Peeled, Seeded and Diced Tomato [food]

Like shallots and alcoholism, most real chefs are into “tomato concasse.”

Boil some water, and prepare a bowl of ice water. Lightly cut an X across the bottom of your tomatoes. From the top of your tomatoes, remove the core by cutting a scoop. Drop the tomatoes into the boiling water. Remove them when the peel starts to shrivel. Immediately toss the tomatoes into your ice water. (This stops us from actually cooking the tomoatoes.) Pull away the peel in the water. Cut the tomoatoes into length-wise wedges. By holding one point of the wedge against your cutting board and cutting away from you, discard (eat) the bitter and seed-y innards. Dice what's left: Cut them into quarter-inch strips, then into quarter-inch cubes.

Use this tomato concasse to garnish everything savoury, especially pasta and crispy (fried) meats. Most tomoatoes now-a-days taste of nothing, since they've been bred to be tough for shipping but weak in the mouth. If you're loaded, so-called hierlooms are an incredible decadence.

Goblet

An excessive aura of pop culture skepticism is required for membersihp in the club, but there's always been a blurred line between skepticism and utter fascination. (“Eighties. Living in the eighties.”) Reading one of J.K. Rowling's best selling screenplays is a negotiation on this line. I read her as the films are released, so I can play that mental game of wondering how someone with mad budget chooses to visualize a hippogrif on screen. She suffers from the usual Tokien-esque shortcomings, but doesn't benefit from his insulation of genre definition.

1. Everyone evil is ugly, and usually wants to pretty.
2. Anti-heroes are glorious in being selfish, by getting what they want but not necessarily winning.
3. Class struggle is delineated by birth only.

This sort of uber-Western prattle is not something I'd choose to indoctrinate in my hypothetical child. However my friend's mother – a big shot children's librarian on the Island – insists that Rowling is fighting the good fight in bringing kids back to reading. I would love to see non-anecdotal evidence that the kids of Potter fandom read much outside the series, since I suspect a fiesty cult of personality is at work. (How many Scientologists read proper psychology, for perspective?)

I would much rather children of the short attention span generation (bollocks) spend a few hours watching quirky, surreal (drug-addled), clever children's films like Labyrinth and Lilo & Stitch. Then again, the Potter series isn't written for children. Right?

Internet as Agreement

The longer we maintain against regulating the Internet, the longer there is legal ambiguity about the most appropriate linguistic metaphor for the Internet (pipes vs. space), the more people wil remain accustomed to the Internet as a natural resource. That it is a natural resource, an agreement is an affirming nuance.

The more people think of the Internet as a natural resource, the more resistance there will be to regulation, to moving things away from the edges. In an inverse corollary of government reticence to allow any given cash flow to dry up — Illinois' toll roads were supposed to be abandoned back in the 1970-80's — people used to getting something for free will expect that price in perpetuity. Maybe we don't need to win, but just stall 'em.