Angry Robot

Bittmanity

If I were going to join a religion it would have to be something dedicated to the chef Mark Bittman. I’ve always wanted to be good at cooking but it didn’t seem to be in my nature. I was too slavishly devoted to the recipe. All I could do was follow it word for word. If I was missing one thing I didn’t know how to substitute and would wind up messing up. It wasn’t a resilient way to cook, but worse, it wasn’t any fun. And so I’d cook the handful of recipes I knew really well, and rarely try much else.

Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, in iPad form, changed all that. The way he presents recipes just clicked with my brain. He gives you a recipe in its most stripped-down form, and then presents a handful of variations. His stripped-down chili non carne, for example, not only omits the meat but also the tomatoes and almost everything other than spice and pinto beans. The variations add them back in and give you an option for “white chili” which I really need to try. It doesn’t hurt that he is a clear, concise and personable writer, but the proof is ultimately in the chili: I have gotten great results nearly every time with his recipes. And the whole approach has hammered into my mind that I can change any recipe I want to anything else. This has been a wonderful, life-transforming thing, no joke. Now I enjoy cooking. It’s not a grim word-for-word recitation, it’s a chance to explore.

The How to Cook Everything app is a little long in the tooth now (never got the iOS 7 makeover), but I still use it all the time. It’s also available in book form and it is ENORMOUS. It’s best thought of as a modern-day Joy of Cooking. He’s got other books, like Kitchen Matrix which takes his variations to their logical extreme. Come. Join me in the Church of Bittman.

Fairly skippable blog post here

Motherfucker I’m running behind here. Didn’t get a post done yesterday, nothing yet today. I was sick yesterday and EXTREMELY low energy. I have this excercise app that I got a few days ago and generally it is THRILLED with me. It’s all about the health benefits of a half hour of low impact exercise (walking) per day. Turns out I get a half hour just dropping the kid off at school and coming in to work. So this thing was logging me at 60, 90 minutes a day. I am ranked like #8 in the region! It’s hard to imagine it being hard to get a half hour of walking in – until you are sick in bed all day. I got like 10 minutes exercise. Not great. Today I drove so I’m only at 17. If you want to get a half hour of walking in DON’T DRIVE! So anyway the app keeps on sending these notifications, “maybe take a walk?” “Walk around the block?” “Time to stretch your legs”. Nag nag nag.

While sick I logged a lot of Jessica Jones. It’s a good show. I wasn’t hugely taken by Daredevil but JJ is more my speed. Writing and acting are higher quality, and it has that quality I love in imaginative stories – the fantastic as an attention-getting metaphor for very real, very human, very mundane stories. In this case a strong woman can’t come to terms with how an abusive partner was able to override her feelings and make her do things she didn’t want to do. JJ super power is physical strength, but not endurance; she can lift cars but still get shot, she can jump high but could break her legs on landing. Her nemesis is Killgrave, who can make people do whatever he wants. He’s the ultimate entitled white guy character. JJ is essentially a PTSD sufferer and is rendered accurately, movingly: drinking problem, fits of rage, overactive defense systems.

So that’s all the time we have for today – a jumbled piece of diarist crap that nonetheless fulfills my self-imposed quota!

Playing Daughter

She says to me, “want to play daughter”? Of course I do.

This means I will play the daughter and she will play the “momma”. So she gets to make all the rules, which is the whole point of the operation – a carnivalesque flip of the power dynamic.

She orders me to get into bed (the couch); she pulls a blanket over me.

“Read to me,” I say. I play my part by saying things she would say.

“No,” she says. “I won’t read to you because you didn’t listen to me.”

“I need a hug and kiss.”

“Hug but no kiss.”

She’ll enforce the pretend sleeping – if I open my eyes I find her standing over me, vigilant, ready to threaten the suspension of dessert prospects, or milk rights. But after a spell, after she’s put the pretend puppy to bed and she’s pretend slept herself, she wakes me up, and offers dinner. It’s really a plastic turkey on a plastic saucer, but that’s not how she spins it.

“Here, it’s pepperoni and cheese and watermelon and peanut pizza but I have to take off the peanuts because I’m allergic.”

After dinner we have to drive to a picnic. I sit on the floor and she straps me into the child seat with the sash from a bathrobe. She sits on a wood box, mimics the steering wheel, and makes maybe the cutest driving sound I have ever heard.

It’s all warped and distorted, but it’s clearly a portrait of her world. Little chores, duties, orders given. Punishments and rewards. Do we really seem this stern to her? Does she really think we’d serve her peanuts?

The journey takes about half a second. We get out and we go to the store to get food for the picnic. “Come with me!” she says, and opens the fridge. She starts looking for food.

Real food, I note.

I come out of character and insist certain things aren’t taken out of the fridge. It’s starting to look like the pretend picnic is morphing into real eating, as we’re playing to kill time while her mom makes dinner and she’s starting to get real hungry.

We negotiate, and settle on a handful of blueberries. I get four spoons as ordered, and a bowl. Pretty soon real dinner happens, and play stops. She’s not the boss anymore.

For now.

Spotify / Apple Music

I signed up for Apple Music when it came out and have been using ever since. I first tried Spotify about a year ago but didn’t pay for it; didn’t love it. I went back and started a trial of the pay version a couple weeks ago.

Streaming music is a tradeoff. On the one hand you get basically ALL MUSIC for cheap. On the other hand you don’t own any of it. That last part was a hangup for me as I am literally and figuratively very invested in my music collection. However I have tried to sidestep the issue by contemplating music’s fundamentally intangible quality. It’s, like, not really there and shit, so can you really own it anyway? Man?

You can certainly rent it from one of these two services.

I really enjoy hunting down music, so I wasn’t looking for any assistance with “music discovery”, but indeed that’s what impressed me right away about Apple Music. Like predecessor Beats Music, its claim to fame is its “curation” by “humans” and at first those hand-picked playlists were fun to explore. There weren’t really enough of them though. However, there are also algorithmic album suggestions which I found were quite good. Amusingly they often suggested albums I already had in my library; also amusingly, I actually found that useful.

Apple Music has huge problems, however. Firstly, on the Mac it’s grafted onto the aged iTunes, which is best imagined as an ancient, rickety donkey which has already had a whale, lion and giant squid grafted onto it. All of its knees have exploded and been put back together with duct tape.

Secondly, both iTunes and Music on iOS are buggy AF. I often try to go to an artist page only to get a completely blank one. Or, a song just stops playing halfway through (especially infuriating in the car or when my hands are in a sinkful of water). Or, some tracks are just greyed out for some reason on some days. Who knows. It’s like the back end just isn’t into it, like it’s being run by a bunch of sullen teens who keep on getting distracted by Snapchat or whatever.

But Spotify? Damn, son.

I didn’t like Spotify using the free version – poor sound quality plus ads every four songs or so made for a crappy experience. But once you pay up you’re good. If the “discovery” was good with Apple Music, with Spotify it is almost too good. I am finding a new, awesome artist like every day, and that seems constrained by my available attention bandwidth. Score this round to the machines.

I also like that I can make a playlist, that it is default public, and people can “subscribe” to it. On Apple Music it’s like only all-powerful yet anonymous genius types who can present you with playlists, but on Spotify anyone can “curate”, including your friends – which would seem to offer more value anyway, and be more analagous with the real world.

My only real complaint is that Spotify hasn’t bothered to get the “AllMusic”:http://allmusic.com licence. I stumble upon some new artist and I want to know a bit of background, and I keep on jumping out to Google. But that’s living. A++, highly recommended, would listen to again.

Two to Three

Was talking to a fellow dad at a party once and he asked how old my child was, and she was like 20 months at the time. He said that was an amazing age, between 18 months and 3 years. I had never heard that before. You hear about terrible twos, or that threes are actually worse, and that babies are horrible, etc. etc. (No, babies are not horrible, but they won’t sleep through the night for the first three months, and they won’t really acknowledge you for like six months or so.)

But the age he was talking about was so great because so many systems are coming online and develop at an incredible pace. Mobility and language are the big ones; the child has probably just managed to walk, but does it shakily at 18 months. Likewise it can string some words together, or maybe just lay down individual words. But by three this kid is going to be running, jumping, and motormouthing on and on, and seeing those skills come together is someting else.

I love when they don’t quite say things right. Yesterday I was tired and got sign-off on a nap. My daughter hadn’t gone down for hers yet. She looked at me, sighed and said, “okay, I’ll show you where your bed is.” She went up to the bedroom, started turning off the lights, and said, “I’ll turn the dark on for you.”

St Patrick's Square

Blogathon update: I don’t have much time today and I’m not feeling particularily content-generational so I went looking through my archive of draft posts and found this one from last summer about one of my favourite parks. I’ve added a little to it but it still doesn’t feel finished, but so be it.

The square is hidden, almost. It’s at the centre of a bustling downtown block, but it’s not visible from the street. You walk between two buildings, or down an alley, and there it is. It’s small, more a parkette than a park. But it is well-used by the groups that know about it: office smokers, the homeless, and birds. Occasionally a gaggle of newcomers will notice it from the market building that abuts its southern edge and abscond to the square to eat their lunch. I like to think they are bound to return.

The market building used to be an actual market which included a butcher that hung chicken corpses in the window. That space is now occupied by a bubble tea house and a bakery that sells cronuts. There are a couple other fast food-ish places – jerk chicken and somalian food – but much of the space is empty. It was much busier a decade ago, when Big Stan’s burger house and The Lunch Box lured in visitors, but the landlord raised the rent drastically and all of the tenants were forced to move. Apparently the landlord owns a club or two and is much more interested in those properties. He stores some surplus kitchen equipment in an unused portion of the market, which would be better used maybe on seating for the restaurants’ customers but oh well.

The jerk chicken restaurant occupies the space closest to the square and the smell of jerk dominates the air. It’s called The Jerk Joint and it is excellent. The chef gets in at 5:30 every morning and starts a laborious yet nose-pleasing series of smokings, rubs, and marinations. If you bring your jerk chicken to the square to eat you will surely be visited by wasps, and birds will gather about you eagerly. There are flocks of pigeons and sparrows in the rather ample canopy of the square – so much so that you should watch where you sit. A frosting of bird shit coats many of the benches and many parts of the concrete retaining wall that skirts the square.

There is a condo building on the western edge, next to the design store Umbra, and a strip of row houses to the east, which are largely split into rental apartments. In the north there is the butt end of a public pool building. Along the alleys that demarcate the edges of the park prowl infrequent service vans, cars pulling out of the condo parking, and the odd Mercedes belonging to a Queen Street restaurant owner.

Smokers descend from their creative-class office buildings and chat in groups, or pace while on the phone. If you’ve quit smoking but have temporarily relapsed, this is the place for you, away from the judgmental eyes of your co-workers. You can take a break and observe the migratory patterns of the birds or the homeless. The park tends to house only one or two homeless people at a time. There are more later in the day, but it usually sleeps only one or two. Last summer there was a masked transgendered homeless who slept in the middle of the open area of the park. She had a friend stay with her for a few days, and then he was gone, and then she was gone. This summer there is an old man on a bike, who sleeps on one of the benches in the shady area at the south end. He is very polite, and collects bottles from the condo recycling bins.

The park has a dense tangle of trees, landscaping, paths and benches in its south end. Its middle is largely open, a sun-trap mini-field that gets little play in the summer. The north end by the pool building has a ring of seating and if it has a primary use, it’s weed smoking. The concrete mini-wall along the edges of the park means that there’s almost always somewhere to sit.

If you’re ever around Queen and John and you need some refuge from tourists, shopping and nose rings, wander north-east a touch. This could be the place for you.