See the World

A while back, my son introduced me to this online game called Geoguessr. It was something that he had done in school on days that it was too cold or rainy to go outside for recess. On their website, they give you one free game per day. We did that for about a month before purchasing a one-year membership for somewhere around $25, which in my opinion, is totally worth it.

The premise of the game is that it drops you somewhere in the world using Google Streetview, and then you have to figure out which country you're in. Personally, I think it's really cool to see what these random locales look like, as a vast majority of them are places that I have never been. Many are in parts of the world that I knew very little about but now want to visit because of this game, countries like Slovakia, Uruguay and Sri Lanka. 

Please note that I am not being compensated in any way to write this, not by Geoguessr, nor by the Ministry of Tourism in the beautiful nation of Slovakia. I just genuinely think this game is a hell of a lot of fun. It's not for everybody, of course, but on some level, it does fulfill at least a little bit of my wanderlust while also keeping me from going completely stir crazy. Considering that we've barely left the house for this entire pandemic, between this and playing video games are about the closest that we have come to actually traveling. 

In the time that we've been Geoguessing, we've developed a few strategies. Usually, the first thing we do is try to narrow it down to a continent. License plates are a good place to start. Even though they're blurred out, you can usually see their shape. In North and South America, the plates are boxier, as they are in Japan and some other places as well, whereas European and Russian plates are wider and shorter. We also take note of which side of the road they're driving on, as that can help narrow it down considerably. Models of the vehicles are sometimes worth paying attention to as well. We like to look at any graffiti we find, too, even though it doesn't usually help all that much in figuring out the country. We just happen to find it interesting.

Once we've narrowed it down geographically, we primarily search for words on signs and vehicles. It helps to be able to recognize and distinguish between languages, but this can certainly provide a useful exercise in that regard as well. It's good to know the difference between Spanish and Portuguese, for example, or Korean and Japanese, Italian and Romanian, or Icelandic and Danish, etc. Also, with countries that essentially have their own alphabets, it can be helpful to memorize at least a few symbols from each. You might be surprised to learn how many countries still use the cyrillic alphabet, too. I didn't expect to see it in North Macedonia or Mongolia, among other places. Unofficially, in our house, we have a rule where we don't look things up while we're playing, although I suspect that most people probably don't play it that way. These are the same people who helped to ruin online Scrabble. 

While we're looking for all these types of clues, we're also looking at the landscape. Are there palm trees? That can be a pretty big hint that you're not in Canada. Are there mountains? Then you are not in Belgium. More to the point, are there any flags? That can also be a tremendously useful clue, but it requires that you memorize a lot of flags. I've also made a point to learn website country codes. Outside of the US, most of them end in something other than .com. For example, RU is Russia, MK is North Macedonia, DE is Germany, Switzerland is CH (for Confoederatio Helvetica - i.e., Swiss Federation), LV is Latvia, etc. As you may have noticed, some are more obvious than others. Knowing these are useful when playing Geoguessr, because a lot of billboards and company vehicles have web addresses on them. 

As far as pre-game strategies are concerned, it is also helpful to know where the various European powers held colonies in Africa. If you see women carrying baskets on their heads, but all the signs are in French, then there's a good chance that you're either in Senegal or Tunisia. If it's in English and they're driving on the left side of the road, you might be in South Africa or Kenya.

Incidentally, when we lived in Micronesia, the cars all drove on the right, but most of the steering wheels were also on the right, as it was generally easier to import them from Japan. I think this is somewhat of an anomaly, though. Either way, this is one of the places that the Google car has yet to go. Knowing stuff like that can be useful, too, as is knowing that you're probably never going to get placed in Saudi Arabia, Iran or North Korea, either. There are certain places that the Google car either cannot or will not go. Every once in a while, we do get one in China, but it seems to be limited to approved tourist destinations.  

Is playing this as good as traveling? Of course not. For one thing, you don't get to sample the local cuisine, which is part of the fun in going to new places. On the other hand, you're way less likely to get your wallet or your camera stolen this way, plus you can do it all without even putting pants on. 

Writing Agenda

I've decided to put the detective novel that I had been developing aside for now to work on something else. As far as the book is concerned, the story is fully outlined and I've got the characters pretty well figured out... but then I got an idea for a screenplay that I want to run with while it's still fresh. Sometimes, I find that's the best way to write comedy. When the muse appears and says that it's time to write, I just go with it. 

I have a certain fondness for screenwriting, too. I like the economy of language in the form. You only have about ninety pages, with relatively limited space on each page, to tell a cohesive and compelling story. This requires discipline, knowledge of the craft, and the ability to choose just the right words to say more with less. In some ways, it's actually harder than writing a book. I tend to think of my first three or four screenplays as practice scripts. They live in a box somewhere, never to see the light of day -- but sometimes the best way to learn something is simply by doing it. In the process, you improve.

The screenplay that I'm writing started with a title and just kind of snowballed from there. It's a comedy that could be shot on a modest budget. That's all I'll say for now. I suspect that the deeper I get into this project, the less time I will have to write blog posts. That said, I hope to have this script done within the next couple of months, at which point I will probably do a few more blog posts and then get back to working on the book. Once I am vaccinated, I also hope to get back to teaching. 

Summer Squash Soup

The other day, I went to the grocery store and they had all these "imperfect" summer squashes that they were selling three for a dollar, so I bought six of them. This evening, I made them into soup. Here's what I did:

1. Peel and cube summer squash, put in bowl with melted butter, olive oil, salt, black pepper, red pepper, paprika, cinnamon and about a little bit of brown sugar. Stir it up until it's all coated, then spread on cookie sheet covered in parchment paper. Cook at 400°F for about half an hour, until they start to brown. 

2. Chop up two carrots, two celery stalks and two onions. Put in bowl. Cut up about a pound of boneless chicken breasts and put in different bowl with a little bit of Italian dressing. 

3. Heat up soup pot. Melt butter. Put chicken in. Put lid on for a few minutes, then take it off so that the chicken can brown. Once the chicken was browned, I removed it from the pot and put it into a different bowl, which I set aside.

4. In that same pot, I cooked the onions, carrots and celery. I also added some minced garlic, chopped spinach and red pepper flakes, along with a little more butter and salt. 

5. Once that was brown, I took it out of the pot and put it into a blender along with the roasted squash. I blended it until it looked kind of like baby food, then I put it back into the pot, along with the cooked chicken and about two and half cups of chicken stock and a little bit of chicken soup base. I also added about a half cup of heavy cream.

6. Salt to taste. This was when I added some lime juice, ginger juice and white vinegar a little bit at a time until it was adequately bright. Then I sprinkled in some oregano and parsley, plus a few thin slices of gruyere cheese, and called it good.

Personally, I enjoy the mad science aspect of making soup. Add a little of this, a little of that, until eventually it tastes like something you want to eat.  

Balance

Balance is the secret to the universe. Now you know.

It is why atoms do not like their nuclei to be separated and why we don't all fly off into space from the cetrifugal force of the earth's rotation. Good old gravity has always got our backs.

We also have just the right balance of particles in the air around us that allows us to breathe, even though about three quarters of it is actually made up of nitrogen. Consider the impossibility of putting out a forest fire if all of the air on earth was oxygen. Nitrogen is what they put inside incandescent lightbulbs to prevent the tungsten filaments from burning too hot.

Homeostasis is happening all around us. If you leave a piece of bread on the counter, eventually the humidity level of the bread is going to achieve an equilibrium with the rest of the kitchen. The same is true if you leave a can of beer in the garage. Eventually, it will be equal in temperature to the air around it. Nature, by nature, seeks balance.

Sometimes when the very delicate balances of the natural world are disrupted, it can cause serious problems. For example, over time, as predators like coyotes, bears and wolverines are killed off and their habitats destroyed, then the animals that are further down the food chain overpopulate and overgraze, which causes soil erosion and other problems. Before long, these environmental imbalances can go so far as to change the way that rivers flow... and worse. Nature is constantly reminding us of the imperative of maintaining balance.

I tend to think that balance is an integral part of any artform as well. If you're using blue in a painting, for example, then an orange background will help it to stand out. In terms of the broader aesthetics, a balanced composition tends to make for an interesting image, as it invites the eye to move through it (instead of leading your attention to land in one place). 

When cooking, in most cases, a person seeks to achieve a balance between the various flavor elements at play. This is why cilantro can fuck right off. It overpowers everything else. If you want chocolate to stand out more, add some cinnamon, as this helps to ground it and provide balance. If you want to balance out a heavy umami flavor, add lime juice or some other acid to brighten it. If you put in too much spice, add a little bit of sugar. When in doubt, add ginger.

This holistic balance method is how I tend to approach baking as well. All measurements are approximate and subject to change at my discretion. I know that the fundamental difference between most kinds of dough is the ratio of liquid to flour (and sugar, if applicable). If I know what that dough is supposed to feel like, once I've got the right balance of the wet and dry ingredients, that's when it's ready to knead or bake or whatever. It really is all about having the proper balance. That isn't to say equal amounts of everything, just that each element is contributing to the whole without calling specific attention to itself. You don't taste the flour, the buttermilk, the sugar, the eggs, the vanilla extract, the baking soda or the salt. You taste the pancakes, which is to say that you taste all of these things in proportionate balance with one another. Then maybe you drown it in syrup, because pancakes usually need something sweet to balance out the flavors.

I could go on, as there are examples of this in nearly all of the things that bring us joy. In fact, I tend to think that the key to having happiness in one's life is to seek (or perhaps more accurately, allow) balance at every opportunity that presents itself. It seems that the more balanced I am in my own life, the happier I am. I suspect that this is probably true with most people. 

If I make a conscious effort to take time every day to exercise and nurture my mind (by reading/writing/teaching/solving puzzles), my body (through physical activity) and soul (by playing music/creating art/being with the people I love), then I generally find this to be a day well spent. 

It all comes down to balance.  

What is in a Name?

Part of the fun in making my own beer, other than the obvious reward of getting to drink it and share it with friends at the end of the process, is in naming my various creations. Before I started putting it in kegs, I bottled it myself, and every time, I would design a label to go with the name. Sometimes I drew it and sometimes I used clip art, but it was always fun. Frankly, it's the only thing that I miss about bottling.

I was designing beer recipes today, which happened to correspond with my ordering of the various ingredients online. One of the beers that I shall be making later this year is an American pale-bodied pilsner with complex notes of fruit, some European flavor and hops from Oregon that smell faintly of cannabis. I'm calling it Rick Steves. 

Watching his show, or other travel shows, helps make up for the fact that we can't go anywhere right now. It's not as good as a vacation, but at this point, I'll take it.

Twitter

Now that Drumpf isn't on Twitter anymore (that's still fun to say), I've started using it slightly more, which is to say occasionally. This past week, I've pretty much just been using it to yell at the television during the impeachment trial, a practice that has proven to be only mildly cathartic. Sadly, I know that it's going to take a lot more than that to preserve the integrity of our democracy. 

You can follow me @sands_zach, if you're into that kind of thing. Even though I still rarely use social media, please feel free to like me. Just like everybody, I like being liked. Every once in a while, I might even say something funny and/or intelligent in 140 characters or less. You never know. 

For me, the hardest thing about using Twitter is ignoring my inclination to employ proper grammar, or not choosing the right word just because it doesn't fit in the space available. Also, I'm kind of a compulsive editor, but only because I know that first drafts of anything tend to be inferior to what they could be if revised and polished. Even these three simple paragraphs underwent a number of reivisions before taking their present shape. 

Anything Goes

Keeping with the title of this blog, I've decided that this is the place where I will write about whatever I feel like on a given day. You may have noticed this. While I do have pretty diverse interests, they are all interconnected in certain ways. 

Plus about the only thing that I enjoy as much as acquiring knowledge and wisdom is the act of sharing these things. That's why I've been teaching college courses for over a decade. It's also why I created this blog. While the ideas that I seek to convey in these venues are quite different, the idea behind them is more or less the same. 

I believe that knowledge and its byproducts are worth exponentially more when shared, so I try to do whatever I can to make that happen. 

If you like my work, please share it with others.

Domestic Terrorism

More often than not, I think that the flames of terrorism are fueled by a perceived lack of other options. If your life is shit, then you have very little to lose, and some grandiose "higher calling" may seem a lot more appealing than whatever else you had going. I suspect that this is true no matter where a person lives. 

I've spent a good portion of the past few days watching the impeachment trial taking place in the Senate. To call what happened anything less than an act of domestic terrorism is to be complicit with what transpired. To have organized, provoked and commanded it is to be a willing accessory to murder and a traitor to the US Constitution. This should be as plain as day to anyone who is paying attention. 

As I watch this footage, I keep thinking: what rational person could have possibly believed that his or her life would be any better if they went to the Capitol with the intent to do harm to our democratically elected officials? Who thought that this was a good idea? And what exactly did they think January 7 was going to look like, anyway? Was it going to be like the end credits of Fight Club? Did they think that their credit card debt would suddenly be erased and that Kid Rock would replace [the proposed] Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill? Did they think that their king was going to knight them? Did they think they'd be cracking some brewskis in the Senate Chamber with Ted Nugent, with everybody putting their feet up on desks, keeping it real?  Or did they think that the nation would fall into complete anarchy, and that they could finally live out whatever other violent fantasies they had constructed? What was the endgame here? They must have known that a terrorist attack on the Capitol would not fundamentally change the way that our government functions, right? From the point-of-view of these terrorists, was this all just one big glorified act of self-destruction that was designed to bring down the entire nation with them?   

As I've written in a different article on another blog, when people don't believe that they have any kind of a future, this sense of impotence sometimes pushes them into doing terrible things in order to overcompensate for this. "My life sucks, so fuck you. Now my life matters." This is the terrorist's creed. As a domestic terrorist group organized under the flag of Donald Trump, it seems that most of the people who invaded the Capitol subscribed to this basic tenet, resulting in a rabid expression of toxic masculinity times a few thousand, all instigated and coordinated by their dear leader and his accomplices.    

By becoming part of a group, it lends a person a sense of belonging. I get that. This is why so many people give a shit about sports, and it's probably a large part of why organized religion still exists. Being a willing member of any collective can provide an amplified sense of self-importance relative to the size of the group in question. It feels good to believe that you are a part of something bigger. The dark side of all of this is that if a thousand other people believe the same crazy shit that you do, then it suddenly lends credence to your own batshit conspiracy theories. Of course, I think that most people need to already be in a pretty desperate state before they can accept the level of delusion that motivates them to commit heinous acts of violence like this. There are fans, and then there are fanatics, just like how there are pious individuals and there are zealots. A rational person knows the difference.

Desperation is rooted in fear. When people are afraid that they have no other options, they sometimes cling to something far more primitive than rationality and logic. This might account for some (but, of course, not all) of the people who buy into the unending bullshit delivered to them by a failed mail-order meat salesman who possesses an almost inhuman lack of humor. I have never understood why anyone would buy anything from this guy, but I think it's that they want to see something of themselves in this false image of winning that is such an integral part of his brand identity. A lot of these people wish that they too could shit in gold toilets and cheat on former fashion models with porn stars. Drumpf repreresents the crass vulgarization of the American Dream. 

But if he is indeed a symptom and not the disease itself, then what happens next, regardless of the outcome of this impeachment trial? I think that a lot of middle-America has given up on the idea of a government that works for them, and electing a professional bullshitter (arguably his only skill) to high office is the cynical expression of this existential despair. His "presidency" was nothing if not a series of calculated acts of destruction, itself a form of domestic terrorism. That said, I believe that the key to fighting the degenerative diseases of hopelessness and hate at the core of our society that led to this orange pus sac occupying the White House in the first place is to implement policies that provide more Americans with real opportunities to improve their lives, a chance to imagine and achieve a better American Dream. I believe that the Biden administration needs to invest in the alleviation of poverty in rural areas as well as in urban centers by helping to provide more opportunities to improve one's station of life in these places. 

By design, a democratic system of government is intended to be a tool for the people and by the people to protect and improve their standard of living -- not one person's standard of living, but everyone who resides within that nation's borders and who calls him/her/themself a citizen. Any form of government is capable of being corrupted, because even a perfect system is run by imperfect human beings. Some of them are in fact far less perfect than others, but very few of them get impeached twice in the same term. The only solution to ending the corruption that plagues our body politic is for there to be accountability for our public officials, for civility is a requisite to civilization. 

Finding the Patterns

Video games and I grew up together. Sometime in the early eighties, my parents bought an Atari 5200. Over the years, we accumulated a handful of cartridges for it, including Frogger, Dig-Dug and Pac-Man. These games were all about finding and exploiting patterns. For that reason, I tend to think that they were incredibly beneficial in the development of this particular skillset, which would later translate to a lot more than just being good at old-school video games. After all, music, comedy, narrative and metaphor are also about working with familiar patterns and then diverging from them in interesting ways. That is to say that I think much of my skill as a writer has been nurtured by playing video games over the years. I'll explain.

 

In Dig-Dug, there would be a certain path that I would take through each level, and the key to doing well in this game was to memorize those routes. In a similar sense, Frogger was about negotiating your way through a series of patterns in order to get your frogs home safely. There might be three logs, then two, all moving swiftly to the right, while just past that was a row of sea turtles in that same basic pattern, but moving in the opposite direction and with two of them disappearing at regular intervals. Pac-Man was more or less the same idea: find the most efficient route to take around the screen in order to eat all of the pellets while avoiding the ghosts, except immediately after you've eaten a power pellet, when you can then turn around and eat the ghosts. 

This was all pretty rudimentary stuff. In the decades that have passed since I was a kid playing Atari, of course, video games have gotten considerably more advanced, and the patterns within them have become far more complex. It really has been amazing to witness firsthand the evolution of video games. The technological advances made in this industry over the past forty years has been nothing short of incredible. 

When I was in college, I had an original Playstation, but I gave it to my brother after Final Fantasy VII called me out on the load screen for having played it for over a hundred hours. At the time, I thought that was crazy and that I shouldn't spend that kind of time playing this and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (which, incidentally, is also largely about finding and exploiting patterns in the environment. So is Super Mario Brothers, for that matter). As a general rule, I still try to avoid video games for the most part when I'm in deep with a big project that I'm working on, including my two stints of graduate school and the two years that I spent abroad. That said, now that I am an advanced scholar of media and culture in my own right, I still recognize the intellectual value in playing them, now perhaps more than ever. 

I have long been a huge fan of the Legend of Zelda games. In my opinion, when they work, they work exceptionally well (the original NES game, Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wild), and when they don't (the rest of them), well, I just don't play those games. That in mind, one of the things that I most appreciate about this series is the developers' willingness to take chances. Sometimes they pay off, and sometimes they don't. This is the nature of experiments. When these experiments are successful, they fundamentally advance the idea of what video games can and should be. I also like these games because they are full of puzzles. Personally, my favorite part of Breath of the Wild (other than maybe the cooking) is probably the shrines. I love how the designers of these games are able to incorporate the puzzles seamlessly into the action. 

There is only one series of games that I probably enjoy even more than the Zelda games, at least in terms of replayability, and that is Hitman. That might surprise people who know me personally, especially since I'm not generally a fan of violent media. In fact, the most recent screenplay that I wrote was essentially a war movie in which no one is hurt or killed in the entire thing. That said, I like the Hitman series for many of the same reasons that I have already discussed, plus a few more that I shall explain shortly.

I first came upon this series by doing a web search for a type of game that I thought should exist: something with secret agents, disguises and special gadgets. When Hitman popped up, I thought that I might need to refine my search, but then I got the 2016 Hitman game for cheap and played it. What I had expected to be a brutally violent game isn't really that, exactly. I mean, it can be, if that's how you play it, but in my experience, I find that it's usually best to avoid a gunfight or anything like that. In fact, if you kill anyone other than the bad guy who is your intended target, then you lose a massive amount of points, which is one of many ways that the game developers incentivize strategy over unadulterated violence and mayhem. 

There are a number of things that are quite brilliant about these games. Among them is the fact that you can play the same level a thousand times and do it differently every time. It's kind like a choose-your-own-adventure book in that sense, and I tend to think that games such as this actually do use the same part of the brain as that which processes narrative. After all, when I'm writing a story, I am basically trying to get a character from point A to point B to point C in the most interesting way possible. Engineering a plot is creative problem solving, and for me, that is precisely what is so appealing about these games.

Every level is its own detailed world full of thousands of variables to be affected by a player's choices -- an expansive sandbox in which to create the story that that individual player wants to experience. Do you disguise yourself as a guard to get in close to your target and then throw a screwdriver at this person from across the room? Do you make them sick with poison and then follow them to the bathroom in order to avoid retaliation from armed observers? Do you use a sniper rifle from the next building over? The possibilities are nearly endless, and many of them can indeed be quite creative.

On a personal level, having each of these vast worlds to explore also helps to fulfill my sense of wanderlust, which has otherwise been all but rendered dormant by the pandemic. When I play Hitman, I get to travel to Italy, France, China, India, or any of the sixteen other locations, where I walk around in a simulacrum of this environment, like a form of virtual tourism. In fact, I think that this is probably why I have played more of these games during the pandemic than ever before, too. It's the next best thing to leaving the house, plus it's kind of fun to walk around in a world where I can have almost complete control over my environment. It's certainly a stark contrast to having to wear a mask everywhere I go out of a legitimate fear of microscopic organisms. 

Hitman 3 just came out a couple of weeks ago, and from what I have seen of it so far, it seems perfectly worthy of being a part of this series. In the same way that Hitman 2 took the basic ideas at play incrementally further than in the first installment, the third and final game in this series does this as well. In short, it appears to be everything that I hoped it would be: a good way to vicariously explore digital representations of the outside world while crafting an engaging and immersive narrative as I go. As an added bonus, it provides a challenging intellectual exercise that uses the same part of my brain as writing. 

Much like Pac-Man, the Hitman games are fundamentally about finding and exploiting the patterns of non-player characters, but this time around, how you approach the tasks at hand can be significantly different every single time. Are these games violent? It depends on how you look at it. In Pac-Man, you killed the same four ghosts over and over, whereas in Hitman, you usually have one or two targets per level. In both cases, however, I think that it's worth remembering that they're just pixels. Parents were just as worried about Pac-Man back in the day. The Hitman games don't train people to be assassins any more than Dig-Dug teaches kids to dig tunnels in their backyards and shoot dragons with some kind of air hose or whatever. Playing Hitman develops players' ability to recognize patterns in their environments, as well as the abstract thinking skills necessary to solve problems creatively. These games are also a hell of a lot of fun.

 

Have an Impeachy Day

Without justice, we are not a nation that is ruled by law, and without accountability, there is no justice. The failed casino owner who trashed our democracy for the sake of his own bloated ego must face consequences for his actions -- not just on January 6, but throughout the crime spree of his entire privileged existence. 

If we are indeed a nation of law, we must first be a nation of facts. We must not let pride and politics obfuscate the truth. We must not tolerate corruption or permit the betrayal and abuse of our sacred public trust, for it is this trust that serves as the very core of our democratic system of government.

I like to believe that we as a nation are better than this. If you think so, too, then I encourage you to call your representatives in Congress to let them know. Here is a link to Senate contact info, and here is the page for the House of Representatives. Maybe with enough pressure, more of them will choose justice over politics for the good of the republic. 

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Please feel free to copy and paste the contents of this blog post or share a link to it on social media. 

And go to my music page to hear me explain all of this in metered, rhyming verses with musical accompaniment -- plus links to a bunch of other songs that I wrote. 

Meteor-Bites

I had some buttermilk that needed to be used, so I made some makeshift donut holes. I actually wrote down what I did this time:

2 1/2 cups flour

1 1/3 cups buttermilk (give or take)

4 tsp baking powder

1 Tbsp corn starch

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp pumpkin pie spice

4 tsp fake vanilla extract (1/2 that if using real vanilla)

4 Tbsp melted butter

2 Tbsp melted lard

Mix the dry ingredients, then gently mix in the wet ingredients by hand until it's a clumpy, sticky mess. I used a spring-loaded scooper, tablespoon size (I think, although it might be slightly bigger), to scoop up the clumps of mush and drop them in clean, hot cooking oil. Since I did not have enough oil in the pan to fully submerge them, after a couple of minutes, I turned them over with a holed spoon (but a deep fryer would probably work just as well here). 

Once they were brown on all sides, I drained them on some paper towel, then rolled them in sugar. After that, I put them all on a parchment paper-lined cookie sheet, which I placed in the oven for about twelve minutes at 375°F. They cooked rather quickly in the oil, so I just wanted to make sure that they were heated all the way through. This last step may or may not have actually been necessary. 

They were somewhat misshapen, hence the name, but they were good: crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, and they tasted and smelled a lot like churros. Then again, it's fried dough rolled in sugar. It's pretty hard to go wrong. 

  

Good Job, Spotify

I just went to find my music on Spotify, where I also found a podcast interview that I did a couple of years ago about my dissertation/book Film Comedy and the American Dream. I did not expect to find those two things together. 

Check out the interview if you would like to hear me speaking to a distinguished colleague about mining comedy films for research material.  

How to Properly Cook a Pork Roast

The taste to effort ratio is way up on this one. It takes ten minutes, then six hours in a slow-cooker. You do it like this:

Chop up two onions and a good-sized chunk of ginger. Line the bottom of a slow-cooker with it, along with some red pepper flakes. 

Take a pork roast, pat it with kosher salt, black pepper and a little bit of brown sugar. Heat up a cast iron pan with some olive oil until it begins to smoke. Gently place the pork roast in the pan so that it doesn't splatter, then leave it alone. After a couple of minutes (or sooner, if you smell something burning), turn it to a different side with some metal tongs. Repeat this process until all sides are caramelized, keeping in mind that now that the pan's hot, the other sides won't take as long. With the brown sugar on there, you have to be careful not to burn it. The more you use, the easier it's going to burn. 

Once your kitchen smells like a restaurant that you would want to eat in, you can place the beautifully browned roast on top of the bed of onions and ginger. 

Open a can of crushed pineapple and unceremoniously dump it on top of the pork roast. Add a few splashes of soy sauce. Put the lid on the slow-cooker. Walk away. Do some writing. 

Cook this thing on high for about six hours, turning it over about halfway through. After that, you can switch the slow-cooker to the warm setting until whatever else you're making is ready. Transfer it to a bowl with a little bit of the onions and pineapple that it cooked in, then let it rest for about ten minutes or so with a piece of aluminum foil loosely placed on top of the bowl. Then I tear it up by sticking those same tongs in it and gently twisting. If I did everything right, it should fall apart without being mushy.

In our house, one three-pound roast is good for about four meals. I might make sandwiches out of it, as I did this evening, but it also makes good teriyaki tacos with some carrots, red cabbage and fried flour tortillas, among other uses. I usually freeze some and put it in with other stuff whenever I don't feel like spending a lot of time in the kitchen.

This is a good way to eat pork, even if you don't dig no swine.

  

The Best Damn Burgers

Here is how it is done: 

The patties are composed of ground beef, salt, pepper, garlic powder and Worchestershire sauce. Fresh meat from a butcher shop is ideal. With grocery store meat, I might add a little bit of MSG (i.e. flavor enhancer/umami), but that's just me. I tend to think that monosodium glutamate has gotten a bad rap over the years, but this ingredient is entirely optional.

Prepare a 9" x 9" baking pan (for four burgers) by lining it with aluminum foil, then cover the bottom of the pan with sliced onions and minced garlic -- plus I like to throw a whole jalapeno in there to be sliced up later. Preheat the oven to 375°F.

Heat a cast iron pan until it's visibly hot. Add a couple tablespoons or so of butter. After it melts, put the burger patties in. Keep the pan hot. Cook the burgers until they are nicely caramelized in the butter. I like to bring them as close to burnt as possible without going over, kind of like The Price is Right.

Once nicely charred, put the burgers in the prepared baking pan. I then pour all of the melted butter/pan juice over the burgers. This is how you make them juicy, charred and without any pink. They're also not greasy, because while the onions and jalapeno are cooked in all that fat, which can then be strained, the burgers aren't. Personally, I can't eat a hamburger that's not cooked all the way through, but in my experience, more often than not, a well-done burger is also dry. This solves that dilemma as well. I also added some chopped up fresh horseradish and put that on top of the burgers, and then I covered the pan tightly with aluminum foil. It cooked in the oven for about a half an hour. 

I often cook bacon on a separate pan alongside it, since the oven's already on anyway, and because I'm from the Midwest. If I put the bacon in five minutes or so after the burgers, then they're usually done at about the same time. 

This evening, I made these hamburgers and served them on some homemade wheat rolls. I challenge you to try this, and then see if you can make a better burger than that. These are so good that I don't even put cheese on them -- and like I said, I'm from the Midwest. 

I might also recommend a bruschetta composed of shredded carrots, chopped tomatoes, chopped mild green chilis, garlic, basil and green olives to top it off. Sometimes I cook a whole tomato in there with the burgers, too. It's messy, but it tastes a lot better than ketchup.

Creative Process

I carry notecards and a mechanical pencil with me practically everywhere I go (not that I've gone much of anywhere for the past eleven months). I do this because ideas seem to come from out of nowhere sometimes, and if I don't write them down, I might forget. That said, I find that the act of writing something down helps me to remember it, even if I misplace the notecard. I also always have at least one current notebook, where I then transfer these ideas when I get home (or where they go if I'm already there, thereby skipping the notecards altogether). Later on, I type up all of these miscellaneous ideas so that I can have a digital record of them as well, and so that I can have them all in one place for later reference. 

Are they all good ideas? Of course not. In fact, at this point, they're barely ideas at all. They are really more like seeds of ideas. They have yet to germinate, develop and bloom. And much like with seeds, some of them are duds and will not grow into anything, while others will bear fruit that can then be shared with others.  

Continuing with this plant metaphor, I check back on these seedlings every now and then to water them and give them some nutrients, i.e. do some development -- usually by hand in those same notebooks. When I sit down to outline something that was just a seed of an idea a few months ago, for example, it's almost like my subconscious has been working on it this whole time. Or not at all. It really depends. Some ideas take root, while others don't. Some take years before they are ready to grow into something tangible. 

Knowing that my brain works like this, I have incorporated it into my creative process. When it is time to choose my next big project, I go back to my "garden" to see what has bloomed while I've been working on other stuff. Sometimes there are two things that are almost ripe, which I go back and forth between, taking them both on concurrently. If I start to get burnt out on one, I go back to the other. Wash, rinse, repeat. Or there could be one idea that I had practically forgotten about, but which I am now really excited to work on. On some level, that excitement helps provide the momentum that is necessary to get through any big project. After all, I tend to believe that if I don't even care about what I'm working on, then there's a pretty good chance that no one else will, either. I think that's probably true with most people.  

I mention all of this because it took me many years to figure it out for myself. I don't know if other people's brains work like this, but in my experience, this process has proven to be immensely productive, and I am always excited to get to work on the next project, whatever it may be. I am also happy to share what I have learned about nurturing creativity, as I believe that making art, in some form or another, should be an integral part of everyone's life. Once you find your creative talents, you might start to wonder how you ever lived without them. 

Secret Ingredient

I put a secret ingredient in the turkey soup that I made the other day. For the broth, I simmered the drumsticks for a while along with a quartered onion, skin and all. As an experiment, I also added four good-sized chunks of horseradish root. I strained it all before using it as broth, and I think it was the horseradish root that made the soup exceptionally good.

After I strained everything, I sauteed some onions, celery and carrots. Once they started to soften up and brown, I added minced garlic, red pepper flakes and sliced mushrooms. Then I dumped the broth back in with everything else, along with the meat from the drumsticks, plus some rosemary, oregano, parsley, salt, black pepper and lime juice. I also added a little bit of reduced chicken stock paste, some soy sauce and white vinegar. How much? you might ask. Here's the thing: it's soup. Soup is not an exact science. You keep adding stuff until it smells good. After it stewed for a bit, I added some "old-fashioned" egg noodles out of a bag. Once they softened up, it was ready to eat, and I tell you, this was some damn good soup. I've made similar soups before. The variable this time was the horseradish.

Incidentally, the reason that I happened to have two turkey drumsticks in the fridge is because last time I went to the store, they had leftover turkeys from the holidays going for thirty-nine cents a pound. The one I got cost $6.82. I've always thought that Thanksgiving should happen way more often, anyway. 

DIY

Here is a link to an article that I just posted on my music site about the pros and cons of DIY music production.