Offered without comment

Chi-infused t-shirts. Don't worry: The energy infusion doesn't wash out in the laundry.

Inconstant craving

Ordinarily, I can reassure myself that whatever I'm yearning toward, I want because it provides some vital nutrient of which I'm running short. Steak? Iron. Eggs? Vitamin A. Beer? Vitamin Ah. But nutritional science sheds no light on why I woke up on Monday with a profound jones for pancakes. My workday morning ritual being one that runs on split-second timing to accommodate the maximum number of whacks at the snooze button, I couldn't get around to dealing with this pressing breakfast situation until today.

As is so often the case, the web proved a boon ("The internet isn't for porn," Gee-Clef commented the other day: "It's really for whatever obsessive people want. Granted, what they usually want is porn, but that's not what it's for"). Behold the glory that is the cinnamon sour cream pancake recipe over at culinary blog Whipped.

Granted, busting out the mixer just for egg whites seems like needless hassle—so much effort on a Saturday morning, isn't that contra some ley naturam?—but it pays off in pancakes so delicately fluffy that they practically float up to your mouth without the intervention of fork or fingers. I halved the recipe, since this was for my own solitary consumption, and can say with reasonable assurance that had I made the original quantity, I'd have et the lot. These are the perfect match for red currant or lingonberry jam, something that doesn't overwhelm their natural sourness with too much sweetness (I used maple syrup this time, but next time, red fruit all the way). Not a recipe for every day, at least not if your ambition doesn't involve outgrowing successive pairs of pants, but for the occasional random craving, I'll subscribe to the Nanny Ogg school of nutritional medicine: "A bit of what you fancy does you good."

How to cure da dredded SWAHN FLUE

"Produced during that brief moment in American history when heroin, chloroform, alcohol, and North Carolina pine tar pretty much took care of anything that ailed you. That, and radium."

Jack Womack needs his own blog like whoa, but I spose having him as an occasional house guest over at William Gibson's place must be sufficient unto the day.

Because Torchwood isn't odd enough

Seriously, Wales, is it something in the water? Of all the peculiar things that mankind has done with sheep, this is...okay, well, it's one of the most work-safe. But fantastic, entirely.

Gettin' board

I know I've got at least a couple of ajedrez-playin' readers out there, so here's a link to a Spanish-language post inspired by a shot I took in Buenos Aires last year. I mentioned some time ago that Argentina's graffiti seemed in general to be more elegant and thought-provoking, not to mention funnier, than what DC usually gets, and Mariano has taken my photo a step further by quoting Jorge Luis Borges at it. For those of us whose Spanish vocab didn't include the terms for chess pieces, here's a translation of what he's quoting.

Fainting king, slanting bishop, fierce
queen, straightforward tower and cunning pawn
on the black and white path
searching and fighting their armed battle.
They ignore the player’s pointing hand
governs his destiny,
they ignore that a tamed severity
holds his will and day.
The player is himself a prisoner
(the sentence is Omar’s) of another board
of dark nights and light days.
God moves the player, and he, the chess piece.
Which God behind God begins the conspiracy
of dust and time and dream and agony?
Translated by Blanca Lista.

Main screen turn on

Heeeey, MightyGodKing.com is back up, resurrected after having been slashdotted into oblivion by BoingBoing's link to the posts on retitled SFF favorites (posts the first, second, and third). This is a good complement to learning that our new president-elect is himself something of a nerd, and if the story about him responding to someone saying the magic words "all your base are belong to us" by quirking an eyebrow and asking, "What you say?" is true, a lot of the interwebs may swoon dead away. MGK also has a good review of Nation up, in which the writer says much more eloquently what I have tried to say about the book.

At riding this week, I was reunited with the inimitable Cappi. After a few weeks with Lear, Cappi feels like those kindergarten water fountains; you can't believe that anything that small was ever comfortable. But a few minutes' work is all it takes to get readjusted, and it is a relief not to be constantly nervous of strong teeth. The barn is debating Lear's future: He's unpredictable enough that he can't be used for any of the lower-level students, and he's nippy enough to keep even the more relaxed riders on their toes all the time. I'd like to hear that they'd found a dedicated skilled customer to take him, but that remains to be seen. Anyroo, the Capster and I had fun being back together. He now does shoulders-in beautifully and offers the promise of an easier haunches-in, as well as doing the pretty leg-yields he mastered months ago. Apparently smart and flexible is a pretty good combo for this sort of work. After class, he was distracted from the promise of dinner by Calamari, the newest barn cat; he seems fascinated by her, though she still walks wide of all of the horses when she can. Eventually I look to find her curled up on Jackson's back, but right now she's more interested in the mice. Work before love, huh?

In totally unrelated news, hey! The NYT namechecks Seesterperson's former derby league! And WJLA runs a great piece called, "Friends, Family Set Sights on Your Couch for Inaugural Week." For the record, I have a sofabed that would sleep two friendly people or one tall sprawly person, and by-reservation-only hardwood floors are also available. I'll shove the paperwork and books aside, but I can't promise more in the housework department.

And now for the BIG question

CERN, who in their wisdom brought us the Web and therefore hallowed be their funding, switched on the Large Hadron Collider yesterday. If you did not hear about this, you are not even peripherally a geek, don't listen to the news, or both, since there was a tiny but non-zero chance that the experiment held in the 17-mile apparatus would, er, destroy the space-time continuum, generate a black hole somewhere in the vicinity of Switzerland, and generally make life as we know it a little hairy. On the up side, it would also spare us further Sarah Palin and that old dude who keeps hugging her before she repeats her convention speech, so that might've been a plus.

But since CERN was, as I mentioned, the originator of the Web, they're On It. We will know if anything bad is happening. We can keep up with subatomic quantum life-devastating events, because now there is a site: http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/. Please note that the source code (Ctrl+U to all my Firefox buds, and who cares what in IE) covers all contingencies.

A brief important question

Have you loved your internet lately?

I mean, have you reaaaaally loved it? Because baby, the internet just wants you to be happy. Really. That's all it wants.

See? Look what it's done for you.

And honey, that's not all.

And baby, that ain't even the best part. (H/T Pandagon)

You're sick. Bring the Tim Tams and we'll talk

Oh Australia. Don't ever change.

Ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision

Well, the first two, anyway. The local media has lost its head completely over this whole election business and George Takei finally getting to marry his partner (aw) and our latest belt of storms and blah blah blah newscakes. That's the only possible explanation for their utter failure to put the release of Firefox 3 above the fold today. Hail the victorious browser!

Keeping the Red Army chorus busy

An uncomfortable number of years ago, I spent a summer at an archaeological field school in remotest taiga-est Alaska, where I learned how to use a transit, fire a shotgun in the approximate direction of menacing wildlife, drink cheap-ass rye whiskey, deploy chemical agents against the local arthropoda, cook a wide variety of packaged foods, and hate, with a fiery unyielding passion, the music of Creedence Clearwater Revival. These days I never have to try to level precision equipment in squashy brush, brace against a shoulder-bruising recoil, drink anything inferior to Macallan, check the room for bloodsucking insects, figure out how to make Product of Hungary bacon edible, or listen to shitty music just because someone thought it made our camp seem more like a 1970s Vietnam movie.

I may reconsider my lifelong CCR ban, though, now that Finland has revealed its strategic reserves of AWESOME WTF.

You may well say gee, young man

I may need to buy a gun. Phased plasma rifle in the forty-watt range? Yeah, this one's ideal for home defense.

The more I read on Hello Kitty Hell, the more freaked-out I get. Really? REALLY? You've got to be joking. And so on. Makes Beeblebears look positively normal.

It has to be said

I love Jane Smiley in ways that cannot be textually rendered, even above and beyond her horse-world pieces (although if you haven't read Horse Heaven, you've got a treat in store). I mean, damn. "Bush and Cheney were hungry for war. Nothing they said could hide their eagerness. The story they put out, they had found out things, and they had explored all options, and now the invasion was a last resort, was evident bullshit. They never for one second had the demeanor of men who were thinking things over and weighing least bad options. They were hot to attack and impatient with anyone who stood in their way (the name Hans Blix springs to mind)."

The other bit of culture-conflict awesomeness, to which party I am fashionably late, is the flap about blogger/professor PZ Myers being banned from a free screening of a movie for which he had been interviewed and for which he was thanked in the credits. The topic of the movie? How intellectual dissent favoring intelligent design is—oh cruel!—being stifled on college campuses and how this is bad because it's important that everyone remember that belief in evolution leads to atheism and thence to the fall of civilization. And yes, the best way to demonstrate your commitment to free thought and open discussion of an issue is certainly to eject someone you know will disagree with you and whose interview you quotemined after getting it by misrepresenting your movie. But. BUT! While the movie's poobahs and their hired security did identify and bar Myers from the screening (for which he had registered under his own name, the foolish honest cephalopoidian creature), they let in Richard Dawkins. A grateful nation stands awestruck at this example of the difference between the fail simple and the fail EPIC.

Linkgeek

Two bits of fun geekly times. First, via Boing Boing, cometh the news that Warp Graphics are celebrating their thirtieth anniversary by posting the entire Elfquest corpus online. Elfquest was the series that got me into comic books, and the only thing to regret about the current project is that digital pages don't give off the smell of comic books fresh out of their "agh you opened it, so much for the resale value" prophylactic baggies. A whiff of that bitter papery smell flips me right back to Christmas 1986, lying in my new sleeping bag and going through 20 back issues that Santa had found in some strip-mall comics joint. Thanks for all the fun times, Pinis!

And then, via Making Light, points of common consensus.

Mind games with the innocent civilians

New York is cooler than DC again some more. I've been fond of the wicked people of Improv Everywhere since they hosted a book signing by hot new author Anton Chekov, and their original no-pants subway ride is the stuff of legend. These days it's an annual tradition up there, like Pamplona's running of the bulls but less stupidly risky. (Of course the people who did it in DC notified the cops and the media first, because we are overcautious nerdlingers in a largely humorless city that's patrolled by bored security personnel, a combo that plays merry hell with comedic spontaneity.)

A lot of what IE's done in the last few years has been cute but a little silly, like the time that they set off masses of cell phones in the Strand or practiced for synchronized swimming in a public fountain. But there's some kind of Sturgeon's Law at work, because their Grand Central piece is genius, beautiful, strange, the kind of thing that people who say, "I don't understand art, but I know what I like," would probably agree is art, because what else would you call it? And I bet they'd like it, too.



H/T Making Light, as usual.

Et cetera

A day without riding is a day that will be followed by some singularly pointless posting. It turns out that an evening of laundry, paying the bills, and eating the butternut squash soup I made from Weebat's recipe (not shown: extensive prolonged cursing during the struggle to peel the squash) doth not a fruitful posting make.

Randomly, then, I bring glad tidings about the NYC yogurt chain's for expansion: "We will 'berry you." Also, here's a bit of fabulous from Defenestration magazine, the less-irritating heir of McSweeney's and makers of the pitch-perfect abridged Jude the Obscure vid. This one's for The Vamp, who lately has been operating on about twenty minutes of continuous sleep per night due to her new arrival's jet lag; maybe laughter can sub for some of the missing snooze time.

Hacking the cerebral cortex

Part the nth of playing games with your fellow beings: Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day. Rose Tyler had this one nailed: "To get that many people dressed up and being silly, they gotta be students." If the respeckable adults among us did it, though, how much stranger and more fun would that be?

Favorite suggestion: "The classic version of this is to get some kind of smoke bomb or smoke machine, as well as an anachronistic costume. Wait for someone to walk past an alley, then set off the smoke and stagger out, looking dumbfounded. If they don't run away, grab their shoulder and ask what year it is. If they respond, shout 'The experiment was a success after all!' and run away. It works even better if you can get some friends wearing suits and dark glasses to go to the person immediately afterwards and ask if they've seen someone matching your description."

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts

I used to work with a guy who played bass in a local rock band, who one year were hired to play the City Paper's Valentine's Day party for singles. He decided that it would be a grand idea to use pick-up lines as between-song patter, so he spent most of a workday searching the interwebs for specialized lines. It was with genuine regret that he reported that the party was so depressing that not even the goth lines got any kind of crowd reaction. He and Dan the Nats Fan would have gotten on well, though; Dan started using his before-they-were-omnipresent PDA to collect bad lines from women he thought were cute (and, NB, he reports that the only line that worked was, "I collect bad pick-up lines. What's the worst you've ever heard?").

In that spirit, and as a thanks to all the people who've been telling me good online dating stories lately, here's a link to Geoffrey Chaucer's lines for use at the annual medieval studies conference in Kalamazoo. It is a fair thought to conjure on: "Art thou a disastrous poll tax? Bycause I feele a risynge comynge on," and "Shulle we maken the cindreblokke to synge?"