Going Dutch

Johannes Vermeer's "The Wine Glass"

My husband Mowgli (not his real name) has a friend who has lived in Amsterdam for several years. He swings through town to see family every so often, and we get to enjoy his company over a meal and drinks. It’s a fine, relaxed time that feels like the best parts of college – zesty, deep, respectful debate about everything from the birth of open source software to religion.

Naturally, we tend to talk about life in the U.S. versus life in the Netherlands. Here’s a list of what I learned:

 The housing market there is unsettling people because prices are fluctuating by 10% or so in either direction.

 It’s equally easy to be a vegetarian in either country, although it used to be harder here.

 Europeans don’t wrap up nearly as much of their identity in their jobs as Americans do.

 Temporary resident aliens have the right to vote in the Netherlands. Thus our friend was able to vote for the next Water Commissioner, which might not sound like much, but it is -- 25% of the Netherlands is below sea level and under constant threat of flooding.

 Our friend was the first employee to refuse a company car – in Amsterdam, you really can’t have one because, he says, there’s just no room. Also, when you have four markets, a cheese shop and two bakeries within walking distance, and the bars are a tram ride away, you don’t need one.

 He described the Dutch language as the intersection between English and German. There are two ways to say “cheers”: prost, and gesundheit (if you pronounce the first syllable like you are a Jewish grandma saying “challah.”)

The Joy of Appliances

We have recently been made ridiculously happy through the acquisition of a new washer and dryer. The old ones were starting to hobble, and it turns out my company's discount on them is significant. Add to that the tax credits available for Energy Star items, which pretty much everything is these days, and we were off to the races.

Here are the space-age machines, stacked because A) they can be, and B) our laundry room is more of a laundry cubby, and expanding the usable space by even a few inches makes our lives much more pleasant. Take special note of the gas line on the left, which I think of as more of a bruisemaker than a gas line. That red knob is 2 feet, 6 inches from the right-hand wall, and while I often curse the idiot who put it there, I am glad they made it sturdy.



Mowgli has a collection of approximately 1.5 million tools and is not at all intimidated by things like the possibility of getting electrocuted, so we opted to have him handle the installation. I admit to being nervous -- you never know what you're going to run into, even in an 11-year-old house, and I had to resist the nightmare scenarios that popped into my head unbidden. I conjured up floods of water cascading into the basement from the first-floor bathroom through an open pipe that could not be turned off while Mowgli yelled instructions to me and I did my best not to scream at him. Which actually happened, years ago, in my old house.

But happily, history did not repeat itself, and everything went relatively smoothly, i.e., we got through it with only two mid-project trips to the big-box hardware warehouse. One of those was for dryer vent parts. I'll spare you the details, but suffice to say Mowgli had some choice words for the folks who built our house. He was pretty diplomatic, though: "They're not supposed to do that" and "Those idiots!" were about as salty as he got.

Once everything was hooked up, we inched the six-foot-tall technological wonder into place by shoving our bodies against it in precisely choreographed little bursts. We tossed some clothes in, consulted the manual, poured the right amount of detergent in the fancy little additive drawer, and gingerly pushed the necessary buttons. Then we sat down to watch.

That's right. We sat on the linoleum floor of the laundry cubby and gazed in wonder at the clothes as they tumbled back and forth, making comments like "What's it doing?" and "That's amazing." and "Wow."

The next morning, I found a stack of folded clothes, and a note. Here's a closeup:

In case you can't make it out, it says, "The dryer is so awesome that it even folds the clothes!"

Now that's a good dryer.

We Heart the Spelling Bee

Over the holiday weekend, my husband Mowgli (not his real name) ran into reruns of last year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, which could only mean one thing: it’s time for this year’s bee.

Go ahead, call us geeky, we don’t mind. We know what you may not: the national bee is an amazing piece of theater.

ESPN aired the semifinal round last night, and by the time ABC televises the finals (tonight, 8 p.m. Eastern/ 7 p.m. Central), the remaining 9- to 15-year-olds will have been whipped into a nervous froth of adolescent yearning. But it’s all good, clean fun: they’re competing for brainiac glory, and money.

The top prize includes a savings bond, $2,800 worth of reference works, a scholarship and an engraved trophy as well as a check for $30,000. If you take second place, you receive $12,500. Even kids who misspell in the first round of the semifinals get $250.

Being a former rule-writer, I checked those out. Here’s my favorite: “The speller must not have repeated fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth grade for the purpose of extending spelling bee eligibility.” Imagine, for a moment, the hilarity of exactly how one would intentionally repeat a grade in order to qualify for a spelling bee. You’re ridiculously smart, and yet, and yet, advancing a grade will erase forever your last shot at holding the big, shiny trophy… oh, the agony!

The statistics about the spellers are fascinating, and sometimes counterintuitive; 44 are only children, 63.5% of them attend public schools, there is one third-grader, and 30 spellers are related to a previous national finalist.

And here’s one to chew on: "English is not the first language of 33 spellers, and 117 spellers speak languages other than English." Imagine that for a moment. Create a picture of yourself at 12, 13 or 14, in France, on a stage, on national TV, spelling French words. Merde!

But as you may have guessed, it’s the kids of Indian descent that really float my husband’s boat. When they're at the mike, he likes to reminisce about his own school days and imagine how they prepared, especially when they cut to the parents’ section of the stage. It's a nice bit of side theater for me, seeing my husband dissolve in fits of laughter while imagining the arduous path that led these kids to the bee. For a taste of this, you can check out the documentary "Spellbound."

And yes, in case you’re wondering, we did watch the reruns; we were hoping to see this moment again:

Hair Conundrum

Among my odd talents is the ability to put my hair up using chopsticks. I did this yesterday while preparing to meet a friend for lunch, and then hesitated. We had talked about going to a Vietnamese restaurant, and I know that in other Asian countries, using chopsticks for non-food applications is a big no-no. Poking your chopsticks into your rice and leaving them there is really bad in form in China -- it mimics the incense sticks (stuck in rice, I think) that signify a funeral.

Gads -- what if my hairdo offended the nice people who make and bring me the yummy food I love so much?

But then I thought, this is America, and they've been here for a while. Surely they've been far more offended by far worse faux pas. I'm not going to Vietnam; I just want a 19.02 with curry sauce.

These are the things that occupy me -- worrying that I might offend someone with my hairdo, and then deciding that it's okay.

Opening the Kimono

Dear readers, I can't fathom what sort of photo could adequately illustrate my mortification when I realized, after joining Facebook, that I'd ranted, ever so gently, last month, against doing just that.

Here's the pertinent section in case you don't feel like reading the whole thing:

"I don’t want to be found by my third-grade classmates. I don’t want to put myself on display. I don’t want to be lulled into exhibitionism by the atmosphere of unabashed sharing and then regret it later. Yes, I know I can set the privacy levels, but I just don’t want to crack that door. It’s too tempting."

So once again, after more or less declaring "never," I've gone and done it. Cracked the door. Opened the kimono ever so slightly. Uploaded photos. Friended pretty much everyone I could think of, and accepted 95% of the friend requests that came my way.

Still, it's a great place to put omote vs. ura to work, and I'm getting lots and lots of practice in the ancient arts of temptation avoidance and self-restraint. Because as nice as I may seem to be most of the time, I have a serious snarky streak, and hard experience has taught me that it's best to keep it under wraps.

At any rate, it's done, and I don't feel I caved completely, because I joined partially for work -- to study the beast and understand it. Here's a short list of what I've learned so far:

- Posts get sentimental and/or silly late at night.

- People LOVE quizzes.

- People also love to dispute the results of quizzes.

- Quizzes can be gamed.

- It's a great place to seek advice and opinions on things like the best way to quit coffee (thanks again, everyone -- today is Day 3, and I'm not missing it).

- Some people are so friendly they'll accept your friend request even if they don't know you. Okay, so the guy could also have been clueless, or looking to reach a certain friend count, but still. I definitely had the wrong guy, and it was almost certainly clear to him that he didn't know me, and he accepted my friend request anyway.

- It can be simultaneously comforting and alienating.

- It's a very serendipitous environment. I would call it Zen, but I don't know enough about Zen to know if that's accurate. Maybe my next status update should be a social media koan: Is Facebook Zen?


And on that note, I leave you with a random photograph.

Coconut Chutney: Round Two

The Cuisinart has been sucking up valuable counter space ever since round one. I left it there to remind myself that I needed to go back in for round two while the coconut was still fresh. And since I have today off in addition to Monday, I decided 9:15 a.m. was the time to jump back in.

I went with a different, seemingly simpler recipe this time: fried coconut chutney. Here it is as it appears in the book “Tiffin Varieties.”



And here’s my mise en place (that’s French for “make sure you have everything before you begin, Einstein.”) Clockwise from top right, we have the coconut with a green chile on the rim, salt, black gram dal (hulled, which is why it’s white), tamarind paste, curry leaves and mustard seeds. Alert readers will notice that the recipe above does not call for curry leaves, but since they're an essential ingredient in most Southern Indian dishes, I made an executive decision to add them.



And thus began today's theme of improvisation. My coconut was still in biggish chunks, and I’d need to grind everything together later on anyway, so I put the coconut, chiles, curry leaves, tamarind, salt and gram dal in the Cuisinart and processed it until all the bits seemed small enough. I also added a little oil to help with the frying, and because it was bone-dry.

Once in the frying pan, the oil didn’t seem adequate to keep everything from browning, so I added some water, which cooked out relatively quickly. So I added more, and decided to continue on that track for 15 or 20 minutes.

From the mutating smell wafting up, I could tell the ingredients were melding nicely, so I took a small taste. Friends, either Mrs. S. Mallika Badrinath is a sadist, or I added way, way too much salt. But what I could taste around and behind the salt seemed right, so I rummaged through the Indian mystery shelf of the pantry to see if the bag of dried, shredded coconut I remembered was a mental invention, or actually there. It was there. On a higher shelf was the can of coconut milk I’d bought months earlier, just in case I felt like making piña coladas or coconut curry.

Here are my coconutty saviors:



After the fried mixture had cooled a bit, I put it back in the Cuisinart with the supplementary coconut products and whizzed it around briefly. It was still fairly salty, but because I have great faith in the Joy of Cooking, I added chunks of potato to the new mixture to hopefully soak up some of the salt, and set it to simmer on medium for a bit.

I just tasted it. It’s much better, but it’s not spicy enough, so I added another green chile, cut lengthwise, which I’ll take out later. I think it will be okay in the end, but I’m really glad I also decided to make dal. Faithful, simple, delicious, difficult-to-screw-up dal.

Love Letter to a Lily Allen Song

For a singer-songwriter-musician, I don’t buy a lot of CDs. It’s weird, but there it is. When I get hold of one I like, I wear it out, and if there’s a track I take a particular shine to, I’ll put it on repeat in my car’s CD player for days at a stretch. For the last month or so, the album has been Lily Allen’s “It’s Not me, it’s You,” and the track has been “Him.”

It’s a song about God that borrows heavily in concept from Prince’s “One of Us.” It’s also a bit sexy, but that makes sense given that Allen has never been afraid to be anything, least of all sexy whilst singing about God.

Fellow blogger Richard Byrne has convincingly argued that Serge Gainsbourg’s “L’Hotel Particulier” is as perfect as pop sex gets; meanwhile, I don’t think I’ll ever hear a song about God that’s more sensous than this one.

In particular, I’m talking about the instrumental break (at 2:05 in the YouTube track below). It starts with a breathy “ah-ah” vocal – an extended version of the lead-in for the second verse – that’s soon joined by a walking bass line. Then it widens into a fattened-up version of the chorus’ musical bed. The synth violins are still there, only now it’s impossible not to notice that they sound as if they’re being played through a trumpet mute for a pulsing effect. They’re propelled along by driving snare-based drum work and an elegantly simple single-line guitar solo. I crank this section up every time it comes on, because I can’t resist the impulse to take a bath in its warm, thick, loungy vibe.



One of the best things about this album outside of Allen herself is the producer, Greg Kurstin, and one of the best things about him is his egalitarian approach to instrumentation – banjo, accordion, and pedal steel are just a few of the pleasant surprises on these tracks. He’s also skilled at quoting musical styles without parroting them. I’m still working out why “Are You Mine” reminds me of the Beatles, though I suspect it’s the piano and the deft employment of the “rule of three” – repeat something twice, then shift away.

Getting back to “Him,” the verses wander through a series of amusing questions such as whether the big man in the sky would drive without insurance, and speculates about his favorite band. But the chorus is where Allen shows us what she really believes:

Ever since he can remember
People have died in his good name
Long before that September
Long before hijacking planes
He’s lost the will
He can’t decide
He doesn’t know who’s right or wrong
But there’s one thing that he’s sure of
This has been going on too long

Finally. Someone wrote a song about God that I can not only believe in, but feel the truth of in my bones. It’s about time. Thank you, Lily Allen.