Sel de la Terre

The pretentious name had kept us away for a while, but enticement from OpenTable sent us straight into Sel de la Terre's Back Bay adventure and dinner was wonderful.

The waitress's suggestion to add an organic duck egg from the chef's farm to the house burger seemed odd, but everything else was spot-on. We had a variation of sole meunier accented with toasted hazel nuts and brussels sprouts that'll make you forget the classic and our date had a braised short rib that melted in your mouth with just a hint of sweetness in the sauce.

Simone Dinnerstein

This industrious Brooklynite bankrolled her own Carnegie Hall debut and her 2007 recording of the Goldberg Variations with microloans from friends and neighbors. The recording, by the way, blows the Glenn Gould 1955 out of the water. Those friends and neighbors were on to something; she now plays Europe by invitation and she landed a contract with Sony Records.

Since we don't live in Brooklyn, we only just now heard of her through her new album, Bach: A Strange Beauty. The album is a set of her favorite Bach concertos and suites for keyboard and orchestra interspersed with chorales. The chorales are especially wonderful... The conventional wisdom is that Old Bach would sit around nights with a cask of sherry and play around with common church tunes, turning them into boozy songs. Hopefully that's true--and if so, he'd wholeheartedly approve of her interpretations.

The Black Swan

Beautifully done story. We were arguing today about how believable the protagonist's descent into insanity was, but so what if there is no clinical syndrome that matches the ballerina's mental disease. The genius was in the screenplay: it was Swan Lake told as a movie about the production of Swan Lake. The doppelgangers, both real and imagined, are every where!

Crayon Factory

Tina Fey Accepts "Nathaniel Hawthorne Prize for Judgmental Personality" at the "Tea Party Rifle Range and Bowling Alley"

Watch the full episode. See more Mark Twain Prize.

If You're Bored with Vodka + Jell-o

Mind you, there is nothing wrong with vodka--jell-o shots. But these look awesome.

Dave Barry's Blurred Groin

We don't think Dave Barry is as funny as some people seem to think he is, but he turned his humiliating pat-down by the TSA into good material, which is worth something. Thing is, last time we flew, we weren't looking for new material for the ol' NPR segment--we were just trying to exercise our right to travel freely. And our right to privacy.

ADDENDUM: TSA agents do not have the authority to remove prostheses from travelers' bodies, but may demand the traveler remove the prosthesis.

ADDENDUM #2: After TSA agent #1 pulled down a woman's blouse and exposed her to the entire airport, TSA agent #2 exclaimed, "Damn, you mean I missed that?! Thank God for the video tape!"

QotD: The Bullshit Detector

In 1914, John Alexander Smith, Oxford University Professor, began his two-year lecture series with this benediction: 

“Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies that (will) form a noble adventure…Let me make this clear to you. ..nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life – save only this – that if you work hard and intelligently, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole purpose of education.”

via.

How Cats Lap Water

Beautiful research inspired by the family cat, published in Science this week. via.

The FDA Grows a Pair

The FDA released 36 graphic warning labels for cigarettes, mostly gruesome, for public comment.

We agree that smoking should be discouraged, and we agree that pictures of autopsy specimens and cancer victims are more powerful than staid Surgeon General's Warnings.

"blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks

Of course, "necessary" is in the eyes of the author, not the rules of English usage and grammar.

Atelier for Malerei

"Studio for Painting and Calligraphy," ca 1910. Flickr stream and backstory.

Pre-Election Round Up

Christine O'Donnell is for separation of thought and speech. The Republican party machine that thinks she should be Delaware's senator even though her closest tie to Delaware is that she defaulted on her mortgage there also doesn't mind that she doesn't know the difference between the 14th and 16th amendments. Since GOP voter turnout is directly proportional to the stupidity of the candidate, we predict she'll win Joe Biden's seat in a landslide.

Sharron Angle thinks the difference between Asians and Latinos is important--ie, they're not all just brown people--but isn't sure which is which--ie, they all look alike to her. Again, the high-functioning racist morons that pass for GOP voters are likely to elect her in a land slide.

Meanwhile, Juan Williams at NPR announced that when he sees people in "Muslim garb" on an airplane with him, he changes flights; bastion of liberal media that it is, NPR fired him for putting opinion above the news. Fox News immediately offered him a $2 million contract if he will only keep putting opinion above the news, which is to say, he'll be senator from Ohio as soon as Diebold gets the check the write-in campaign is launched.

Longform.org

Sign up at instapaper.com then head over to longform.org and re-discover reading a good article that's longer than a blog post. This is seriously what makes the iPad a killer device.

As good a time as any to honor the 10th amendment

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Thought for the Day

When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

--Sinclair Lewis

Khan Academy

Loads of online lectures. Learn anything, from high school algebra to how the capital markets work. Now if only there was time to absorb this stuff...

Language & the Way We Perceive the World

The myth of Eskimos with 30+ words for snow will live forever, but this is about the real impositions of language our on experience with the world.