Soba Noodle Soup

I made a pretty good soba noodle soup the other day. It was simple, light, and easy to make. The first step is to make a Japanese seafood stock, a pretty traditional recipe:

Just throw in some carrots, onions, green onions, ginger, konbu (kelp) and hijiki (another kind of seaweed). Simmer that for 45 minutes, until the vegetables are soft:

Then strain the stock and try to squeeze as much liquid out of the vegetables as possible. Once that's done, put the stock back in the pot and bring it to a simmer. Now you're ready to finish the stock with a few other ingredients:

You add a little dashi to taste (the tan-colored granules on the left). It's a kind of fish stock and you can make your own, but most Japanese just use the granules; that's what I did. Then add a few tablespoons of a 50/50 mixture of shoyu (soy sauce) and mirin (rice wine), which is the dark colored liquid in the center. Finally add some sliced carrots and spring onions. Keep those over a very low heat, and boil the soba noodles (bottom) in another pot of water. When they're all done, just combine the ingredients and enjoy.

An interesting, disheartening blog post by Anne Midgette in the WP. The key graf:

Many of us who love music share a vague idea that audiences should be open to new things, and that they should be convinced to give them a try. But is this true? I’ve observed before that classical music, particularly opera companies and orchestras, are unusual in that they repeatedly try to force things on its audience that its audience doesn’t necessarily want. Someone who comes to the movie theater to see “Avatar” is not necessarily going to be thrilled if I show him “Pan’s Labyrinth” instead, even if I’m convinced that he would really love it if only he would watch it. And yet this is what’s going on in classical music, all the time: audiences are being asked to pay lots of money in order to be taken out of their comfort zone.

I  think it’s worth unpacking this statement.  I’m troubled for instance by the way in which she talks about the audience for classical music as though it’s a monolithic entity; it’s not. In fact, one of the biggest challenges classical music faces is that there is a substantial rift running right down the middle of it’s listeners. Go to the symphony on any given night and it’s easy enough to see: on the one hand you have the older, wealthier segment of the audience. These are the folks who occupy the box seats, the folks who can afford to shell out for season tickets, the folks who show up on the donors list in the program. And by and large, they want to hear the operas and symphonies and concertos they’ve always heard: the classical warhorses. For them, Ravel and Debussy are as adventurous as they like to get. Because these audiences financial influence is high, one often finds their impact  on programming is frequently disproportionate to their numbers.

The other audience for classical music is just as likely to show up at a matinee concert: they’re younger, more open to new music, but don’t wield the purse strings of the  organization. And keeping them coming—in fact, attracting more like them—is the only hope classical music has if it wants to survive, at least in the US. The older audience might be supplying the bread and butter now, but they are dying off and no one is replacing them. This issue is somewhat orthogonal to the old vs. new music debate, but the fact is, new music can spectacularly engage younger, new-to-the-scene audiences; I’ve seen it happen. For these audiences, new music doesn’t have to be an occasional event, leavened with heavy doses of Beethoven and Brahms to make it go down. It can be a vital part of how they define classical music.

It’s also worth looking at this statement: “audiences are being asked to pay lots of money in order to be taken out of their comfort zone” because wittingly or not, it gets at a huge problem in the classical industry. Symphony and especially opera tickets are insanely expensive. If I want to get even halfway-decent seats at a WNO performance, I can expect to pay $100 - $250 per ticket. Big organizations spending lots of money on top-flight talent are going to tend to be risk-averse, but this is happening precisely at a time when the industry needs to take some risks to survive. That’s a likely reason why smaller venues, chamber and solo concerts tend to be more welcoming of new music. But orchestras can do it too. Right here in Baltimore, Marin Alsop and the BSO are a good example.

Update: Alex Ross has more on the state of current classcal audiences, with breakdowns by generation. Good read, albeit depressing.

The Coakley loss was not surprising and there's blame aplenty to go around for what Josh Marshal has aptly termed an unforced error. This election was the Dems' to lose, and they lost it. Par for the course, depressingly. But seeing any prospect for health care reform now falling apart is shocking.So far I count Anthony Weiner, Jerrold Nadler, Evan Bayh, Jim Webb, and Barney Frank (!!!!) all coming out against getting this legislation through reconciliation by passing the Senate bill wholesale. Some folks (like Bayh) never wanted it in the first place. And I understand why progressives like Nadler or Weiner prefer the House bill to the watered down Senate bill, but they can't seriously believe that thery're going to get another shot at this. There will not be another, more progressive bill later on: there will be either an even more compromised bill or, more likely, nothing at all. I don't think the Senate bill is even close to what it should have been, but for goodness sake, it's better than nothing.

And Barney Frank's role in this is extrodinarily disheartening. Here's his statement post-Brown-victory statement which Rachel Maddow read tonight:

"I have two reactions to the election in Massachusetts. One, I am disappointed. Two, I feel strongly that the Democratic majority in congress must respect the process and make no effort to bypass the electoral results. If Martha Coakley had won, I believe we could have worked out a reasonable compromise between the House and Senate health care bills. But since Scott Brown has won and the Republicans now have 41 votes in the senate, that approach is no longer appropriate. I am hopeful that some Republican senators will be willing to discuss a revised version of health care reform. Because I do not think that the country would be well served by the health care status quo. But our respect for democratic procedures must rule out any effort to pass a health care bill as if the Massachusetts election had not happened. Going forward, I hope there will be a serious effort to change the senate rule which means that 59 are not enough to pass major legislation, but those are the rules by which the health care bill was considered, and it would be wrong to change them in the middle of this process."

He says, "I am hopeful some Republican senators will be willing to discuss a revised version of health care reform"...?!?! Name one. That's an insult to the intelligence of everyone who has supported you.

As to this: "But our respect for democratic procedures must rule out any effort to pass a health care bill as if the Massachusetts election had not happened," your party still has solid majorities in both houses. The election results in Massachusets (which, by the way, has something very like the bill you're are ready to throw out) is not a referendum on national policies, no matter how much idiotic pundits like to say it. Josh Marshall again, hits the nail on the head: "[the] statement he put out tonight that is just an embodiment of fecklessness, resignation, defeatism and just plan (sic) folly." I'm happy that Frank doesn't like the filibuster, but it's not going anywhere anytime soon, so either dems work within those constraints, or they accomplish nothing. Those are the options on the table.

Voters are amivalent about HCR, but I can gurantee these idiots that throwing in the towl like this will win them no votes. Not one.

Update: a couple of constituents were able to talk to Bareny Frank personally, and he layed out his reasoning to them in greater detail. He may or may not be correct that the votes for this just aren't there in the House (himself included), but I totally disagree with his assessment about the likely outcome of November elections if HCR fails: it will be a disaster. And while I don't like the Senate bill any more than he does, it really is better than nothing, not just politically, but in the lives it will save.

Taken while walking through Wyman park.

I've entered the final stretch on my site relaunch. Coding and templating are probably about 99% done and the project currently stands at about 3500 lines of code, including HTML templates. I'm a big proponent of TDD and belleville comes with an extensive suite of unit tests. Using Ned Batchelder's excellent coverage.py library, I can measure my test coverage, which currently stands at about 86%. That's pretty good as far as I'm concerned, and although I'll probably be able to improve that soon, it won't be before relaunch.

So besides a few sections of the site that need a little styling love, the final remaining task is migrating content from my old blog to this one. As of this post, mazelife.com contains 26 blog posts with 16 comments using 21 distinct tags. That's a depressingly small amount of content that could well be migrated by hand (e.g. copy-and-paste) but I'll probably dump the existing blog content as JSON data, then write a script that serializes it and puts it into the new system.

Got some screenshots up of the redesigned blog (just filled with test data right now):

Take a look at :

• Site homepage
• Tumblelog
• Blog Entry
• Search result

I’ve had a big blog post floating around in the back of my mind about journalism (particularly print) today and the issues which have brought it to the rather unpleasant state in which it now finds itself. I worked for one of the newsweeklies for a couple of years and that's given me a first-hand look into the problem, and I still follow the issue closely. Maybe one day I’ll get around to to writing that post, but in the mean time: a small scene I found rather revealing:

Apologies, first off, for this blog being so "meta" lately, but I thought I'd offer an update on the site redesign progress. And the update is: meh. The project currently stands at 1069 lines of python, 170 lines of html and 122 lines of CSS. The blogging and tumblelog apps are completely done, including comments, tagging and the ability to cross-post tumblelog entries to a Twitter account. I've templated all the views and done some basic styling. And I do mean basic. Here's a screenshot of a blog entry detail page:

Progress on my personal site relaunch for Sitesprint II continues apace. At this point all the work has been on the backend code but my gains there have been good. In my last post I set some ground rules which I have so far kept, including five significant commits to my code repository per week. Admittedly, it’s only been one week, but whatever... The result is Belleville, a blogging CMS written in Django. As I mentioned, this site currently runs in a Django-based CMS I wrote a while ago. Does the world really need yet another django-based blogging CMS? Or another blogging CMS at all? Well, no, probably not; but I do. And my hope is that this one represents a good example of code that is idiomatic to Django, is extensible, offers a nice feature set, and is easy to theme; in other words, I hope other folks might find it useful too. It’s open source and free for the taking.

I happened to post about redoing my personal site the same day a coworker pointed me to Sitesprint. The idea behind it is to stop procrastinating and launch or re-launch your personal site by December 15th. The rules are simple:

1. launch by 12/15
2. document your process
3. on launch, share what you did and how you did it

If you followed the progress of my django site-seach module, you'll know I'm the procrastinating type. Definitely. So I signed up and I'm hoping this will give me the kick in the pants I need to knock this thing out. Forthwith a few personal rules:

• 5 signifigant contribs to the svn repo for my new site CMS per week.
• One blog post about the prcess per week
• Feature-complete by 11/25
• Design (such as it is) done by 12/1
• Design coded by 12/5
• Soft launch 12/10

So, we'll see how it goes. The coding part I'm not worried about, to be honest. But design...ugh. I've tried to redesign this site about 5 times since I launched, and I wasn't happy with anything I came up with, which is why the site still looks like it does.