Found off Das Racist's myspace page. I know I said no more about them, but this is about Hari.
Maybe not such a big deal to you, but to me it's pretty great seeing people who look like me making music videos and doing comedy on Jimmy Kimmel. Our parents (1st generation) came over here, worked their asses off and sacrificed so their kids could become lawyers, doctors and engineers. My generation (2nd) will end up having kids (3rd) who go to art school and become layabout rappers/comedians.
Ain't life grand?
p.s. my daughter is only allowed to be a rapper/comedian in her spare time, i.e. when she's not on call at the hospital where she's a DOCTOR
The Pledge of Allegiance. WTF? If you went to school in the U.S., you had to stand up and say this every day, in middle school at least. It seems really weird to me now. Do other countries do this?
I was thinking @ why I'm so obsessed w/ das racist lately. I like their lyrics (post-graduate-esque, silly, food obsessed, glancingly racial/political, funny) and the production's good enough. But maybe it's also cos one of them is sub-continental. I mean, are there any Indian rappers in the game? The only one I can think of is P.I.D., a.ka. "Politickin' Indian Dude." I bought his CD on principle, but it wasn't very good.
I guess that's the other part of it-- Hima's brown-skinneded, but he's also got skills. Not necessarily the next Ghostface, but not embarrassing at all. Also, I love his hat in the "Chicken and Meat" video.
I tried to transcribe the lyrics, but got stumped in several places. On a whim I emailed them, and Hima sent me the lyrics! That's the advantage of listening to obscure rappers-- they answer their mail. (Fiddy when you gonna write back?) He also told me where he got that hat.
[Victor]
barcode barcode library of congress molto spinach photo finish canon cannon
shoot me out the cannon gun blaster cut faster
muevelo muevelo ven pa'qua oh my god it's so hard andale andale epa epa fastest rodent check the components andale andale epa arriba niña pinta santa maria ave maria ave maria cheese, bread, sauce, pizzeria carlos santana juelz santana b-b-b-b-b-b-bananas b-b-b-b-b-b-bananas ( Read more... )
As usual, cooking makes me realize how little I know about anything.
What is fenugreek?
Is it related to fennel?
What's a pressure cooker?
How do you spell dal?
Red Lentil Dhal Submitted by Isa prep time: 15 minutes | cooking time: 50 minutes | makes 6-8 servings
Toasting and grinding your seeds is so worth the effort, and doesn't take long at all. Serve this dhal as a main dish with rice or as a side dish. It is aromatic, rich and delicious.
Equipment: Coffee grinder or mortar and pestle, saute pan, large, soup pot
Ingredients 3 tablespoons peanut oil 1 medium yellow onion 1 tablespoon fresh ginger, grated 4 garlic cloves, minced 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup dried red lentils 2 tablespoon tomato paste 4-5 cups water or veg broth 5 plum tomatoes, chopped juice of 1 lime 1 cup lightly packed chopped fresh cilantro
2 dried red chilis (seeds removed) 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Directions In a saute pan over medium heat, toast the seeds (but not the dried red chili) for about 5 minutes, stirring frequently. Remove from pan and let cool. Transfer to coffee grinder, aling with the dried red chili and cinnamon, and grind to a fine powder.
Over medium-high heat oil a soup pot, add onions and saute for 5 minutes. Add garlic and ginger and saute 5 more minutes. Add spices and salt, saute 5 minutes more.
Add 4 cups of water and stir to deglaze the pot. Add tomato paste and lentils. Bring to a boil then lower the heat a bit and simmer for 20 minutes.
Add the tomatoes, lime juice and cilantro and more water if it looks to thick. Simmer 10 more minutes, or until lentils are completely tender.
I was going through some recipes Amma printed out for me, and it struck me that the original promise of the internet has not been realized. A while back I joked that the internet is really catching on; it helps you keep your recipes organized. The joke being: back in the early days of computing, nobody could think of *any* good uses for home PCs, so they had to fall back to lame grasping at straws like recipe organization.
But, now that I've actually tried to use computerized web technology to deal with recipes, I see that we are living in the Stone Age.
My family loves to talk about food. We email recipes back and forth, ask questions about spices, ponder why you can't get vada pav in SF, etc. So, here is my vision. We should have a Pai family food blog, that lets any of us automatically post to by cc'ing an email address (food@pai.com or whatever). Then whenever we got these email threads going, the discussion would automatically get archived.
FURTHERMORE, this food blog should serve as an online repository of all our recipes. It would have to be extremely searchable and continually indexed. (Some data sanitization, tagging & such, might be needed, but no more than putting together a set of printed recipes... probably less.) So anytime we wanted to find a recipe we could just look it up.
FURTHERMORE, (and this is where it gets Jetsons-esque) every kitchen fridge should be a lightweight internet client. It should have a screen that can be used to navigate ones family food blog, and it should be able to print out recipes. AND it should have a built in camera so when you make something you can instantly take a picture of it and include it with the recipe file.
Sounds reasonable doesn't it? In reality, it's surprisingly non-trivial to set up the autopost via email thing I mention above. I spent a lot of time messing with bloggering softwares and email servers and got no farther than registering paifood.com. All the solutions people proposed sounded complicated, boring and like a 2nd job. I even asked metafilter, but metafilter just collectively shrugged.
Will the vision I've described come to life in my daughter's lifetime? Or her daughter's, daughter's lifetime? If not, what is all this technology worth?
SBQR w/ Angi, Alice, Arnab & Alicia
Arnie & Alicia are expecting a Hinjew baby too!
Hinjews will crush you
Nick & KT stayed over, made dinner: paella & rhubarb pie
KT is taking "Intermediate Thai Cooking." Intermediate is like Guppy or Webelo
Friday night service at Temple Emmanuel (Reform)
Young crowd, very different vibe from Beth Shalom (Conservative)
Afterwards got pho w/ Fraidy/Tawny, but did not take the 'Pho Challenge' (2.5 lbs noodles, 2 lbs beef)
Philosopher-king Sarah Paul bid us all farewell
She's moving to Maine (!) to be a professor
Art/fashion street fair near Thee Parkside Bought a monster sockpuppet with glistening white teeth
Ran into buncha folks, ended up going for pizza with Dav, Mia, Tesla
Tried talking to Tesla's Hello Kitty sockpuppet with my own, but she ran away in horror
Nick & KT came over with Megan & Ryan, visiting from Portland
Liska made channa masala w/ rice, salad, naan for dinner
Watched skate videos in slow motion while listening to sensitive singer/songwriters on Nick's ipod
Bid farewell to Lizzie -headed to DC to be a science writer
She's gonna cover 'the hill'
Big day looming
Office transforming
Middle name pending
Temporarily gain a highly developed aesthetic sense with regards to shoes (i.e. see the world through the eyes of a sneaker fiend or Samantha from Sex in the City.) Instinctively reject anything ugly, unfashionable and/or uncomfortable when shoe shopping. Tell at a glance if your running shoes are too worn down and need to be replaced.
To cast: burn a pair of shoelaces at both ends
Transmute Food to Food
Level 1: Convert a foodstuff into some other foodstuff. Only works for a 'single serving' of the item in question.
To cast: swallow a handful of poprocks
Level 2: As level 1, except the converted item is unchanged in appearance and retains its original nutritive value (e.g. spinach -> chocolate cake tastes like cake but looks like spinach and has same calories/fat/vitamins as spinach)
This track is from the latest Resident Advisor podcast - RA.157 Tony Lionni. Nice tune. I especially like the part around 5 where the synths start coming in, and then at 5:45 they become this old school ravey melody... such a nice warm sound. Makes me nostalgic somehow.
Ah, Berlin
The one great regret of my youth is that I didn't get to party in Berlin
It's alright, you should always leave the table a little bit hungry.
Rented Synecdoche w/ Nick/Az. Discussed it quite a bit afterwards. i think all kaufman's scripts tend to fall apart (adaptation as well) and he writes things weird and meta- because he can't finish a coherent story. so he really needs a good director to compensate (he directed synecdoche himself). also, why so miserabilist? we did have about 45 mins of giggles from repeatedly making the dictionary guy pronounce syn·ec·do·che and its myriad variants. *examples of synecdoche and/or metonymy. i get them confused. according to wikipedia, synecdoche is a kind of metonymy, and metonymy is a type of fresh-water fish
SATURDAY
Went to Star Trek w/ Sven/Nicole/Az. Crowd-pleasing, no doubt. good idea to get rid of all those old fogies and replace them with actors of interest to people under 40. (I liked Simon Pegg and Harold from Harold & Kumar esp.) The time travel crap made no sense whatsoever, but at least Uhura was toxic foxy in her impractical miniskirt. I still find Winona Ryder alluring, as well, although you have to hide the good silverware when she comes by. Oh before the movie we ate at the fancy Dosa across from AMC Kabuki. damn good. Kabuki is now Sundance and they let you drink beer while you watch the movie (a basic requirement of civilization if you ask me.)
SUNDAY
We had Mike/Megan/Deena/Will/Jonathan/Laura over for dinner-- 8 people! Very grown-up. This was enabled by our recently purchased crate n' barrel dining room table, which has quickly become the most used piece of furniture in our house. (esp. now that my office is a babby room). Menu was spaghetti carbonara, cucumber gazpacho, meatballs, salad and many bottles of good wine. I love s. carbonara but feel like it's cheating since the ingredients are all 'cream, egg, cheese, bacon'. Of course it's gonna be good. But, if you eat it with salad it all cancels out. I think I heard "Dr. Phil" say that. (this pic isn't from aforementioned dinner party, but that is the table in question. yassi made this incredible persian rice with ground beef dish, lubia polo-- it's gonna be in the 2009 top ten for sure)
don't worry, other side of the brain is filled with positive thoughts like "DNA testing indicates this baby is mine," and "There will be many opportunities to steal candy from this baby"