House of Dioxin

red skies @ night

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:13:25 -0500

test

Flickr

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 12:28:24 -0500

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

art car in the wild

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 12:26:35 -0500

test text

i would put a chocolate cookie in the middle of a donut

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:15:55 -0500

For all you top scallop fans (no, wait it's NOT top scallop), here's a Fabio update. Sounds like he'll be making an appearance in the upcoming season of Top Chef out in Vegas. No surprise as they seem to bring back the TV faves whenever they can to guest in later seasons. Also, he seems to be working on a cookery-type book. Altho, according to this article, it's being contract published. I guess being not the winner but a fan fave of TC only gets you so far. And apparently one of the places it doesn't get you is to a major/actual publisher. My fave fun fact from the article, though, is that apparently Fabio spent some time working as a personal chef for William Fucking Shatner.

khaaaaaaaaaan-oli!!

ah well, that's this wrrld over

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 09:04:51 -0500

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 19 jul 09)

Sun People :: Nickodemus
À l'Aveuglette :: Françoiz Breut
Fondo :: Vieux Farka Touré
Thai Funk ZudRangMa :: various
Panama! 2: Latin Sounds, Cumbia Tropical and Calypso Funk on the Isthmus, 1967-77 :: various
Funk Mundial :: various
Amatoria :: Federico Aubele
Espoir :: Hermas Zopoula
Kelenia :: Oran Etkin
the World is Shaking: Cubanismo from the Congo, 1954-55 :: various

this week's video feature: Federico Aubele

but 11:50 does not exist here. ok!

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:45:10 -0500

This almost makes me want to sign up for twitter. (Sorry blind link haters but some things are better with the element of surprise... don't worry, it's not a rickroll)

conductive themselves in the simplest manors

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:33:14 -0500

So this article by Andrea Reusing (chef at Lantern) is actually from April of this year but I just followed a link to it this week so it's new to me. I've been thinking about this cos of all the complaining I've been seeing online about how the Durham Farmer's Market is too expensive. First off, I don't think the prices (at least for some things) at DFM are that out of whack. Second, and this is the point Reusing is making, what are the hidden costs of food being as cheap as it is. It's easy to dismiss this idea as elitist. But I think it's more complicated than just "cheap=good; expensive=bad". Altho, honestly, I wonder sometimes about the people screaming that loudest about farmer's market pricing. I don't think they're the ones worried about running out of food money before the week runs out of days.

you've clogged the bathtub drain with jam and celery

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:24:37 -0500

Okay, just one more moon video.

jesus h. christ in a chicken basket

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 06:36:57 -0500

Moon video #4.

Got knocked offline late last night which is why the moon series is spilling over into Tuesday. To mark the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, TCM showed Melies' Trip to the Moon and a documentary made for the 20th anniversary called For All Mankind that used footage shot during a bunch of the Apollo missions, most of which I'd never seen before. Lots of amazing images, including footage of the command module separating from the last booster stage, shot from a camera in the booster. So you see the capsule fly off and then just the blackness of space and then the Earth appears. At which point you realize that what you're seeing is the booster stage falling back into the atmosphere. Of course. Otherwise how could they have recovered the camera. Because that wasn't a special effect, it was something that actually happened.
The other fun thing I learned was that for (at least) one of the missions, the astronauts got to bring tape recorders so they could listen to music. One of them was a country music fan and Buck Owens and Merle Haggard recorded songs specially for the tape. Also a funny scene of (I think) another group of astronauts (the movie wasn't always very good about identifying which mission they were showing) playing "Also Sprach Zarathustra" on their tape recorder.
Finally, here's a fun list o' Apollo 11 factoids.

let me play among the stars

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 23:14:36 -0500

Moon video #3

i wonder why he's uppin' me

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:51:12 -0500

Moon video #2

but there ain't no whales so we tell tall tales

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:12:22 -0500

Moon video #1

people who want to sit in their rooms and watch youtube videos and eat sherbert

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 20:29:12 -0500

A while back, this new restaurant opened up over at ATC called Cuban Revolution. I know... poor taste, right? Or perhaps you don't care. Or perhaps you actually are, say, Cuban American. Then I think you'd have a serious right to be offended. There's been a lot of back & forth in comments both at Carpe Durham and Bull City Rising. Some have been a bit over-heated. Some have been incredibly stupid. The winner in that category was the guy who started taking people to task for being angry over the name of the restaurant, which is "a matter of free speech and expression." Let's pause and admire that logic. 1) Choosing a name for your business is a matter of free speech but complaining about that name is... what? A violation of free speech? An abuse of free speech? Censorship? 2) Yes, he really referenced free speech and expression in an argument about the legacy of the Cuban revolution.
The best comment I read was one that suggested that it's the fact that Cuba is little known and exotic due to the travel ban and that allows people to project these fantasies about Cuban life. The funniest was the person who suggested that some of the people defending Cuban Revolution online might have a different opinion of an Italian restaurant that was serving Mussolinguini.
I went and checked out the Cuban Revolution website. (Odd fact: the original version is in Providence, RI. Today, Rhode Island... tomorrow, Durham?) As you can see, CR has all the depth and political insight of a Che t-shirt. I kinda feel like I've already spent more time thinking about their theme than they have.

next...

that's like a yak swimming in the atlantic

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:41:23 -0500

Interesting article at the Atlantic website -- Grant Achatz on celeb chefs, leaving the kitchen, and related issues. I've read similar takes on those topics by Bourdain and Boulud. So he's in good company. And it makes sense to me. Both the need to do something other than just be in the kitchen cooking in order to find inspiration or recharge the batteries, and that as a chef's career evolves he's going to be spending more time doing other "stuff" and less time actually cooking. I only spent a few weeks in a pro kitchen (not cooking; washing dishes) but it was long enough to confirm what pretty much every chef or writer or blogger says: cooking (esp. line cooking) is a young person's game.
The other thing I wanted to say about the Achatz article is that it never ceases to surprise how some folks can get so bent out of shape if "the chef" isn't there. I dunno... I'd have thought that anyone going to Alinea would be enough of a food geek to understand how it works in a bigtime restaurant. We've been to a few "big chef" restos and only once have we ever even laid eyes on the chef. That was at Morimoto when he was working the sushi bar for a while the night we were there. Certainly didn't see (or expect to see) Colicchio at Craft. The idea that you'd expect the presence/absence of "big chef" to make any huge difference in your meal strikes me as whimsical at best. The idea that you'd get bent out of shape and actually let it ruin your meal seems flatout fucking insane.

glitter isn't a color, it's an emotion

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:43:38 -0500

At the end of a post about Caribou Barbie's fundraising, the usually reliable Nate Silver made a point about small donors to campaigns who, he said, "have a way of turning into activists and, ultimately, voters." That is almost exactly wrong, I think. Donors (or anyone else) do not turn into activists and/or voters. It takes a highly organized effort to channel enthusiasm and to organize it into productive campaigning. That's what the Obama campaign understood -- that it takes a lot of hard work by a lot of people. Sure you need enthusiasm but unorganized enthusiasm tends to look a lot like chaos. It's not some magical process that will happen just because everyone in Wingnuttia is clicking their heels together and repeating the magic words.