34

34 is undergoing another server hiccup as a result of my ongoing apartment move. I'm putting back up some old content on another server in the meantime. Your patience is marvellous.

The Times goes all out by providing not one but two pieces of almost-useful advice in their Dining In section (not to be confused with my coincidentally named Dining In section) today. Their article on chef's knives hits the mark by pointing out that yes, chef's knives exist, and they even deigned to include a photograph of my particular favourite chef's knife, the Wüsthof Classic six-incher. The article does polite society a disservice by stopping short of pointing out that you cannot, under any circumstances, cook without a decent chef's knife. So please don't do it. Attempting to do so is what gives people the impression that cooking is difficult. The other article of note concerns frying . It rightly points out that frying is no big deal provided that you have the proper pan (go with a solid 12" non-stick deep pan, which has plenty of uses other than frying). Curiously, it neglects to mention frying tip #34 . Water splattering into hot oil should be yo...

As mentioned previously , I bribed my roommate into cleaning the bathroom recently by cooking some steak. Here's the recipe: soy sauce minced garlic (not from a jar, idiot) minced ginger (not dried powdered ginger, idiot) fresh ground black pepper (buying pre-ground pepper not being as bad, but why would you want to?) London broil endive Marinate the London broil in the soy, garlic, ginger and pepper mixture for a couple of hours. Put it in the oven. Cook it at 375° for a while, maybe 25 minutes, depending on your conception of time. Finish it off with 3 or 4 minutes on each side in your broiler (which you have, even if you think you don't, under the regular oven-y part of your oven). Slice it up and serve it on top of endive leaves, which will make it look nice and distract people from the fact that they are eating something fundamentally Not Healthy. I served it with homemade french fries as well, but there's no reason to go to all that trouble unless your bathroom is rea...

I read the Times , and the Times reads me (or my readable proxy).

Who else saw my nerd-phone featured prominently in last night's episode of Arrested Development ? It was used to photograph David Cross's testicles, which were then mistaken for a detailed map of Iraq. Which is something I've never tried before.

Hmmm, I didn't know that Frank Black broke up the Pixes via fax . Go figure. I've got a ticket to tomorrow's show thanks to my Swiss connections.

Ya'll should read Krugman's column on Social Security from yesterday's paper if you've not yet.

Good.

I write the best email at work.

The aforementioned meta-music has metastasized. It's a mix of mixes: all the tracks from The Black Album , consisting of whatever is the best version from The Grey Album , The Black & Blue Album , or The Slack Album . I neglected The Black on Black Album because I've neglected Metallica for all my life. Here it is . Enjoy. I take credit only for the meta-ness.

Harvard and the Crimson : Nazi-loving smacktards . I always jokingly point this out when I attend sporting events where Columbia plays Penn, because they have a similar shpiel, but it's not really funny now that I know there's truth to it: Hanfstaengl led the Nazi efforts to win over world opinion, and is reported to have introduced their trademark stiff-armed salute and "Zeig Heil" chant, basing both on Harvard football cheers, Norwood said.

If you've got a Mac and an expensive video camera, check out Delicious Library . It lets you catalog everything you own, and makes it look all purdy on your computer. And then you can, like, publish it to a website and show everyone in the world all the stuff you've bought. It's mentioned by name at the end of Das Kapital as the final harbinger of the deacy of Capitalist society. Now, I'm not saying that the Socialist revolution is going to take place tomorrow or anything, but I'm divesting the fuck out of my 401(k).

I wasn't sure as to whether there were still politics out there, resigned as I was to a string of Bush cabinet departures followed by another four years of new people fucking things up, but things are still alive and well (well, not well) in the Ukraine. Ukrainian political graf of the day : In this battle for public perception, Mr. Yushchenko's face is one of his weapons. Mr. Yushchenko said his recent disfiguration was a result of his being poisoned. Mr. Kuchma's camp says that he is afflicted by a mysterious disease, or that perhaps he ate bad sushi. But the illness underscores Mr. Yushchenko's message that in Ukraine, things are so fundamentally ugly that they must fundamentally change.

I've got more interviews to do at work on Monday. I think I might trot out some of these . They seem to already know all of the other questions I ask about containers of liquid and burning strings used as timers.

Okay, this time's for real: Adam and I found a new apartment. (They have a check of mine for several thousand dollars, so I certainly hope it's for real.) It's on Court St. in the heart of Cobble Hill, and is a fourth-floor walkup much like the current flat. The layout is very similar, but it's in much, much better condition (brand new appliances, bathroom, floors, etc.) and has a motherfucking covered balcony/terrace/porch (nomenclature pending). We are going to grill everything and more of everything out there. The views from the back are of the Williamsburg savings bank and from the front you can make out some of lower Manhattan. It's a shorter walk to the regular subways and to walk, and right around the corner from the F train at Bergen St. Move in should be December 15. I'm very happy. There are some pictures here , though they'll presumably take them down at some point. We got the place for $2100 rather than the $2300 listed.

For those clamouring for RSS feeds , turns out I always had one--who knew? Just put "?flav=rss" at the end of any of 34 's URLs to get the XML RSS feed. This , for instance, is the RSS feed for the main page.

For those wondering about all those empty storefronts on Montague St. (Primarily me and Adam.) As a special bonus, we're about to visit two out of the three real estate brokers mentioned in the article to see if we can't find a new apartment today.

Here's what the New York Times has to say about how my salary is going to change next year. (What are newspapers writing about how your salary is going to change next year?) As the article states, I'll probably be making about $15 million, and I still can't afford to buy an apartment in Brooklyn.

My roommate Adam upon seeing this week's New Yorker , which features Osama dressed as Santa and looking very Grinch-like: "Wow, that's like the second cover he's been on." Thank goodness I have this section. The cartoon issue was last week and that's always exciting; I am still waiting to hear whether I won the caption contest from two years ago.

I'm going to leave it to the pros to write about the steroid revelations. (Does it count as a revelation if it's always been painfully obvious?) I now have a convenient scapegoat for my fantasy baseball season, though.

And now, a teaser: stay tuned to 34 as I will, within the next few days, unveil something extremely meta and musical.

It's Holiday Party season at my office. (How about at your office?) Monday was yummy dinner at the White People's, which, okay, had nothing to do with the holidays but was lovely nonetheless. Tuesday was a Corporate Services dinner at a French-y place in Cobble Hill. I have absolutely nothing to do with Corporate Services, so I had absolutely no right to attend, but they just camre to our office and swept up like 20 of us. So okay. I narrowly missed the all-confit three course meal. The wine was a disappointment; the red was Boggle, which is one of the joke wines I occasionally bring to people because of the funny name and the $7 price tag. At least it wasn't Bull's Blood. Free fancy dinners that don't require subway rides are important. Wednesday was a Cisco holiday party, which shared a number of similarities to the previous dinner: I have nothing to do with Cisco (well, my IP packets pass through their routers at some point, but that's a truism, ya know?) and...

Well, I've kind of been feuding with the current Systems Administrator at the Spec who kind of thought it would be a good idea to disable my account on the server that 34 used to run on for reasons of his being a jerk. I've moved things back, yet again, to the server in Adam's room, which is fine except for the fact that a good number of people have trouble accessing that server. If you're reading this now and I haven't moved things back yet then hi, you're one of the lucky ones. I'm going to keep things like this for the time being, as a more sympathetic regime will be taking over at the Spec in a couple of weeks. Or maybe I'll just move things over to Blogger like everyone else, which I'm reluctant to do because it's not nearly as nerdy and I hate using Google technology (or at least technology Google purchased with their scads of Google dollars) when I could use something more homegrown.