excerpt from hesiod's works and days, lines 438-442, as translated by stanley lombardo:

this is the rule for plains and seaboard
and for mountain valleys far from the sea:

plant naked, plow naked, and reap naked

if you want to garner all of demeter's bounty
in season, and have each crop grow when it's due.

done and done!

at work i make soups a lot. last week i was making two at one time, in identical pots. one soup gets finished by pouring a bunch of lemon juice into it at the end, the other does not. spaced out, i poured a pint of lemon juice into the wrong pot and ruined a soup-pot full of expensive ingredients.

what to do?

i thought about it for a while and, ignoring other people's advice to just turn it into a lemon soup of some kind, thought harder: soup tastes bad now -- why? to much lemon juice. what is lemon juice? mostly water and citric acid. so soup is too acidic. how do you get rid of acids? aha!

every american school student who's made it through the fourth grade knows that baking soda reacts with vinegar and makes a volcano. lemon juice will work just as well.

solution: add baking soda to soup!

it totally worked, and blew the minds of my fellow cooks, who looked on in horror as i poured baking soda into the soup pot. all that remained of the overbearing lemon juice taste was a very faint lemony taste, which i presume was the non-citric acid component of the lemon juice.

the reaction goes something like this:

C6H8O7 + 3NaHCO3 => 3CO2 + 3H2O + Na3C6H5O7

the large product on the right side is trisodium citrate, which has a salty, mildly tart flavor that was not very pronounced.

the only tricky part to this procedure was not adding too much baking soda -- add too much and all the acid is gone but then there's unreacted baking soda floating around in the soup tasting gross. a pH meter and a titration setup would have been ideal but just slowly adding it worked pretty well.

this was extra fun to do at the hippy-ish vegan place i work 'cause all the people who eat there are into the ancestral earth spirits of their food and what local farm it came from but really they just got served molecules.

have been gleaning apple, pear, plum, and asian pears trees in my neighborhood. random walks are fun (in 2-d you usually find your way home), but i've been wanting to get a map happening for a while -- here's my first effort. it is editable (and edible) by anyone, so add trees if you know of them.


View Larger Map

problem: commuting to work/riding around city for moderate amounts of time in the pac nw winter. getting wet is a given, so waterproofing and insulation of some kind is needed. sweater/water resistant jacket works well for top, but pants are less straightforward. "rain pants" are a big hassle of changing, and are expensive. jeans/bens get wet and cold, and stay cold. i don't actually mind this too much while i'm riding, but being soaked for hours afterwards at work is kind of annoying.

tentative solution: wool pants, (cost $6 and half hour of sewing). went to thrift store, bought heaviest weight wool pants that fit me. cut off bottom ten inches of legs and hemmed them because a) makes riding easier and b) the kitchen where i work is hot. also, can use newly extra fabric to reinforce seams.

data: works well so far. have ridden in pretty much the full spectrum of seattle winter weather, from cold and not raining to cold and raining a lot. pants stayed reasonably warm in all situations (even heavy rain), with occasional drafts up legs due to "shortening" of pants. contemplating wearing light weight silk-type long underwear if it gets much colder. dry exceptionally fast, esp compared to jeans. problems/things to work on -- could be heavier weight wool. didn't shop around for pants; recommend looking for really heavy ones. questionable durability -- don't know how long slightly dressy wool pants will last as bike pants. single stitching makes me nervous, may have to reinforce seams.

verdict: four stars out of five. for six bucks and less that an hour of work this was the best solution i could come up with, and it works really well so far.

other ideas? pdx crew, how do you ride in the winter?

old? news to me. in any event, xxxfoodxxx wholeheartedly supports anarchist ice cream trucks everywhere.

only semi-scrounge, but free ("free") food nonetheless. yesterday alex sent me a link to his friend julia's site illsendyoucookies.com, which, apparently, launched yesterday. go visit it, it's nice.

premise is basically what the url says: girl likes making cookies (choco. chip) and sending them to people; sign up and she'll send you cookies. you can donate if you want, but you don't have to, and she'll stop sending cookies out to anyone if she goes over $100 in the hole on the endeavor.

this project is such a beautiful example of a commons (wiki: tragedy of the commons) that it makes me wonder if this is an econ thesis project or something. but she seems really sweet and genuine about it, so maybe not. she seems to be doing not so great on the money front after two days (net -$39), hopefully the linear projection of two and a half more days of cookies isn't accurate.

curious: do projects like these fare better with more or fewer participants? i would think fewer, as that would usually mean they were people with social ties to the baker, thus discouraging abuse of the commons. but maybe bigger numbers have some advantage? lower variance maybe? i think that wouldn't matter as much as the possible damping mechanism that social pressure might provide. makes me wonder what would happen if someone like kottke linked to it...

at work when you make food you label it with who made it so that later, if it's especially good, or if it's all fucked up, everyone will know who made it, and they can be appropriately lauded or shamed. since i work with a bunch of hippies, instead of writing our names or initials, we each have a symbol. having just started last week, i have been symbol-less until today, because i take things like this very seriously and have put some thought into mine. so, confronted with this need, i did the only thing i could think of:



ps: alex, stop reading frilly keats' coughing up tubercular arterial blood on his lace-fringed pillow and read watchmen before the movie ruins it.