Textism

No symbolism whatsoever

12 hours ago

Cherries? Foliage? Cherries under foliage? Nah, I got nothin’.

Photograph of a cherry

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Where we live you’d be hard pressed to find anyone under 70 (and even then, at any time other than Sunday morning before family lunch) making poule au pot, but nonetheless it is I think one of the very best of the ancient, rustic slow-cooked standards, and everybody should have it at least once or go to the grave wondering why they hadn’t.

Tons of good brining info here.

Right: brining chicken, even if it is to be poached in liquid, is righteous and good. On a tip picked up reading the great McGee (a book so hugely useful it should be distributed Gideon-style) I’ve been tinkering around with the idea of brine as tea, into which other flavours can be brewed to participate in the saline-protein exchange voodoo. You’re going to prepare a 7% brine (70g of salt per litre of water), so while boiling enough water to dissolve the salt, chuck in a few bay leaves, a head of smashed garlic, a big bunch of thyme and twenty three black peppercorns. Boil for 5–10 minutes, then strain and add enough ice water to make the final brine, into which is gently slid a nice plump dead chicken. Into the fridge overnight, then rinse.

Elizabeth David’s bread crumb method still reigns: dry slices of dense crusty white low and slow in the oven, lay them out on a counter and bash like hell with a rolling pin. Also: packaged bread crumbs taste like shit.

Create about a chicken cavity’s worth (that’s a standard measurement, look it up) of a stuffing made from chopped garlic and shallots, lots of chopped flatleaf parsley, good home-made bread crumbs and ground pork or sausage meat (the proportions are entirely yours to choose; I go about 40/60 bread/flesh) and a raw egg. You should be smoking while doing this, with the cigarette perched at enough of a jaunty angle that falling ash may add random colour and texture every time you swear. Stuff the chicken quite tightly (cram, cram) before trussing with string.

It now dawns on me the whole reason for typing out this longish quasi-recipe is to strut about a fetish object I’ve wanted for, like, ever, and just got because the local hardware store was doing a sale on Le Creuset, which even here in its country of manufacture is risibly expensive, and hardly ever discounted. Anyway, in the second recent bout of consumer ecstasy I am now in squidgy love with this enamelled cast-iron thing:

Photograph of a consumer fetish object

Seriously, love. I visit it at random throughout the day. Anyway this or any vessel of its ilk will do: it’s strictly stovetop, so oven-proofedness isn’t a concern, but it should be deep enough so the chicken can be, oh do we really need a Pooh reference, completely surrounded by water.

Do just that and bring to a low boil, skimming off any scum that should rise to the surface. Add any combination you like of aromatics like carrots, celery, onion, parsley, garlic. Simmer for an hour or so, then remove the chicken and strain the by-now knackered vegetables from the broth to be chucked in the compost or served to rotten children.

Check the broth for seasoning, then the chicken goes back into the pot, to simmer for another half hour with whatever vegetables you like; here that’s chunks of waxy potato, carrots, young purple turnips, spring onion bulbs, and, toward the very end, thickly sliced fresh fennel (this does tend to make everything taste like fennel, so go lightly if that’s not your thing).

While that is burbling away, mash together a sauce gribiche, which is just an emulsification of boiled egg yolk, mustard and olive oil into which you mix chopped sour pickles, chopped boiled egg white, capers, anchovy, chopped parsley and shallots with salt and pepper until it’s about the consistency of lumpy ketchup.

Let the chicken rest on a plate for 15 minutes before mutilating it into dainty little portions with your favourite knife, then prise out and slice the stuffing. Pile the vegetables high in a huge bowl, arrange the chicken and stuffing slices on top, ladle a lot of the broth on top of the whole mess, then plunk it down in the middle of the table. The sauce may be passed from person to person, but only counter-clockwise, to be globbed thickly onto the plate as necessary. Cheap red wine and bread go real good.

Screenwipe

6 May 2008, 2pm

During that rather gruesome thing I went through last year there was a lot of content piped through the Mac Mini to the fickle and aging television. The percentage of garbage was high, but in every dumpster there lies the chance to find, say, an unopened bottle of beer (which, along with the return deposit, can practically rain good fortune). By far the best and most surprising television discovery was coincidentally a show about television: Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe.

People in the UK likely already know about Brooker from his TV and video game reviews and ‘Comment is Free’ posts at The Guardian, or from the satirical TV listing web site TV Go Home, in particular its recurring item Cunt, about a loathsome stereotype of the day, which he and Chris Morris eventually turned into the infamous Nathan Barley, which didn’t quite work (was dated by the time it appeared, wrong actor in the lead, comedy and strident moral advocacy can’t and won’t mix, I could go on).

It’s on Screenwipe, though, where he truly shines: you know how you watch Boston Legal just because it’s fun to watch Alan Shore get away with such singly dimensioned grandstanding and axe grinding in court? It’s like that, only funny. You know how, against your better judgement, you watch those shows in which talking heads crack snarky about decontextualised clips of some common theme? It’s like that, only he makes sense, and you almost always agree.

The way he deflates execrable bullshit like the various Simon Cowell franchises, or the relentlessly vacuous Lost, or the tooth-pulling UK version of Deal or No Deal, is just so bang on you want to dance around the room. His facility with cruelly sharp language seals it: doing a recap of the fiasco that was last year’s Celebrity Big Brother, he described the mother of the puzzlingly famous Jade Goody as ‘Dot Cotton reflected in the side of a dented kettle’. I laughed so hard I think something came loose.

I could quote all day, but best to enjoy them in situ. Do search around – there are quite a few episodes on Youtube, and the tenacious will find collections of all four extant series floating around torrentially.

And then, to contrast and compare, watch TV Burp. Or, rather, don’t.

On not (yet) seeing blue

5 May 2008, 6pm

Where I grew up there was enough damp, acidic soil to support oceans of u-pick blueberry operations, where we used to get them by the hamper. As I understand it they’re native only to North America, which is something of a drag; myrtilles are very hard to find hereabouts, usually only available in tiny, sour, frozen, Swedish form.

Herself planted these bushes two summers ago, and the yield then was about 1¾ muffins worth. Last year we did rather better. This year I hope to walk around blue-lipped for most of July.

Photograph of inchoate blueberries

On (not) seeing red

4 May 2008, 4pm

Say, did you know that people who design web sites who write on their own sites about the changes they’ve recently made to their site design have no idea whatsoever that you couldn’t give a flying roll of monkey doughnuts? Bless their little cotton socks.

Moving on: apologies to the 7–10% of you so rudely disrespected since the relaunch of this here site. In one of those regrettably too-clever-by-half design decisions, influenced by the hardcore tradesman’s printing shop belief (which indeed goes way back to scribal rubrication) that the universes of thought conveyed through text need never arrive in any colour but black, or sometimes red, I had chosen to differentiate hyperlinks within text with that sometimes colour.

It’s always good design practice when indicating differing kinds of text to change one parameter at a time: what patent disrespect to both writer and reader to go too far, as many designers do, and interrupt the simple process of reading to pile on multiple indicators (weight, decoration, size, colour, background colour, popups, whatever) just to flag that some text is clickable (imagine driving along a smoothly paved road, then being on a block with an Olive Garden on it, information conveyed not only by the Olive Garden sign but by the road suddenly being paved with thin red sauce and shitty cheese).

Hover over a link for a before-and-after.

My one parameter shift, however, didn’t take into account the sizeable percentage of people unable to easily differentiate red from black, effectively rendering the parameter change to zero. Any designer who ignores this sort of accessibility issue must go to bed without dessert.

Much as I prefer the red from a text design perspective, these chalky underlines will have to do until some night next week when I’ll no doubt wake up remembering underlines cause shingles in badgers or some such.

But is it advertising?

4 May 2008, 12pm

Yes, it is. Short behind the scenes video here.

Perhaps you share my reaction to clever ads: as soon as I see one, a filmy layer of distrust and seething hatred gets in the way, and I can’t think of anything other than some bearded agency doucherocket receiving an award for being ‘clever’ and subsequently feeling on top of the world because he gnarled whatever wit and narrative grace he could muster into the successful injection of a brand into an ecosystem that, milliseconds later, does not care.

This ad for metal prongy things to hold up paper rolls, however, has just enough DIY dorkiness, and a complete absence of the sort of knowing, winking, preening aspirational slumming with which bearded agency doucherockets brush their teeth, so: goodonya.

My father is visiting

2 May 2008, 3pm

Eleven random biographical notes:

When I was very small he worked two jobs at once; one was in a sawmill
On his fortieth birthday he got a perm
He used to drink too much, then one day he just stopped
He can be stubborn as a mule who’s just graduated stubborn school
Though born in Alberta, his veins practically pulse with sea water
On a hot day out in a boat near North Pender Island, he dared me to dive into the water to cool off; a week later I developed pneumonia
When she had decided their marriage was over, I helped move out my mother’s stuff while he, completely unaware, was out fishing
His own father was seriously injured when a drunk woman, unable to find her chauffeur, plowed her car through the crowd at Lansdowne Racetrack
We got into a fistfight when I was sixteen and he had me down in seconds
He has a new hearing aid, and a new hip
He is sixty nine years old

Photograph of the author's father

Embedded video is broken

1 May 2008, 3pm

The highlights of my first trip to Europe, at the age of nineteen, were as follows: getting mugged at knifepoint by a tweaking mass of dreadlocks in Amsterdam (followed by a delightfully sleepless, dehydrated night in a hostel built by Satan himself); hearing, with stunned disbelief, a person of Japanese heritage speak in a cockney accent; and sitting on a Tate Gallery bench staring at the paintings of Francis Bacon, whose work I spent all my late teens and early twenties pretending to understand (still don’t, twenty years on, but continue to enjoy the hell out of).

I was going to tell you about this magnificent South Bank Show on Bacon, made around the same time as that trip (the best bit is the lunch, but do watch all six parts), and now that I’ve done that (just there, a few words back) I realise it’s been, what, twenty seconds since I rattled on all high and mighty and finger-pointy about some user interface issue, so let us then consider for a moment that embedded video is broken.

To my mind the point of failure lies at offering only two options to the viewer: stay locked onto the web page, which, no matter the site, is like watching a dancing bear on a television being carried by a dancing bear, or go full-screen, which, given both the resolution thang and one’s god-given ability to perform more than one activity at a time, is rarely attractive.

I know it’s possible to sneak in the back door of some video sharing sites and download files to watch on a standalone player, but that’s no solution to the problem.

This happens several times a day: I find myself at Youtube or Vimeo or Brightcove or wherever, begin watching something interesting, and immediately start looking for a way to put that in a corner of my screen so I can continue working or doing, um, research, and cast my eyes back to it whenever interest demands I do so. This evidently can’t be done using any of the popular embedded video gear, so I end up resizing the browser window (which results in layout chaos) and opening up a fresh window to resume what I was doing before. This is lame, this is broken.

Please Mr Internets, make a standard embedded video solution that allows us to pop up an actual-size window in which to watch the dancing bears while we continue to save the world. Thanks in advance.

Oh it is so on

1 May 2008, 9am

Here we go again. The vines are cracking off, ready for another season hoovering up all the delicious carbon dioxide and belching out ‘oxygen’. I’m told the fruit however is sometimes useful.

Photograph of vineyards in spring

The book I mentioned earlier

30 Apr 2008, 8am

I COMMAND you at once to order a copy of Things I Learned About My Dad, an anthology of writing gathered by the well-known dooce woman which happens to feature my girlfriend Gail Armstrong, whose contribution, a memoir about life with her father, is SUPERLATIVE.

We haven’t seen a copy yet but Gail’s piece better be PRECISELY at the point where the book naturally FALLS OPEN to the casual READER or I shall be VERY CROSS indeed.

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