Raja's Blog

Our book for March 29 2007 will be Wasp by Eric Frank Russell. It's currently out of print, but it's what the consensus arrived on. It is available as part of the omnibus Entities, linked below. It's also widely available through http://abebooks.com/ (a search for "Wasp" as the title and "Russell" as the author turns up 92 results). Click the title above to do the ABEBooks search.

If you want to buy the omnibus, here it is:

An interesting article tracking the next major release of Windows.

The results of an interesting, but rather amateurishly-executed, online survey. The unnamed "MrAndrews" was trying to figure out whether it might be possible to fund a TV show by gathering money (and subscribers) online.

(Thoughts on watching this movie for the second time, on our newly-purchased DVD.)

This is an excellent and dark film that, unusually for fantasy mysteries, includes a favorite touch of mine from Back to the Future II (hope that isn't too much of a spoiler). If I had read the book more than once it's possible I might be offended by the differences between book and film, but I haven't, so I'm ok ;-). While I give tremendous credit to the cast and crew of this film (and I'd like to add to the praise of director Alfonso Cuarón, who unfortunately won't be directing the next film in this series), I'm with the overflowing ranks of the literate who also give tremendous credit to J. K. Rowling for doing such an excellent and dark fantasy that also works as a fair mystery (i.e., the clues are there for you to find them).

For the historical record dept: At this point in our lives (December 2004), we were watching three excellent TV shows on DVD—Buffy Season Seven; Alias Season Three (generously loaned to us by Ignacio and Dr. Ana); and The West Wing Seasons 1 and 2 (generously loaned to us by Matt & Kat). They're all among the best of their genres; Buffy has the strongest characters and, therefore, to me the most heartbreaking storylines; Alias is high-speed beautiful people engaged in espionage; The West Wing is wall-to-wall intelligent people overworking to help the country the best they possibly can. As of this writing (3:42 AM December 27 2004; who knows when Blogger will be up to receive it as a posting?), we finished Buffy (and I feel a certain coldness in my life because there'll [probably] never be any more) and Alias Three (apparently Season Four will be on broadcast TV next month; I probably won't watch it until the DVDs); we're somewhere near episode 9 of The West Wing Season Two.

The average episode of any one of these is much better written (even Alias, which I would have considered the clear "runt" of this litter, until this season showed that creator JJ Abrams clearly did plan ahead; this season has made the show as a whole up to now feel like a single story arc) than almost everything I've seen in a movie theater this year. As I've mentioned to my friends before (and if the Google search worked on this blog, I might be able to tell whether I'd mentioned it here before :-S), most movie trailers I see in the theater make me want to never go to the theater again (presumably because the trailers feel like they're aimed at teenage idiots). For the average theatrical film, I come out wondering why we didn't stay home and watch the next episode of
Buffy / Alias / The West Wing.

I'd rate this 4/10. The problem is, I went in with expectations, since somebody from Julie's workplace had said it was particularly good, and Orson Scott Card had praised it (explaining why its box-office performance was "defying" critic's lukewarm reviews). A key quote from Card's review:

National Treasure is not only smart, but it thinks we're smart. It is made with the assumption that we can follow a storyline that actually requires us to think and remember and care about what's good and decent.

If I hadn't been prompted by this, I probably would have enjoyed the movie more; as it was, National Treasure felt to me like a Movie-of-the-Week done with an A-list cast (Nicolas Cage! John Voight!) and an infinite budget. But it's a Jerry Bruckheimer film, so it neither requires, nor rewards, any more intelligence than the average Jerry Bruckheimer film.

My very good friend David Caulton, who works for some big software company in the Pacific northwest, has been playing with a beta blog done by a subsidiary(?). Some interesting features. Check it out.

At Gregory's house I saw a sort of "Instant" Indian meal, and asked him about it. He said he'd told everybody but me, because he knew I hate Indian food (an utter lie—I'm just burned out on South Indian food). Basically, there's a grocery near (the IU) campus that has a lot of these Indian meals; I asked my wife Julie to pick some up on her trip home from work.

The meals are (I think) by a company called MTR. (I say "I think" because the packaging makes it hard to tell—shouldn't there be some marketing rule about making your company name a clear part of your package? ;-). Ah—there's an email address: feedback@mtrwonderkitchen.com . Visiting that domain in my browser turns up "Welcome to MTR FOODS LIMITED" and "This website under construction. Please visit us later!" The company name is in a <blink> tag (or equivalent). Are these people trying not to get my business? ;-)

The food is inexpensive and precooked and doesn't need refrigeration. You can heat it by putting the foil pouch in boiling water for 5 minutes, or by pouring the contents of the pouch into a microwavable bowl and cooking on High for 2 minutes. I did the latter.

The first dish I tried, Paneer Butter Masala, is really very good. I'd rate it 4 out of 5. It's not as good as the food at the excellent (north) Indian restaurants in Indianapolis, but it's not 60 miles / 100km / 1 hour's drive away, either. And it's quite inexpensive as well.

Since I use this blog for keeping notes of things I want to remember, I think I'll just keep a list of the dishes I try and what I think of them. So, to start out:

Chana Masala ("Wholesome chick peas cooked in a tangy, piquant sauce") 4/5
Paneer Butter Masala ("Mild spiced gravy with cottage cheese") 4.1/5
Rajma Masala ("Red Kidney beans in spiced gravy") 3.9/5 (reminds me a bit too much of Tex-Mex chili without meat).

Ignacio's posted some pictures from his birthday party on his blog. The one that features me prominently is titled “Raja Doesn't like Mate So Much”; in the zoomed-out picture, it vaguely looks like I'm smiling; in the zoomed in, you can tell that I'm squinching my eyes fiercely and sticking my tongue out as far as it can go.

I was happy to find out about yerba mate. Yerba mate (pronounced closer to “SHER-ba MAH-tay“) is a popular(ish) drink in Argentina; it's like a super-concentrated tea with orange and tastes like orange dirt (as our friend Simms said). It's chock full of caffeine. There are special containers used for drinking it; one is a bag made from a bull's testicle (!); the container Ignacio and Ana gave us to use was much more like a traditional ceramic mug, but it came with a complicated metal “straw” (which you can't quite make out in Ignacio's photo captioned “Kate tries MATE and finds it good!”. You can find a little more information in the Wikipedia's article on yerba mate.

I was happy because this cleared up a long-standing mystery for me. A few minutes after I tried the mate, I remembered where I'd heard of it:

“I was tired, as I said. I kept thinking of a good hot meal, and then from that I jumped to reflections of how nice and home—like even Borneo would seem after this crazy planet, and from that, to thoughts of little old New York, and then to thinking about a girl I know there—Fancy Long. Know her?”

“Vision entertainer,” said Harrison. “I've tuned her in. Nice blonde—dances and sings on the Yerba Mate hour.”

This is from “A Martian Odyssey”, Stanley G. Weinbaum's classic
1934 short story. I'd always thought that “Yerba Mate” was someone's name (and pronounced the way it's spelled); it was fun to find out what it really is!

I just woke up with a martial chant in my head:

Nick affiliated!
I went by the goldfish house
It's so complicated
I had to catch a mouse

The corresponding dream featured long stretches of walking endless blocks in San Francisco (which looked rather like Walnut street here in my hometown), trying to phone a friend to hook up for a quick meal since I'd be heading home soon (ironically, said friend lives back here now), and arguing with my parents about eating at a not-quite-diner that prominently featured hamburgers and ice cream sundaes.

Dreams are strange.