In which I was right and I hate it

On July 22, 2013July 22, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews8 Comments

Can I call something a crushing disappointment if it was exactly what I thought it was going to be? There really should be a word– maybe there is, and I just don’t know it– for something that you don’t want to suck, that you think probably will suck, that then turns out to suck just like you thought it would.

Why, yes, I did see Pacific Rim yesterday, how’d you guess?

As my wife and I were walking out of the theater I suggested that what they had done to make this film was take every bad movie ever and throw it into a blender and that they then somehow managed to make a good movie out of that pureed mess of bad movies. Now, fourteen hours or so later, the good parts of the movie have cooled and the bad parts have come to predominate. My wife, for what it’s worth, normally more of a plothole hound than I am, declared the movie to be exactly what she wanted. I can’t make that claim, just because it would have been so damn easy to make a good movie instead of the stupid movie they made.

It is not that much harder, Hollywood, to write a smart movie than it is to write a dumb one! I promise! You really could have done this!

Here’s the good stuff about Pacific Rim: the monsters and the robots. (Note: I have a weird prejudice against people who use Japanese words when there are English words that suffice perfectly well; the word “kaiju” annoys me enough that I refuse to use “jaeger” either. Monsters and robots. Fuck you.)

Generally whenever the monsters and the robots are on screen and punching each other, good shit is happening, at least until the point later in the movie where one of the robots reveals an ability that really makes you wonder why they were bothering with punching for so long if it’s obviously so ineffective. They never forget how big the monsters or the robots are, the action is stunningly shot (at least insofar as any of it is “shot;” that’s the wrong word for a movie which I assume was composed entirely in a computer) and there is never a point where you can’t figure out what the hell is going on on-screen– I’m looking your way, every other action director working right now. I had initially speculated, prior to seeing the movie, that the fact that every battle appeared to be at night and in the rain was going to be a bad sign and a crutch to make the action murkier; I couldn’t have been more wrong. The movie is gorgeous, crisp; they’ve raised the bar on what you can do with special effects in film.

What was bad: everything, and I mean everything else. The acting is horrifyingly bad, and made worse by the incredibly dumb things the actors have to say and do. Mickey fuckin’ Rooney might suggest that maybe the stereotypes were a bit over the top. The main dude’s brother (he probably had a name) looks enough like his rival (whose name was Iceman, I think) that at first I thought they were supposed to be clones. The science is crap even given that this is a movie about million-foot-tall robots fighting million-foot-tall monsters. The ending is literally exactly the same as the Avengers, which just came out and wasn’t too terribly original when it did. They spend large portions of the movie insisting that certain things are either Impossible or Really, Really Dangerous right up until the point where all the sudden they aren’t anymore– and not in a Ghostbusters “You said crossing the streams was bad” sort of way, but in a “yeah, never mind that, I’m good” sort of way. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Unavoidably, stupidly, painfully bad. All the punching in the world isn’t enough to make up for it, unfortunately. And I really wanted to like this movie.

I hate it when I’m right.

Three is still my limit

On July 21, 2013July 21, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

…except in this case I’m referring to days in a row in which I’m willing to have nothing useful to say. This weekend has been good for nothing but inexplicable exhaustion and pointless crabbiness; I’m pretty sure I’m the only living thing in the house right now who is actually awake, and I’m certain I’m the only human. I’ve been trying to get useful things done every once in a while– I cleaned up my living room and spent some time practicing my ukulele in between bouts of lying on the couch and moaning– but that’s about it.

This afternoon, I will see a movie where giant robots beat up giant monsters. It is a sign of just how deep the rot in my brain has gotten that I’m not looking forward to it.

Blech. Something interesting happen, please.

Well, this counts for something, I guess: the six tags on this post? Were suggested by WordPress after I dared to put a post up that I hadn’t bothered to add any tags to yet. I’ll let you decide what relevance any of those six words have to anything I wrote. At the moment we have not the slightest idea.

Prediction: at least one of those will get me a follow from one of the legions of WordPress SEO spambots that appear to do nothing but follow tags and like posts with those tags in them. The longer I spend on this site the more I become convinced that I’m the only actual human being writing here.

In which three is my limit

On July 20, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Had to clean up two different human body fluids without entering our bathroom at OtherJob yesterday. Heat exhaustion is a bitch, folks.

Soooo not interested in going to work again tonight. At least the weather’s better.

NO I’M SERIOUS DO IT

On July 19, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

It is 7:48 in the morning, it is supposed to be one billion degrees today with a humidity level of nine jillion, and I will have to spend half of my day outside.

Kill me.

In which I redeem myself

On July 18, 2013July 17, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking2 Comments

I went through Oven Hell today– possibly to be detailed later in this blog post– and have authoritatively determined that my oven has not the slightest idea what three hundred and fifty degrees is, nor does it understand that there are temperatures between 350 and 400 degrees. Yes, those things are both true at the same time; be patient.

I experimented for dinner tonight, and it actually worked out, for the most part, which I’m probably prouder of than I have any reason to. This was basically off-book entirely; a Facebook friend got a bunch of zucchini through a CSA and posted a call for zucchini recipes; I contributed the zucchini risotto recipe I’ve used before and then another of her friends suggested stuffing it with quinoa and goat cheese. He gave me a few details and I ran with it. This is what happened:

Stuffed Zucchini with Quinoa, Goat Cheese, and Tomato Sauce:

The first step is to cook the quinoa. Quinoa basically cooks like rice; boil two cups of water, then pour a cup of quinoa into it, reduce the heat, cover, and leave it alone for 12-15 minutes or so, checking on it a bit toward the end to make sure you don’t burn it. Pull it from the heat when it looks done (again, pretend you’re making rice,) fluff it with a fork, and get it off the heat to mind its own business while you deal with the zucchini. Oh, also: RINSE THE QUINOA FIRST, unless you have the kind that says you don’t have to, in which case do it anyway because they might be wrong. Quinoa is insanely bitter if you don’t rinse it off first.

I used two zucchini. Cut the stems off, cut them in half the long way, and use a spoon to pull the seeds out, hollowing the center of each half out. I would suggest doing some scraping on the inside afterwards, too, to try and get the flesh of the zucchini a little thinner, then chop the crap out of everything until the pieces are super small. I put everything into a 9×13 glass pan, so I had to trim the ends a bit to get them to fit, but otherwise that size was about perfect. This takes about five to seven minutes, which is how long the quinoa needs to rest, which is perfect. Mix up the quinoa with the zucchini seeds and whatever flesh you managed to scrape out and add half of your goat cheese. Now, unfortunately, my containers are in the recycling bin already so I don’t know exactly how much goat cheese I used, but I had two containers, both of which were four bucks or so at my slightly-overpriced local supermarket. I think they were four-ounce containers but don’t hold me to that. So let’s say four ounces of goat cheese mixed in. Pile the mixture into the zucchini and then, after spraying the glass pan with something non-stick (note: this may not be necessary) put the rest of the zucchini/quinoa/goat cheese mixture into the pan and spread it out so it’s even. Put the four stuffed zucchini halves on top.

Pour the entire contents of a jar of tomato sauce on top. I used roasted pepper and garlic spaghetti sauce because that was what I had in the house; do what you like. Dump the other container of goat cheese on top of that and cover with foil. (This step may also be unnecessary, but in doing some minor research, every recipe for stuffed zucchini said to cover the dish with foil before it went into the oven. It certainly didn’t seem to hurt anything.)

Here’s the tricky part: I’m not sure how long to cook it. My oven sucks; I set it at 375, which according to the oven thermometer I put inside actually produced 350 degrees. I baked everything for twenty minutes and Bek and I both felt that the outer part of the zucchini was too tough. Note that we ate them anyway; if slightly-crunchy zucchini doesn’t bug you, this should be enough, but I jacked the temperature up to 400 degrees and put the other two back in while we finished the first half. I think 30 minutes at 400 degrees or a bit longer at 350 would probably sufficiently soften the shells, but this bit really depends on your oven. The good news is that so long as the quinoa is cooked you can basically eat this raw if you want to; it’s not like there’s anything in there that is dangerous uncooked; it’s just got a chance of being wonky on the texture front.

Interesting note: I was unaware that goat cheese does not melt. It doesn’t. Don’t expect it to.

Second note: Quinoa is impressively filling. I ate two of the shells and Bek got through one and a half; I’m full right now. The half-shell we have left and the rest of the bed underneath it will be more than enough for lunch for me tomorrow. I was super happy with how this turned out; it’s not terribly original or anything like that (my contribution over what the guys on that thread suggested wasn’t much more than using the extra filling as a bed for the zucchini halves) but screw it: no recipe and it worked. Whee!

Yeah. The oven. After the Celsius fiasco (I seriously cannot believe I didn’t figure that out on my own) I got a bug up my ass and went out today and bought an oven thermometer. Long and short of it is I need to figure out how to retune my oven so that it produces something closer to the temperatures it says it will; at 350 it’s considerably less than that (fifty to sixty degrees lower when it beeps that it’s done preheating; if I give it another 1o minutes, it’ll be at 325) but it does 400 degrees basically exactly right. The convection setting is slightly more accurate but not much, and I haven’t actually tried to use the convection feature– until yesterday I hadn’t even bothered to figure out the difference. 375 degrees, if you give it a few minutes past the preheat beep, actually produces 350 degrees, but again: 400 is accurate. I suspect if I ever have a recipe that calls for 375 degrees I’m just going to have to go for 400 and watch it closely. My gut tells me that this shouldn’t make much difference– shit, people were baking over fire for thousands of years before modern ovens got invented and did just fine– but my gut is apparently incredibly crappy at baking, so… yeah. We’ll see.

Sooner or later, I’m gonna try a pie. I might just burn the damn house down, but I’m gonna try it anyway.

In which referral logs are fun

On July 18, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

Why, hello there, Australia and the Isle of Man. Apparently my Celsius stupid has gone international. Woo!

In which I fail at baking again

On July 17, 2013July 17, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, idiocy, Parenting5 Comments

So this post at Cutting Corners is apparently pretty famous; it’s a recipe for making chocolate chip cookies out of chickpeas, of all things. A friend found it and posted it to Facebook. She made the recipe and, due to a hilarious (to me, anyway) confusion between the terms “blender” and “food processor,” damn near blew out the motor on every kitchen appliance she owns trying to mash up the garbanzo beans.

(NOTE: Garbanzo beans and chickpeas are the same thing. I didn’t know this until two days ago, and I’ll probably be using the terms interchangeably, so I might as well make sure you know too.)

Anyway, as someone who had just mashed up garbanzo beans for his buffalo falafel the other day, I was immediately intrigued. I like chickpeas; I like chocolate chips, and I like weird food. Plus she’d already hilariously screwed up making the damn things, so surely I’d be able to get it right, right? You can’t have more than one I’m a Dumbass posting for one recipe, the universe doesn’t work like that.

Pfah. I forgot the Cardinal Rule of Baking: Don’t.

I’m getting smarter, though: go ahead and read the recipe and see if you can spot the part that’s obviously completely wrong. Seriously, go ahead; I have time.

…

175 degrees, right? That’s gotta be a typo. But the post is supposedly really popular and there’s no mention of the oven temperature being wrong in the comments, so what the heck? Well, we’re making pea-cookies, which is already weird… maybe they just need to set or something and not really cook?

No. No, they do not. After the recommended ten minutes in the oven they looked exactly the same as they’d looked before I put them in the oven. I might as well have spent my time breathing on them. I asked my friend about it and she said that she’d baked them at 350 for ten minutes. She’d also drizzled some honey over them before baking, which I’d also done– which wasn’t in the original recipe. I jacked the heat in the oven up to 375 and left them alone for ten minutes.

No change at all. None. I decided to blame the honey and ditched the first half of the batch– luckily (at least, I suppose it’s lucky) I’d decided to double the recipe so only half of them had gone in the oven. I decided to leave out the honey on the second batch.

It took twenty-five minutes at 350 degrees in the oven before they reached the rather vile-looking half-burnt half-cooked consistency you see above, at which point I decided I didn’t give a shit anymore and pulled them from the oven. Also at this point Lisa realized that the recipe she’d followed wasn’t the one she’d linked to, which apparently just doesn’t work at all, and told me she’d put in slightly more than twice as much peanut butter as I had.

I don’t understand why my oven bakes things that don’t involve batter in no more than a minute or two longer than I expect them to, but whenever I try to make anything involving batter all hell breaks loose. I apparently have terrible luck with recipes but this shit is still ridiculous.

Punchline: as horrible as they look, the stupid little things didn’t actually taste bad. But next time we’re doing 20 minutes at 375 before we even check the oven, or maybe I’ll just cook them with a blowtorch.

We had BLTs for dinner. I was gonna make stuffed zucchini tonight but after the failure of the cookie experiment I wasn’t up for anything I hadn’t done a million times. The wife suggested I make the same remoulade we’d had with our crab cakes a couple of months ago, and I whipped some up. Dead easy– some mayonnaise with about a spoonful each of dijon, horseradish, and sriracha, with a few shakes of Old Bay on top, then mix together. It’s a great topping for wedge fries (which she’d also made) and we used it for the BLTs too.

Randomly, we decided to offer the boy a fingerful or two of it. Now, remember the ingredients: dijon, horseradish, and sriracha are pungent, and I don’t know any kids who are terribly into mayo. I figured he’d run screaming. We were both expecting betrayface.

He spent the rest of the meal loudly demanding “sauce,” which he refused to sully by combining it with any of the bacon or bread or potatoes on his plate, instead choosing to eat it by the fistful.

I don’t understand my kid.

OH YOU STUPID, STUPID ASSHOLE EDIT: As Facebook immediately points out: Celsius. The bloody oven temperature is in Celsius. Jesus. I’d even gotten a hint since she says you need 400 grams of chickpeas; I’d already done the conversion to make sure the 15 oz cans I was buying were in the right neighborhood. ARRRRGH.

In which I suck

On July 16, 2013July 16, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

No, seriously. I am absolutely terrible at being alive. And I’m ready for summer to be over. This notion that two months more-or-less-off in the summer is a “perk” for teachers makes me insane, people. If I don’t have a schedule to follow of some sort I degenerate into a fat, unwashed mess of unmotivated sludge so fast that it’s astonishing. Right now? I got home from work thirteen hours ago and I’m already so bored I want to die. Most of that time was spent asleep.

There has been more than one point in my life where I was working three jobs, and for my working life I’m pretty sure there has been more time where I’ve had multiple jobs than when I haven’t. So summertime, where I not only have only one job but that job isn’t even full-time, is torture. I have been awake for four hours and these few, crappy little sentences are all that I’ve done. Wait, no– I dragged myself into the kitchen twice, once to eat two granola bars and let the dogs out, and a second time to eat a microwave pizza and let the dogs out again. I’ve technically eaten two meals and I haven’t showered yet.

I have about a month left until I can start spending ten hours a day in my classroom and griping about that. I seriously don’t know if I can keep my shit together until then. Also it is a hundred thousand degrees outside and fuck that. It was so humid yesterday afternoon that I could drink the air. It’s not that bad just yet but it’s supposed to be again later.

Arrrrrrrrgh.

Twice this week I’ve run into people in public who I used to be really close to but haven’t seen in fifteen to twenty years. In both cases it’s led to half an hour or so of relatively pleasant conversation (“relatively” because one of them started off with me saying “what the hell are you doing here?” before I realized how rude that sounded and the other because it started with an accusation of Unfriending on Facebook, which, while it was almost certainly true, I didn’t remember doing it and therefore couldn’t defend myself adequately; plus, as everyone who is in regular touch with me knows, I’m not normal about Facebook; in both cases the conversation started with me way off-balance) but I’m seriously wondering when the hell the almost-inevitable third shoe is going to drop. I spent some time last night going over everyone I’ve ever known in my head and trying to figure out who has the most reason to be pissed off at me and now I’m thinking about doing some cyberstalking to figure out if those people live anywhere near me. Of course, that won’t be terribly helpful– one of the two lives in bloody Norway and still managed to run into me in a bookstore in Indiana, which is a pretty fuckin’ impressive feat.

I should take a shower, shouldn’t I?