ... and the second being a result of my relative inexperience with habaneros ...

A while ago I decided that since I like a lot of things that are flavoured with habaneros, I should learn to use them myself -- I mostly use jalapeños and serranos, and sometimes those skinny red Asian peppers that I'm not sure the name of. So for the past month or two I've been playing with habaneros, and have figured out how much habanero goes with how much egg and cheese to result in maximum flavour within a comfortable-to-me level of heat.

Yesterday morning I learned that "this much habanero to that much egg & cheese" does not translate to "somewhere in the ballpark of this much habanero to that much other stuff". Not even close. (Either that, or habaneros get a lot hotter after sitting in the fridge for a while.) Tasty, yes, tasty, but rather uncomfortably hot. Eat-slowly-and-drink-lots-while-my-nose-runs hot. Accent-hot or maybe snack-hot -- pleasant for a bite or two -- but too hot for "I'm hungry and want to fill my tummy" eating. Whoops.

I ate half, and threw the rest in the icebox. Last night I hit the grocery for a block of cheddar, and this morning I ate the rest of the too-hot breakfast with occasional bites of cheddar to tame the effect. That worked. I'll get the hang of the little orange firebombs yet. But I get the idea they're easier to use when making a large batch of something than in single-serving recipes. I wouldn't mind finding a milder but similar-tasting pepper to use instead. Chipotles taste a little bit like habaneros to me, but not so much that I'd call one a substitute for the other. (It's interesting that I notice any similarity in the first place, since habaneros aren't smoky and fresh red jalapeños don't taste anything like habaneros -- they taste like, well, like green jalapeños minus the green-taste -- but the interactions between flavour components are fascinating and often mysterious.) One of the reasons serranos are my favourite pepper so far is that their flavour:heat ratio is unusually high; even though serranos are hotter than jalapeños, you can (optionally) make milder recipes with them because it takes less of the pepper to get more of the pepper's flavour. (The other reason serranos are my favourite is that I happen to really like their flavour, of course. I find that they taste much more interesting than jalapeños regardless of the overall heat level of the dish they're used in.) Habaneros, alas, are t'other way 'round, having an interesting flavour but a relatively low flavour:heat ratio.

My ability to tolerate cold on my hands seems to be dropping. I suppose I should take notes to figure out whether it's correlated with my levels of fibromyalgia pain from day to day or an actual long-term trend of its own.