That is the question, at least as far as the University of Maryland is concerned. Because the university decided over the weekend that I no longer exist as a person. I couldn’t log in to my email account and emails sent to my umd address actually started bouncing (which seems a bit extreme).
When I called OIT (Office of Information Technology) to ask what had happened, I was informed that my ‘position with the university had been terminated’. Huh, I thought.
Because while I’m moving from one department to another (which will technically require a new appointment), my current position doesn’t run out until the 21st or so. And even if it had ended now, I feel that the approach of turning off someone’s email with no warning is… what’s the word I’m looking for here. Silly. They tell you a month and a half before your password is going to expire (with seemingly weekly reminders after that), but they don’t tell you that your University existence is about to end? That seems more than a little foolish. Particularly when they don’t even have the option of forwarding email from my address here.
This situation is supposedly being dealt with by the Biology department giving me a temporary appointment to last through the 21st. However, the wheels of this were set in motion on Tuesday and I have yet to detect any change in my actual status, so I’m not exactly holding my breath on this. I suspect things won’t really be cleared up until I start my new job (at which point the temporary appointment will no doubt turn out to have some kind of dire consequences meaning that I can’t get health insurance or get paid or something like that).
So yesterday Beth and I went to our friends Doug and Kelly’s wedding reception. They’d gotten married back in April but didn’t have the party until now. It was a fantastic affair, very low-key and with some of the best food you can imagine. Doug is a chef (working at a very nice gastro-pub downtown) and the main feature was pork served seven ways.
There were also a variety of side dishes, all of them delicious, but I must admit that I focused most of my attention on the pork and the dessert (amazing cupcakes).
So how does one do pork seven ways? Well, the first two were different sausages. One was rather like a traditional banger, although with more garlic. The other was a chorizo recipe, a bit spicier, and incredibly tasty. I could easily have gorged myself just on these, but there was so much more to try.
One of the finest things there was porchetta. You can read all about this fantastic dish on wikipedia, but to summarize, it’s the loin and belly of the pig with the skin rolled around it (with a variety of tasty spices and herbs in the mix) roasted until it’s gorgeous and crispy. Now I was originally calling it por-CHET-a, but it’s apparently pronounced por-KET-a. Either way, it’s one of the tastiest things in the world.
Then there was a seemingly innocuous bit of Canadian bacon. This was far tastier than any such thing had any right to be, as well as being incredibly juicy and flavorful. I ended up going back to this again and again to eat little slices because it was just too tasty.
Another powerful contender for tastiest dish there was the pulled pork. Bursting with flavor (I still don’t know what they put into it), it was utterly delicious on its own or (probably better) on a roll.
And of course there was the pig’s head which was prepared as slices of terrine, I guess. Intensely flavorful, but perhaps a bit much for some people. I certainly enjoyed it greatly but it was not my favorite of the dishes.
The pork bellies were on the fatty side, although this obviously made them all the more tasty. Particularly because they were grilled with a fantastic maple glaze that really combined beautifully with the taste of the meat (and the accompanying fat).
The side dishes were all fabulous as well, but I must admit that I didn’t eat very much of them, as I wanted to be able to focus my attention on the glorious pig. The potato and macaroni salads were tasty (I sampled them), as was the couscous and coleslaw, but the highlight for me was the amazing pickles. There were bread and butter pickles, pickled zucchini, pickled onions and pickled beets. All of them were fantastic, although the beets were probably my favorite just because they were bursting with flavor in a way that I was unprepared for.
And there was a watermelon salad which had the unique (in that I’ve never heard of this as a concept before) feature of having feta cheese in it. I would never have thought to combine feta cheese and watermelon (balled), but it worked fantastically well, particularly with the blueberries also in it and combined with the chopped mint leaves that rounded out the list of ingredients. If you’re trying to think of a way to make watermelon more exciting, I definitely recommend this dish.
And then there were the cupcakes… Four amazing varieties starting with a plain vanilla cupcake with vanilla frosting/cream on top, and then with a touch of Malden salt on top (dyed pink). The saltiness offset the sweetness of the cupcake fantastically leaving a perfectly balanced dessert.
Then there was the strawberry shortcake cupcake, which was also vanilla but filled with chopped strawberries, topped with sweetened whipped cream and garnished with more chopped strawberries on top. And it had a splash of vodka in there somewhere as well (presumably in the whipped cream or with the strawberries).
The most popular choice (based on there being less of those left at the end) was a chocolate cupcake with a beautiful swirl of chocolate frosting on top. It was very chocolatey and not too sweet, making for another wonderful combination.
Finally, the most impressive (I think) was the lemon meringue cupcake. A vanilla cupcake filled with lemon curd (I think), topped with meringue which was browned using a blowtorch.
The maker of all these delicious desserts was the pastry chef from Againn, who was apparently a little disappointed that she didn’t get to make more challenging and ambitious cupcakes. I feel a visit to the restaurant coming soon so I can taste more of her creations.
So there you have it. Gourmet food served in a casual way (on paper plates with plastic utensils) combined with excellent beer, great company and perfect weather. I’m actually salivating just thinking about it…
I don’t think I’ve ever gone to a party with such high expectations for the food, but neither have been so overwhelmed by the quality of what was there.
I find myself wondering, every now and then, how The Who could have never had a number 1 hit song. I mean, you would think that somewhere along the way this seminal band would have had at least one song that was at the top of the charts. Apparently competition was a whole lot stiffer back in those days than it is now. Because, seriously, they were a seminal rock band.
With an emphasis on ‘were’. Their performance at the Superbowl this year was just deeply depressing. They would have been a great half-time show thirty or forty years ago but as it was it was just depressing. I swear when I saw them play at Madison Square Garden some years ago they still had it and that it’s not just me imagining things. But okay, I guess that was eight years ago now. Wow.
It’s hot here in DC. I mean, this does have a tendency to happen around this time every year, but in the past week it’s just been ridiculously hot and unpleasant, which has left me extremely appreciative of having air conditioning. A friend of mine doesn’t have it (she lives in Charlottesville,VA) which I think is pretty much asking for trouble. Either you won’t be able to sleep, or you’ll have heat stroke, or something along those lines. Sure, in Ithaca it was fine to not have AC, since it never really got that hot, and even when it did, it would always cool off at night. Here, it’s a different story.
It does tend to lead to people living like they’re in space, though. You run from inside to your car with AC, and then from your car to your work or the grocery store, and then back home in the evening. And of course it makes everyone sedentary, because who wants to exercise when it’s like this outside? I went for a couple of runs last week when it was nice, and it felt quite good. But the idea of running in the current soup just seems silly. Yes, it’s cooled off ten degrees from yesterday to today, but even so.
This of course leads to the difficulty with excess air-conditioning. I understand that it’s nice to feel a cooling breeze when you walk in the door of somewhere, but cooling buildings to 65 degrees, as often seems to happen in a lot of institutional settings, is just ridiculous. Having to keep a sweater at work for the summer is just plain stupid. It also leaves you with a difficult choice when it comes to clothing: Do you pick something that will be comfortable inside but cause you to roast when you go outside? Or do you try to be more comfortable outside and risk feeling cold whenever you’re in your office?
When I was at Origins a couple of weeks ago, I opted for the ‘wear warmer clothes and tough it out in the heat when you’re outside’ because I knew I was going to be inside the convention center almost all the time. Our short excursions to the North Market were unpleasant, but I managed to feel cold inside even with long pants, a shirt and a fleece on. Not a good place to wear shorts and a t-shirt, certainly.
I guess the theory is that your clothing shouldn’t have to change depending on the season, so you can wear whatever you want inside? I just find that kind of silly and absurd. We do live in a climate, no matter how much we may try to avoid it by staying indoors.
/end rant
So I haven’t written anything here in a long long time. And I’ve also stopped posting to my main message board. And I’ve been thinking a lot about why that is.
And lo and behold, I’ve come up with some kind of answer. Because I think I’ve found what I do instead. Which is to chat with friends online. Basically, I feel like chatting online is really my perfect medium. It lets me formulate my thoughts in a slightly more detailed and considered way than I would in conversation (and utilize the written word rather than the spoken, with all the delights that offers), but it’s still spontaneous and quick and fast. It’s more about wit than about carefully crafting something. And maybe it’s that I don’t have a long enough attention span to really craft a carefully worded blog post that will contain deep and meaningful content. But I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s okay. And that I’m going to allow myself to just write blog entries more like how I chat online. Which is to say free-form, without extensive editing.
If I really want to write something that’s meaningful, I can obviously edit it and make it better. But if I’m just writing some simple observations about stuff, then I think I can just do that without needing to feel much pressure. And hey, it should be better than writing nothing at all, right? That’s my hope, in any case. Because so far, the alternative has been to just leave this sitting here and write nothing whatsoever, feel vaguely guilty about it, worry that I should try to fill in all the empty space from whenever I last posted, try to write entries about things I promised literally years ago but know I probably won’t ever and thus feel more guilty about that, and end up doing nothing about it thus perpetuating the cycle.
Yeah, so I’m done with that. That’s the idea, at least.
Well, my Amber game is continuing. It’s a little bit difficult because my players are completely new to the setting and I’m not sure I have done a good enough job of explaining it all to them beforehand. The dynamics of the family are a complicated thing, when you get down to it.
I had thought that it might be simpler by my choice of running a pre-Chronicles era game, but I’m now seriously doubting that decision. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not the case. The problem is that some of the characters are fairly (on the order of a century) old, and so should be reasonably well versed in how everything works in Amber. But if their players are not, it makes for awkwardness. And I’m not sure whether the best thing to do is to go extremely slowly, explaining everything in a sort of tutorial type way, or whether to just proceed and let things fall where they may? The latter approach seems like it’s likely to have a lot of potential negative outcome, and so I’m inclined against it, but the former seems like it would just be… painful. I’m guessing there must be some kind of middle path, but I’m not sure what it is. I certainly don’t want to end up doing retcons, although I’m already dangerously flirting with having to do one as it is.
So what do I do? That is the question.
This of course doesn’t even get into the questions about the actual game, which are a completely different matter 
So I’m following up my last post with another one with astonishing rapidity… Two blog posts in one day, it’s almost shocking, I know! But anyway, as a result of having written that last entry, I realized that I had failed to renew my home url for this blog so it had lapsed in the months since I had last written anything. This of course reminded me of the fact that I haven’t been doing anything with my domain name in general and other things like that.
The upshot of all this is that my blog has a new online home. This should hopefully soon be followed by a real live homepage and things like the Amber game homepage, all of which will be found at dbhertz.com. But for now, at least, http://blog.dbhertz.com will point you to here. The old address (blog.danhertz.net) will forward to here as well, but dbhertz.com will be my home from now on. But let’s not get too excited about it just yet, since I don’t have anything at dbhertz.com itself the moment.
Well, I’m starting a new game. This is my first time as a game master in quite a few years. Quite a few, really. I guess when I start to count it really adds up. I had a brief Vampire (Dark Ages) game that I tried to run (it just didn’t work out logistically) in the fall of 2001. But other than that I guess I would have to go back to high school to when I last actually ran something…
So wow, it’s been a while. But okay, it really doesn’t feel like it, oddly enough. I guess I’ve spent enough time talking about games, thinking about them, having endless discussions with JP and Jason that actually getting to run one seems like more logical progression than anything else.
And yes, it’s an Amber game. I mean, of course it’s an Amber game. I suppose there are other options, but given that I’m really not too interested in mechanics at the moment, the idea of having somewhere wherein the mechanics are not at all a major factor is a huge selling point. Plus, the setting draws me back again and again. Why, though? That’s really a question for another post (assuming I start blogging again). In any case, this is going to be a game that is not so much based on the ADRPG rules style as it is based on the flavor of the Corwin Chronicles and borrows slightly from the ADRPG rules for inspiration. I’m chiefly using JP’s Infinite Amber rules for character creation, meaning eight attributes and partial powers, but there are a number of modifications, which I’ll write more about later.
The time period of the campaign is way back in the day, in the Golden Age of Amber (or possibly Silver, I suppose?). It’s set pretty shortly after the death of Faiella, so the cast of Elders are Davina (a non-canonical older sister), Benedict, Eric, Corwin, Caine, Deirdre and the PCs. Of which there are presently two, but may be more. The players are not familiar with Amber, which is one reason why I wanted to set it in a time period when things were simpler, in some ways. The family is smaller, and the PCs are a not-insignificant part of it. They are comparable in power to Eric, Corwin, Caine, Deirdre and Benedict. They are real people with real responsibilities. Not just insignificant younglings.
Amber is undergoing expansion in its base of power, with the Golden Circle still very much being established. Many Shadows have been brought into it, but there are many more yet to be fully incorporated, certainly. And Amber’s power over its neighbors is by no means absolute. Amber is certainly a powerful player, but some older siblings have been killed fighting wars in Shadow in the Golden Circle. Shadowlings are not to be underestimated.
The city itself is rather like a more beautiful version of renaissance Paris (with more Venetian architecture). And the Castle itself is very like the Louvre or Versailles. It relies chiefly on natural geography to defend it, rather than heavy castle walls, so it is mostly a palace for living in. And a beautiful on at that, being the residence of the Royal Family of the richest city in the known worlds.
I’ll be making a website for the campaign at some point, once I get around to it. So keep an eye out.
So last week I met up with Susan and finally got to meet her mysterious boyfriend Ian, who has been away in Japan. We were going to go bowling but owing to the closing of the UMD bowling facility over winter break, we instead went to The Spirit. What follows is a sort of mini review (what I wrote for a discussion thread of a message board I frequent).
The constant feeling I had during the whole movie was “What the FUCK?” I think the movie is really best summarized by the five minute long slugging it out between The Spirit and The Octopus at the beginning of the movie. In a giant pool of mud. At the moment when The Octopus smashes a toilet down over The Spirit’s head and says “Come on! Toilets are always funny!”
It certainly doesn’t take itself too seriously. And there are definitely stunningly beautiful women in it. And the scene of Samuel L Jackson dressed up as a SS officer is wildly surreal, if nothing else. And some of the surreal nature of the dialog (or monolog, as it sometimes is) is wildly entertaining. Like when our hero wakes up tied to a chair and says: “What smells dental? (looking up and seeing a nazi flag) Dental and Nazi. Great.”
But while that’s funny and over the top, it’s not enough to make for a good movie. Or even a mediocre one. Ultimately, I kept wondering whether it was all a giant joke, at the viewers’ expense. I felt like I was watching Glen or Glenda, or possibly Bride of the Monster. Yes, in many ways the movie felt as much like Ed Wood as Robert Rodriguez (for all the people who were expecting Sin City 1.5). And isn’t that a disturbing thought?
Quite frankly, what it made me feel most of all is that Frank Miller should go back to writing graphic novels like “The Dark Knight Returns” and “Sin City” and leave movie directing to people more capable of it. Because while he may be talented at some things, making movies clearly isn’t one of them.
So I have become an avid consumer of podcasts. They’re how I get an awful lot of my news and information about the world. But I am also fairly selective in what podcasts I listen to (I’d like to think), given that there are so many out there. The majority of the ones I listen to are of radio shows from Public Radio, and they include both dailies and weeklies.
KCRW in Santa Monica provides three of the shows which I listen to. First of all, it’s the source for my main news analysis show, their daily show To the Point (Monday-Friday). This is an excellent hour-long show with interviews, in-depth analysis of a variety of issues and serious debate between a whole host of different knowledgeable people, giving all sorts of insight into what’s going on in the world. It’s obviously mainly focused on US events, but it does have a global slant as well. I listen to this on the way to and from work and find that it keeps me well informed about what’s going on in a way I wasn’t previously.
The other shows KCRW provides me with are weekly and are Harry Shearer’s Le Show and their weekly debate show Left, Right and Center (featuring Matt Miller, Arianna Huffington, Tony Blankley and Robert Scheer). I wish it lasted longer than half an hour, because it’s really refreshing to have a debate show that covers what’s going on in the news between intelligent people without it turning into demagoguery or shouting talking heads. I may not always agree with all (or any) of the people, but they’re at least intelligent and well-spoken and capable of expressing themselves in a way that doesn’t involve having to be completely disrespectful of the other side. Le Show includes a variety of different things, usually his segments of News from outside the Bubble, Apologies of the Week, News of the Inspectors General, News of the Warm, as well as various sketch portions for which he does all the voices. These are often biting satires of public radio, the entertainment industry, phone calls between Bush 41 and 43, or other various things. Extremely entertaining as well as informative and enlightening.
Of course if we’re looking for entertaining shows from public radio, we can’t forget Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Their weekly news quiz, featuring a rotating panel of hosts (in addition to Peter Sagal and Carl Kassel). Some of the funniest stuff on radio, and not just because they had Dennis Kucinich on there giving part of the Gettysburg Address in his Donald Duck voice once…
There is also WNYC’s fantastic show On The Media (OTM for short), which examines the Media, their effect on our lives and our society. Hosted by Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone, it’s profoundly insightful and incredibly illuminating on a whole host of issues relating to both modern media issues such as freedom of information during the most recent administration and wiretapping, not to mention the downturn in the print press and its effect on journalism, as well as covering older stories, like the tale of pirate border radio stations in Mexico and their importance for close to 50 years in the 20th century.
And then there is the classic. This American Life from WBEZ in Chicago. And it really does produce some of the most fantastic (and consistently so) radio I can think of. The stories are compelling, the people in them are fascinating, and you just can’t stop yourself from listening to the whole thing. I went and saw Ira Glass speak in Ithaca a few years ago, and what he said was most telling about how powerfully the show draws people in is the statistic of the average length of time people listen to an episode, if they catch it on the radio: 48 minutes. Since the show lasts an hour, most listeners are tuning in for the whole thing, clearly. And of everyone else, they basically listen from the moment they tune in until the end. It’s not something where you start to listen and then stop a bit later. It’s the kind of show that people stay sitting in their cars to listen to the last ten minutes of. It’s that good.
Finally there are some podcast only shows that I listen to: NPR’s Planet Money, which started up this last fall and which is a daily that lasts about 15-20 minutes. It’s done by about four people (Adam Davidson, Laura Connaway, Alex Blumberg and David Kestenbaum), and it provides the most insightful and best analysis of the economy I have found to date. Alex and David both worked on TAL, previously, and Adam and Alex put together an award-winning show for TAL (and a follow-up episode) explaining the mortgage meltdown last spring. David is also a former particle physicist and quite a nice guy; I met him when he gave a colloquium at UMD this fall. I really can’t say enough good things about this podcast. I wish I had time to post more comments to their blog and say more avidly fan-boyish things, because it’s that good. I finally understand what Credit Default Swaps are, how Short Selling works, what the TED spread really means, and how it all affects me. And I wish I’d learned more economics somewhere along the way. But tragically I don’t see how that’s going to happen any time soon.
Last but not least is The Moth. These are true stories told on stage without notes. Just that. Some are funnier than others, some are more sad and touching, but they’re all compelling and intriguing. They’re about 15 minutes or so (sometimes shorter), and well worth a listen. Also weekly.
