Crickets Chirping

How to make Bacon Tortilla Soup

Wake up with a hankering for something to eat that doesn’t come in a box. Head down to the Divisadero Farmer’s Market to check out the goods. Get some heirloom tomatoes. Marvel at their psychedelic phenotypes. Also get some peppers of various hotness, some onions, garlic and cilantro.

Then walk down to Lucky’s to pick up some organic chicken stock, chicken breasts and bacon (yes, it’s organic too). Head home.

Arrange food items for a family portrait. It will be their last.

Prepare apartment for the cloud of Bacon smoke that is about to invade it. Then cook the bacon. Eat it. Then cook some more and leave it on a paper towel to drain. Start grilling two chicken breasts in a pan with some olive oil.

Whoah there.

You okay? Did you stare at the patterns on the tomatoes for too long?

HEY! It’s important to suppress these flashbacks because you are standing very close to an open flame.

Take a deep breath and wait for that feeling that you’re hovering three feet above your body to subside.

After you cut all the fractals off the heirloom tomatoes, core and dice them. Set these aside in a bowl.

Dice the onions and peppers, and chop the garlic up into itsy bitsy pieces. Cry from the onions, but don’t touch your eyes- you’ve been handling jalapenos! Oh Noes! You did? Okay, just remember this lesson when you have to go to the bathroom in a few minutes because it actually is possible for your comfort level to decrease, even at it’s current miserably low point.

Buck up little solider! Pour two turns around the pan of olive oil and saute the peppers, onions and garlic.

Take the two chicken breasts that you’ve been grilling on the other burner and shred them. Put them into a pot.

Add onions, peppers, garlic and crubmled BACON. Realize that this pot is FULL and you haven’t even added the chicken stock or tomatoes. So get out another pot and parallelize this operation! Add chicken stock and tomatoes to both pots. Put one can of black beans in one of the pots for variation A, and chop up some cilantro to add to the other pot for variation B.

Bring to a boil, then simmer for a couple of hours.

Enjoy variation A, but realize that you can taste the can that the black beans came from. Grumble, but finish the bowl because it’s friggin delicious anyways.

Variation B hits the spot. Twitter and blog about it.

Now freeze the leftovers in single serving containers just like Grandma used to. Except without the corn and tortilla strips because you’re trying to cut corn out of your diet. Not for health reasons, but just because you don’t like corn.

I’m too lazy to update this blog with new posts lately, so I wrote a bot to write new ones for me. It leverages the raw text of posts I’ve written going back to 2002. Try it here:

After it finishes loading, click on the button at the bottom of the page to generate a new post.

I’ve tried it out on Firefox and Safari and it seems to work on those. IE, I have no idea.

Details: It’s a Markov chain implemented in JavaScript. View source if you are so inclined (hint). The training phase was taking a long time, leading to “Slow Script” warning dialogs, so I broke it up into async chunks (and added the progress indicator) so hopefully it won’t crash your browser :)

Wordpress ate the post I made about this on the bus this morning. I totally saved it and published it, but now it’s like, totally gone. WTF WP???

Just for that I’m switching to Blogger.

Anyways Deerhoof up the ante by leaking their own single as sheet music. I can’t read sheet music, but I do have a copy of Logic, so maybe I can transcribe it into a MIDI file in my copious free time if nobody has done that already.

Edible Augmented Reality:

I Eat Beats from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

via tomc.

Went through my old laptop looking for songs to salvage and I found one. Recorded it back in the garage in Austin.

MP3: Shooting Scars.

We’re tight
Tonight
Our trails are burning bright

Can’t get it right
Every time I find you it seems

Thought you were a shooting star, but no
You’re just another scar in a sky gone black

Mistook
Misery
For your sympathy

You’re just like me
Fucked up and I don’t that ’cause

Thought you were a shooting star, but no
You’re just another scar in a sky gone black

Drums: Brent. Guitar, vocals: me.

Not one of my more uplifting pieces, but it’s resonating with me lately.

Newly open-sourced goodies from teh goog: Thrift, meet Protocol Buffers. I believe you two have a lot in common. Mark Slee (one of authors of the Thrift paper) apparently interned at google.

Anxiety in the cockpit surged.

The pilot checked the instruments in front of him. Gibberish. You see, this airplane had Lite-Brites instead of radar screens.

Violent thunder storms approached. Menacing clouds, sketched in crayola hung from Big Chief horizon lines, like electrified half notes in the score to Hot Cross Buns.

The navigator tried to make out what was left of the map, but turbulence had erased most of his diligent cartographical Etch-a-Sketch work.

The cabin then “experienced a sudden drop in pressure,” as they say. Finding Nemo flickered and disappeared from the movie screen. Sippy-cups rolled into the aisle.

I took a photo of what subsequently fell from the overhead compartments:

Pipe cleaner oxygen masks.

That’s the last time I fly Kid Air.

“Toe Jam” by Brighton Port Authority featuring David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal (maybe NSFW but there’s no actual nudity):

THE BPA - THE BPA ‘TOE JAM’ FEAT. DAVID BYRNE & DIZZEE RASCAL from Fabio Resende on Vimeo.

The video is directed by Keith Schofield, who has a lot of other great videos on his site.

via hoyhoy