Beef Barley Soup

I save recipes as text files on my hard drive. Then, when my kids call me (and actually, recipes are the #1 thing my kids call me for), I can just email them the file. But, tonight I made a beef barley soup from scratch - I used to use a mix to start with - and it was totally delicious! So, for posterity, here it is.

Beef Barley Soup

1.5# steak (sirloin)
2 cans (14 oz) reduced sodium beef broth
1.5 cup baby carrots
3 stalks celery
1 large russet potato
1.5 cups fresh green beans
3 smallish vine tomatoes
4 oz gourmet blend fresh mushrooms
3/4 cup frozen corn
3/4 cup frozen peas
1 cup 10-minute barley

Total cook time, 1h20m. Ready to eat at T. Stir every 2-3 minutes.
2 quart big pot too small; you need a 3 quart pot minimum.
Bump heat up every time you add stuff, bump down when boiling again.

Remove fat and cube steak.
T -80 minutes: Brown steak in a little olive oil w a few shakes garlic powder.
Add 1 t onion salt; 1/2 t MSG; 1 t black pepper.
T -70 minutes: Add beef broth + 4.5 cups water (8 cups liquid total).
Add diced carrots, celery, potato, green beans.
Add 1 t dried parsley, 1 t dried oregano, 1 t dried basil, 3 bay leaves.
Once boiling, reduce heat, cover.
T -25 minutes: add diced tomatos and mushrooms.
T -20 minutes: add corn and peas.
T -15 minutes: remove bay leaves; add barley.

Serve with crescent rolls.

Three Moments of an Explosion

Three Moments of an Explosion is a collection of short stories by China Miéville. I had read one of his novels - "Perdido Street Station" I think - a few years ago and liked it OK, but not enough to try any of his other novels. It was a very noir, slipstream fantasy. I'm surprised I didn't try more of his work. He consistently gets very positive reviews, so I thought I'd try this book of short stories.

This was very fun reading. A wide variety of topics, concepts, and approaches. A few with overly odd approaches don't really work, but the bulk of the stories more than make up for the weak ones.

One story I really loved: the 4th story, titled "The Dowager of Bees". It was about professional card players who sometimes get cards from Somewhere Else - and you look in the card rule book and it tells you what they mean, but only until the hand is over. Here are the cards he mentions:

Dowager of Bees; 8 of Chains; 2 of Scissors; 9 of Teeth; Detective of Scissors; 9 of Chains; Ace of Ivy; 4 of Chimneys.

I clearly am fascinated with cards. I've loved Tarot since college years. As astrology can be viewed as an early attempt to classify personalities, tarot can viewed as an early attempt to classify life experience. I still pull cards on the Tarot app on my iPad. It uses the Rider deck; I've always loved the imagery of the non-trump cards in that deck. I also helped fund an IndieGogo project to create a Rider Waite deck with photographs taken in Haiti. I loved "Last Call", by Tim Powers, which was more a fisher king story but had some creative uses of cards in it. And of course, the trumps used in Zelazny's "Nine Princes in Amber"series were very Tarot-like. I blogged about my reread of that series here.

I need to find a card game somewhere. Euchre, pinochle, or hearts. No poker for me.

The World Until Yesterday

"The World Until Yesterday" (2012) is the latest book by Jared Diamond. It is subtitled "What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies". Traditional Societies are the world's remaining hunter-gatherers, normally bands or tribes.

I enjoyed this book by far the least of any of Diamond's works. It just did not seem to have near the insights of any of his other books. I did learn some things I did not know, but none of them had the "aha" quality of his other books.

The book is 480 pages, with a prologue and an epilogue and 11 chapters divided into 5 parts. Diamond compares traditional to modern societies in 8 different areas (he says 9???): peaceful dispute resolution, warfare, child-rearing, treatment of the elderly, dangers, religion, languages and multilingualism, and health-promoting lifestyles.

In the first chapter, Diamond discusses territoriality, including exclusive versus shared land use. For traditional peoples, everyone is a friend, enemy, or a stranger. Strangers you pretty much treat as enemies. Traditional peoples normally live their whole lives around the same people and locales.

On peaceful dispute resolution, Diamond notes how traditional peoples are more concerned with figuring out how the disputing parties are going live together for the rest of their lives, rather than worrying only about justice and compensation. This approach would make sense in modern societies for things like divorce and inheritance.

On war, Diamond points out that although the absolute numbers seem small, as a percentage of population the deaths from warring traditional peoples are huge. Not sure there was something we were supposed to learn from this.

On raising children, traditional peoples seem to show children a lot more respect, and to expect more of them. He also notes that traditional peoples tend to crying babies immediately, without worrying that this will negatively affect character.

On treatment of the elderly, there are traditional societies that abandon or kill old people. But most find grandparents to be sources of history, and helpers with tasks they can still handle. There are no retirement homes among traditional peoples.

On dangers, and dealing with them, I liked the chapter titled "Constructive Paranoia". Given that very few traditional people die of old age, they tend to be extremely wary of anything that could signify danger. Diamond thought they were being overly cautious at first, until a life-threatening situation that developed out of nowhere showed him the error of his ways. Also interesting, in dangerous situations, traditional peoples completely admit how frightened they are - no macho cowboys here!

On religion, Diamond lists various definitions and attributes of religion to determine what is religion and what is not. Diamond lists 7 features/functions of religion:

1. explanation - now being usurped by science;
   
2. defusing anxiety over problems and dangers beyond our control;
   
3. providing comfort, hope, and meaning when life is hard;
   
4. standardized organization - priests, ceremonies, etc;
   
5. preaching political obedience;
   
6. regulating behavior towards strangers by means of formal moral codes;
   
7. justifying wars - I have been big on this one lately.
   

On multilingualism, Diamond is all in favor of it. Traditional peoples usually speak many languages. Diamond posits that bilingualism leads to increased mind development, since the mind is always having to decide which language to do things in. He also talks about research showing that Alzheimer's sufferers who are bilingual function better even when the disease is further advanced physically.

Finally, on health-promoting lifestyles, the contrast between and traditional and modern societies could not be clearer. Traditional peoples never die of heart disease, diabetes, and the other diseases of our overweight modern peoples. Traditional peoples often came close to starving. The adaptations that developed in the face of that work against us in the modern world where there is always more than enough food. Salt and sugar, which are particularly ubiquitous in processed, packaged modern foods, are craved by all of us, and lead to heart disease via hypertension and diabetes. These are now spreading to India and China as they come out of extreme poverty. Time for the Mediterranean Diet for all of us!

Well, that's it. As I said, my least favorite of his books. Even if you enjoyed his other books, I'm not sure I'd recommend this one.

Not The Years Best!

Every August I look forward to the new annual edition of Gardner Dozois's "The Year's Best Science Fiction". This year is the 32nd edition. One of the better covers in recent years.

I buy these in trade paper or hardcover if possible. I collect less and less - as you get older you realize, your kids really don't want to have to fool with this stuff - but I still collect these. I am missing editions 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 17, and 18. Occasionally I pick one up.

This year the reading went quite a bit differently than usual. The biggest difference was, I had already read several of the stories from other sources. In particular, the excellent Cory Doctorow story and one of the Elizabeth Bear stories were in the excellent "Hieroglyph" collection with I reviewed here; the Lauren Beukes story was in the "Twelve Tomorrows" collection I reviewed here; and the Peter Watts I had purchased as a $1.99 novella.

The last story of The Year's Best is usually a very strong novella. This year's last story was a first contact story by Nancy Kress. Ms. Kress is a top writer and I don't remember not enjoying her stuff before, but this just wasn't a strong effort. Minor twists on the 1st contact theme were OK, but the characters were mostly unlikable. Plus the volume had already had a completely off-the-wall and unique 1st contact story: "Thing and Sick", by Adam Roberts. In addition to being unique, this story was really creepy as well.

There were some other good stories. The Robert Reed was interesting. But all, in all, I think I'd have to pick those other two collections together, "Hieroglyph" and "Twelve Tomorrows", as the year's best.

Music: In, Out, and Over

Let's start it off with music in. We've got more sources than usual this time around.

• Sunset Hearts, "wwwindswept", 2014. The current main band of my most excellent drumming nephew Max Heinz in Portland ME. 7 tracks, purchased from bandcamp. Very well produced, but I don't think the songs were quite up the quality of their debut album. 3 stars.
  
• Marie Stella, "from", 2011. Max's prior band. A lot edgier than Sunset Hearts, very strong alternative rock. 6 tracks, purchased from bandcamp. 3 stars.
  
• The Beach Boys, "Ten Years of Harmony", 1980. Ripped from vinyl loaned to me by friend musician Richard Mattingly. He says this was a fan club only release. It covers mostly the same great period as the Beach Boys I had already ripped: "Sunflower" through "Holland" including my favorite "Surf's Up". 27 trecks, including a few I hadn't heard. None of those were standouts, so I just gave the whole thing 3 stars.
  
• The KingBees, "Hoodoo Moon", 2013. These guys are a Louisville blues band. My wife and I happened to catch them at Stevie Ray's when we were spending a weekend in Louisville. 5 piece, harpist, guitarist, bassist, and keyboard player all good vocalists. Then at the Tuesday Blues Jam at Weekend Willie's in Naples FL, I wound up playing with the harpist/vocalist Rick Cain - he also has a place in Naples. Last time I played there on a Wednesday night sitting in with Black Cat Bone, he was there and we chatted and he gave me this CD. It is well produced and has some decent songs, but there was also misogyny and sexism that I don't have much use for at this point - songs like "Younger Girls", "I Got My Ex Paid Off", "Gimme My Money Back". 2 stars
  
• Tame Impala, "Currents". I love this band's sound, but the songs on this album were not as strong as on their prior album. 3 stars.
  
• The Cisco Cliftons, "Is Anybody Out There?". The drummer for this band is young Evan Stripplehoff. He was the 1st drummer of record for the jam I was running at Heny Clay Public House a few summers ago. He got an mechanical engineering degree from UK, worked in the field for 5-6 years, got tired of it, had enough money in the bank to try to pursue music full-time. He's in a couple other bands, this is I think his best. 3 tracks, I think from bandcamp. Well engineered and suprisingly tasty tunes. 4 stars.
  
• Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, "Free For All", 1964. Ripped from my vinyl. Art Blakey is an incredibly strong drummer. And for all my normal complaints about jazz not having enough hook, the 1st 2 tracks, the title track and "Hammer Head", both written by Wayne Shorter, are really catchy. 4 stars for those 2, 3 stars for the other 2 tracks.
  
• The Blues Project, eponymous, 1972. Ripped from vinyl. Subtitled "A Compendium Of The Very Best On The Urban Blues Scene". Maybe better would have been "White Guys from Greenwich Village play the blues". 4 or 5 mostly solo guitarist/vocalists. Most of the guitar work is very good, the vocals not so much so. It made me think of local musician Willie Eames - a white guy playing traditional blues (and other stuff) - who is 10 times as good as any of these guys. I burned him a copy, hopefully I'll get it to him sometime. 3 stars.
  
• The Blues Project, "Live At Town Hall", 1967. Ripped from vinyl. Wow, what a difference. I remember most of this one. Al Kooper on Keys, Denny Kalb on guitar. I think I remember playing "Flute Thing", "Wake Me, Shake Me", and maybe "I Can't Keep From Crying", but I can't imagine what band that would have been with. Put this in the Psychedelic genre - I think the 1st album in that genre that doesn't suck! 4 stars for those 3 tracks, 3 stars for the rest.
  
• Bonzo Dog Band, "Urban Spaceman" 1968; "Keynsham" 1969, "Let's Make Up And Be Friendly" 1972. Ripped from vinyl. Also known as the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. They were a British novelty band from Back In The Day, led by Vivian Stanshall. We really liked "Urban Spaceman", but, man, novelty doesn't age well. 3 stars for "I'm The Urban Spaceman", "We Are Normal", "Beautiful Zelda", and "Mustachioed Daughters", 2 stars for everything else. I created a Novelty genre for this. I also put Ween in it.
  
• Arthur Brown, "The Crazy World of Arthur Brown", 1968. Ripped from vinyl. Wow, talk about something that did age well. I thought Arthur Brown was a black guy, but he's a British white guy. He was known for his theatrics. I think the song "Fire" was a radio hit. The main instrument on the album is kickass organ, with horns on some songs. I put this in the Unclassifiable genre, really hard to characterize. 4 stars, 3 for "Spontaneous Apple Creation".
  
• Joss Stone, "Water For Your Soul". Quite a bit more reggae than Ms. Stone's earlier efforts. It didn't do that much for me. 3 stars.
  
• Lianne La Havas, "Blood". I think I heard a track from this on WRFL. Nice vocalist from London, some bossa nova / spanish sounds, but also some more energetic sounds. A nice mix of tunes. 4 stars.
  
• Will Nelson & Merle Haggard, "Django and Jimmie". Recommended by my friend bassist Gary Jones. Had to go for it, love both these old guys. A few covers but mostly new stuff. 3 stars.
  
• Adron, "Organismo", 2011. Recommended by my friend bassist extraordinaire Jairaj Swann when she was going to be performing in Lexington recently. They are currently both based in Atlanta. Beautiful vocals and guitar work. Consistently interesting songs. Sorry I didn't see her. 4 stars.
  
• Cibo Matto, "Hodel Valentine", 2014. Couldn't resist another entry to the "Japanese Chick Pop" genre. Hunh, their other 2 albums I have are from 1996 and 1999, with not many since then. Sounds pretty much the same as those, decent listening. 3 stars
  

That brings us up through mid-August. 5 new ones in the hopper for next time.

On to the music out - and over. It looks like I have retired from being a semi-professional jam musician. I haven't been out playing - or picked up a guitar for that matter - since mid-June. Maybe it will just be temporary, I don't know.

Most of the musicians at the jam have 10 songs in their repertoire, maybe 20. I've done 84 over the years, but had only been able to work in 1 new song in the last year. I get tired of doing the same stuff ("play 'Crossroads'"). And overall, I don't know, sometimes I felt like I sounded good, and people would say I sounded good, but videos of my playing and singing seemed to me to be consistently pretty sucky. And I've always said, I don't do things if I suck at them.

Plus, a few things lately, minor but very annoying health issues, have reminded me, I'm getting old. I don't need to be staying out late in bars drinking, smoking, and otherwise abusing myself.

And, I seem to have very little inclination to practice lately - too many books to read, too many tweets to tweet.

So, the guitar cases stay in the basement for a while. We'll see how long, I guess.

Europa Report

Last night I watched the movie "Europa Report" (2013) on Netflix. It's about a manned spaceflight to Jupiter's moon Europa. It's not bad. Rather than using "jumpy cam" is uses "cutting in-and-out cam" as a suspense mechanism. The pacing and suspense are good, as is the exciting conclusion. So, worth a watch.

I thought it might be foreign made - Canadian or British - but the credits call out only the Film Bureau of New York. More importantly though, the credits roll on for page after page to NASA, JPL, and Lockheed-Martin. So basically the film is an infomercial for manned exploration of the solar system. Early on the woman who is the corporate project manager says that they we have to send people because people contain "unquenchable will to make things work and get the job done." or some such.

The film totally fails as an informercial. In fact, it is a testament against manned space exploration. I'm going to go into details, so, if you are going to watch the movie, please go do so and read the rest after you're done.

* * * SPOILER ALERT * * *

I'm just going to list all the bogosity here, in no particular order.

• Most of the 6-person crew (4 men, 2 women) are way too high strung to be astronauts, particularly for what would be a, what, 3 or 4 year mission. Particularly the female oceanographer who sits around looking tense all the time. Astronauts like airline pilots I would think are chosen to be stolid, phlegmatic, unemotional.
  
• Space missions only "wing it" when absolutely necessary. They totally go by the numbers unless it is completely unavoidable. The 1st crew death occurs as a result of when a damaged solar module won't come out and the 2 guys working on it decide after about 4 seconds discussion to pry and yank it out. The 2nd crew death occurs after the oceanographer, at the limit of her range from the lander on Europa, sees glimmering lights, decides to move after them, and the commander in the lander says "Yeah, go for it".
  
• Plot tension is generated by having the lander miss its target by 100 meters (the oceanographers walk). They wanted to land on an area showing thermal anomalies - heating. As soon as they are down, they find out the thermal anomalies are melting the ice and making it unstable - duh!
  
• The "compelling purpose" of the mission was to look for life in the seas of water underneath Europa's icy shell. And finding other life "would be the greatest discovery in the history of science". Wrong, wrong, wrong. I guess sometimes scientists, NASA administrators, etc. do speak like this, trying to build excitement for budgets, but, it just ain't so - it ain't science. Science is The Scientific Method, and 10000s of discoveries over the history of mankind, always building to some extent on prior discoveries. Science is a team sport. I see finding other life as pretty inevitable. When it happens, it will be just another brick in the wall.
  
• The whole concept - send 6 people to Jupiter with no backup, no contingency plan - just seems so wrong. I'd guess at least a 50% probability of it being a suicide mission - hey, I was right, they all die! But, the last 2 alive scavenge life support to repair their busted Earth comm so they can get the news back. Surely there's a better way!
  

There is a better way - let our friends the robots do it for us. They are currently doing amazing work! Look at this picture of Pluto, of all places, on what looks like a close flyby!

Or this one, of the odd shiny spots on the largest asteroid Ceres.

When we do want to try to create human presence off of the Earth, say on the Moon or Mars, why not send teams of robots to first setup facilities to build more robots (if possible), and then build the structures for humans to come inhabit? It will take a fraction of the cost, and greatly delay the inevitable PR blowback from the 1st human deaths, which we know will eventually occur.

This seems like the only way to go that makes sense to me. You're going to have to have the facilities to create raw materials, particularly oxygen and water, for human inhabitants sooner rather than later. Let's let the robots do it!

The End of All Things

I decided to finish up the novels on my iPad by kind of "known authors" who I have enjoyed in the past before moving on to new stuff. Next up was "The End of All Things", by John Scalzi. This is the latest (6th?) installment in The Old Man's War universe. Scalzi again serialized this book, I think as 4 $2.99 novellas, before releasing it as a novel. I'm guessing he makes more money that way, good for him.

It is a very enjoyable read. It has many of the same characters from the previous 1 or 2 novels. A different narrative voice for each of the 4 parts. Scalzi seemed to be somewhat less snarky, which I think is not bad for him.

Note that 2 of the 4 narrators are female voices. Scalzi, who was prez of SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) for a few years recently, has been one of the main warriors fighting against the dumbasses who finally coalesced into Sad Puppies (and GamerGate) - poor oppressed white males, who just want everything to be the way it used to be: manly men without all this obviously wrong politically correct support for feminism, multiculturalism, LGBT rights, etc. [sarcasm] These guys stuffed the ballots in the Hugo award nominating process to create slates where all the candidates were mostly inferior but mostly WASP males (I don't know, maybe they snuck a Slav in there somewhere). But, yay, a couple of days ago they mostly got their butts kicked with "No Award" taking all the categories where they had allowed for no real worthy alternatives. They are, of course, vowing vengeance! You all just wait until next year!

Plus ca change, plus ca la meme!

In the light of that, in addition to the 2/4 female narrative voices, I am going to guess that at least 1/2 of the characters in this novel, lots of whom are Colonial Marines, are female. That wasn't hard, was it? It does not affect the story at all to do this. It does not create any cognitive dissonance.

If all the scripts coming into Hollywood did this, it might fix a lot of the problems with underrepresentation of females in their productions. I personally feel, the more women in any production the better. The FIFA Women's World Cup, particularly the 5-2 final win over Japan, was some of the best soccer I've ever seen - and I coached soccer 9 years and refereed for 12, so I know the game.

Go wimminz!!!