Bloomington has SF/English weather right now, light overcast, occasional spritz of rain, grey over green, a combination I've always loved. And maybe the winter really got to me, but right now it seems *really* green around here, as in I'll look down a street and see the trees in leaf and be surprised at how the view is blocked. Many of the blocks here are criss-crossed with alleys, vs. blocks in Chicago that just had a long block going down them, or ones in San Francisco with no alleys and trash pickup is out front. (Out front here too, despite the alleys.) Today I was diverting myself down alleys, and discovering the central spaces, standing on gravel under clouds and trees, the cars somewhat distant and muffled by houses and leaves, birds chirping in the trees above me. Chicago wouldn't have that feeling, I think, partly from there being fewer trees in that location, and largely because of the feeling of being in a crossroads, and looking out in four directions, vs. being trapped in the middle of a long alley. I think *that's* related to Jane Jacobs's observations about short vs. long city blocks, and how much more pedestrian (and business) friendly the former were. Also related to my brief couple of weeks working at Knowledge Adventure, in some office block around LA, in the middle of an inhumanly long block, of course sans any green or softening features. My friends Glenn&Sarah lived in blocks half a mile long, but at least all those 3/4 acre lots softened the view, plus G&S were close to one end.

( Review )

Right as I got to Samira to meet lyceum, I got a mystery call. Turned out to be from some Comcast employee (exec?) in Pennsylvania, who'd seen my earlier LJ complaint, and was calling to see if he could help. That's kind of neat. Not as neat as an actually smooth changeover system, but still.

Samira buffet: still tasty. Best parts for me are the chicken -- especially fatty skin bits that have fallen off bigger pieces -- and the cucumberish salad. For the first time, I saw smaller chuncks of chicken in with the fried pieces, yellow mild curry things.

Real sunken continents! Zealandia and Kerguelen.

Administration claims immunity to the 4th Amendment. Can I start talking about traitors yet?

Pharyngula coins an acronym: SIWOTI syndrome.

Article on the farm bill and a (foo) Dakota family that avoided the temptation of subsidized corn.

There may be a bottleneck in building top quality nuclear reactors. Unlike a_steep_hill, I don't see that as a good thing.

Me on how I'd be happier if a lot of "science fiction" was called something else. Or if I thought of space opera as its own genre, not a flawed subgenre of science fiction.

59% of US doctors favor national health insurance.

I could do better, but something I wrote about why I like the Exalted setting.

A one-way mirrored public toilet

Ancient Mideast water delivery and storage and air conditioning tech.

Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and higher food prices.

Edit: article and spin from james_nicoll. Counterspin.

Summary: food prices are rising on conventional grains and things made from them, which is almost everything, especially everything junky. Organic and local food prices aren't rising so much, or even falling for produce, so the named people are quoted as looking forward to people having incentives to eat in a healthier and less environmentally damaging way, though a more expensive way.

Fanw cooked one night. I forget what the main meal was, but I told her about Burmese coconut rice, a la Mandalay here in Bloomington, and she had coconut milk handy so tried that. Not bad, though comparing to my memory it could use more milk and/or sugar.

Also, she took me to a Tibetan restaurant which seemed better than either of the ones here. So much for "brother in law of the Dalai Lama" or whatever we have going on.

Conversely, she introduced me to za'atar, a Middle Eastern condiment. Basically a bunch of herbs mixed together and poured onto a plate, and we'd dip bread in olive oil and then into the herbs. Tasty. I've been replicating it, mostly by pouring herbs directly into oil and dipping the bread in that.

I kind of taught her the family meat sauce. Made it while she watched, anyway.

Her cat really wants to go down into the basement. She (the cat) has clearly identified the doorknob as the key part in opening the door; she'll stretch up the door toward it in a way she doesn't elsewhere, or get up on the counter and try to paw the knob. Can't reach, though. I'd tantalize her by gripping the knob while she sat in front of the door... then let go, and she'd give me this look. Recently I thought that she could be held up so as to be able to paw the knob, so as to learn that that won't actually help her get out, since she'll still be missing the human magic touch.

Ami is the cafe that opened up among the restaurants on 4th street, with the white and red decor. Started off as pure coffee, developed a Korean lunch buffet, and now has a full Korean dinner menu. I tried the buffet today. $7.50, or $7.95 with tax.
Notable: seasoned egg 'cake', beef, salad furnishings
Decent: spicy pork and broccoli, potato pancake, vegetable noodles, fried rice
Eh: chicken, with or without sweet and sour sauce. Dry and bland. Also, the two soups available, one of which resembled egg drop soup. These weren't bad in the way of cheap greasy Chinese buffet soup, more that they had a flavor I didn't like. I think I've encountered this with Korean food before, though the brown soup also made me think of menudo (with genuine tripe!) I had in a Mexican restaurant in Kentucky. But maybe it was just excess cabbage. Anyway, I got a feeling more of "not for me" than "lousy".

There's a new cafe in town, which opened just a few days ago. Rachael's, 3rd and Lincoln, right across from Turkuaz. I haven't eaten there yet; I just dropped by today, en route home from lunch. The person there said she's still getting food up to speed, with breakfast and deli coming, but that she's got "good coffee" -- Brown County, same as Tallent and Blue Boy (chocolate place next to Buskirk-Chumley) use, and hot chocolate made from chips and milk, which gets my attention.

Huh, I'm reminded I haven't been to Neannie's since I first went, nor Soma in a long time. Or Django ever.

Thank you, pompe! I get to re-use my 'hubris' tag (in a good way): biggest building plans, from an architect who's already built similar buildings. Article also links to a much bigger proposal for Japan, which is probably vaporware. This hyperbolic pyramid design is a new one to me, for arcologies, and my first reaction is "wow, that's really space inefficient", compared to a cube or dome, but I assume there are other benefits. Be nice to know what they are.

From James we get GOP candidates as Buffy villains.

From fallenrose, Michael Pollan (Omnivore's Dilemma, Botany of Desire) has a new book out (In Defense of Food). Don't eat too much, eat plants, don't eat things your grandma wouldn't recognize as food... I'd note that some of the animal engineering he mentions is arguably counteracting previous abuses; eggs aren't getting "fish oils", they're getting a flaxseed component which might be closer to natural eggs than the pure corn diet.

I wonder how this interacts with the John Hawks paper on rapid human evolution, which seems to support my intuition that various human populations could well have adapted to their specific agricultural diets. Perhaps we should think about not just traditional foods but food traditional for our individual genomes, where determinable. A related thought was that if there's any genetic component to correlations between 'race' and IQ, perhaps it's not from "X are dumb" but "X aren't adapted to Middle Eastern-derived agriculture, and IQ is nutrition sensitive", with certain middle-class populations suffering from the fact that while they can afford all the food they think they want, their genomes actually want foods not sold in their hemisphere.

Creationists take on plate tectonics and linguistics.

Squeeze from its package some pork sausage from one of the local 100% grass-fed beef producers. Add some organic, sugar-less, salsa, and some pieces of Danish havarti cheese (sparing a thought for the Mohammed-cartoon protesters who inspired me to seek out Danish cheese.) Microwave for a minute. Mix up the sausage, microwave another minute. Add organic garlic corn chips, smash and mix, wait a bit for it to cool off and the chips to soak up juices. Eat.

Seems way too fast and tasty to be healthy. Well, fair bit of fat and salt (from the chips) in there, so not exactly salad healthy, but I'd think not crappy either. Meat, cheese, grain, tomatoes, onions, spices...

Huh, I just found that the farmer's market has been open from 8-1pm this year, not 7-noon. Effect of Indiana going onto DST, I assume. The Oct/Nov market is open 9-1 instead of 9-noon. Produce is mostly squash, some boxy tomatoes, and greens I don't eat. My usual grass-fed beef sources weren't there, but a new one was, Padgett Farms. Lots of egg sources but I've got over a dozen in the fridge. Honey, elk. Also a soup tasting on the side, with samples from various restaurants or inns (like the Grant Street Inn; can you go in there to dine?) I didn't see any locals I recognized, though a girl at the tasting looked a lot like mrs_feltner back in her brunette days.

Last night I finally went to Baked. I feel my cookies weren't as good as Insomnia's, but it's not a controlled test -- perhaps butterscotch chips weren't such a great idea. Insomnia doesn't let you specify your own cookie types or get nuts. It does let you buy *one cookie* as opposed to a meal's worth.

( Boring board game gloating )

Walking up Walnut tonight, I found, between 7th and 8th, "insomnia cookies". A cookie place, open from 4pm-2am, making deliveries after 8pm. Cookies and brownies, basically. I had a chocolate chunk cookie for $0.95, and it was good chocolatey gooeyness. Been open a week, I asked if they were still decoration since it looks very industrial -- warehouse-high ceiling, big steam pipes, black walls -- and she said yeah, the owner's looking for artists to pretty up the place. Don't know if that means murals or hanging art or what, but hey.

Japanee, formerly Japonais, I'm pretty sure formerly had a parking lot. Now it has Japanese-ish wooden outdoor seating.

I've usually been disappointed by the savory crepes at Cafe et Crepe, but tonight's chicken fromage was pretty good, and the other SFDG attendees liked their dinners as well.

Random thought: "I owe you a phone call" is not, in the end, a substitute for actually making the phone call.

Bought a combo from Lucky's -- sweet and sour chicken, curry chicken, lo mein. $4.97. Weighed in at 900 grams, including styrofoam container. I'm not sure of the calories per gram, but since it's not a weight-loss product, 2-3 seems a reasonable guess. Not something you want to eat all of in one sitting...

Sahara Mart and Bloomingfood's downtown (and probably the others) have great Valencia oranges. I've been cutting them into sections and eating them, the way I eat grapefruit. Sahara Mart is cheaper -- 79 cents each, vs. $1.49/pound for things coming in at 3/4 a pound. OTOH, as usual you want to look out for ex-ripe produce at Sahara.

Runcible Spoon started offering burgers when I wasn't around. Not black bean burgers for vegetarians (though those are still there) but actual beefy burgers. They're okay, no special Spoonness, apart from coming on whole wheat buns. Servers don't ask how I'd like the patty, so it's come fully gray-cooked. Don't know if they'd do rare if I asked.

I went to Mandalay Restaurant; the buffet is back. I think it's cheaper, $7.99 vs. $9.99. Didn't seem as good, but that might have been because I was there at 1:30 for a buffet which ends at 2; they were nearly *out* of most things (and what they weren't, I helped along.)

Ami, the white and red cafe nearby, has expanded to Real Food, specifically a Korean buffet. Saw what seemed to be the owner looking out, forlornly. Will have to try it -- hey, lyceum, we have a lunch schedule to resume!

On one side of Buskirk-Chumley used to be a truffle shop, long since replaced by Greek's Pizzeria. On the other, we now have Blu Boy, serving truffle like things. Shopboy wasn't sure if dark chocolate qualified as proper "truffle". I was just out from Mandalay, so didn't buy any yet.

CS Department Red Hat Enterprise 5, KDE interface, takes forever to log in. GNOME is faster. So is my TWM setup, not changed much since Caltech 1992.

The public library has a stand offering bike information and asking for input on their Plans.

Last night I bought and read Order of the Stick: Dungeon Crawlin' Fools (the first 120 strips) and Start of Darkness (Prequel of EEEVIL, and quite good.)

News I'm not linking to since it was Yahoo articles, which expire:
Sony has a sugar-powered battery.
"Out of body experiences" have been induced in the lab, though it read more like telepresence than "going into the light".
Japan is hit by smog, China blamed.
There's a billion light-year void in the universe, empty of light or dark matter, as far as they can tell.
A common kind of killer pneumonia causes bleeding in the lungs. It took them this long to figure that out?

And in conclusion, I need a Carthago delenda est, except meaning "Arcologies must be built" or "Weather must be controlled."

I went to Le Petit Cafe for the first time in a while. Good, though less ecstatic than before; highlights would be the pasta with pesto, and the dessert. But I left stuffed, without having eaten everything; I think it needs to be shared.

Does one tip at a place where the server clearly owns the establishment? I did, but it feels weird.

I went by the new Bloomingfood's for the first time. It's got a cafe, like Eastside. Looked decent otherwise; don't know if it has more than downtown, or just more space. More fridges, I guess, and including Traderspoint 100% grassfed milk! At $3.49/32 oz, making it twice the price of the last milk mentioned, and about 4x the price of normal milk.

I seem to have lost my sunglasses, which is very very unfortunate. I walked to a lot of possible lost/found places, but no luck.

I seem to have gained 6 pounds in the last 13 days, which implies an extra 1700 calories a day, which seems implausible.

I haven't posted about food in a while... I'm not seeing Traderspoint 100% grass-fed milk at Sahara or Bloomingfood's, just yogurts. But I did get Farmer's All Natural Creamery Grass Fed milk from Bloomingfood's, $4/half gallon, "VAT pasteurized" (supposedly longer but lower temperature) and non-homogenized. It tasted weird at first -- slightly sour, I'd have said, like buttermilk -- but now I'm learning toward saying it has the diversity of flavors that Traderspoint had. It also might be not having enough fat, since I don't think I got the fat stirred in well, it's still mostly in clumps. By comparison, the Organic Valley whole milk was rich, but flat, coating my tongue in Fatty Milk Stuff as opposed to "Wow, what explosion of flavors is this?" Stuff.

Tangentially, Organic Valley Orange Juice? Still inferior IMO to Tropicana. Let alone to fresh squeezed oranges, which I had a few of courtesy of the Asian market in Eastland Plaza.

Orange juice with calcium in has been around for a while, competing with milk. Yesterday I saw OJ with Omega-3 oils in. Actual fish oil ingredient. That just seems wrong. More precisely, I don't think I want my OJ tasting of fish...

Up lateish. Ran into someone at Sahara Mart, a reminder of the virtues of getting out. Went to the Post Office. Long line, but there was someone who could hand over packages. Yay! Yay? No -- my mail is not handled by the post office three blocks from me, it is handled by a post office on the other side of the Moon -- excuse me, on Pete Ellis. Supposedly even my local post office's own mail is handled by Woodbridge, because they go by zip code, and the post office which handles 03 and 04 mail is located in 01.

It being lateish, I didn't feel I had time to bus over, wait, and bus back, given eating and Pirates. So that's what I'll be doing tomorrow at some point.

Italian sausage at Bloomington Sandwich Co. was okay, nothing special.

Oh, yesterday lyceum and I went to Nomad Buffet, which replaced American Chopstick, the Mongolian BBQ. Nomad also has a BBQ, which neither of us tried -- I was diverted by everything else, and she was afraid of the non-frozen state of the meat slices. I sampled almost everything from the buffet, at least the Chinese things (vs. macaroni and cheese), plus some prime rib which they cut raw and cook for you. Conclusion: it sucks. The prime rib wasn't bad; a vegetable momo (Tibetan dumpling) was interesting, the spicy tofu was in fact spicy tofu. But the egg roll was dry, if spicy; the nomad chicken was dry and bland, the salmon on the sushi was almost completely tasteless. Fried rice and General Tso's chicken might have been okay, but I wasn't inspired to get more, and the buffet is about $9; you're better off at China Buffet.

I thought I was tactful in not complaining too loudly, but lyceum said the guy -- owner? -- was sitting right behind me, and looking sad. He gave me a "come ten times, next one free" card -- I was polite enough to take it, rather than saying "I don't think I'll be needing this."

Who knows, maybe the BBQ part is actually decent.

Why do Twinkie-calories cost more than carrot-calories?  Michael Pollan blames the farm bill.

I haven't done a restaurants review in a while.  Briefly: I thought the new noodle place on Kirkwood had a poor selection and a poor veggie pad thai, but I admit I was in a very bad mood when I went  Pita Pit made lyceum_arabica excited but what they gave me was a tasty but appetizer-sized pita, for almost $6.  Not impressed.

But today lyceum and I went to Mandalay's lunch buffet.  The location here is odd: it used to be a Burmese restaurant, then turned into Masala Wok, which was a cool name for Asian fast food but it never actually opened, and now we have Mandalay, another Burmese restaurant.  A bit pricier than I'd like, and the buffet is $9.  But it's *good*.  Fried rice is decent, the white rice is coconut rice, and very tasty by itself; there's a noodle and chicken dish which is bland but still tasty; juicy fried chicken chunks; curried chicken; something beef; nice fried shrimp; and a bunch of fruit -- melon chunks, strawberries, grapes -- for dessert.  Lyceum liked the cauliflower and had some soup, though I was less taken by the cauliflower.  The overall appeal was rather higher than that of Samira or Bombay House buffets, let alone Siam House's. 

I also had Burmese ice coffee, which didn't come like standard Thai ice coffee.  The coffee was in a tin thing on top of the standard tall glass, dripping into a small pool of condensed cream, with the final liquid maybe being 1/3 of the glass.  Then there was a whole bunch of ice.  So it felt less than the usual amount, for $2.25, though Thai ice stuff comes with so much ice it's hard to really compare.  it certainly tasted good.

Oh yeah.  Near the end,  I overhead some women talking, and it seemed like I heard "he's a very religious person... steals a bunch of sodas".