We found mangosteens in the supermarket today! I recognized them from the Yihai market, but I really didn’t expect to find them in such close proximity to drive-thru hush puppies.
Disconnect
Posted in Raleigh
Tagged as seen in Beijing, Beijing:Raleigh, Chinese food, Chinese life, Raleigh, southern food, yihai
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Dirty Kitchen
A few years ago, my mom got me a magnetic poetry set. It was the seasons and celebrations collection, with haiku words like magic, flower, spring and rain. For Christmas, Andrea and Ian got us a sci-fi/pulp set. This one has goblin, squirt, bite and thump. I’ve got both sets up on our fridge now… It’s an interesting look at my character, when you think about it.
The problem is that the combination of the nature words and the pulpy words leads to endless romance novel euphemisms. I’ve mixed up some of the more obscene pairings, but my fridge still reads like the steamy parts of a potboiler.
Record-Breaking Uno
A few nights ago, we had our newish friends Monty and Lynn over to play Arkham Horror. Monty works with Stick, and I’ve hung out with his friend Lynn a few times outside of our D&D game. I guess they’re more acquaintances, but, hey, socializing with people in North Carolina, outside of Stick’s family!
Arkham Horror is a complicated boardgame based on HP Lovecraft stories, where players play against the game, not against each other. It’s got a good story and characters, with a strong random element, and a lot of resource management. It’s a bit like Betrayal At The House On The Hill, although not enough like it to make up for Betrayal House going out of print. We played over two evenings, and when we finished on the second night it wasn’t too late.
“What about a quick game of Axis and Allies?” Stick said. He has a special super-deluxe exclusive edition where you can manage everything, down to what color socks your troops are wearing. He loves this game, I think he’d sleep with it under his pillow, but it’s the opposite of quick.
Although Stick has a lot of games, we decided on a quick round of Uno, out of my ESL materials box, since it wouldn’t require any time to set up or explain the rules.
Our quick game turned into the longest Uno game in the history of the planet.
Somehow we all ended up with huge hands, while the pool of drawable cards dwindled. No one was going to be able to call Uno! But this was a group of players amused by statistical possibilities, so we tried to see if we’d break the game by playing only draw cards, creating a smaller and smaller pool of cards with a higher and higher proportion of draw cards. While shouting Trienta y nueve! or Veinticuatro! to break up the card-drawing monotony.
I think that means we’re friends now.
Posted in North Carolina, Raleigh
Tagged Arkham Horror, e3, ESL, family, game culture, games, Lynn, Monty, North Carolina, oops, packing, Raleigh, random, Stick, Uno, unpacking
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Fashion Solitaire On The Shelf
I was so excited to see this in Target the other day! I beta-tested Fashion Solitaire in February 2008, but I was in China when the game came out so I’d never seen a hard copy on a store shelf before.
Posted in Game Reviews, Gaming Culture
Tagged beta, China, e3, Fashion Solitaire, Game Reviews, Grace, Large Animal Games, why's it gotta be pink?
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Podcasts
I got into podcasts last year when I had the Beijing commute. I’d listen to Notes From Spain and ChinesePod.com, crammed with full bodycontact against other bus riders. Now I listen to them when I’m either at the gym or talking walks and telling myself that any minute now, I’m going to start running and really burning calories. Any minute now. Oh, look, I’m home again.
Right now, British History 101 is my favorite history podcast, mostly because Skaggs picks interesting topics that history books often gloss over, like exactly what one has to do to receive the order of the garter. The show has a great overall tone. There’s no condescension to listeners, but you don’t need to keep a massive calender of events in your head to follow it.
I also like TudorCast, Ancient and Midevil History and The Biography Show, for more non-pretentious, informative podcasts produced by independant history buffs. Both TudorCast and AMH are on extended hold right now, but BH101 and The Biography Show are still producing new episodes. I think of myself as a classicist, but really I think I’m just interested in not-American history. Any recommendations for other history podcasts?
Podictionary, a vocab podcast, sounded good at first, but I only made it through a couple episodes before unsubscribing. Each interesting three-to-five minute word etymology comes with an abrasive advertising minute. It may sound odd to complain about ads in a podcast when I run ads on my site, and even British History 101 is ad-supported, but that means that once in a half-hour podcast, he mentions how great his podcast host is. Other podcasts also suggest buying paid subscriptions. Maybe it’s just the grating announcer voice I don’t like.
I also follow a podcast review blog, Anne Is A Man!, which first made me think that some distant crossdresser had amazing podcast taste, but it turns out that Anne is a man’s name in the Netherlands. I imagine the blog title occuring around the 3,000th time he had to explain that.
Posted in Beijing, Books, Raleigh
Tagged Books, British, chinese, chinesepod, dictionary, e3, Eric, podcast, Raleigh, stuff I like
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Eight
When I started working on my happy post about all the new podcasts I love, I felt an elephant in the room.
Eight years ago, a guy I knew jumped off a bridge. I remember hearing about it and thinking it wasn’t true, it was someone’s April Fool’s joke in horribly bad taste. I also remember standing around at the wake with goth club friends, in our black, without our makeup.
I wasn’t particularly close to him. He was a friend of a friend, we knew each other peripherally from where the anime crowd and the goth crowd intersected. I have friends who were much more affected, then and now. I didn’t lose a friend, as much as I saw emotions kill someone.
No idea why this is on my mind this year, and it wasn’t so much on anniversaries that I’ve spent with that crowd of friends. I don’t know if I’m even thinking about Bill, more that I’m thinking that people look like they’re just fine when they’re really not.
I wasn’t going to mention it here, since I like my blog to be happy navel-gazing, not depressing, but I just felt that I was faking my cheery post while I was really preoccupied with other thoughts. Happy post to follow.
Bosphorus
Bosphorus Restaurant
329 North Harrison Ave
Cary, NC
I drive past Bosphorus restaurant every week on my way to teach at Chinese school, but it was our first time eating there. Inside, Bosphorus is decorated with posters of Turkish landscapes and artwork, painted pottery and blue-and-white glass evil eye medallions. (Being classicists, we joked about how to warn off the evil eye.) The coffeemaker and a silverware caddy are visible to patrons, like a diner’s prep station, and you can also also peek into the spotless kitchen.
Our area of North Carolina is mostly chains, convenient at times, but facelessly interchangable with everywhere else. Bosphorus, with its mix of diner efficiency and cheerful exotic decor, stands out with of character and warmth, amid mandatory flair and planograms from corporate office.
We ordered a mezze platter,which came with delicious warm bread. It reminded me so much of the grilled bread from Muslim Noodles. The main difference was that Muslim Noodles bastes the bread with a tasty spicy oil concoction, but Bosphorus serves a tasty spiced oil as a dipping sauce. I spent so much time in China cooking Western food, but there are a few Chinese dishes I miss, and grilled bread is one of them.
I really like vegetarian choices that are filling meals, not token salads or the old replace-meat-with-a-portabello-mushroom standby. Also, there were no stupid artichokes on the menu!
Posted in North Carolina, Raleigh
Tagged cary, Chains, China, chinese, classicists, coffee, cooking, noodles, North Carolina, RACL, Raleigh, restaurant reviews, teaching teenagers, Western food
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All Artichoked Up
It’s been years since I ruined dinner badly enough to scrap it and order take out. Look, I’m not saying I’ve never had trouble boiling water, and there was that time in college when I set off Eric’s smoke detector, but my cooking mistakes are usually minor, food that’s a touch overdone or needs a bit more salt. Not a disaster.
My recipe said that if you don’t have a steamer, you can boil artichokes, placed upright and arranged snugly in saucepan with a few inches of water. I think there was a typo, and what it meant was if you don’t have a steamer, don’t even think about boiling artichokes, placed upright and arranged snugly in saucepan with a few inches of water!
First my artichokes turned brown, which was a little odd, and then they spectacularly failed to get soft enough to eat. Then the water turned brown, and somehow began to smell of blanching citrus peels, while the artichoke leaves were still hard. Also the leaves never opened up and out. I pulled a leaf off to taste, just in case I’d picked up that rare African Brown Artichoke, that looks bizarre and tastes good, but it had the consistency of bark. Bark with the smell of toxic vegetable matter. Sadly, the extremely rare oak-artichoke crossbreed is inedible.
Once it was clear that my artichokes were more science project than delicacy, I thought I’d cut one in half. I tried with a paring knife, an awesome culinary knife and finally a serrated bread knife, which shredded the artichoke, into a mass of unmarinated artichoke heart and tree bark. Some of the leaves managed to be both over- and under-cooked, which defies all logic.
I’d been thwarted by an artichoke.
I decided to be thrifty and not order a pizza, although it was definitely warranted. Stick is awesome, he didn’t complain about the thrown-together replacement dinner, and he even offered to clean up the kitchen. Possible because if I saw the artichoke debris, I would cry.
Stick thought it would be a good idea to put the artichoke bits in the garbage disposal. Remember that part where none of my knives could cut through the leaves? Yeah, he didn’t remember. Again, the smell of toxic vegetable matter, only this time, it was rising up from the clogged sink.
Good thing we didn’t order in last night, because we’re definitely eating out tonight.
Update 3/31: Any chance I bought Hurley’s cherimoya instead of the artichoke-oak hybrid?
Posted in Raleigh
Tagged adventures with Stick, awesome, cooking, Eric, food?, Google, Raleigh, Stick, things I'm not good at
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Ada Lovelace Day
Have you heard about Ada Lovelace Day?
If you’re a girl who likes programming, who are your role models? Too few and far between, says UK-based freelance software consultant and tech blogger, Suw Charman-Anderson. Which is why she’s named March 24, 2009, Ada Lovelace Day, the first of what could become an annual Internet event.
Ada Lovelace Day is meant to be an international day of blogging to highlight women in technology – more than 1000 people have pledged to write a blog post today focusing on women and their contribution to technology. Charman-Anderson called for the day after observing the feelings of disempowerment experienced by her female friends in the tech industry, and after recent research showed that women need to see positive female role models more than men need to see male role models.
Via mental_floss Blog » Happy Ada Lovelace Day!
First. I love Ada Lovelace! “Lovelace” was actually one of my first online handles. (Although it was back in the old AOL chatrooms, so it was probably more like Lovelace2575820582.)
But I’m rubbed the wrong way by the kind of female empowerment that makes a big fuss when a woman does the same thing a man does. If we were really equal, there wouldn’t be this excitement when a woman does something men do all the time. Commemorating Lovelace as a brilliant proto-geek is awesome, but the focus on her gender bugs me. It makes it seem like smart girls are really unusual.
I’m a bit of a hypocrite in this, because I blog over on my gaming site about women in game development whenever I can. It’s pretty much the same thing, highlighting a woman for doing what guys do all the time, because even though I want everything to be equal, there just aren’t as many female game devs. I’m also connected to a bunch of female China expats, like Gabrielle and Anna, it’s a stronger connection because there are so few girls in the expat blogosphere.
What do you think? Does Lovelace Day have a bit too much amazement that someone can have a uterus and be good at math? Or is a long-overdue appreciation of women in technology?
Posted in Gaming Culture, Raleigh
Tagged awesome, China, expats, gaming, girls play that too?, other blogs, Raleigh, tech, ThumbGods
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Travians on SeeJaneGame
I have a review of the addictive little browser game Travians up over on SeeJaneGame:
The game opens with a message from your Travian’s uncle Horatio, asking you to come and help him with the ancestral estate. As he sends you on basic intro quests, it becomes apparent that Uncle Horatio has had a few drinks in his day, and that the ancestral estate is more of a run-down farmhouse. Uncle Horatio’s hiccups and rambling tales set the tone for the game, everyone in Travians is full of character. Some of the first NPCs you meet are a sheep-loving, Horatio-hating guard and a travel pig with memory issues.
Posted in ESL, Game Reviews, New Jersey, Raleigh
Tagged dead romans, ESL, Game Reviews, my other writing, New Jersey, Raleigh, SeeJaneGame, Sims, travel, Travians
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