CCCB: Magic Hour

I’ve never made a pie before, which isn’t surprising, I guess, because I’ve basically never baked in my life before starting this blog series. So I was just thinking about what to make, and the words Lemon Meringue Pie just popped into my head.

So I’m going to make that, even though I’ve never tasted one and have no idea whether it’s even good. But it’s sugar and lemons, so how bad can it be?

There’s fewer ingredients than I expected from a dish with several separate parts… I especially like that there’s exactly the same number of egg yolks and egg whites needed (yolks in the stuffing and base and whites in the meringue).

I got new stuff! I non-stick silicone mat to use when rolling out dough. Seems more hygienic, too.

And a pie tin.

For the pastry, I’m supposed to pulse the ingredients “until the mix starts to bind”.

I guess this is what they mean? There should be more pictures in recipes.

After rolling it out… how to get in into the pie tin? It rips easily…

Oh! I’m a genius! The bottom of the pie tin is detachable, so I can just slide it under the dough…

… and then sorta get it all into the tin! I bet nobody else has thought of that before!

I mean, except for everybody else.

And then trim and push and poke a bit. That looks awrite, dunnit?

Then into the fridge for an hour and a half to… er… get colder? One thing I miss from virtually any recipe is an explanation for why certain steps are done…

Meanwhile I’m making the lemon filling, which has a lot of lemon zest in it. I’ve made cocktails with lemon zest, but not a foodstuff, and I was surprised that the recipe didn’t say “simmer and then strain”, because I didn’t think the actual zest was supposed to end up in the pie.

But also a lot of citrus juice, so I finally got to use my squeezer thing that I haven’t used in a year.

And then it all turns into a custard with three egg yolks and one whole egg. It tastes very lemoney: very tart, and I was tempted to dump more sugar into it, but I resisted. I mean, there’s gonna be meringue, so I’m hoping that’ll even things ou.

Meanwhile, the pie shell is out of the fridge…

.. and lined with alu foil and with some ceramic balls to weigh stuff down. (Never used them before.) This is apparently called “blind baking”… because… you can’t see what the crust looks like?

It comes out of the 15m/200C oven very pale, of course.

But then I bake it for 8 more minutes without the foil, and it get kinda crispy and a nicer colour.

And I picked up the pie form wrong: It’s almost impossible to pick it up with one hand, because if you put any force on the bottom, it’ll just pop up. See? I ruined the crust on one side because of that.

They really should come up with a better way to grip those things. Perhaps handles would have been good?

And then the custard goes into the shell…

And then the egg whites and sugar (prepared concurrently; man there was a lot of bowls and implements used for this recipe) on top of the custard.

And then into the oven for 20 minutes.

Wow! I hadn’t expected the egg whites to expand when doing the meringue, so I was worried that there wouldn’t be a sufficient amount…

Getting the pie out of the tin was quite easy: Just push on the bottom, and the outer ring dropped down toot sweet. But getting the bottom out from underneath it seems impossible to me: There’s nowhere to grip on the pie. The shell is very crispy and I’ve carefully angled the pie here so the least broken bits are pointing towards the camera.

Such a cheat!

Let the pie sit in the tin for 30 mins, then remove and leave for at least another 1⁄2-1 hr before slicing. Eat the same day.

*looks at watch*

EEeek! It’ll have to wait over an hour before I can start eating, and I have to eat it all tonight? It’s 20 already!

Only six books to go! As usual on Thursdays, I have to pick a book I acquired in the early 90s, but have avoided reading since then.

I choose… Magic Hour by Susan Isaacs, in Norwegian translation.

My reasons for not reading this are pretty straightforward: As I went on at length here, I try to avoid reading books in translation if I understand the language they were originally written in. Which is the case here.

The other reason is that I got this book from the “free book” stash supplied by my sister who worked at a Norwegian publisher at the time. Somehow reading those never seemed as pressing.

And I know absolutely nothing about the author or what genre the book is, but from the cover design I’m assuming “literature”.

Hang on… Is that blood on those pool tiles on the drawing? Is this a murder mystery book of some kind?

Let’s find out!

Yes! After all this literature, this looks like entertainment. Already in the first page we have a murder, and the protagonist is a police detective or something.

The language looks to be very florid (no verb without adverb and no noun without an attending adjective) and witty, if not actually funny.

I’ll read some more and report back to you.

The translation is bizarre. There’s a lot of words here I’m sure I’ve never seen before. Just one at random: “Kamgarnsdress”. It’s a suit, apparently, but what kind?

Oh, right! A worsted suit. I know what that is.

But is that really a word in Norwegian?

Not really: There’s a whopping 172 hits, and the vast majority are from dictionaries.

There’s just so many of these that it makes me wonder whether the translator didn’t know Norwegian well and is just looking up words in dictionaries. If it had been a modern translation, I would have guessed that it was a machine translation, but it’s old, so I guess not.

And the incomprehensibilities just keep coming. “Klikk-klakker”? It’s an unknown term to me, but according to somebody on google, they’re clogs? Why would anybody be using clogs here? Does she mean flip flops?

At this point my curiosity about what the book really said just got the best of me and I bought it on Kindle.

Oh, yeah. Flip flops. Or “rubber thongs” as the character calls it… (Is he from Australia?)

“Borte i teltet svinset mennene” which means “in the tent the men were swishing”, and that’s about a bunch of cops…

Oh, “swarming”.

If I back-translate that last sentence in the first paragraph, it goes “perhaps Lindsay was just a rude, scornful, cold, emotional bitch”. Which makes no sense. Is she cold or emotional?

“maybe Lindsay was just an insolent, contemptuous, emotionally defective twat”.

*sigh*

At this point I decided to just give up: Reading the Norwegian version, there’s just so much that doesn’t makes sense. I find myself having finished a paragraph, lost, not quite knowing what just happened. I wonder whether the translator was just transliterating English into Norwegian and that’s why everything seemed so… abstract… But she’s not: She rearranges words into proper Norwegian.

It’s just that it’s so bad. From the antiquated choice of words, to neologisms that convey nothing or the wrong thing. For instance, our protagonist has fun names for everybody: There’s a woman he just refers to as Freckled Cleavage. The word the translator settles on, “Fregnesprekken”, is best reverse-translated into “Freckled Slit”, which, er, implies something quite different about their relationship.

ANYWAY! By switching to the English version, perhaps the book’ll make more sense.

OK, the pie has cooled off now… Hm… it’s certainly very moist… Or rather, wet. I had expected something more cake-like, but what do I know.

The pie crust is quite nice. Not soggy at all, but not desiccated either. The filling is very tart. Even combined with the meringue, it’s too sour for me. And the meringue itself should have been crispier, really. So should it have baked longer? Is this what it’s supposed to be?

Not one of the more successful baked goods in this blog series, but it was fun to make.

How does it pair with the book?

The book is about the murder of a rich movie exec. Which is so refreshing after having read a handful of modern thrillers last year. Perhaps they could just rename the genre How To Horribly Dismember Women instead to make things line up better with reality, because there’s nothing thrilling about reading yet another book about some psycho hacking away at a bunch of poor women. I’m now officially boycotting any mysteries where that’s the main plot, which means that I’m choosing to read zero mysteries written after 1995.

The protagonist here is a police detective, and I guess you could call this a police procedural? It’s well written and has a pretty intelligent plot, but the protagonist (who falls in love with one of the suspects, of course) is just so over-the-top sometimes that I wondered whether Isaacs was going to subvert the genre by having the book turn into a psychodrama about him really being totally loopy. For instance, in the sequence above, he’s apparently taken to calling her from random pay phones and hanging up after she says hello.

Because he wants to hear her voice.

PSYCHO ALERT!

But Isaacs doesn’t do anything with this, really. I get the feeling that she thinks this is kinda cute behaviour? Somehow?

But, no, they get together and find true love (OOPS SPOILERS) and spend chapter after chapter hiding out from the other cops (!) and talking and talking and (of course) solve the mystery.

Those chapters were really boring.

But well written, I guess. Isaacs has a nice way with words. Her sentences don’t always go the way you’re expecting: They have a zing to them. She’s not funny, per se, but she’s witty.

It’s an entertaining read.

However, the surprise reveal of the killer literally gave me cancer, because I’d figured it out two hundred pages earlier (it was the only one that made logistical sense, emotional sense, dramatic sense and structural sense for it to be the murderer) and was hoping for a surprise, and I’m now dead.

New Music

Music I’ve bought this month.

Last month I declared that I was going to cut back radically on how much music I’m buying (because I can’t listen to all this stuff), so this month I’m down to… er… thirtyseven releases…

OK, quite a bit of that was albums trickling in that I’d ordered earlier, so hopefully next month will have less music.

Surprise of the month was the new Sleaford Mods album!

They’ve, like, developed! The songs have melodies and stuff now! Whodathunk!

Old album of the month:

I See The Sign by Sam Amidon.

jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Zola+Jesus&album=Ash+to+Bonejukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Lockweld&album=Blueprint+Theoriesjukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Simon+%26+Garfunkel&album=Bridge+Over+Troubled+Waterjukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Insides&album=Clear+Skin+EPjukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Various&album=Disco+Rallado
jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Dolby+Anol&album=Dolby+%26+Gabbanajukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Rustin+Man&album=Drift+Codejukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Herbert&album=Early+Herbertjukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=LCD+Soundsystem&album=Electric+Lady+Sessionsjukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Elecktroids&album=Elektroworld
jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Sleaford+Mods&album=Eton+Alivejukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Christoph+de+Babalon&album=Hectic+Shakesjukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Sam+Amidon&album=I+See+The+Signjukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Steward&album=I+Was+The+Only+Boy+On+The+Netball+Teamjukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Talk+Talk&album=It's+My+Life
jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Tuxedomoon&album=Live+in+Los+Angeles+(2005)jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=The+Rapture&album=Mirrorjukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Peter+Broderick+%26+Friends&album=Play+Arthur+Russelljukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=XXL&album=Puff+O'Gigiojukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Various&album=Raumschiff+Monika
jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Motorpsycho&album=Roadwork+vol.+5+(1)jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Motorpsycho&album=Roadwork+vol.+5+(2)jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Genesis&album=Seconds+Out+(1)jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Genesis&album=Seconds+Out+(2)jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Godflesh&album=Streetcleaner%3A+Live+At+Roadburn+2011
jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=The+Locust&album=The+Locustjukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=The+Third+Sex&album=The+No+Heart+7%22jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Various&album=The+Wire+Tapper+49jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Machinedrum&album=Vapor+City+Citizenship+Programmejukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Yoko+Ono&album=Warzone
jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=David+Kristian&album=Woodworking%3A+Cricklewood+Remixesjukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Steve+Roden&album=invalidObject+Series+(for)jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Warmdesk&album=invalidObject+Series+(function)jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=V+Vm&album=invalidObject+Series+(if)jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Oval&album=re%3Asystemisch+(1)
jukebox.php?image=micro.png&group=Oval&album=re%3Asystemisch+(2)

4AD 1996

Listen to 4AD 1996 on Spotify.

Let’s focus on the positives: Dead Can Dance returned with Spiritchaser, and that’s a quite good album. Throwing Muses continued the streak begun with University and released another excellent album. His Name Is Alive went in a new direction: They discovered the Beach Boys. Heidi Berry released her final, and her most fabulous album, Miracle. And Lisa Germano released another really spiffy album.

So that’s all pretty good, right?

But the year is pretty much dominated by 4AD trying to make Lush the great new Britpop sensation, and I think they were successful? It did mean that they shed everything that was great about them, and I don’t think there’s anything from their six (!) EPs or the album they released this year that I enjoyed.

The other “big thing” 4AD tried to make happen was Icelanders Gus Gus, which wasn’t as successful commercially, I think. I kinda liked the music at the time, but I haven’t listened to any of afterwards. I seem to recall it being very mid-90s?

And then there’s the Paladins album, which I think a lot of people interpreted as a practical joke upon the listeners.

I’m still not sure that’s not correct, but I don’t want to hazard listening to the album again to make sure. You may feel a certain compulsion to start skipping when you get to that part of the playlist.

1996

 BAD CD6001
Lush — Single Girl

Single Girl, Tinkerbell, Outside World, Cul de Sac

 BAD D CD6001
Lush — Single Girl

Single Girl, Pudding, Demystification, Shut Up

 BAD CD6002
Lush — Ladykillers

Ladykillers, Matador, Ex, Dear Me (Miki’s 8-track home demo)

 BAD D CD6002
Lush — Ladykillers

Ladykillers, Heavenly, Carmen, Plums and Oranges (Neil Simons)

 BAD 6003 CD
Scheer — Shéa

Shéa, My World, Demon (acoustic), Nemesis

 CAD6004
Lush — Lovelife

Ladykillers, Heavenly Nobodies, 500, I’ve Been Here Before, Single Girl, Ciao!, Tralala, Last Night (Steve Orborne), Runaway, The Childcatcher (rerecorded), Olympia

 AD6005
Scheer — Wish You Were Dead

Wish You Were Dead, Hanging on the Telephone

 CAD6006
Scheer — Infliction

Shéa, Howling Boy, Wish You Were Dead, In Your Head, Demon, Baby Sized, Sad Loved Girl, I Started Something, Screaming, Goodbye

 BAD CD6007
His Name Is Alive — Universal Frequencies

Universal Frequencies, Up Your Legs Forever, Summer of E. S. P., Your Word Against Mine, Untitled

 BAD CD6016
Throwing Muses — Shark

Shark, Tar Moochers (rerecorded), Serene Swing (rerecorded), Limbobo (rerecorded)

 DAD6008
Dead Can Dance — Spiritchaser

Nierika, Song of the Stars, Indus, Song of the Disposessed, Dedicace Outo, The Snake and the Moon, Song of the Nile, Devorzhum

 BAD6009
Lush — 500 (Shake Baby Shake)

500 (Shake Baby Shake) (Mike Drake), I Have The Moon, Piledriver, Olympia (acoustic version)

 BAD D CD6009
Lush — 500 (Shake Baby Shake)

500 (Shake Baby Shake), I’d Like to Walk Around in Your Mind, Kiss Chase (acoustic version), Last Night (hexadeciman dub mix)

 CAD6010
His Name Is Alive — Stars On ESP

Dub Love Letter, This World is not My Home, Bad Luck Girl, What Are You Wearing Tomorrow, The Bees, What Else Is New List, Wall of Speed, Universal Frequencies, The Sand That Holds the Lakes in Place, I Can’t Live in this World Anymore, Answer to Rainbow at Midnight, Famous Goodbye King, Across The Street, Movie, Last One

 CAD6011
Heidi Berry — Miracle

The Mountain, Time, Holy Grail, Darkness Darkness, Miracle, The Californian, Queen, Only Human, Northern Country

 CAD6012
Lisa Germano — Excerpts from the Love Circus

Baby on the Plane, a Beautiful Schizophrenic, “where’s Miamo-Tutti?” by Dorothy, Bruises, I Love a Snot, Forget it it’s a Mystery, Victoria’s Secret, “just a bad dream by Miamo-Tutti”, Small Heads, We Suck, Lovesick, Singing to the Birds, Messages from Sophia, “there’s more kitties in the world than just Miamo-Tutti”
by Lisa and Dorothy, Big Big World

 BAD CD6013
Gus Gus — Polyesterday

Polyester Day*, Cold Breath ’79 (Crystalized)*, Polyesterday (Late)*, Polydistortion*

 CAD6014
Throwing Muses — Limbo

Buzz, Ruthie’s Knocking, Freeloader, The Field, Limbo, Tar Kissers, Tango, Serene, Mr. Bones, Night Driving, Cowbirds, Shark, White Bikini Sand

 CAD6015
The Paladins — Million Mile Club

 TAD6017
Throwing Muses — Ruthie’s Knocking

 BAD CD6018
Tanya Donelly — Sliding & Diving

Bum, Restless, Human, Swoon

 BAD CD6019
Lisa Germano — Small Heads

Small Heads, Fun Fun For Everyone (Acoustic), Tom, Dick And Harry, Messages From Sophia (Instrumental)

This post is part of the chronological look at all 4AD releases, year by year.

*) Missing from Spotify.

Useful Consumer Review

I’m always in the lookout for new smart remotes, so when I saw this Turn Touch wooden thing, I thought it might go better with my living room table:

Than the old remote I use to control the stereo (and the lights):

Eh? Eh? Slightly better, huh?

That Targus thing there has worked reliably for me for almost a decade now. I use the pointer thing to control the volume and the other buttons to skip and stuff, so I wondered whether this Turn Touch thing would be as flexible.

The Targus thing appears as a USB HID device in Linux, so it’s very easy to interface with. And it has a nice range: It doesn’t drop that many events. I’m almost always disappointed by the range and reliability of wireless things, but we’ll see…

But first of all, I wondered how the Turn Touch worked. There was no manual included, so I wondered how this thing is even charged and how you open it, because there are absolutely no screws.

But it’s all held together by magnets! How brilliant! Prying it apart was trivial, but it still feels nice and solid when it’s all put back together.

And it’s charged by a normal button battery that’s supposed to last about a year. That’s nicer than having to recharge it, I think.

Anyway! How do you interact with this thing?

Python to the rescue!

# pip3 install TurnTouch
# pip3 install typing

and then a script like this:

from turntouch import TurnTouch, DefaultActionHandler

class MyHandler(DefaultActionHandler):
    def action_north(self):
        print("Up button pressed.")
    def action_east_double_tap(self):
        print("Right button double-tapped.")
    def action_south_hold(self):
        print("Down button held.")

tt = TurnTouch('e5:b6:51:8e:f4:50')
tt.handler = MyHandler()
tt.listen_forever()

where that address can be detected by saying

# bluetoothctl
scan on

and waiting for a line mentioning “Turn Touch” to show up. Apparently you don’t have to pair things explicitly and stuff… These low-powered bluetooth things are a mystery to me…

However, as that this shows, the responsiveness is, what’s the technical term… Oh, yeah: “EEEK! THAT”S HORRIBLE!”

A second after you’ve hit the button, you get an event on the computer?

So, in the /usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/turntouch/turntouch.py file, there’s a line saying

MAX_DELAY = 0.75

that sounds suspiciously like the one-second delay I’m seeing, and reading through the code, I understand why it’s there: Each key is supposed to be able to give you three actions: Single tap, double tap and hold. You see this in mobile interfaces, too: If you want to support double tap (and mobile UX people thought that was going to be a thing), you have to wait a while to see whether the first tap was all there’s going to be, or whether another tap is to follow.

But I think that’s pretty horrible, and I can live with either single tap and very-quick double taps; I don’t need “hold”. Especially if the holds are going to fuck the UX up this much.

I changed MAX_DELAY to 0.1, and:

Now, that’s almost acceptable. It does mean that I get a tap event before I get a hold event, but I think that’s OK for my use case here… I think…

Hm… no, it’s janky and doesn’t really work properly.

And… I can’t really understand why it’s programmed this way at all. As far as I can tell, the device itself sends over events like “West” and “Off” and “West Double Tap”…

Oh, right! When you hold a button, you get “South”, “South hold” and then “Off”… But… when you tap a button, you get “South” and then “Off”. And on double taps you get “South” and then “South double tap”.

Uhm! No! OK, now I’ve added proper debugging, and I understand why the library is doing what it’s doing. If you double tap, these are the events you get:

North
Off
North
North double tap

So you can’t fire the “North” action on the “Off”, but have to wait and see whether you get a “North double tap”. And the built-in delay in the device is 0.75 (i.e., if you hit the button faster than that, you get a double tap event), so single taps can’t be executed faster than that if you want to have double taps.

The library almost has support for this: There’s a “debounce” parameter that’ll call the action immediately, but that’s also wrong: Then you can’t have a separate “tap” and “hold” action, either.

I think… I can live without double taps. A “hold” gives me these events:

East
East hold
Off

So I can have immediate for single taps (i.e., on the “Off”), and also support holds without introducing delays. So I’m going to fork and hack the TurnTouch library.

Man! Do I have to learn Python?!

*time passes*

Well, that was trivial enough. The TurnTouch library is written in a clean and nice fashion, so ripping out all the logic was easy.

My version is on Microsoft Github.

So after that slight detour… ahem… Is the Turn Touch any good?

Yes!

I’ve only been using it for a very short while, but the signal range seems pretty good: From the couch to the stereo (with a bluetooth dongle on the back of the computer; about three meters) it doesn’t lose any events. If I go to the next room, I’m able to send some events through the wall, but then it loses the connection.

But that’s a lot better than I expected.

And! It’s an open platform with good documentation, which is very nice indeed. And, with libraries like the one I forked here, you have pretty good access to the events and can construct your own workflows based on what’s important to you.

So, while I have no idea whether it works well over the long haul, I’m giving it all my thumbs up.

Decade Redux

After watching movies kinda aimlessly for a while, I wanted to focus on a specific era, so I chose the 40s: One movie from every month of that decade.

I chose the 40s more by process of elimination than anything else: All the other possible decades had bits that seemed less exciting here and there. I did consider doing, like, 1936 to 1945, but that’s… so… random.

Keeping the same three digits at the start is way less random, right?

Right.

Also, I thought it might be interesting to do the second world war and the aftermath just to see whether you could notice that there was a war going on in the movies or not.

And boy, could you. Before Pearl Harbour, the American movies were pretty circumspect: You wouldn’t want to be accused of spreading pro-British propaganda, donchaknow. (Well, I didn’t, but that was a thing politicians at the time accused Hollywood of doing.)

So most of the American war movies are set in Czechoslovakia during 1939. You could show how nasty the Nazis were without getting involved with the entire WWII thing.

And also a few historical war movies that kinda hint at, you know, invading other countries being a bad thing and stuff.

But then Pearl Harbour happened, and finally the producers can let loose and show American soldiers, now, fighting the good fight.

But it’s not like the majority of movies during the war was about the war. Several of the bigger war movies were not box office smash, and Hollywood pulled back a bit and did lighter fare. It makes sense, I guess: When half the people you know are overseas getting shot at, you may want some movies to take your mind off things.

So the period is more dominated by comedies than anything else, which was surprising to me.

But I was totally unprepared for what happened immediately after the Japanese and the Germans surrendered:

Film noir!

It’s like Hollywood had this bottled-up stash of scripts about criminals and low-life and were just waiting to spring them all on the public: Now, finally, they’re allowed to make people about people in the US being bad!

Sooo bad.

So that was interesting. Well, to me, at least.

But were movies in the 40s good?

Yes.

The Hollywood studio system was in full effect at the time, with directors and actors more or less employed by the studios and assigned to whatever project the producers wanted them to do. That sounds kinda soulless, and perhaps it was, but they were just really good craftsmen: They really knew what they were doing. While some of it’s Extruded Film Product, it’s well-made Extruded Film Product.

Largely.

I did discover at least one director (that I didn’t know about before) that I think is a genius, Preston Sturges. He had an interesting career as he chafed under the studio system and tried to strike it out on his own.

Which brings me to:

Smaller studios (and outright independents) mostly went bankrupt, and nobody bothered to buy up the rights to their movies, as far as I can tell.

So a huge swathe of these movies are in the public domain, meaning that anybody can release them these days. That’s something that I would have thought was a good thing. I mean, free movies! Nice, right?

Well, yes but no. When everybody can download these movies, sourced from an NTSC broadcast recorded to VHS and then uploaded to Youtube, that means that it’s difficult to make any money off of restoring them. So I’ve been suffering through more than my share of films where I can barely tell what’s going on.

In the UK, the British Film Institute finances restoration of significant movies, but there’s apparently no such system in the US.

And now that the market for DVDs and Blurays is fading, I wonder whether the window of opportunity for saving this part of our history is closing.

But perhaps Netflix will save us all!

So this is

But here’s a list of all the movies: