First thing I did was search around for a bittersweet chocolate syrup recipe. This one looked promising. Secondly, I did a search to see if anyone else was thinking along these same lines. This answer on Yahoo! Answers suggested a similar method to the one I’d observed. So, this morning, I got out the trusty blender and went to work. In a word: delicious.

We deviated from the Starbucks recipe because we were out of some stuff: primarily, we substituted wheat germ for whey powder (because I find the idea of whey powder objectionable), which gave the drink a more pronounced grain flavor that was pleasant. Additionally, because Shawna and I usually add a shot of espresso anyway, we dissolved some espresso powder in the drink to give it a yummy coffee richness that really enhanced the chocolate flavor.

Banana Chocolate Shake

Yield: 1 drink

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup 2% milk (we used 1% plus cream)


• 1 cup ice cubes


• 1 1/2 T bittersweet chocolate syrup


• 1 banana, broken up into a few chunks


• 1 1/2 t wheat germ


• 1/2 t espresso powder

Method:

1. In a blender, mix the banana, milk, and wheat germ on the highest setting (ours was “liquefy”) until smooth.


2. Add ice, espresso powder, and chocolate syrup. Blend until smooth (using ice crush setting, if available, to break up the ice and then move to a medium setting).

Notes:

• The drink seemed a little thinner than the one we get at Starbucks. You might try experimenting with milk levels a little to fix the thickness.

Image Credit: olha a banana! by .mands.

One of the things I really enjoy about cocktail mixing is how it’s like cooking but with even less margin for error. Essentially you take three or four ingredients (or a dozen if you are making a tiki drink), shake them with ice, and strain into a chilled glass. Yet, as you can learn when you start playing with those few ingredients, you can radically change the shape of a drink (which is why I’ve stopped ordering Manhattans at restaurants; it takes to long to explain to the wait staff what whiskey I want (with a few options), what vermouth I want, that I do want bitters, and that I don’t want a cherry or any cherry juice). Recently, I decided to place an order with Fee Brothers, inspired by local cocktail superstar Kaiser Penguin’s account of their customer service. In addition to the bitters I was actually ordering (and the bitters they talked me into ordering), I decided to add a bottle of their falernum.

As you can see from the linked Wikipedia article, falernum is a spiced, rum and lime based syrup that is considered one of the great forgotten cocktail ingredients. I’ve been making my own for a while now and my third batch (the recipe is from Chris Hannah of Arnaud’s French 75 in New Orleans) is something I am quite proud of. So, I thought it would be fun to get a bottle of Fee’s syrup to try against my homemade product and to serve as a backup for the homemade.

The bottles from Fee Brothers arrived in the mail yesterday, so I cracked open their falernum and whipped up two half recipes of Don the Beachcomber’s Test Pilot, using my falernum in one and Fee’s in the other.

The difference between the two drinks was apparent before Shawna and I had even tried them: my falernum produced a dark brown cocktail and the one with Fee’s was more of a copper color. This made sense as mine is made with evaporated cane juice while Fee’s isn’t. When we tasted them, they were entirely different beverages. Mine produced a drink that had much more depth to it and foregrounded a lot of the smokiness of the alcohol from the rum and the Clement Creole Shrubb I used in place of the Cointreau. The Fee Brother’s falernum tasted more openly citrus-y, highlighting the orange of the Shrubb and brightness of the limes. This makes sense as, tasting them straight, the Fee Brother’s syrup foregrounds the lime flavor with spice notes backing things up. Mine, on the other hand, is almost good enough to drink straight, with a heavy depth emerging from the coffee beans and with the lime hitting the palate later in the tasting. I think this played out in both of the drinks.

I hope this discussion highlights why I’m so interested in cocktail making. By changing the half ounce of falernum from one source to another (in a 3.75 ounce drink), I radically changed the drinking experience (also, I’m not entirely sure which I liked more). Nonetheless, I think this calls for more experimentation.

Image Credit: Falernum Infusion by Elenadan

I remembered that when my cable had been installed, I’d been “pushed through” (I think that’s Comcast’s term) by Shawna’s laptop. After the tech left, I couldn’t connect my router to the Internet, so I spoofed her MAC address with the Linksys and have not had trouble since. Logically, I assumed that Comcast somehow stores the MAC address that first connects to the Internet and you just have to use that for all eternity. Turns out I was wrong.

Loading Tomato wiped out the old, spoofed MAC address and I didn’t have Shawna’s laptop around to check the new MAC (also, I wasn’t sure I actually used Shawna’s MAC; it might have been the tech’s laptop; getting cable out in Bellefonte, that day, was a wild and weird experience), so I called Comcast. The rep said that Comcast doesn’t store MAC addresses and that I should just reset the modem and my computer with my laptop (a MacBook) connected directly to the router. Rebooted modem, rebooted computer: everything works. Connected up the router and no Internet. Then, I spoofed my computer’s MAC address and got back online.

I may be going out on a limb here, but it looks like Comcast (and maybe all cable modems (?)) grab the MAC address that’s connected to them when they turn on and will only authorize that MAC. In any case, if you ever run into such a situation as mine, try rebooting the modem.

I hope this helps someone, someday.

Image Credit: cable modem and wi-fi router by osde8info

What caught my eye in the NYT article is that some people are concerned about Comcast doing this. They feel like Comcast is acting like Big Brother. According to the article, 20 year-old Brandon Dilbeck blogged about his dislike of ads on Comcast’s programming guide. A Comcast representative found the post (Google blog alert perhaps?), and responded to him via email.

[…]

But to air your concerns publicly and have someone from the company read it? If you’re concerned someone would actually read your post, then don’t blog. I’m actually surprised this 20 year old was concerned. The Gen Y folks are supposed to be pretty open about everything in their lives.

I’ve actually written a little about this before, in a paper on revisions of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in contemporary SF/action cinema ( Equilibrium , The Matrix trilogy, Aeon Flux, etc.) and how this documents a nostalgia for the possibility of resistance afforded by Totalitarianism (in contrast to the smeared and distributed power network created by multinational capital). I identified the same problem seen in the above post (w/r/t Comcast): people are willing to perform a public lack of concern about privacy as long as there aren’t reminders of how public this information actually is. I was talking about the arrival of the news feed on Facebook and how this made a lot of people freak out about the fact that this information was being made public.

I suppose I could say that I’m beyond such concerns and, as an objective observer of the socius, this amuses me, but that isn’t the case. I’ve also received tweets from the Comcast twitter people (thanking me for nice things I said) and I was also recently followed by the State College Police Department on Twitter (which freaked me out). Why, though? Obviously, everything I say on the Internet is published. There are very few things I say online that I’m embarrassed by and I’m certainly not doing anything illegal. Yet I wasn’t comfortable with the State College Police following me on Twitter.

I talked about this article from the Collegian about Twitter and the police in class the other day and had trouble convincing my students that this was a problem. Everyone could see that Facebook is a really easy way to get in trouble, but everyone loves to put up photos of themselves drinking beer (although, their recent class party had Bacardi 151) despite the fact that they are 18. Had I not liked my students so much this semester, I would have put up some of the pictures I was talking about (they all friended me on Facebook). Even threatening to do this, though, they didn’t seem to see a problem.

Maybe we actually are getting beyond this problem that I observed a few years ago and that shows up in the NYT article. If I can’t explain to a room full of 18 year-olds why there is a problem with them giving away embarrassing information on the Internet for all to read, maybe we are moving out of this anxiety after all.

At the same time, it could be that my students will all have their chains yanked soon enough. Either way, this still doesn’t get at why people are so willing to publish personal details of their lives in what amounts to a distributed many-to-many system of surveillance. The best thesis my class and I could come up with is that we do it because it’s there. Which doesn’t seem like a good reason, at all.

Image Credit: Big Brother Congestion – IMG_3280 by jeroen020

Sigh.

Image Credit: Skynet by benpatio

In a post on WorldChanging, Alex Steffen details a discussion he and Cory Doctorow were having about the unbelievability of post-apocalyptic fictions. This was something that I’ve actually been thinking about a lot lately. They posit a term called “the Outquisition,” suggesting that the new Utopianism for a declining America may lie in very smart people roaming around the country sharing new ideas and new technologies. All of this flies in the face of the model of post-apocalyptic life foregrounded in books like Alas, Babylon or (more importantly) The Road.

I like Steffen and Doctorow’s ideas a lot. As I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the growing food crisis (brought about by ethanol, by the way), the falling dollar, the increasing irrelevance of American politics, and the collapse of a lot of infrastructure, I’ve been reading a lot more about survivalism (which is interesting, given that my dad went through a similar period in the 70s). Problematically, I find that I don’t believe the rhetoric. Part of the doom & gloom verbiage of survivalist literature hinges on The End of the World, but as Fredric Jameson (probably) said “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” I’m starting to think that this quote might be a positive, actually. The real problem with End of the World discourse is just that: it posits a radical break, an Event so jarring that we become completely unmoored from History itself.

When I first read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it scared the shit out of me (much as I would imagine Threads scared the shit out of a lot of people in the 80s). Only much later (and in the context of my worrying about whether or not I should be stockpiling ammunition), did I start to think how full of shit that book is. The idea that a nuclear war would be survivable is silly (although, Philip K. Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? makes it seem more believable), but, similarly, the world McCarthy sees is really a post-Modern updating of the West, as constructed in books like Blood Meridian. The fact that McCarthy falls back on post-apocalyptic cliches shows that he hasn’t really thought about the future and, I think, this might mark out one of the reasons the book (and other SF-troped books by non-genre writers) is a piece of crap that gives Science Fiction (and thinking) a bad name.

Wow. That was angrier than I’d intended. The point I’m trying to get at is the fact that McCarthy’s world view seems to have people going through a thought process something like this: “wow! everyone is dead and there’s no more working power stations. Oh well, time for cannibalism.” The likelihood of that seems less than an alien invasion. What I ultimately mean is that the problem with so many post-apocalyptic narratives and what is so smart about Steffen and Doctorow’s Outquisition is tied up in questions of the absolute Endedness of the End. In other words, Steffen and Doctrow refuse the idea that an Event of the magnitude of governmental collapse in the US is actually a complete break with History (because, really, such an idea is silly). Memory persists and, frankly, the technological innovation of the United States seems to suggest that such a radical break wouldn’t likely occur. It always bugged me that no once thought about solar or wind or water power in The Road: ultimately, I think we have to realize that books like McCarthy’s are pornographic survivalist fantasies.

While I am, perhaps, putting my faith in a salvation narrative, which is something Stoekl’s book really shreds up, the idea that creativity and innovation will respond to an Event seems more likely than the idea that we will all start eating each other. Maybe not, though. So much post-apocalyptic (or at least anti-Utopian (which is what the Steffen piece is be talking about)) SF is filled with images of human degradation (for instance, I’m reading Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark (which is her, best, imo) and it features a lot of savagery and brutality that his reminiscent of the Mad Max films). I’m especially thinking of Richard K. Morgan’s Market Forces in which the poor are so degraded that they approach the level of animals in terms of behavior, so much so that socialism has completely given up. I wonder how willing people are to be saved (probably pretty high, actually) following a traumatic Event (although the creation of the U.S. Security State after 9/11 suggests that people are pretty busy looking for saviors after a major, national trauma).

Nonetheless, this idea of creative solution to world changing problems suggests that we may be close, as a society, to transcending the notion of the End. I’m particularly excited about this possibility of the End of Ends because, while they are compelling, visions of the End of the World get really boring and, ultimately, fall apart if you pick at them. For me, though, I’m interested to see what comes after the End of “the End of.”

Image Credit: El árbol de la vida by “• 7”:http://flickr.com/photos/eyedeaz

As a researcher interested in transhumanism, I’m very interested in this new filmic plot device (I won’t get into Fredric Jameson on the Utopian potential and boom/bust cycles of film genres, but interested parties should read “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” in the first issue of Social Text), and how these sorts of films constitute a new genre of cinema (perhaps we should call it the “pre-singularity film”) full of Utopian potential centered around the coming spiritual singularity suggested in the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo. While films, like Babel, may merely constitute the latest iteration of Hollywood cannibalizing successful films to extract the last dime from this concept of radical human interconnectedness, I think these pre-singularity films are suggestive of the larger memetic spread of transhuman ideas (and good transhuman ideas, to boot (I’m sure I’ll get around to explaining good and bad transhumanism at some point)). The fact that so many of this kind of movie should show up on a mass-media portal at the same time is suggestive of the growing global awareness.

One problem, though, is that many of these films (Babel especially, and Traitor it would seem) are centered around questions of the “truth” of this radical potential and the “meaning” of these new social constellations. As my dissertation director, Dr. Richard Doyle, is fond of pointing out: the next step towards the evolution of consciousness is people learning to stop asking if these new formations and weird interconnections are true. The truth/falsity of such formations is irrelevant to their political, social, and spiritual power.

Image Credit: answers are somewhere hidden within ourselves, but often we just don’t know how to read them by yives

As evidenced by Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012: the Return of Quetzalcoatl, this subject position is much easier said than actually done.

Opening the book by articulating a thesis that the world is on the cusp of a spiritual/psychic/cognitive reconfiguration, Pinchbeck suggests that the framework of Western rational thought has closed off much of the spiritual and psychic knowledge gained by the societies it labels primitive (especially, for Pinchbeck, the Maya). In giving reading instructions, Pinchbeck suggests that a suspension of the ingrained model of Western rational thought will produce a deeper and more satisfying reading of the book.

For what it’s worth, I did my best to approach the book on Pinchbeck’s terms.

The problem that this book has with belief, though, lies more with the author than the reader. While it proposes to be an account of non-Western knowledge systems and what they can teach us about a possible coming change in human life on Earth, the book becomes increasingly unhinged from Wilson’s anti-belief position and falls into a new system of belief. Largely, the book is a personal narrative of moving from one belief system (Western rationalism) to another (New Age spiritualism). Consequently, I found the book increasingly hard to read, as I approached the ending.

While initially a survey of some of the bizarre and unexplained phenomenon that contribute the growing since, on the fringes of society both Left and Right, that the world is going to either change or end on December 21, 2012 (the Winter Solstice and, also, the moment at which our sun crosses the Galactic Equator), the book becomes an increasingly difficult to swallow account of dreams, visions, and numerology. While it may be my own Western, rationalist biases, I find numerology incredibly hard to believe. Basically, the idea behind much of what Pinchbeck talks about in the book’s latter (and lesser) half revolves around numerological coincidences (or synchronicities) resulting from the Mayan long-count calendar. This idea is very similar to some of that Bible code stuff (which is parodied quite well on The Simpsons) that could really prove anything. Anyway, my larger point is that Pinchbeck’s book ultimately reveals that he is believing in the sort of New Age spirtualist framework of reality at the expense of other frameworks.

I find this problematic, as the rhetorical situation of the book demands that I change my perspective from a belief in science to a belief in spiritualism. That’s not something I feel prepared to do. Of course, the genius of the book is that Pinchbeck’s frequent articulation of the bad Nietzschean subject position (the kind of intellectual who feels that people don’t “get” him and, therefore, are like the sheep described in books like Beyond Good and Evil) and his equation of lacking of belief in the New Age with being locked into a capitalist, materialist, phallocentric (my word, not his) civilization allows him to dismiss any criticism like mine as resulting from my own lack of enlightenment.

This is what I love about this stuff, beyond my other interest in real, existing transhumanism: the way that New Age, conspiracy, or other outsider discourses turns the act of prolepsis from a moment of anticipation to a moment of direct attack (instead of merely anticipating your objections, it figures you as wrong because of your subject position). Hello, book #2.

Anyway, that said, I think 2012 is probably worth at least grazing. The first half is pretty solid, but once he gets into the stuff about changing the calendar and his trip to Hawai’i, it kind of loses steam. I’m treating the book, for my own work, like I treat Daniel Kevles book on eugenics: a work that traces out a lot of interesting territory but, as its own argument, makes a lot of unusual and suspect claims along the way. In other words, I’m going to be drawing heavily on Pinchbeck’s bibliography and not so much on his theories.

Image Credit: belief by phanphanphan

The thing is, though, I live in an information ecology that doesn’t normally value this style of thought. Instead, the English Department continues to value the long, complex, linear narratives that dominated our cultural mind before television and that Carr says are passing away. Frankly, I don’t think this is really how the story goes: television clearly killed the book and, as Carr also points out, people are reading more, now, than they were 20 years ago. This fact troubles a lot of people (again, Carr says that this reading is a new and different kind of reading that removes a lot of the contemplation of linear text consumption), but I see it as positive. Also, when I make this claim about text and English Studies’ relationship with it, I don’t just mean on a profound level: I’m interested in how many of colleagues’ eyes glaze over when I start excitedly babbling about RSS readers and Twitter. On some fundamental level English Studies has never understood the Internet.

As weird (I was going to say bad) as the new patterns of reading appear (at least to old school, linear authors like Carr and myself), I think the fact that people are reading again, at all, is a really positive and exciting thing. Clar Shirky’s ideas about television are true. It is a waste of time. I think blogging and rssing, though, aren’t wastes, as such. The number of new ideas I’ve been exposed to this week is greater than what I could have gotten from the three books (although, reading Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality, Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, and Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix Plus makes that almost an untrue claim, but that has more to do with what I read). The problem comes in figuring out how to synthesize this information. Sure, I’ve fired off a lot of pithy (in my mind) “tweets” about this stuff on Twitter, but does that really count? Also, I’ve posted about some of it on this blog (and could do a better job, I would imagine), but these media don’t count as work in the information ecology of a graduate-level English department. We still highly value linearity.
This dichotomy between what I feel and what I do is starting to become a crisis: as I gear up to write a long, linear book that somehow synthesizes my interests in science fiction, rhetoric, and technical communication at the twilight of the current age of mankind, I wonder: “Why?” Can a textual form that everyone seems to think is outmoded capture what it means to suddenly think in parallel (as Carr claims the Internet has done)? If not, what would such a form look like? The answer isn’t hypertext, as people like Jay D. Bolter have talked about it, as that form is largely a joke and an attempt to wield old forms onto the new logic of the Internet.

I’m partly thinking about exploring these issues in my English 015 class this summer, but I’m not even sure what this new kind of thinking will mean in a composition classroom. I think one thing I’m going to do is talk about how to read linearly (which is something that we seem to be forgetting as a culture) as well as how to write in parallel. I plan on using Twemes to get the students on Twitter and talking about class. I have some new media texts to present, so we’ll see if this can help resolve some of these issues, but, frankly, I worry about the future of this field, in general.
We claim in composition studies that we are teaching our students to write, but what good does it do to teach a model of writing that no longer matches the information ecology that exists outside of our insular world? Further, how do we teach composition as a discipline that is behind the times, in terms of the cutting edge of text? I don’t necessarily have the answers for these questions and I don’t think that as a discipline we will understand the forms these answers must take for a long time, but I think we need to at least try to keep a few steps ahead of our students. I think this approach should be implemented, as our society is still going through a shift in the way it deals with these information technologies: despite that most of my students have Facebook accounts, I’ve never had any who (to my knowledge) blog (I’ve only had a few freshmen who even knew what blogging was). These changes are not yet complete, but if we don’t want to get left by the wayside, I think we should start thinking about what composition means in the era of the 140 character “tweet.”

Image Credit: Sunset in Criação Velha, Pico Island Azores by Ulrich Thumult.

I’ve been trying to get posting via email to work, for quite a while. Well, actually I’m trying to get it working again. I migrated my domain tools to Google Apps and suddenly couldn’t post via email anymore. Why, you ask? Well, it turns out that Wordpress’s out of the box post via email doesn’t work with the SSL used on Gmail’s servers. Does it say this anywhere in the documentation? No. No it doesn’t. The only hint I had was this mention: “Postie supports posting to categories, automatic removal of email signatures, POP3/IMAL (sic) (+SSL) and more.” What does that mean?

I assumed it meant that Postie was better at handling email than Wordpress’s bare bones implementation. What it actually means is that Wordpress doesn’t support SSL (also that Wordpress doesn’t proofread things). I suppose I could log in and fix it (it is a wiki after all), but it seems sort of embarrassing that this software has such poor documentation.
Additionally, the Wordpress plugin that does work with SSL servers, like Gmail’s, Postie, ships with syntax errors (someone didn’t close all their parentheses). Additionally, the configuration menu is an over-designed nightmare that contains a number of spelling errors.

Further, I’m having trouble finding wordpress plugins to do things that Wordpress’s hosting service has by default. How do I include delicious updates in my sidebar (like most wordpress.com blogs)? Well, I installed del.icio.us cached++, but it drops a ““ tag at the bottom of its sidebar widget. Again, being open source, I could fix it myself, but I’m not your f***ing bug checker.

Adding on to this: iWPhone doesn’t work at all. I’m so sick of fighting with Wordpress’s crappy documentation, lack of good plugins, and non-working software. I’d say that this was like using Linux back in the good old 2.0-kernel days, but even then most of the stuff worked.

Part of my problem, I think is how hard it is to find things about Wordpress widgets and plugins. Searching their plugin repository is a vague description filled crap shot, at best. Admittedly, there are some really good plugins out there: croppr, for instance, is great.

I think the issue I’m having with Wordpress lies in a lack of focus on the part of Wordpress w/r/t their audience. Most Wordpress users, I’m guessing, are not people like me. They want a blog and they want it now. Cool, fine. For those people, the template writing documentation (which treats like a child) is probably okay. I would imagine that I would have trouble writing a Wordpress theme if I didn’t already know PHP. Let’s assume, though, that I do know PHP and have been using it for years. Also, let’s assume that I want to try to do something novel with Wordpress. Why shouldn’t I have access to all the constants that Wordpress defines? Why shouldn’t I have a list of global variables? Why can’t I access post information without printing it to the screen by default? I realize that I could find all of this stuff out (and have via much Google usage), but as it is, it’s easier for me to start an output buffering every time I want to get the post’s title loaded into memory.

My point is this: Wordpress is a really amazing blogging system (esp. given that it’s free), but due to the assumption that most power user’s are not going to be extending it (or that power user’s aren’t lazy), doing anything with Wordpress outside of posting in the default theme is a frustrating nightmare. I wonder, though, if I’m the only person with this problem, as I’ve had a lot of trouble just finding information in Google. Hmmm.

Update: Posting this item, Postie decided, first, not to work because I didn’t configure a feature that I wasn’t using (but can’t turn off). The error message was wonderfully vague, so I ended up going into the source code, again, via vim and commenting out a bunch of crap.

Image Credit: “RANT, This Way” by Nesster