After receiving a record 85 blog comment spams about porn in one hour, I decided: it’s time to turn comment registration on. I hate to do it.. but this means that you need to do a (fairly quick) signup at TypeKey if you want to comment on this blog.

I welcome your (relevant) comments.

from News24.com, South Africa: “In an interview with Time magazine US President George W Bush has reflected on his role in the war on terrorism saying: ‘I’m not the historian. I’m the guy making history.’”

Is he saying “I’m shaping history,” or “I’m fabricating history,” or both?

Good thing there are other interpretations.

I think it was Daniel who turned me onto KCRW. This is what radio should be. I really like the “{Morning|Weekend|Evening} Becomes Ecclectic” for all kinds of good music, new and old, different genres, a fair bit from artists I’ve never heard, but all very good, very wisely chosen. Lots of great live performances, too, ala the Beeb.

When it comes to local Boston stations, WERS is really good, and though it still has that hit-or-miss college vibe to it, its always got something good up its sleeve.

“It’s almost Fall,” Whitney whispered into one of the still-closed buds of our sunflowers on the porch. Her voice was just loud enough to carry through the flower’s microphone and down the stem to its roots. I rolled my eyes, thinking they’d never listen.

But her coaxing worked, and the sunflower finally opened up this morning. We thought we’d have two bright yellow flowers all summer long, but until today we had only short stalks while the next door neighbor’s sunflowers have been brilliant since June.

At first glance, you might blame the late bloom on our small flowerpots, but I suspect it’s because we never water the damn things. Whitney goes away for a weekend and I forget, or I go away and she forgets, and each week the plants seem to lose more leaves than they gain. So I’m surprised the notion of flowering even came to their minds.

We met up with my parents in NY to see All Good Things at the NY Fringe Festival this weekend. It’s about The Remains, a rock band my dad formed in the 1960s. Strange to see someone play my dad at 21 (and who looked a bit like me…). While my dad as a young man wasn’t addressing me directly from the stage, I did hear some life lessons that (I think) he always wanted me to understand; they were woven into the creative triumphs (and administrative failures) of The Remains, who managed to play the Ed Sullivan show and tour with The Beatles and coming so close but never getting what they perceived as success: a Top 40 hit song.

All in all it was a great show, very energetic, and I could see a lot of potential in it. I was surprised by the versatility of the whole cast and crew— they had to set up the entire theater, including a few hundred folding chairs, in the 45 minutes before show time. But everyone had a blast, on stage and in the audience. It got some good press, too, so who knows what could happen with it next.

Karl’s been really helpful with my work to figure out what my “calling” is, and whether that’s a worthwhile exercise or just a distraction. We realized it will evolve, and that I don’t need to answer the question “What shall I do with my life?”, but “What shall I do right now?” is good, and the greater life-level stuff will yet emerge. He is facing a similar 20-something crisis at the moment, but I think he understands better what he needs to do about it.

On a whim, we took a boat out to Ellis Island. This is one of the best tourist deals in NYC. $10 bucks gets you a boat ride out to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Ellis Island has a great (and free) museum about immigration history and the history of the facility. We also found my great grandparents, Vahan and Nazelie Tashjian from Armenia, on a plaque:

(the j was later removed to simplify the American pronunciation)

Harvard Extension School
EXPO E-35 Essay Writing
Workshop. 4 units. Undergraduate credit $780, graduate credit $1,400. Limited enrollment.

Fall term (11494): Heather Bryant Jordan, PhD, Author. Tuesday, Sept. 21, 5:30-7:30 pm, Sever Hall, Room 105.

“The essayist does what we do with our lives; the essayist thinks about actual things.” We explore Annie Dillard’s assertion through careful readings of professional and student writings. Short exercises, considered drafts, and copious revisions lead toward the production of three honed essays on topics largely of the students’ choosing. Prerequisite: a college-level writing course.

Today I wanted to make that sesame-ginger dressing they use at good sushi bars and Japanese steak houses. I looked around on the Net and found a few alarming varieties, including more than one with ketchup as a main ingredient. Huh? Since when was ketchup a traditional Japanese ingredient? I’m all for “fusion cuisine”—unless it means Americans squirting ketchup all over the world’s food.

And that’s what appears to be happening. Karl and I were in a dubious Mexican restaurant in Portsmouth, NH a while back and we encountered ketchup in our enchiladas. Granted, the place wasn’t trying to be anything more than a sports bar, and this was about as far as we could get from Mexico, and enchiladas do involve tomatoes in some capacity, but ketchup? I was disgusted.

Ketchup evokes strong American memories from my childhood, like afternoons at the Tennessee state fair with corn dogs, fries, and funnel cakes, a summer day on the beach in New England with a sandy hot dog, or a messy 4th of July hamburger and Fritos on a paper plate with a can of Coke. I love these traditional American dishes, but they’re in vomitive dischord with my favorite ethnic food experiences: eating tacos made with chopped onion, avocado, cilantro, lime, and beef on a flour tortilla, visiting the Chinese tea house for a solemn three hours of meditation around a pot of jasmine tea, or picking plates of raw fish from an indoor stream at a minimalist urban sushi bar.

The irony is that ketchup began its life in Asia as ke-tsiap a few hundred years ago, though back then it was a pickled fish sauce without tomatoes. But that was a few hundred years ago, and this is now, and I doubt whether our circa-1870s varient of ketchup has a place in old-world cuisine. Yet I’m surprised by the frequency with which it appears in intriguing (disgusting) ways in “ethnic” online recipes from all over. Isn’t this sacrilegious? Or am I just being a curmudgeon as usual?

My theory is that English translators of recipes made before the 1980s knew you couldn’t find white miso paste or caper berries or fish sauce outside of the biggest cities, so in order to reach the widest audience they said, “No problem, just put ‘ketchup’ instead, nobody will notice.” And this is how world cuisine came about: When you don’t have something needed to make a dish in the traditional style, you need to improvise with whatever’s locally available. Now you have something new!

Which is why I’m now paranoid in restaurants, always peering under the sashmini for a hint of Heinz, or directing a suspicious eye toward the red soup paste on the table at the Vietnamese restaurant. We have assimilated traditional food from other cultures into our cruel, thankless culinary melting pot, and I’m not going to sit idly by while we ruin meal after meal. I want to catch the cooks red-handed, the ketchup still oozing from their plastic squeeze bottle into the bowl.

But deep down I know I should be forgiving. Taste conquers all in the end, doesn’t it? And surely someone more meddlesome than me is probably mixing up an incredible ketchup-laden Korean-inspired beef marinade or ketchup-infused red wine reduction as I write this.

So lets get back to ginger-sesame dressing. After picking what I liked out of the online recipes, here’s the dressing I ended up making. Throw some stuff into the blender: a chopped shallot, a small chopped carrot, an inch or so of minced ginger (about 2T), juice of a lemon, 2T rice vinegar, 1/2 cup sesame oil, a couple teaspoons of toasted sesame oil, if you have it, and blend. Add salt and black pepper (or even some chili oil/paste) to taste.

PS. For great ketchup recipes, check out Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything.

www.1000journals.com

It’s 2pm the next day and I’m still not hungry.

Last night was a feast at Sasha’s. It was visceral, primordial, and carnivorous. Everything made from scratch, even the barbecue sauce (especially the barbecue sauce). It was hot coals, beef, pork, and chunks of soaked hickory in the back yard. It was a meaty, grisly, bone-marrow-sucking, beer-drinking evening. And it was cole slaw and potato salad and buttermilk biscuits at sunset. It was summer raspberry and peach tarts.

Good people and good conversation out on the tree-house deck. The screen door swung open and shut as people stepped into the kitchen for another beer or extra napkins. The next door neighbor’s dog wandered over, timidly, for a taste. This is an American tradition I can get into.