Black Coffee (Deprecated)

Black-Coffee languishing, like so many other things

If the time between blog entries on Black Coffee is a poisson distribution, I've been several standard deviations from normal during the last several months.

This week I should be skiing in France, except the week prior, a colleague resigned, leaving me doing everything, so now I am 150% busier than normal and no idea how I'm going to take a vacation any time soon, let alone ski holidays in Europe.

What else is going on ?

We're importing a maid from the Phillipines. She arrives February 10th. That promises to be a whole load of issues in itself.

Luke went through a talking spurt during the last couple weeks, and now it appears he's undergoing a movement spurt. He's now capable of launching himself off the bed, so no more unattended babies.

Turned on the Ham Radio for the first time in six weeks last night. Worked a ZS South Africa and then most VKs in Australia. At least there is a modicum of life to 20m. When I came back from Perth and turned on the radio I thought my antenna was broken because thigns were so dead. I hadn't bothered to turn it on since then. I was on my way to scoring my first Israel contact, but local QRM on the caller's side killed it.

My preserved lemons are ready to go. I made a morroccan chicken recipe on saturday that used them. They were ok only.

Have been using the MagiMix food processor to make up taco chip dip. Yesterday was some sort of picante salsa. Today I made a bean dip, excep the only problem was that the only beans I had were a can of limas. Anyway, add enough cumin and chilli and no one knows the difference.

It's Chinese New Year again, so Lion Dances occuring all around the neighborhood. Mister is once again terrified of them. We don't know why they terrorize him so much, but he is profoundly scared of them. I dragged out my didgeridoo tonight and he was scared of that, too.

Working on my next kitchen appliance, a home coffee roaster. My idea is to buy an i-Roast 2.

Had car problems a couple weeks ago. Turned out it was a vacuum hose leak, which is not covered under the warranty. It's considered "Wear and tear" which sounds odd. Anyway, I shouldn't complain, as my airconditioning failed only a few weeks before warranty expiration, so that saved me many hundreds of dollars.

Ling is in the middle of searching for a new place for us to move into by the time our lease runs out in late March/early April. Needs to be bigger this place and closer to my office. It needs to be antenna friendly, too. I want a multiband antenna so I can get off 20m and onto some of the other bands.

Still fighting computer problems, although I have a decent beachhead now. my latop died (under warranty, being repaired) which I replaced with a simple IBM T43. My desktop I rebuilt with an intel motherboard and cpu. It seems to be stable so far. Now my only problems: 1) my lcd monitor is undergoing repairs which will take two months for parts 2) my buffalo terastation network storage device is flaky and untrustworthy 3) I've got a stack of broken equipment in the art room that needs sent to various warranty centers 4) I still don't have gigabit ehternet or a sound system installed into the new desktop.

Haven't read much or had any decent meals lately. Or at least any that come to mind.

ciao

Floyd

Ling goes to bed several hours before I do, but on weekends I'm not busy, so I can come in and watch tv as she falls asleep. The last two Saturdays, starting at midnight, I've been watching a bizarre set of food programs hosted by British host Keith Floyd.

The first time I saw him, he was cooking reindeer meet in a skillet with a lot of rude tropical vegetables (pineapple, big red peppers, etc) on a crudely-fashioned portable kitchen in the middle of a bleak snow field. The snow must have been four feet deep around him and he was constantly scolding the camera man and telling him where to aim the camera.

The food didn't look good at all, but Floyd was weird and and had an entertaining quality.

His food didn't look any better this week. I tuned in halfway through and he was cooking a whale-meat based curry and some sort of (again) pineapple preperation. yuk. Keep in mind, he was operating from a card-table kitchen in the hills above a Norwegian fjord in chilly springtime, too, making it even odder.

Anyway, the second half-hour is a show called 'Floyd Uncorked." He's making his way through various valleys in France, profiling two wines each episode. Tonight was Pouilly-Fume and Vouvray. Tagging along is "JP" a wine expert who tries to explain the basics of analyzing or appreciating a bottle. I find wine talk very nearly totally unsufferable, yet somehow the pace is fast enough that it's ok. There is no pretentiousness either. At some point JP starts meandering and talking about Sauvignons from New Zealand and Floyd very obviously looks at his watch and rolls his eyes. It's all pretty amusing and reasonably interesting. Certainly much more interesting to way to learn about wine than reading a book or listening to some twat carry on.

Floyd comes off as a crank, but I read a brief biography of him, and he actually was one of the earliest 'wild men' of tv cooking shows and has been broadcasting for a very long time.

Disneyland Country

This evening I was reading an article in the Economist about Central America's and the United State's severe problems with Central American gangs called 'Maras' (Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha). The article discusses how the gangs are technologically adept, using secure communication protocols (disposable mobile phones) and decentralized communications like websites. Websites? Yeah, Mara 18's site is www.xv3gang.com.

Of course I was curious to see what the hell it was.

It was partially in Spanish but then I saw a link "Anedimos a Singapore".

What could these enormously violent gangs possibly have to do with Singapore?

Oh, so it turns out to be some sort of photo gallery of affiliate "Maras" around the world. Gee, someone's purchased the Mara 18 franchise for Singapore. Neat. Take a look at these photos, a bunch of silly teenagers posing for the camera (in their school uniforms) trying to look like gangsters they see on tv.

Good grief. No sense at all. I've seen this naive mimicry of western stuff before too, like the Chinese guy trying to look hard by having spiderwebs tattooed on his elbows. Huh? The Aryan Nation wears them to symbolize being "caught in the (prison) system" and to note their deep hatred of minorities, particularly black (but surely open to hatred of Asians as well).

It's just laughable. Singapore detests Secret Societies (asian name for gangs) to the same degree they detest drugs, so the idea that these kids would be legitimately representing one of the most violent, criminal strains of western organized crime is ridiculous. Read the Economist article on how dangerous and violent the Maras are and you'll get a sense of how ludicrous these children playing at gangsterism is. It also suggests how insulated Singapore is that they don't even have any real sense of what they're pretending involvement in.