BC&B: Tapenado Restaurant Maurice Brun w/ Oeufs en Meurette

This is a slightly unusual tapenade — it’s big and chunky and is supposed to be eaten like an appetiser. Well, I’m on board with that, because I love olives.

I was unable to find olives from Nyons, so I substituted some other, less Nyonneuse olives. I wonder what makes them special… Hm… Ah, they’re called “Tanche” olives. I should try to get some to see what they’re like.

Anyway, the other ingredients are thyme, capers and anchovies, which is the normal ingredients for this sort of thing, I think. And then there’s rum. That’s a bit more speecial. Anyway, blast them in the food processor, but only until they’re chunkily chunked.

That’s not a very… pleasant sight now is it? OK, I’ll sprinkle some thyme over it.

There! I did it!

OK, I have to quickly get started on the book to read while shovelling tapenade into my mouth. It’s Patrick deWitt’s French Exit, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, which is never a good sign. But you can read the first three pages while I’m setting the table.

Caught up?

OK, let’s get eating and reading. deWitt is going for witty and worldly, I guess, while this tapenade is going for super-rustic, so it’s not an obvious pairing. The tapenade is quite good, though. Olives are always nice, and the pop of super-salty anchovies here and there provide excitement. And the rum does do something for it all. Adds a kinda effervescent thing.

Quite nice.

But more food is required, so:

This is basically poached eggs on toast with a red wine sauce. Oh, right, it says to in the subtitle up there.

But so many ingredients for the sauce!

Chop!

Chop!

Chop!

And then this is supposed to really cook for ten minutes to reduce. That’s a lot of wine.

For the toast, we’re supposed to cut out rings of rustic bread with a cookie form thing, but I don’t have that, so I used a cocktail glass.


Poor birb.

Into the oven to get some broiling.

The sauce is thickened by adding a flour/butter mixture to the sauce slowly. It’s not explained what’s the point of mixing them together first is. Wouldn’t doing a normal roux work?

Add add.

Whisk whisk.

And now the toast is ready, so it’s time to do something I’ve never done before: Poach eggs.

So I’ve got my water/vinegar cooking, switch it off, and then I add a couple of eggs and let them steep for three minutes. I managed to get the eggs into the water without burning my fingers! I’m a pro!

That… does… not look very appetising.

But as soon as it’s on the toast it looks delish!

And then I poured some of the sauce over and did my best to eat before the eggs cooled off.

Mmm… almost perfect yolks. Yum yum.

This was pretty good. The eggs are eggs are eggs, but the red wine sauce did add something special to it all. I mean, besides making the plate look like I had committed a grisly murder.

Perhaps there should have been less sauce.

But know I know how to make poached eggs on toast, at least. I should do that more in the future.

I didn’t get to read much while eating the eggs (JUST EAT NO READ), but the books is a bit annoying. deWitt tries so hard to do this style of writing that it comes off more like a proposal for a romantic indie comedy: The characters deliver one line after another like this; always seeing like scripted world-weariness. Oh yeah. It’s being made into a movie.

Quelle surprise.

So I guess it was a successful gambit for the author, but not a win for the reader.

The author piles on the quirks and the repartee and characters, and it almost works. It’s almost a charming book. It’s probably going to be a very charming little movie. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the lead.

The most annoying thing about this book is probably the hapless son: He’s given absolutely no positive characteristics, but even so, a young, stunningly beautiful woman can’t help but love him. That shit’s just not necessary in a novel, but in a movie, it’s a must, of course.

On the positive side… uhm… well, OK, deWitt writes with a light touch. Everything breezes by. It’s pleasant. It’s a nice read. While nothing’s actually funny, everything happens with with a little smirk and a wink.

Except for the requisite third act tragedy to give the movie the required gravitas.

This blog post is part of the Bistro
Cooking & Books series.

Parsing Exif Data

Emacs is moving away from ImageMagick support, and is instead handling all the major image formats (PNG, JPEG, etc) natively. The reason for this is that the ImageMagick libraries have a pretty bad track record: Over the years, a large number of Emacs crashes have turned out to stem from ImageMagick crashing. While things have been getting better, this is still a problem, especially as Emacs is being used as a web browser and a buffer overflow can lead to code execution.

But ImageMagick provides features that the native libraries do not, like image scaling and rotation, and without image scaling, everything’s sad. Have you tried looking at a web page in Emacs with all images being ENORMOUSxGINORMOUS pixels large?

Sad.

Fortunately, Emacs 27, while deprecating ImageMagick, has gained native image transforms at the same time, so we’re all set, I think. The only thing that’s missing is a way for image-mode and the like to suss out what the rotation of images should be, and that data is stored in the Exif portion of JPEG images.

So this weekend I finally got started with writing an Emacs Lisp package to parse Exif data (in JPEG images)… and I finished, too, because the format is way simple. Which shouldn’t come as a surprise, because it’s meant to be implemented by camera manufacturers, and they er well you know.

But it’s an interesting format. It has the smell of being cobbled together from whatever formats people had lying around, and it’s not… er… smart. I don’t think I’m being controversial when I’m saying that.

I’m not an Exif expert: All I know what was I googled while writing exif.el yesterday. If I say anything horribly wrong here, I’m er horribly wrong:

Basically, the Exif format is a TIFF file plonked into the APP1 field of a JPEG. The TIFF format is the weirdness: It’s based on four-byte (32 bit) offsets instead of something sensible like length specifications. And the offsets are always from the start of the TIFF file, so they’re absolute. (Well. Relative to the start. Relatively absolute.)

This means that there’s no way to say “just extend this string”: You have to recompute (or regenerate) the entire TIFF file, because everything that points to something after the string will have their offsets changed. One person writing one of the many web pages that try to explain the format laconically commented that no Exif editors do so correctly, or without corrupting at least some part of the data.

The main part of the TIFF is the IDF: The Image File Directory. It looks like this:

LL
TT|FF|LLLL|VVVV
TT|FF|LLLL|VVVV
TT|FF|LLLL|VVVV
...
NNNN

LL (two bytes; a 16 bit number) say how many entries there are, and then each entry is 12 bytes long. In each entry TT is the tag, FF says what “format” the data is, LLLL says how long the data is (a 32 bit number), and VVVV is the value of the data.

Simple, eh? Hah!

The format is stuff like “ascii”, “short” and “long”. A “short” is 2 bytes and s “long” is 4 bytes. To find the actual length of the data, you have to multiply LLLL with this number of bytes, so if you introduce a new format (with a different byte length), there’s no way for older parsers to know how long the data is! No wonder it’s common for Exif editors to mangle the data.

Besides not making sense, it’s not even any kind of optimisation, because no part in a TIFF file can be longer than what can be described by a 32-bit number, so having LLLL just specify the length directly would have been just as fine.

*sigh*

And then the real fun: If LLLL (times the format length) is shorter than 4, then VVVV is the value. If it’s longer than 4, then obviously it can’t fit into VVVV, so… VVVV (a 32 bit number) holds an offset value that points to a place in the TIFF file where the data really is.

But there’s nice things about the TIFF format. I mean, it has fractions. (They’re represented by eight bytes, the numerator is the four first and the denominator is the last four.) Ideal for parsing with Common Lisp, but unfortunately Emacs Lisp doesn’t have rational numbers.

Oh, I didn’t mention what NNNN is: It’s a pointer to the next directory section, which is er useful if er you have more than 65536 directory entries, I guess.

I think the funniest part of the Exif format is that the numbers embedded in it can be either little-endian and big-endian. Fortunately this is called out explicitly with a bit that says either “II” (Intel) or “MM” (Motorola), so it’s no biggie, but it’s just weird that they couldn’t decide on one or the other.

But isn’t it nice that all this archaeological technology lives inside our modern devices and programs? Just think of that the next time you see an image that’s correctly rotated for sure.

NFLX2019 September 20th: Between Two Ferns: The Movie

Between Two Ferns: The Movie. Scott Aukerman. 2019. ☆☆☆☆★★

*gasp*

This is like the first Netflix Original in a while that isn’t “well, if you like that kind of stuff, here’s a movie that’s kinda like what you’d like to see, only not actually that movie you’d like to see”.

Instead if’s a mockumentary about Between Two Ferns, the Interwebs TV show where Zach Galifianakis insults celebrities.

I’ve only seen a handful of episodes. They can be very amusing, but the concept is so limited that it doesn’t really… feel vital.

But this movie kinda works! They do the obvious thing: Pack the two ferns into a car and make it into a road movie with some interviews between the ferns interspersed. They’ve got some funny performances in here: Chrissy Teigen is great, for instance, and the Peter Dinklage thing is funny.

But there’s also scenes where they… inexplicably… try to go for real emotions and stuff, and those kind of drag.

And also: As with the Interwebs series: The jokes aren’t really that good. It’s also disappointing that they don’t have enough confidence in their jokes and then resort to explaining them (“La Croix”), which is just embarrassing.

This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.

NFLX2019 September 13th: Tall Girl

Tall Girl. Nzingha Stewart. 2019. ☆☆★★★★

There haven’t been many Netflix Original movies the past few months. I’ve kinda missed watching horrible, horrible movies.

This doesn’t really look that bad. It’s a high school comedy where the main concept is that it’s embarrassing to be a tall girl. I can relate. I’m tall, girl.

So I was just idly wondering “if this is such a big deal, why doesn’t she just move to Norway” and the next second a (tall) exchange student from Sweden walks in.

So close!

And so is this movie, really. It’s got all the required set pieces: The nerds, the Heathers, the movie parodies, the wipe cuts, the album scratches, and the over-the-top characters.

But it just doesn’t have funny enough jokes, and the pacing is way too slow. Instead of a totally super-zany makeover scene (it always works in these movies), you have them dragging down the paces by having the makeoveree (that a word) saying stuff like “thanks mom… but… it’s just not… me…”.

Edit! Edit!

I think there’s a salvageable movie in here.

Sabrina Carpenter steals every scene she’s in: It’s like she’s in the version of this movie that’s how it’s supposed to be, and the rest are in a much duller film.

It’s frustrating watching this. At least when a movie totally sucks, you can enjoy hating it.

This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.

My New Innovations in Packaging blog

While unpacking this week’s haul, I was surprised when unpacking a Laraaji album (Sun Transformations) sent to me by…

… All Saints Records.

It’s this intricately, but beautifully cut paper. It feels like just kinda normal paper, but since it’s been cut in this way, it replaces bubble wrap. It’s kinda magical: It’s light but has kept the album safe during shipping.

And this is much, much, much better than previous paper-based packaging material I’ve seen: I’ve had some just kind of pour out of the package and get into everything.

I hope everybody starts using it.