52 Weeks of Dresses -- Week 27

Otherwise titled: dinner in Ethiopia

The dresses are back!  I finally have a little bit of order back in my life, and the weather's nice again.  So, without further ado...

T and I went to dinner last Saturday night with some of his friends at Meskerem.  (Apologies for the delay.)  Meskerem is an Ethiopian restaurant on South Grand.  I'm not sure that I had ever had Ethiopian food before, but it was quite good.  It's similar to Middle Eastern or Indian food in that it's sort of a big pile of meat, veg, and sauce all cooked together, which you scoop up with bread to eat.  Lots of dirty hands by the end of the meal.

There were five adults and four kids at the table, so there was lots of food.  It's done family-style, so we ordered about half a dozen things off the menu, but my favorite was the lamb, although I can't remember if we got the one cooked with curry or turmeric.  Curry, I think.  Also we got a couple of vegetarian combo platters which had some really good sauces and veggies.  Everyone who likes fish really liked the tilapia as well, but that's not really my jam.

The bread was interesting.  It was a soft, spongy, sort of sticky thing.  The best description I can give is this: picture a large crepe, folded into quarters, but it's served cold out of what seems like slightly undercooked crumpet dough.  That sounds unappetizing, but it wasn't bad.  It was just a bit unusually textured, and a little sour.  I think I was expecting something more like naan, which is fluffy and a tad sweet.

After dinner we crossed the street to the Gelateria for dessert and coffee.  My salted caramel gelato was quite good, but the caffe gelato could have used a little more kick.  (My actual coffee, a decaf vanilla latte, was just as sugary and dessert-like as I hoped.)  T got Mayan chocolate gelato, and that cayenne/cinnamon combo was a real winner.

After all that excitement, this was me (and a curious Radar):

Happy Birthday, Grandma!

Technically Grandma's birthday was Monday, but we celebrated late.  Last night, T and I went to Robust with G&G to celebrate the big day!  The food was delicious and we had so much fun!  There was live music which was a bit loud, but the selection of songs was good, so I suppose it can be forgiven.  Happy belated birthday!

What I Watched -- Downton Abbey, Season 1

Technically I'm not actually finished with the whole first season of Downton Abbey; I still have one episode to go.  But I don't care because I love it!

Maggie Smith is hilariously British and fantastic as the Dowager Countess of Grantham, and I also really like Michelle Dockery and Jessica Brown Findlay as Lady Mary and Lady Sybil and Brendan Coyle as Bates.  Really though, the whole ensemble is quite good.

As of now, we're still pre-WWI at Downton.  Elsewhere in the outside world, politics are starting to shift and it won't be long before women have the right to vote.  Inside the abbey, the ladies of the house struggle to figure out their relationships and find the proper matches, while the servants fight their own battles against the position and each other.  Drama, drama everywhere, but in the most restrained way.

I can't wait to get started on season 2!

What I Watched -- Elizabethtown

Over the weekend, T and I watched Elizabethtown.  I had it, neither of us had seen it, and we were in need of something not at all serious to entertain us while I halfway paid attention for a couple of hours.

Elizabethtown is the story of Drew (Orlando Bloom, who makes a better elf or pirate than love interest) and Claire (Kirsten Dunst, who would be adorable if she weren't for some reason so irritating in this movie).  I have many criticisms.  Two are in the previous sentence, and the third of which is that the movie totally underutilizes its stellar supporting cast.  Susan Sarandon plays Drew's mom, but she's relegated to about three scenes, in one of which she makes a total bumbling fool of herself.  And the whole starting point of this movie is the death of her husband.  Just one or two scenes of heartfelt (or at least well-acted) sorrow would've done wonders (with or without Judy Greer, who plays Drew's sister).  Alec Baldwin has one scene in which he basically plays Jack Donaghy, his character from 30 Rock.  It might've been nice to let him stretch a little. Longtime actor Gailard Sartain also has a bit part.  I know the movie is a love story between Drew and Claire, but at least give the supporting cast something to work with!

Despite those negatives, the movie wasn't actually unlikable.  Unfortunate in life though he seems, Drew had a few funny moments, mostly upon encountering the small-town side of his family. 

As for the aforementioned love story, though I found Claire's overly adorable persona to be a bit much, both Dunst and Bloom at least kept to their characters throughout the film's more outrageous scenes (a fire at the memorial service, being welcomed into a wedding party with open arms).  They do manage one charming, early-relationship, all-night phone call, which is perhaps the most winning scene in the whole film.

The movie is directed by Cameron Crowe, who has such musically-inspired goodness as Say Anything and Almost Famous to his name, as well as documentaries of Tom Petty and Pearl Jam.  The music in Elizabethtown will not disappoint.  It is wide-ranging and generally great; I didn't know nearly all of it, but it always suited the scene and the mood.  The whole thing is capped off with an intricately planned road trip and an ode to the wonders of a good mix of music to go along with it.  A truer point was never made.

Bottom line: listen for the music, watch it only if you have nothing better to do.  (Let's hear it for the mix tape.)

Goal #13

Goal #13: sort lost bookmarks.

What? More bookmarks?  Yes, more bookmarking fun!  Now that I've sorted through the bookmarks on both my personal and work computers, I feel pretty organized in that regard.  They're grouped together, I deleted all the links that no longer work, etc.  But I also have a whole bunch of links saved in Evernote (my life saver!) which need to be double-checked and organized as appropriate.  A lot of them are links someone sent me in an e-mail ("Check out this awesome site!"), but I never got around to.  I made a big long list of them, and now it's time to tackle it.

Recap of Goal #12: Success!  My work computer is now organized, and cleared of a lot of clutter that frankly should be on my personal computer.  But I get a lot of e-mails and do some of my surfing during the day, so unfortunately a lot of that junk ends up on my work computer.  No longer!  At least not until tomorrow.

Happy Birthday, T!

I hope you enjoy your day!

What I Watched -- The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Actually, just kidding.  I tried to watch The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, but the DVD wouldn't work in my computer or T's.  Bummer!  But since I don't have a DVD player and just plug my computer into the TV (now that Dell finally fixed my HDMI port!), we were out of options.

T asked why I got this DVD from the library, and the truth is that I can't remember.  Probably I watched something else that had Tommy Lee Jones in it - The Company Men, maybe?  Since I like him, I wanted to watch a movie of his that I hadn't seen yet.  That sounds like something I would do.

Better luck next time.

The Song I'm Loving Today

Sorry, I'm not loving any songs today.  Where have all the songs gone?  Why am I not loving any?  Sad face.

What I Watched -- Friends With Kids

I got back early yesterday morning from 10 days out of town and T wanted to see a movie.  That's cool, and I'm pretty sure I can stay awake despite my overnight bus trip (that's right, bus) and my 5:30 a.m. arrival time.

However, the only movie currently in theaters that we both had any desire at all to see was Friends With Kids.   (Despite what those of you who know me might think, this was not, in fact, my first choice.  The Artist was.  And sadly those were the only two movies that looked even remotely worth seeing, at least until The Hunger Games comes out.  The Artist was vetoed.)

The parts of this movie that were about having friends with kids were both funny because they are true and tragic because they are true, but that was only a small percentage of the film.  Mostly it was about Jason (goofy-looking Adam Scott) and Julie's (Jennifer Westfeldt, who is lovely in a vaguely unconventional and high-cheekboned way) decision to have a child despite their total lack of romantic interest in one another.  They are friends with a kid.  Their story was great at the beginning, then frustrating, and the end was just...well, there's no other word for it.  It was stupid.  VAGUE SPOILER: If you've ever seen Speed and hated the last scene in that movie, you'll hate this one too.

But the movie seems to have it backwards - more time should be spent on the friends with kids, less time on the friends with a kid; the others' characters are better, their stories have more to them (or at least seem like they could).  Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig are great playing a once overly-lusty couple whose marriage is unraveling.  Maya Rudolph and Irishman Chris O'Dowd hold their own as the (somewhat clownish) couple trying to keep theirs together.  (The Hamm-Wiig-Rudolph-O'Dowd quadruplet was also featured in Bridesmaids.)  As for Jason and Julie, there's really nothing surprising about their story, except that Jason for some time manages a relationship with Megan Fox's character.

There's actually one thing about that lack of surprise that works for me though.  It's Ms. Fox herself, because in some ways she reminded me of me (looks excepted).  She has a busy life and likes it that way.  And now, I'm going to do something I rarely do (actually, have I ever done this?): I'm going to pilfer from someone else's review (the horror!).  I think her review takes an interesting perspective (that this movie is actually designed for people with kids, not without - see also my point in the paragraph above, about where the focus should be), and this bit from her review underscores that.  From Lisa Hymas at the Huffington Post:

"There's one resolutely childfree character in the film -- Mary Jane, Jason's girlfriend. 'Honestly, I've just never had the urge, and I love my freedom,' she explains. But in her last scene, she's supposed to come across as selfish and pouty -- because she isn't happy about being seated in high-end restaurant next to a family with three squirrelly kids. Overall it's not a terrible portrayal of a childfree person (Mary Jane is played by Megan Fox, so at least she makes the childfree look smokin' hot), but in a movie in which almost everyone is presented sympathetically, M.J. gets the shaft."

You can hear Megan Fox's take on Mary Jane here (skip to 0:46) and here (skip to 1:08).

In other news though, did I mention the film is set in New York?  Many bonus points there!  It relies on the old cliche of having kids and moving to Brooklyn, most fabulously featured in Sex and the City.

Bottom line: mostly cutesy and not bad, but the ending was terrible.  Good for people with kids and/or people who <3 NY scenery!

Goal #12

Goal #12: might as well carry on with Phase II of organizing the bookmarks, this time on my work computer.

Recap of Goal #11: I made a fair bit of progress, despite the fact that I was out of town all week.  I didn't get totally finished with my personal computer though, so I'll keep working on that this week as well.

St. Paddy's Day

For your St. Patrick's Day enjoyment, an original song!



This song is by Natural Gas, an Irish band mom discovered on one of her many trips "home."  Unlike all the other Americans they met who threatened to do so, mom actually got in touch with their US manager and brought them to St. Louis to play!

Another place that they frequent is Savannah, a lovely city and the site of an enormous St. Patrick's Day parade and party, including a rugby tournament!

Random Links

More fun that I've been collecting for you!

Is Ryan Gosling cuter than a puppy?

Scary, scary students.

Read Alikes, in case you need any suggestions.

Oh my god, that's disgusting!

Awesome vintage news footage - watch the video! 

Okay, okay.  I guess sometimes people can be pretty awesome.

What I'm Reading Now -- Clapton: the Autobiography

One of my law partners listened to Clapton: The Autobiography and loved it.  Despite his status as one of the world's preeminent living guitarists (and really any guitarist, living or dead) I'm not a die-hard Clapton fan.  I love his stuff, when I hear it, but I rarely say "I'd really like to hear some Eric Clapton right now."

What's more, I've never done much in the way of obsessing over musicians' personal lives.  I love music, but aside from the humorous anecdote that makes it onto the evening news, I don't pay much attention to the background of the person making it.

But so far, so good!  Interesting stuff.  There are a few other (auto)biographies I've been eyeballing, so maybe I'll actually get to them some day.

Guns, Germs, and Steel -- Take 2

Despite, my best efforts, I'm not sure I gave Guns, Germs, and Steel the attention I (and J) said I should have.  I tried!  I think this is maybe a book better read than listened to, since then you're less likely to be doing something else as well.

Regardless, I did enjoy it.  I think I even got a few nuggets of wisdom out of it, though I do not consider myself expert enough to judge the quality of the arguments the author made.

Diamond starts out his history with broad history of the settlement of peoples, specifically on their domestication of plants and development of agriculture.  He makes an interesting point about the spread of various domesticated plant species across land masses with broad latitudes but limited longitudes (for example, the Eurasian pan-continent), while masses oriented longitudinally (Africa, the Americas) experienced a much more limited spread of species due to the variability in climate.  The same is largely true for technological developments.  Domestication of animals also played a role in how large a developing society became.  He ends with an analysis of the different structures and sizes societies can take: band, tribe, chiefdom, or state.

PBS did a television special based on the book, and also has a website full of interesting information here. 

I now face a dilemma: I also have his book Collapse on audio.  Do I listen to it, knowing I will probably have the same issue with attention, or do I read it, knowing that I may never get around to it?

Goal #11

Goal #11: online bookmarks, phase I - the personal computer.

I have a lot of bookmarks.  They need some organization.  This is going to be at least a three-week project, through I may not do them all right in a row.  Or maybe I will.  We'll see if I'm on a roll.

Phase I consists of sorting through all the bookmarks I have "saved" on my personal computer.  Do I need this one?  Do I use it?  Does it even work anymore?  How should it be categorized?  That sort of thing.  Then I will get them all in order, on my personal computer anyway.

Recap of Goal #10: Oh my god, the craziest thing happened at my first left-handed meal!  I was eating some of T's leftover potatoes (we went to brunch at First Watch), and I realized that, with my left hand, I was misjudging the distance to the potato. Sometimes I would overshoot, sometimes I would undershoot, and my fork would just meet empty plate.

I tried my right hand, and got my potato with no problem.  I pointed this out to T, who is left handed, and he reached for a couple of bites of my waffle to test out his skills.  Left hand? No problem.  Right hand?  A little slower, but still no problem.

Then he did a little experiment with me.  He put the salt shaker somewhere near the middle of the table, and - quickly and without much thought - I was supposed to use my left hand to reach out and touch it.  I missed.  I underestimated the distance.  Again, but this time with my right hand?  Dead center on the top of the salt shaker.

As many of you know, I was born amblyopic (specifically exotropic).  My depth perception is terrible generally, and I think that's why I was missing the potatoes with my left hand.  First of all, I'm a righty, so my fine motor skills are less developed in my left hand.  But Ty, who's a lefty, can still manage to get the distances correct with his right hand, so it must be something more than that.  It seems that the compensatory skills I've developed to judge distances somehow work better when I'm using my dominant hand.  Maybe it's just because I've had more practice with it, so my brain communicates with it more effectively.

Anyway, super strange.

Neal Degrasse Tyson and NASA

This past Friday, Neil deGrasse Tyson was on Science Friday.

Prior to that hour of radio, I had no idea that Dr. Tyson was on a campaign to educate Americans about the importance of continuing space exploration.  Boy, do I know that now.

It's not clear how much success he's having on that mission but it is clear that he's passionate about it, and perhaps more importantly, he's a great ambassador.  He's like a good professor: he communicates well, he listens to questions with interest - and then answers them!, and he gets excited about his subject matter.  If you asked me prior to the show whether I wanted to listen to an hour-long podcast about raising money for space exploration, I would have said "no way."  But I listened to the whole thing, and enjoyed it!  (Hear Dr. Tyson talk about the most astounding thing in the universe here.)

During the show, someone asked whether we shouldn't be focusing on the problems here at home rather than worrying about outer space.  Dr. Tyson responded by pointing out that the federal government spends 50 times as much on domestic social programs as we do on the entire NASA budget.

I have no idea how much of that money spent on social programs I actually see.  My first instinct is to say, "not much," but it's probably more than I would think.  Regardless, I'm certain that, penny for penny spent, the amount of enjoyment or satisfaction or whatever you want to call it which I get from NASA projects far outstrips that from federal social programs.  (For evidence, see here, here, and here.  And look!  Even in that last post, I was in agreement with Neil.  I just didn't think I'd want to hear him talk about it.  Lesson learned.)

Now, I grant that when things go wrong at NASA, they can go so spectacularly, disastrously wrong that they put other government missteps to shame.  However, given their relatively paltry budget, NASA seems to do a darn good job avoiding those disasters, or at least taking them seriously when they do happen.  I bet lots of politicians could learn something there.

On a related note, WU professor Ray Arvidson is the science advisor to NASA's Curiosity Project (aka the Mars Science Laboratory).  He was written up recently in the St. Louis Business Journal.

Long live my little rovers!

[Aside: have you seen NASA's most recent satellite photo of Earth?  If not, you can check it out here, and the story includes a link to download a high-res copy for your own self.]

An Organized Kitchen

These pictures are long overdue, but I thought I'd entertain you all with how I spent my last few days of winter: by organizing the kitchen and getting crafty!

(Okay, so some of my labels are a little crooked, but still.  I think I did a pretty good job.  In any case, my organizational OCD is at bay, for now.)

What I'm Reading Now -- Guns, Germs, and Steel

I'm a few tracks in, and I can already tell that I'll have to put a little more effort into listening to Guns, Germs, and Steel than I have to other books recently.

At least at the beginning, the author covers the subject matter in such sweeping statements that if you miss one or two, all the sudden you're centuries behind the discussion and have no idea how he got from A to B.

He's already told me that his goal is to disprove the biological superiority theory for why some societies thrive while others fail, so I'm thinking these broad generalizations will give way to more in-depth discussion once we get the background info out of the way.  We'll see.
 
Also, I really like Diamond's (or his publisher's) use of the Oxford comma in the title.

The Painted Drum -- Take 2

I finished with The Painted Drum over the weekend, and rather enjoyed it.

It's told in four parts, each part narrated by one of three voices.  The suspense of the novel is in the unfolding of the story each narrator tells, and discovering exactly how how the drum connects them to one another.

The book starts and ends with Faye Travers, a New Hampshire woman who appraises estates and actions estate property for a living.  She discovers a valuable drum from the Ojibwe tribe of North Dakota, to which her mother is connected.  Faye discovers the drums origins, and later how it continues to affect the Ojibwe living near its new owner.

Common themes run across the three stories.  Redemption seems too strong a word for the strongest theme.  Recognition, perhaps?  Acknowledgment?  Sort of a coming to terms.  Unlike Beginners, which I watched recently, The Painted Drum seems to have a more realistic, if also slightly more depressing, outlook.

Goal #10

Goal #10: eat with my left hand.

What a silly thing to do!  But really, I'm going to work on this.  Beware of flying escargot if you're my dining partner.  But why am I doing this?

I've gotten into the bad habit of scarfing down my food without really taking the time to appreciate it.  Since I'm a righty most of the time, eating will my left hand will force me to slow down a bit, and hopefully in the meantime, I'll enjoy what I'm eating.

Recap of Goal #9: a qualified success!  I made little to no progress on my work e-mail, but my personal e-mail inboxes look LOADS better and more manageable!

What I Watched -- Beginners

My timing is not usually too good, but I lucked out with Beginners.  I had gotten it from the library just days before Christopher Plummer won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.  Plummer plays Hal, a 75-year-old cancer patient who comes out to his son Oliver (Ewan McGregor). 


For some reason, despite all the things I liked about this movie, I was not totally taken in by it.  I liked Plummer as the old man with a new lease on life, however temporary.  I liked McGregor as the confused, somewhat wayward son who just bumbles along because he has nothing else to do.  I liked the photo montages which punctuated the film.  I loved Arthur the dog.  (Perhaps not incidentally, Arthur is Christopher Plummer's first name.)

But I just wasn't swept away.  Maybe everything was a little too neat and tidy, despite Oliver's bumbling.  Or maybe he just reminded me of one of those clueless people for whom everything seems to work out swimmingly, regardless of whether they put any work or even thought into the direction in which their life is heading.  Maybe it was my disbelief that beautiful French actresses fall out of the sky and onto your couch, even in L.A.  Maybe it was just a story too unfamiliar from my own. 

Bottom line: whatever it was, while I enjoyed the movie, I didn't fall under the spell of the story and probably won't watch it again.

What I'm Reading Now -- The Painted Drum

Louise Erdrich, as it turns out, has written many books.  She's one of those authors who sort of flies under the radar - from what I can tell her books are generally acclaimed but do not become singular sensations like Olive Kitteridge, Jodi Picoult books, or anything recommended by Oprah.  When they're new, you can usually find them on those displays of new books in the bookstores, but not for long.

I've read only one of her other books: The Beet Queen (which I always get mixed up with a completely unrelated book I read: Queen of the Turtle Derby and other Southern Phenomena, which in turn I get mixed up with a series I've never read: the Sweet Potato Queens books; it's the "queen" thing).  Anyway, I read Beet Queen when I was living in London, and frankly I don't remember the details too well, but I do remember enjoying it.  Why I haven't read more of her stuff, I can't say.  (Same with Anne Tyler.  I read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant when I was in London, liked it, and haven't read anything else of hers.  She's another fly-under-the-radar type.)

Since I've gotten this far without actually telling you what I'm reading but talking about lots of other books, I guess it's time: The Painted Drum.  Erdrich is half Native American (Chippewa), and many of her books deal with Native American themes, including this one.

Outliers -- Take 2

As I expected (and hoped), this was a fun read.  Gladwell picks well-known and interesting subjects to investigate and support his basic conclusion, which is this (he says this at the beginning, so it's not really a spoiler): outliers aren't, in fact, outliers at all.

We have this idea that people like Bill Gates are somehow so extraordinary that their accomplishments are way out of reach for anyone else.  But in fact, their accomplishments are a combination of talent honed through lots of work (10,000 hours needed to become an expert) and coincidence or circumstances that they were able to exploit to make the most of those talents.  This is not groundbreaking information, but it's nonetheless an interesting personal and social study.

My biggest criticism: he does, in fact make his point at the beginning, and again at the end, with a study of his own ancestors.  What falls between are basically a series of case studies, all with similar themes and plots, which is a little flat.  By the time you've heard the same story three or four times, you know how it's going to end.  It's kept interesting because the actual means, the breaks each person gets, are different, even though the outcome is the same.  Generally, though: enjoyable.