Once There Was And Was Not In Ancient Armenia

Holiday Decoration!

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 02:38:28 GMT

Since several people on my flist have posted pictures of their holiday decorating, I shall now return the favor! These are among the first pictures taken with the new digital camera, which was a gift from a friend when she heard that my old one died.

The living room, no flash, with the menorah in the window, fully lit for the last night of Chanukah, which was tonight.

A couple of close-up shots of the menorah, taken with flash.

Ah, Holiday Traditions!

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:17:38 GMT

Behold the latest skirmish in the War on Christmas!

My favorite quote from this year's edition is from Barry Lynn, an ordained minister who's also president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State:

"You would literally have to be living in a very deep cave not to understand that there is a religious holiday called Christmas that is soon to come."

The War on Christmas Captain Obvious Award 2009 goes to Rep. Henry Brown of South Carolina:

"What I'm afraid of -- if we don't bring some kind of closure to this continuous change, then in 20 years it will almost be completely different from what we see today ... "

Yes. Yes, indeed. I believe that's what "change" means.

Whatever. Since I've already posted Straight No Chaser's opinion on the matter ("Run to your closet, grab your Christmas sweater, screaming carols all the way. FA LA LA LA LA!"), I shall now offer commentary from a subset of the Alleged Opposition:

Kitchen Komedy!

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 13:51:05 GMT

I have a neat new kitchen device. It's a combination blender and mini food processor -- one motor base with two attachments. One of the reasons I got it was that the food processor has a shredder disk, and I would like to be able to make borscht without spending a full hour grating beets by hand, turning my kitchen pink in the process.

So last night, new food processor in hand, I decided to make borscht with the shredder disk. At first, things went pretty smoothly. I chopped the onion and the tomatoes and put them in the pot, then trimmed and peeled the beets, washed my hands, and assembled the food processor. It shredded beets like a charm. VRRRRRRRRRMMMM, and those beets were gone. The only issue, as it turned out, was that the flying beet shreds clung to the inside wall of the processor, so I really couldn't see how much grated beet I had. By the time I'd grated all the beets, I'd packed the processor bowl to the point that beet juice was starting to bleed out the sides. So I Very Carefully detached the processor bowl from the processor . . . and beet juice sprayed everywhere, turning my kitchen pink!

Well. I have now learned a Valuable Lesson about this food processor. Next time, I will empty the bowl after half the beets.

Of course, it did shred the beets nicely and in good time, which was what I wanted it to do, and I did manage to clean up the kitchen while the soup was coming to its first boil. But I'll definitely remember to take a peek inside while making latkes tomorrow!

Straight No Chaser

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:29:54 GMT

I believe it was telperion1 who posted Straight No Chaser's "Twelve Days of Christmas" last year, which is one of the great holiday videos, right up there with the first two versions of Adam Sandler's Chanukah song and Weird Al Yankovic's "Christmas At Ground Zero."

Clearly, I am not the only one who thought this way -- Straight No Chaser got a recording contract out of this deal, and so here is their new holiday song, "The Christmas Can-Can."

Preeeeeeeeesenting . . .

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 21:21:19 GMT

Ph.D Candidate Pony, ABD!

I passed my special fields and my proposal defense!

Wheeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!

Gearing Up

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:19:54 GMT

Tomorrow at noon, I will go in and do my combination special fields exam and dissertation proposal defense. This means that I could very well be ABD by tomorrow afternoon. Yaaaaay!

But today I think I have to go to the student care center. I think I've got pinkeye in my other eye. Boo hiss.

The Return

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:39:55 GMT

Hi everyone! I'm back from Mexico City, which was absolutely wonderful, except for the really remarkably horrible conference reception at the National Archaeology Museum.

There will be a picspam, but not for a few days. The digital camera chose this weekend to go on the fritz, so I had to buy a disposable. So I'll have to take the camera in to be developed, and if they can't put the photos on CD right there, then I'll have to scan them down at school. But rest assured, there are pictures.

Adios, Amigos!

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:22:10 GMT

I'm off to Mexico for SEM tomorrow at the butt-crack of dawn! I'll be back on Sunday night, ready to sort through the many pictures that I'm sure I will take for you all.

Dance, Wee Undergrads!

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:45:46 GMT

Today is the Great Dance Experiment. My dance teacher is coming to Music 102 as a special guest, and we are going to teach a class on Scottish Country Dance. Culminating (and this is the Great Dance Experiment part) with the students actually getting up and learning a very simple dance.

Everyone I've talked to in the department is fascinated by this. Apparently, lots of music professors say they want to find a way to incorporate dance into the curriculum, but relatively few of them actually do that. So they're all impressed that I'm trying it out, and they all want to know how it will work.

I want to know that, too . . .

Success! Success!

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:08:45 GMT

Against all the odds, the All-Day Singing has managed to happen again, for the eleventh time, and be a rousing success. There were a million places where it could have gone irretrievably pear-shaped, and it didn't. People knew where to go. Stuff arrived on time. All my keys worked. People were good about only bringing bottled water into the recital hall. Singers loved the space. Handicap access was better than expected. Food was plentiful. Student kitchen helpers showed up on time and did fantastic work. They sang my song. Cleanup was thorough and efficient.

It could not have gone off better. This is probably because each and every single one of the Hyde Park singers has been angsting about this singing for six weeks already, but it all paid off.

Now I am waiting for seven o'clock, when I will go to Mandel Hall for the Halloween concert. I shall listen to The Planets and the Star Wars and Star Trek music, and enjoy being at a musical event that Somebody Else has put together for me.

What Time Is It? Inane Dialogue Time!

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:28:59 GMT

I've been giving the gamelan one last try this quarter, in a desperate attempt to reconcile the fact that I love playing it and hearing the music with the fact that it's run by a collection of jerks -- last spring, for instance, there were some remarks made to me that didn't qualify as anti-Semitic mainly because the person making them wasn't smart enough to understand how they could possibly be offensive. But I'm trying to hold out at least for this quarter, partially to keep playing, and partially because . . . well, it's a good idea for the Music 102 TA to be involved with the gamelan.

But boy, when I have to deal with inane dialogue like this, I wonder if I'll be able to hold out through December.

We were working on a short, simple piece. I was playing kempul and gong. It's not a difficult part; the piece never goes too fast, the 'pul plays only one beat out of every four, mostly the same pitch, and there's plenty of time to get everything done. It's the sort of 'pul part I can play in my sleep. Then, this dialogue happens . . .

Gamelaneuse: Pony, is that 'pul part too hard for you? Would you like someone else back there to help?
Me: Well, actually, it's a pretty easy part. I'm not having any trouble playing it on my own, but if someone would like to come back here and play along, that would be perfectly fine with me. But I'm not dying for lack of help.

Pause. Clearly, this answer does not compute.

Gamelaneuse: But . . . but . . . would you like someone to come back and help you?
Me: Um . . . it's an easy part, and I don't need help to play it. But if someone wants to come back here, that would be perfectly fine with me.
Gamelaneur #1: I don't want to come back there if I'm not welcome.
Me: Well, it's fine with --
Gamelaneur #2: Do you want someone back there to help you?
Me: Do I have to take a gong beater to someone's head?
Gamelaneur #3 (semi-seriously): But tell us how you feel!
Me (mostly just as semi-seriously): *makes a famous hand gesture at Gamelaneur #3*
Gamelaneur #3: Okay, that's pretty clear!

I mean, seriously. Was I suddenly speaking Urdu or something? What part of "I don't need help, but it's fine if someone wants to come back here anyway" did not get through to them? Maybe it actually is that they just asked for the sake of saying something, and never had any actual intention of actually listening to my actual answer.

It's just till December. I can take this for another month. Right?

Sigh.

A Meme From Juno_Magic!

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:20:54 GMT

1. Pick 10 of your favorite books or series.

2. Post the first sentence of each book. (If one sentence seems too short, post two or three!)

3. Let everyone try to guess the titles and authors of your books.

1. I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice -- not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. dawtheminstrel guessed this!

~~2. The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.~~ juno_magic guessed this!

3. When Mr. Dildo Bugger of Bug End grudgingly announced his intention of throwing a free feed for all the boggies in his part of the Sty, the reaction in Boggietown was immediate -- all through the messy little slum could be heard squeals of "Swell!" and "Hot puppies, grub!" juno_magic guessed this!

4. The Fossil sisters lived in the Cromwell Road. At that end of it which is farthest away from the Brompton Road, and yet sufficiently near it so one could be taken to look at the dolls' houses in the Victoria and Albert every wet day. dawtheminstrel guessed this!

~~5. Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.~~ thunderatiger guessed this!

6. Alex barely lived eight years. That's not long at all. Why, looking back, it seems as if it took her much longer than that just to die.

7. In 1910, the surgeons Moreau and LePrince wrote about their successful operation on an eight-year-old boy who had been blind since birth because of cataracts.

8. I can't shake the feeling that I've lived this moment before. Maybe that's because, like Jennifer Lopez walking into divorce court, I have lived this moment before -- over and over, again and again, for close to ten years now.

9. Like many fathers, mine could occasionally be prevailed on for a spot of "airplane." As he launched me, my full weight would fall on the pivot point between his feet and my stomach. It was a discomfort well worth the rare physical contact, and certainly worth the moment of perfect balance when I soared above him.

10. [Original] Diese Inschrift stand auf der Glastür eines kleinen Ladens, aber so sah sie natürlich aus, wenn man vom Inneren des dämmerigen Raumes durch die Scheibe auf die Straße hinausblickte.

[my translation] This inscription stood on the glass door of a small shop, but of course, it only looked like that when one looked out from the gloomy interior through the glass onto the street. juno_magic guessed this!

Yay?

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 02:57:28 GMT

Way back in June, I took my last practicum, the Transcription Exam. My advisor (who was supposed to grade it) was away in Europe for a month, and so I waited until school started to ask about the grade for the exam. I've been asking ever since mid-September, being a gadfly on the rumps of several people around the department. No one seemed to know what had become of the grade, or even whether or not a grade had been given. Today, I had some semi-success in that field. My advisor (who told me two weeks ago that he had passed the grade on to a gentleman who left the U of C) let it slip that I did, in fact, pass the Transcription Exam. All we need to do is locate the grade and get it into my Permanent Record. Like everything involving the Transcription Exam (oddly enough, this does not include the actual transcription itself), this is easier said than done. But I have high hopes of finding this grade . . .

Food Porn! Roasted Carrot Ginger Soup.

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 03:31:09 GMT

Tonight is one of my nights to cook. I make full recipes of things that I cook, so I don't cook every night, and I eat a lot of leftovers. But tonight was a Cooking Night, so I thought I'd give you folks the recipe, illustrated, for Roasted Carrot Ginger Soup. (I originally cut it out of a magazine, but I've forgotten which.) All temperatures are in Fahrenheit, and all measurements are imperial. Sorry, metric people.

So the first thing you do is to preheat the oven to 350 degrees:

Then you assemble your ingredients. Pictured here are: 1 pound of parsnips, 1 1/2 pounds of carrots, 1 onion, a knob of ginger that's about 3" long, 3 tablespoons of brown sugar, 6 tablespoons of butter, some crushed red pepper flakes (originally, the recipe called for cayenne), two cups of water, and three of the four bouillon cubes I used (the recipe says to use chicken broth, but these are vegetable bouillon cubes, just to make the soup vegetarian). The pomegranates are just there because they live in that basket, and they don't get used in the soup.

The fourth bouillon cube gets combined with the water and cooked into two cups of veggie broth:

Meanwhile, you trim and peel the carrots and parsnips, peel and slice the onion, and peel and chop the ginger:

Then, you take the Really Big Knife and cut the carrots in half lengthwise, and cut the parsnips into quarters:

Put the veggies into a roasting pan:

Dot them with the butter, sprinkle them with the sugar, and pour the two cups of vegetable broth on top:

Cover the pan with tinfoil, and stick it in the oven:

The veggies have to roast for two hours. Go and do something else to amuse yourself:

At some point, turn the remaining three bouillon cubes into a further six cups of veggie broth. After two hours, the veggies come out of the oven looking like this:

They smell pretty good, too! Take out a big soup pot (this is my Dutch oven), and transfer the veggies into it, and pour the six cups of veggie stock over them:

Sprinkle in some salt and some crushed red pepper flakes:

Bring all that to a boil, then partially cover it and let it simmer for ten minutes:

Next step is to purée the soup. The recipe says to use a food processor and do it in batches. I don't have a food processor, but I do have an immersion blender, which is a tool designed expressly to purée things in pots. Stick it in and give it a buzz:

Keep buzzing till the soup gets thick and blended and smooth and orange and delicious-looking:

Slice some bread to go with the soup. This is oatmeal anadama bread, from the King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook:

A dollop of sour cream for garnish (the recipe says creme fraiche, but that seems to be just a more expensive version of sour cream with a French name), a glass of red wine, and voila! You have dinner fit for a graduate student:

The soup keeps well in the fridge for about a week, and it reheats well, as soups tend to do. I wouldn't eat it cold, but you could try that if you want. I've never frozen it, but I bet it would freeze well, since there's not much dairy in it. It's thick and warm, a nice bright orange color, with a little bite from the ginger and the pepper -- just the thing for autumn!

All Good Things Return

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:09:34 GMT

I had a lovely evening out yesterday, and I am now convinced that all good things in my life will eventually come back for seconds.

See, about ten years ago, I was a theater and music major at the Fairest College, and I was taking one of my two elective courses, Introduction to World Music. The professor, Ted Levin, was (and remains today) a specialist in Central Asian music, and he'd invited an ensemble of Bukharan* Jewish musicians called Shashmaqam for a performance at the campus center. He encouraged all of us in class to go, though I don't remember whether or not we had a writing assignment about them. Anyway, I went. The performance was very much like this one.

It was a complete revelation to me. Up until that point, my experience of Jewish music had been limited to what I'd heard in my own personal family and community -- my family sang imported Aramaic Passover songs, and we were Neat and Different because of that, for instance. But I'd never seen or heard anything like Shashmaqam. In addition to being a fabulous show, I remember perceiving them as both "like me" and "not like me" at the same time. I thought that was pretty cool, and that it might be a neat thing to look into this whole "world Jewish music" deal at some point in my life.

Well.

Fast-forward ten years. I'm a Ph.D student in ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago, a student of Jewish music under one of the world's foremost scholars on the subject. I'm also this guy's TA for Introduction to World Music. And Shashmaqam -- that same group -- came to the U of C for a performance last night! I was truly excited to see them again after ten years, and I told the class about them and exhorted them to go.

Well, they were as beautiful and exciting as I remembered, the music was fantastic, and the costumes even more glittery (I covet the manager's cloth-of-gold dress and gold-spangled hat with the gold lace veil). They really are master musicians, they've been working together for decades, and they were just enchanting.

And I spotted two of my students in the audience, too! Who knows? Maybe in another ten years, one of them might be an ethno grad student telling his students all about how Shashmaqam made a big impression on him and they should really go see the group in concert . . .

*Bukhara is a city in present-day Uzbekistan that was a great and famous cosmopolitan Silk Road hub way back in the way-back-when.

The Things I Do For Ethnomusicology

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:26:58 GMT

This morning, I had the immense privilege of standing out in the pouring rain at 10:15 this morning (having previously had to explain to a university catering services person that the broad category "tea" also includes the subcategory "black tea," and that, while I am not ordinarily a violent woman, subcategory "black tea" should be produced RIGHT NOW, since it was for a university catered breakfast, thankyouverymuch) watching a faculty procession and the 500th convocation, and having to listen to the university pipe band play "Scotland The Brave" not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES.

Oy vey.

"Scotland The Brave" is a lovely tune, but no one -- not even the pipers -- NO ONE needs to hear it three times in one day.

My Tribe In The Media

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:30:38 GMT

In this case, I'm talking about New Englanders. I am deeply in love with this Newsweek article -- it spoke to my New Englandy little soul. (Though I do find autumn leaves very pretty; but I've also had the distinct non-joy of being sent out to rake them. And the maple syrup candy is never as good as you think it's going to be.)

Taking Bookishness A Bit Too Far, Perhaps

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 23:38:39 GMT

Merrily stewing away on my stove is a pot of Chicken Kédjénou, a West African (specifically, from Côte d'Ivoire) dish that's basically a chicken stew with red wine and a bouillon cube as the liquid. I got the idea to make it and the directions from . . . a graphic novel. To be fair, both of the Aya books have extensive cultural notes in the back -- in addition to Chicken Kédjénou, the second book also tells you how to bundle your baby onto your back, African style, and has a little essay about how Ivorian families care for a new mother. I guess I'll just have to see if the Chicken Kédjénou is really good enough to seduce a girl from Paris . . .

And In Other News

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:20:02 GMT

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/10/02/olympics.2016/index.html

We didn't get the Olympics! We didn't get the Olympics! Hip Hip Hooray!

Wibble, Wibble

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:11:20 GMT

I'm going to bite the proverbial bullet and go down to the student union for a flu shot in about an hour. I've got a friend going along to hold my hand, but it's still a needle.

Good vibes, please?

Sponsorship Fail

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 23:33:15 GMT

Who thought it would be a good idea to serve two trays of open-faced ham and cheese sandwiches at a talk by a Jewish Brazilian writer, on the topic of Latin American Jewish identity, co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies?

FAIL.

First Day Of School!

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:49:23 GMT

Well, technically, that is. Actually, school was supposed to have started yesterday, but as soon as they made the schedule last year, they proofread it and discovered that the "first day of classes" was in fact Yom Kippur. D'oh! The administration did a very quick "oops, our bad," and canceled classes for yesterday. So, school starts today. I'm not taking classes any more, just TAing Intro to World Music again. That's a Monday/Wednesday class, so I don't even get to meet the students till tomorrow. And then only for a little while. The prof (my advisor, same as before -- basically, the Advisor 'n' Pony Show has been renewed for another season) is off giving a colloquium at Yale tomorrow, so I just show up to hand out syllabi and explain that anyone who still wants to be pink-slipped into the class should come back Monday.

I spent much of yesterday and the night before at the local synagogue (right across from The Family's home, so plenty of security) engaged in the Yom Kippur rituals of Endurance Judaism. Cool things from this: At Kol Nidre, I got to hang out with an old friend from the Former Job. It turned out that we'd both spotted each other before the service started; I made a note of where he was sitting and trusted that he wouldn't walk out in the middle of the service, so I'd see him afterward. He, on the other hand, apparently kept trying to get my attention throughout Kol Nidre, but succeeded only in getting the attention of the stolid, bearded gentleman sitting behind me, who thought he was very weird. But we did get to hang out for a bit afterwards, because of a flash downpour that we waited out in the building.

Also, I enjoyed the alphabetized listings of sins and virtues at the morning and afternoon services; they're alphabetized in both Hebrew and English, which makes me snerkle a bit. A speech that began with the words "Judaism . . . and Scottishness. The connections." And finally, towards the end of the afternoon service, even the rabbi started to flag a little, turning to the congregation and announcing, "The cantor assures me that we are on page 498, and I'm inclined to believe her."

I do like this cantor. She's starting up a four-week class on Sunday mornings on the history of Jewish music, and I think I'll sign up.

One of my friends came over for break fast. She's not Jewish, but she participates happily if I ask, especially because she hadn't really had much time for lunch that day. It was a cold dinner, which was not so great with the chill in the air, but it was a nice meal, and didn't involve me sitting and smelling something cooking while Very Hungry. I'd made a chilled strawberry soup, so we ate that along with a nice vinegary Caprese salad, the last of the challah, and a bowl of fresh figs. The figs were kind of a surprise. I stopped at the grocery store after Neilah let out to pick up some fresh basil for the Caprese salad, and . . . well, they always say you shouldn't shop hungry. Fortunately, my grocery store sets out stuff like lychees, longans, and fresh figs for impulse purchases, not Snickers bars. Fresh figs are good, and they made a nice complement to the meal.

So. Off to see about taking (yet another goddamn) German exam, reading more feminist musicology, photocopying the syllabus, and finding time to watch the movie I'll be screening for the class in a few weeks.

How were your weekends?

Government Goodness

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:40:34 GMT

Whoda thunkit?

A bill to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act has been introduced into the House, with something like 94 sponsors. Even better? It's called the Respect for Marriage Act. Check out the report here or the full text (it's short, sweet, and to the point) here.

It's not a perfect bill, but boy, it's a start!

Rabbi Rambo

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 17:50:18 GMT

Embedded video from CNN Video

In case that doesn't work, the link.

So CNN.com is showing this video about a guy who is a security expert, black-belt martial artist, and a rabbi. (One of these things is not like the others?) His shtik is that he teaches anti-terrorist techniques for use in synagogues, including -- I am not making this up -- how to use your tallit (prayer shawl) as a weapon. Given our current culture of security, as well as the recent Holocaust Museum shooting and an incident where a couple of New York synagogues were the subject of a terror plot, this isn't such a far-fetched thing for a black-belt rabbi to offer, nor for a synagogue to look into. After all, I attended Erev Rosh Hashana services last night at a synagogue that is delighted to be located across the street from the Obama house because of the free top-notch security they get out of the deal.

If you watch the video, you'll notice that the rabbi is armed, and that his techniques for taking down terrorists all end with him kneeling on the guy's head and pointing a gun at the guy's terrorist pal. I have to say, I'm kind of ambivalent about the idea of bringing a gun into a synagogue. I know they do it in Israel, and that's even mentioned in the video, but Israelis aren't Americans. I suspect that Israelis are much more capable of being cool around guns than Americans, who tend to fetishize them in one way or another (either pro- or anti-, take your pick), and who are probably not quite so trustworthy with the things.

And, frankly, this guy is pretty badass even without the gun. Yes, the gun will cause the terrorist to freeze and wet his pants. But that move with the tallit? That'll take down the terrorist and have your entire Bar Mitzvah class, and at least half of the Bat Mitzvahs, going "Awesome!" as well.

Happy New Year!

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:09:17 GMT

Just checking in to say:

!לשנה טובה

L'shanah tovah! Happy New Year!