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It's become something of a pet peeve with me when I hear people--usually ones who don't seem that familiar with how searching the web for info using Google actually works or assume that Google "knows" everything--discuss "Googling" either themselves or other regular everyday people that they know and suggesting that this is a surefire, easy way to instantly turn up a heaping treasure trove of data on literally anyone. I was reminded of it again yesterday when I was listening to a segment of The Moth radio show where someone was talking about the all-powerfulness of the Google search and how she was obsessively digging dirt on a personal enemy and on herself in a really successful way. Her story was amusing, but it just didn't ring true. Because if you are not publicly very well known, and unless you have a really uncommon name, just entering a name into a Google search and easily finding much about the actual person you are searching for is a real hit-or-miss proposition. You are not going to learn everything on Earth about your upcoming blind date (to invoke a cliche) by doing this unless your date is quite well known and has left a big online presence, or you just get lucky. 

My little, non-scientific example: For a regular civilian of no particular note or importance, I have left quite a lot of detritus by and about myself on the web, associated with my real name, as a result of my publishing activities, my frequent blogging here and elsewhere, my thousands of Twitter updates, etc. So I decided I would perform a search for myself on Google using only one parameter, my name, Christopher Fletcher. My name is extremely common, and as expected, a whole boatload of other Christophers Fletcher are referenced in the first ten pages of search results (I decided arbitrarily that ten pages is as deep as anyone wants to go unless they have a lot of time to waste). So, probably because of the size of my online presence, I do manage to appear near the bottom of page one of this search, a hit on my M-Brane SF profile page. Page 2 contains a link to my M-Brane Press page. Pages 3 and 4 don't hit on me at all. Page 5 picks up my book The Aether Age on Amazon. Page 6, nothing; page 7 nothing. Page 8 has another hit on Aether Age, this time on Goodreads. Page 9, nothing; and Page 10, another Amazon hit, this time for Cesar Torres' book The 12 Burning Wheels that I published. And that's it, and notice that every one of these has to do with M-Brane and my books, nothing at all personally about me.

I flipped it over to image search, still with only my name as the search term. In images, I don't show up until page 2, and both are book covers from things I was involved in. Other page 2 images include a cute, groovy-looking 17-year-old kid who shares my name, and a gay porn dude whose image takes one to some kind of slash fiction site (so we're getting closer, yo!). An actual pic of me appears on page 3 from one of my M-Brane sites. After that, I don't actually show up again in images except for a few more book and mag covers. There's a couple more porny dudes, a Chris Fletcher who looks a lot like Mark Zuckerberg, and another one who looks a bit like an unhappy Justin Bieber. But none of me.

So you might rightly say that this doesn't prove much since if someone wanted to dig dirt on me, they would put more into their search other than my name. True, but I was having a hard time doing that myself without biasing it too much the other way: getting more specific than someone who doesn't know me well probably could. So I re-ran the search adding one term to my name: "gay." This gets a bit closer. Page one's web results feature me 4 times...but, again, they all have to do with my mag and book publishing activities. And then over the next nine pages, there a few more similar hits. But again, nothing about me, the person. If I had never become a small press publisher, I suspect that it would be well nigh impossible to find any sign of me anywhere by way of a Google search. (By the way, the image search adding the "gay" parameter, isn't hugely different than without it other than my M-Brane profile pic moves up from page 3 to page 2, and all the porn boys move higher as well). (Another "by the way": if one subs "queer" for "gay," then the results change a lot: page one of web results is all about my book Things We Are Not, and the first couple pages of image results are all me and Things We Are Not). 

I will occasionally recheck these results because it has come to my attention that a scurrilous and wholly vicious falsehood about me--concocted by a villain!--has appeared online! I will not point anyone to it. I am convinced that no one can find it without inside information. We'll see if the mighty Google ever trowels it up!

Spam report

Aug. 19th, 2010 09:53 pm
mbranesf: (Default)
Last week I ranted and raved about how Blogger won't let me use my M-Brane Gmail email address as my account address on my Blogger account and how I am stuck using the private-lame-business address that I stupidly used when I created my Blogger account in my pre-M-Brane days. That account is a stupid old AOL address, and it appears that AOL is far, far worse than other service at spam blockage despite their claims to the contrary. 

I went to AOL itself (I don't normally visit mail websites, using instead the built-in Apple Mail client on my MacBook to gather up all of our emails from all accounts in its in-boxes) to see if there was some kind of setting I could adjust to improve spam blockage. Indeed, I was able to switch from "medium" blockage to "high" blockage, which they claim will eliminate virtually all spam. It does seem to help a little bit. Apple Mail says that my AOL spam box has accumulated over 600 spam messages in the last week. But about 200 of them have still gotten through, all of which I have forwarded to AOL's abuse-reporting address.

While I am still getting way too much spam, I seem to have at least stopped the recurring message with the image of the Octet of Douchebaggery (Canterbury) that was driving me insane. I am not sure if spam blockage or abuse reporting did the job on that. Or maybe it could have been me actually replying to the message with very crazy, mean and brutal messages of my own.
I noticed that this article on Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow, about why he won't be buying an iPad, has attracted a lot of favorable attention in the Twitterverse, as tech-related pronouncements by Mr. Doctorow tend to do. Generally everyone seems to be completely in agreement with his critique of Apple's new device as being piece of junk aimed at "consumers" rather than creators, and which doesn't do anything to inspire kids to become hackers because you can't tinker with the thing's innards. If you can't open it, you don't own it, so it goes. Screws not glue. 

I understand his points, and I might agree with them whole-heartedly if I looked at these things from that point of view. But I think there is a lot to be said for a piece of technology that just works well for the user and the consumer. If I were to buy an iPad, I wouldn't dream of wanting to crack it open any more than I'd take a screwdriver to this MacBook that I am typing upon. Indeed, I'd probably be frustrated if it operated in any way other than it's intended manner. Because I am not a tinkerer or a hacker. I might be inclined to become one if I didn't have technology that worked well for me (or if I could afford to risk ruining my devices by cluelessly screwing around with them). Before I was able to get this MacBook (a gigantic, monumental investment relative to the size of my household economy), I relied on a series of PCs that failed one by one, and I wished that I did have more of that do-it-yourself know-how. But I don't. And I really just wanted something to work for me.

I had a Gateway laptop that conked out. At the time when I bought it, in 2001, it was a fancy, high-end computer and it cost twice as much as my MacBook did eight years later. But I was relatively wealthy at the time. Then, right about when I started to fall into financial peril in 2005, it failed (fried motherboard). Instead of trying to fix it, I accepted the donation of an old desktop PC that my father was no longer using. He mailed it to me in a huge box, a monitor, a gigantic tower and all the peripherals. It was a couple years older and not as nice as my Gateway had been, but it worked, and being broke I couldn't really complain. And it was with this computer that I dared to do some tinkering. It was an old enough machine that it lacked any good way to get on to high-speed internet. I managed to get DSL service to my home in 2006, and on the same day the DSL modem arrived I also bought a cheap printer. This was a sad day for a few minutes when all my new toys appeared useless because my computer lacked an ethernet port for the DSL and did not have adequate RAM for the new printer--two things that I failed to consider as possibilities, forgetting that my machine was almost a decade old and not realizing how much the hardware had advanced during those years. So, with the sense that I had a virtually useless computer now anyway, I decided that it was worth the risk to make some modifications to it, even though I had no idea what I was doing. I went out and bought an ethernet port and a RAM card, opened up the tower, and spent a few minutes installing these things, not really expecting that it would work and, in fact, assuming that I was probably destroying what little functionality the machine had left by fucking around with its guts. But it worked. Suddenly I had about three times as much RAM as well as high-speed internet on a PC that was still running Windows 98. So I got that DIY thrill of doing something like that and getting a good result. It felt brilliant. But not so much so that I wanted to be doing stuff like that all the time. It was a necessity to make my computer function in a very basic way, not a project that I was doing for the fun of it.

Well, in late 2007, that computer breathed its last. My friend Pat lent me his old PC, a giant hulking Gateway of the same vintage as the Win 98 PC that had just died. I removed the ethernet port and the RAM card from the dead PC and installed those parts in Pat's old machine and repeated my success at making an ancient carcass of a computer perform reasonably well for me. This machine was, however, basically just a big web browser and word processor and it worked reasonably well for that. But I was stymied as far as improving its performance by getting software updates or new software, because downloads seldom worked, it was a constant battle to clear viruses from it, and it was just plain slow despite the RAM upgrade. My desire to do things like start M-Brane SF had to be set aside for a while because it was simply not a powerful enough machine for my needs. 

Then, in October of 2008, I got this MacBook, which I love more than any non-human, non-feline thing in my home. I'm not sure if I count as a "power user," but I do use it a lot and for a lot of uses, and it has provided me with an almost totally trouble-free computer life for the last year and a half. It's also a bit scary because I am so totally dependent upon it, that if it fails, I am totally screwed. So I guess that gets me back to Doctorow's point in his article about the iPad. I guess my beloved MacBook would also be a thing that I can't really own because I can't open it. But I really don't want to. The idea of busting open the case or changing its operating system almost makes me sick to my stomach. So I guess I'm just a "consumer" and a slavish follower of a big corporation that has decided for me how my technology should operate. But, if true, I think that would describe the vast, vast majority of all computer users and I think most of us are fine with that in the sense that we just want things to work and don't feel any burning need to muck around with fixing or altering these machines.

As for the iPad, I won't be buying one this year because I probably won't have the money to spend (or perhaps waste) on it, but I think it would be really great gadget for tech civilians like my partner Jeff to have. If I had the money for it, I'd probably buy him one because he is not much of a computer user, but when he uses one, he wants it to be extremely easy and straightforward. He doesn't write or edit photos or do much social networking. His use for a computer is confined to web browsing and the two or three emails he sends each week. Indeed, he finds the MacBook to be overkill for his own needs and gets frustrated with my usual jumble of open apps and browser tabs and files-in-progress whenever he goes to it to check his mail or look something up online. So the iPad would probably be the perfect device for him, and he wouldn't care at all about not being able to "open" it. So while I get Doctorow's point and sympathize to a great degree with the ideology of it, I don't think buying an iPad or wanting an easy-to-use device makes people who are not tinkerers or hackers or power users dumb-ass "consumers" in the way that he quotes William Gibson describing them: "something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote."

Printer

Jan. 3rd, 2010 09:05 am
mbranesf: (Default)
Jeff's master gardener course, which he starts taking online in a few days, involves printing a great deal of study materials. We haven't owned a properly functioning printer in some time. Generally, I've had bad luck with printers. I think I have owned at least four of them in the last decade and none have lasted what I would consider a reasonable lifespan. I'm quite accustomed to a paperless office approach to my own work with M-Brane and my other projects. But there's no way around needing to print stuff for his class. Even if he could figure out a paperless approach to it, then we would run into a computer usage conflict. We only have this one computer, and I can't give up as many hours of access to it as it would require for him to do all his classwork on it. So, we are once again a printing household.

We received a bit of money for Annual Gift Day from our parents and allocated a portion of it to getting a new printer, plus all the ink and paper it will need. This was a shopping ordeal, at least by our standards. Neither one of us has much stamina for shopping. "But I thought gay boys loved shopping!" some people may wonder. Well, we don't. We also don't like musical comedy or figure skating. We decided to try to get the printer at Sam's Club. We needed to restock some staple food items that we usually buy there (like coffee, bacon, cheeses, onions, garlic, olive oil), and I recalled that the last printer I had purchased about three years ago came from Sam's and seemed a good deal at the time (though it now sits derelict). 

So we found what seemed to be a reasonably decent and cheap (about $49.00) printer/scanner. Cheapness was a major criterion for selection, and this one was just under my price limit of $60.00 (well, I said I wasn't going above $60, but there was no way we were coming home without a printer for J, so I was braced for a higher price if necessary). We bought the printer and congratulated each other on the way out of Sam's on how we had beaten the crowd by getting their early enough, drove home, and set to work on installing the printer. Then it all went downhill for a while. It didn't occur to us that printers might be for Windows systems only and just not have the drivers to work with a Mac. I even looked at system requirements on the box at the store, noted what Windows versions it was good for, did not see anything about Max OSX, and still bought it, just not thinking that this could be a problem. I mean, really. A goddamned printer driver? Well, as it turns out, Dell (this was a Dell-branded printer) simply does not offer Mac drivers for its printers. I did a quick scour of the intertubes, certain that someone had come up with one anyway or found a work-around for it. Site after site said the same thing: sorry, out of luck, your printer won't work with your Mac. Fuck.  So we boxed it back up and set out again to Sam's...which was a human zoo by the time we got back there. 

We returned the printer, got our refund and headed to Best Buy, thinking we'd have more selection in our price range, and knowing now to make certain that whatever we buy says on the box that it works with Mac OSX. Best Buy was a human zoo also, and it turned out that the only printer that was anywhere close to our price point was $70.00. Unwilling to cave at this point, we moved on to Office Depot. Though Office Depot is some kind of corner of hell on earth normally, possibly one of the most depressing retail establishments imaginable, it was not a zoo yesterday. Perhaps noon on Saturday is not the peak of shopping for office crap. But same problem as far as the printers and their prices. Again, cheapest one was $70.00.  Then I said it: "Prince, we are going to have to go next door...to Walmart...and just take a quick look." His face fell. "Oh hell no!" he said. We must, I insisted. If we can save thirty or forty dollars by suffering through a few minutes of Walmart, we need to do it. The budget is too tight to stand on principle. We must at least look.

About an hour later we had a printer, the HP Deskjet D1660, $32.00 at Walmart. Since we were in the store and doomed to go through the checkout line anyway, we decided to get other tedious stuff that we would need soon anyway, like cat food and soap. On the way out of the store, J declared that he was happy to have completed his Walmart shopping "for another year," all of 2010 lying ahead, Walmart-free!  

Im actually pretty impressed with this cheap little printer, by the way. He printed the first few weeks worth of his class materials last night (and we need to pick up some replacement ink already), and I was really surprised how tall a stack pages it spat out (and how quickly it did it) before ink ran down. I'm not expecting it will have a long lifespan, but if it survives J's immediate need for it, then that's good enough. And I guess I can use it if ever want to do any off-screen editing. But no one should expect to receive a physical letter from me anytime soon.
 Ten observations about our trip to St. Louis (with subjects ranging from televisions to cooking to sex) begun last Thursday and concluded today:

The road was wearisome as ever. We made our customary dinner stop, glad for a break in the drive. The Mexican restaurant in Springfield was laboring under a suspension of its liquor license. As a former owner of such a restaurant, I felt badly for its owner. Ninety days of not being able to sell margaritas or beer would have been lethal for us. As customers at this place, we were a bit disappointed. We didn’t really need a drink at the mid-point of a long road trip, though we certainly would have drunk a beer or two had it been available. We could have instead gone to the Applebee’s across the street, but then that would have been a situation where the living would have envied the dead. Unlike Applebee’s, the Mexican joint had the obvious virtues of not being crowded in general, not being crowded with assholes in particular, not being a douchebag chain restaurant, and not being the worst restaurant on the planet. But neither was it anywhere near the best restaurant on the planet. After we resumed the road, J complained of stomach discomfort. But I suspect this was due more to the quantity of food he consumed than its quality. For him to fully consume a plate of beef enchiladas and all the side dishes is remarkable.

Fuck driving in bad weather. Fuck it all to hell. I’m sick of it.  All my driving life since I left Wisconsin to attend college in Iowa, there has been time after time after bloody fucking time of needing to travel hundreds of miles by road to visit family members in other states, and so many times this has occurred during snow storms, ice storms or, as in the case of this trip, blinding, torrential rain. Night had fallen, the road was slick and black and flooding over. Of course, even though I-44 is continuously under permanent construction, they can’t ever manage to paint or re-paint the lines on the road, so it’s nearly impossible to see where the lane divisions might be. And it always seems that all big-rig truck driving in America needs to happen during the shittiest weather. It’s as if the trucks are monsters sitting in the truck stops waiting for inclemency before firing up their engines and rolling across the blasted and blighted middle regions of the country. I’ve decided that it is ridiculous to risk our lives in this manner of travel, though I do not doubt that we will continue to do it.

Mom’s computer:
            “So what should I set as my homepage?” she wondered. Jeff had no real opinion on the matter, but he pointed out that while this decision was perhaps of no great import in its specifics, she would indeed need something as the homepage. She had considered not even having one. “But what will open when you go to the web?” he wondered. “Since something must open, it may as well be a page that you enjoy.” Eventually she settled upon the Gmail page. Chris located the Windows Live Mail application and configured it in such a way that mail from her new Gmail account would download automatically and be accessible to her by way of a mailbox icon on her desktop. “So now you can have something else other than Gmail as your homepage,” said Jeff. “You don’t even need to go to the website now to get your mail.” She retained the Gmail site as her homepage. She said that there wasn’t really any other one that she needed as her homepage at this time. Perhaps she would join Facebook later and switch to that.

            Mom had been lacking a working computer and home internet service for a number of years. She was delighted that her son Jeff and his boyfriend Chris came to St. Louis and assisted her in purchasing a computer and a number of other items at Best Buy. She got a very inexpensive Toshiba laptop, preloaded with the new Windows 7 operating system. Chris was intrigued to see the new operating system but concluded that it was still very Windowsy and not Mac-like at all, but he refrained from sniffing in disdain at it. He knew that this computer would be perfectly adequate for Mom’s needs, and he conceded that it was a probably a better computer than its very low price would have suggested. She also purchased a wireless router, a 19-inch flat screen TV, a TV antenna, and a DVD player.

The TV:  We experienced much frustration with the new TV. Mom needed a new TV for her bedroom, but she doesn’t have a cable jack in there. The new TV, therefore, needed to simply receive its signals out of the air. None of us had ever seen the new style of TV using the new style of broadcast signal (digital) up close before. Great tedium resulted from trying to scan in the channels and fuss with the antenna to achieve best reception. Eventually it seemed that it was working—at least well enough—but we discovered that we were missing channels 5 and 12. After much more mucking about, Jeff managed to tune in channel 5. Then we discovered that there is no channel 12 at all. Though listed as 12 on the cable system in the living room, it is actually channel 30 when one tries to pull it from the air, and it had been there all along, perfectly tuned. We relaxed and laughed at all this once it was done. Interesting trivia: the new TV retrieved a hazy signal from a hitherto unknown low-power analog channel which was airing reruns of Dragnet. I wondered if there was somewhere nearby a TV rebel, perhaps a radical broadcast pirate testing out his still-secret TV station, an old VCR whirring in a basement or a bedroom, playing tapes of old TV shows, preparing for headier days to come.

Down in the city, our old homeland where we breathed the sweet air of freedom for the first time in over a year, we visited our good friend of many years and her new girlfriend. Because of the sensitive nature of the situation, I will thinly veil their identities by calling our friend “E” and her girlfriend “V.” To begin, I should say that it is quite possible that V is a horrendous bitch. We had some forewarning of this. It was made known to us that V did not wish us to visit E. “Why must they come and ruin your birthday?” it is reported that she said. Also, “Why are they coming at all?” V’s disapproval of our visit was rooted in the crazy belief that the main purpose of our visit was to have sex with E.

Jeff and E have been best friends since they were teenagers, but they have never fucked. Not even once. I don’t believe that J has ever done it with a female at all much less his best friend E. It would be like boning one’s sister. I have known E for about a decade, almost as long as I have known J. I have never fucked her either, nor even considered it. Not even once. Furthermore, E is more or less a lesbian.  She swings both ways, but she is more a lesbian than anything else. This new girlfriend of hers, V, seems to find the basis for her jealousy, mayhem and foolishness in a cultural bias. V is from one of the countries of the Indian subcontinent, specifically one of the Islamic ones. Where she comes from, we are given to understand, it just doesn’t happen that men and women are friends with no sort of sex or romance implied. To her it beggars the imagination that E would have been “just friends” with J and me for this long with no sex going on. I wonder what her more conservative religious brethren have to say about her smoking, drinking and lesbianism.

So we knew to expect some friction coming into the situation, but we ended up feeling quite relieved and delighted when V proved to be sociable and friendly toward us. In fact, she seemed to have dropped her misgivings about us entirely. She was preparing intensely aromatic food when we arrived. She created a huge feast of dishes based on her homeland’s cuisine. It was beautiful and delicious. Indeed, it was restaurant quality and we told her so, and she seemed delighted that we enjoyed it so much. The evening ended in a very amiable fashion, and we left thinking that things were much better than expected with E and V.

As J and I drove away, en route to O’Connell’s for a beer, J’s phone rang. We gleaned through a series of ringings and hangings-up that E and V were going at each other hammer-and-tongs. Evidently E was trying to call J to get some testimony from him about what “really” went on that evening, but V was grabbing away her phone and hanging it up. We learned that as soon as we left, V accused E of having managed to either make out with or fuck both J and me during our visit. She’s out of her goddamned mind and we abandoned our briefly-held good feelings toward V.  But that food was still really good!

At the Zoo with E, we saw: penguins, puffins, sea otters, sea lions, and various primates. The visit was brief, but we were glad that we finally saw the new exhibit with the Antarctic birds as they are quite cute and interesting to see in person. The Saint Louis Zoo is one of the best in the world, and admission is free. Beer, however, costs about sixteen dollars for three servings. Fortunately E was buying.

Libido: From Doctor Drain’s notes regarding the proclivities and behavior of the Subjects C and J: Marked heightening of libido is generally observed in these subjects whenever they travel. This is supported by a large amount of information that we have gleaned from their implants over several observation sessions from the year 2000 to present. The reason for this is not yet understood, though a hypothesis was suggested last year by Doctor Benway and other members of the project  [Lab notes, 2008:0816].   “We did it a lot on the last trip, but not so much this time,” said Subject C, who requested one type of activity this morning, was denied, then requested a variant form of that same activity and was again denied. He made a third request, this time for an entirely different style of activity, and was once again refused. Subject J, as his reason for declining these requests, cited the proximity of his parental unit only a room away. “I can be quiet,” said Subject C. “We did it last time, and I managed to remain silent throughout.” Subject J remained firm in his position on the subject. He left the bedroom and prepared coffee. We next observed the subjects at a breakfast restaurant where Subject C made it known first to us via the implants and then to Subject J verbally that he was experiencing arousal induced by their waiter’s physical attributes. “He knows that you think he’s cute,” said Subject J. “He is responding with predictable and appropriate behaviors and signals. In other words, he’s ‘working’ it.”  Subject J is an expert in restaurant table service and knows the behaviors and signals that servers employ to discreetly “flirt” with their clients. “Too bad,” J said, “that he doesn’t know that Mom is the one who is tipping!” Both subjects found this to be ironically funny. Subject C adhered for the next hour to a fantasy of inducing the waiter into joining Subject J and him in a tripartite adventure of rather elaborate and unlikely specifications, but Subject J was less enthusiastic about this idea, not finding the waiter to be as attractive as Subject C judged him to be. A marked disparity between Subject C’s arousal state and Subject J’s persisted throughout the day. We concluded that that there would likely be no shared activities between these subjects today and shifted our focus to other subjects.

Chores to assist Mom:  I broke down an old computer system and an old desk and hauled all that junk out to the trash. We also threw away an old non-working analog TV and its useless antenna. She didn’t need that stuff anymore, since she bought all that new equipment at Best Buy a couple days earlier. Plus, none of it really worked anymore. I thought it was a shame to get rid of the desk, but I suspect that a neighbor dumpster-dived it right away. Jeff potted a plant for her, one that he had brought as a gift from our garden. He also hauled up from Mom’s basement storage locker an antique radio cabinet. It now sits where the obsolete desk and computer were.  While these tasks were perhaps not a lot of fun, neither were they too onerous; and they were things that she would have had difficulty doing on her own. So we were glad to help.

Jeff prepared hot browns for dinner Sunday night. It was delicious. Here is a recipe for that dish, excerpted from the unfinished draft of my cookbook/restaurant memoir Stackin’ Hogs

            Like some of the lunch items that we discuss in another chapter, the Hot Brown is a regional curiosity.  It’s native to Louisville, Kentucky where it was developed at the Brown Hotel (hence the word “Brown” in the dish’s name). Jeff prepared them at Lynn’s Paradise Café in Louisville years ago when he cooked there, and has been a sort of evangelist for the dish ever since.

            Though slight variations may be found, it is built like an open-face sandwich with some sort bread topped with roasted turkey, smothered in a white sauce, topped with tomato slices, bacon strips and some melted cheddar cheese.  The bread may be toasted or not and the white sauce may or may not incorporate cheese into it.  We had it on the menu at the Saint Louis Art Museum for several years when I was chef there, and we used a Mornay-type sauce, which was simply a basic white sauce with shredded Gruyere cheese melted into it.  We also called it by the wrong name, as Jeff has never tired of pointing out.  St. Louis local cuisine also features this dish, but there it is known—incorrectly—as the “Turkey Prosperity.”  Another anomaly is that it sometimes shows up in St. Louis as a conventionally constructed sandwich that has little in common with the Hot Brown (or “Prosperity”) other than containing turkey, bacon and cheese. This approach, as Jeff would tell you, could not be more wrong if they were using a steam-driven, copper-plated wronging engine.

            Most recipes that we have found say nothing about toasting the bread and Jeff confirms that it was not done like that in Louisville.  Authenticity aside, I insisted that for the Jasoom rendition the bread should be prepared in the form of thick chunks of garlic toast. This ended up being a big improvement on the “original” (in my estimation anyway) since it provided an enhanced layer of flavor and texture at the ground floor of the dish.

            So this isn’t really a recipe so much as an assembly.  To make a Hot Brown, have on hand some toasted bread, some sliced roasted turkey, slices of ripe tomato, strips of cooked bacon, shredded cheddar cheese and the white sauce of your choice (ours was made my melting 2 tablespoons of butter and whisking in 2 tablespoons of flour and then adding 2 cups of milk and cooking until thickened; we seasoned with salt, pepper, granulated garlic and a splash of hot sauce).  [Alternatively, start the sauce with finely chopped onion and minced fresh garlic, as Jeff did last night.]

            It works best to assemble the portions on the dish that you plan to eat it off of, though you could assemble them in a skillet or on a baking sheet.  At the restaurant, we used large deep bowls that we then underlined with a flat plate.  Place the bread on the plate, add the turkey, pour the sauce over it all and then arrange beautifully the bacon and tomato slices on top.  Sprinkle cheese all over it and stick it under a broiler or in a hot oven for a few minutes.  In that case, probably don’t use plastic plates.  It is done when the top is melted and luscious looking.             [Since the original drafting of this recipe, J has pointed out a number of times that since one does not use shredded cheddar cheese but rather squarish slices of it, one cannot “sprinkle” cheese on it, as I suggest above.]

 

We’re back home now. J is sleeping and so are the cats. They missed us, and we missed them.

 

While I generally like technological innovations and the nice things they do for me, I have almost never been part of the first wave of people getting in on anything new. When I was a kid, I was behind everyone else on having things like a VCR or one of those portable cassette players that were all the rage before CDs took over. I was not an early adopter of CDs either. I was very late to the game on computers, too.

I am old enough to be in a generation of people for whom it seemed to be an actual decision whether or not to "get into computers." Sounds ridiculous now. When I was about 12, I had one of those cheap Radio Shack computers that so many kids got that year. It was basically a big calculator/typewriter-like contraption that was hooked up to a TV. It had almost no internal memory at all, and relied heavily upon cartridges that fit into a slot on the side of the thing (the programs actually resided on the cartridge--they did not load into the computer's memory; imagine nowadays if you wanted to use, say, Microsoft Word, you needed a physical disc spinning in an external drive the entire time). To save one's work, one would use a tape drive--literally a tape cassette recorder that plugged into it. To load your saved work back onto the computer, one would play the tape and it would squeal and whine for a while and eventually you'd have something to look at. The truth is, the Radio Shack computer was not easy to use, didn't really do much that was very interesting, and wasn't any fun. It was really much less interesting than an Atari videogame system. Somebody gave me a book of programs for it. I was expected to sit for hours at a time typing code into the damned thing, in hopes that it would cause some sort of primitive graphic event to manifest itself on the black and white TV screen. So I associated computers with programming them, and I didn't want to do that. It seemed boring and time consuming and I couldn't see what it could possibly have to do with my life. I don't think most other people were very interested in computer programming either. That's why we all have PCs and Macs now, and 99 percent of us know jack about how they work. And we're fine with that.

In general, my late-adopter mode has served me fairly well. By the time I realized that I needed to be a regular computer user (and not a typewriter or word processor user), they had evolved into a fairly modern and easy-to-use form. By the time I got online for the first time, the web already existed. It was not anywhere near as dynamic and rich as it is now. But it existed, and the internet was no longer just a mess of weird bulletin boards and mailing lists. I won't even be getting a Blu-ray player because I can see that convergence will soon make all discs obsolete. When I got my first cell phone, the devices and the networks for them were reasonably like they are now. Same with the social media stuff, which I have come to only recently. The verdict was pretty much in on what things like Twitter and Facebook and LiveJournal are for and how they work by the time I came to them. Easy. 

So being late to the party has the upside of being able to miss out on a lot of the early growing pains of new things. On the other hand, I am more and more into finding new things that will improve how I work and live. A couple of things that I actually was an early adopter were in that category: I started doing online bill-pay over a decade ago and only now are most other people I know coming around on that; I joined Netflix as soon as I heard of it (screw going to Blockbuster! I haven't seen the inside of a video store more than once or twice during this millennium). So I look for things that will improve efficiency and make more time for things that I want to spend time on. 

With that in mind, I am trying to figure out what Google Wave is about and assessing whether I will be an early adopter of it. It's in a preview phase right now, and one evidently needs to get invited to join it and test it. To listen to people talk on Twitter, pining for an invitation, in some cases almost begging someone to invite them into Google Wave, one would think it must be some sort of online El Dorado or Shangri-La. I have to admit that I was getting rather curious myself and started poking around for an invitation, and I eventually got one. I don't know what the etiquette is in this situation. I probably shouldn't say publicly who invited me. Maybe it's a secret. It is someone who occasionally reads this page, and so I will say "thank you" (you know who you are). 

So it is an online Shangri-La? I really couldn't tell you yet, because I really don't quite understand what all it does. It has a steeper learning curve than something like Twitter or Facebook. That much I can say for sure. So what is it even? It appears to be a communications interface that has the capability of merging things like instant messaging, document sharing/collaboration and even some email functionality (like sharing docs or links) into a "wave," which is basically a live document with all these functions and possibilities within it. I've only had one real interaction with another user so far. This afternoon, I chatted for a couple minutes with my friend, the writer Cesar Torres.  The window within which we chatted resembled more or less what you would expect from any instant messaging interface. But then it gets rather slick and fancy: communication is so instantaneous that you can see each other's messages as they are typed. Indeed, at one point Cesar was able to anticipate what I was probably going to say and he produced an answer before I was done saying it. This is very different than a normal IM operation or Twitter where you fully compose your message and then send it before anyone can see it. I'm not sure how much I dig this. I became very self-conscious of my sloppy typing when I realized that he was seeing my every keystroke as I made it. I suppose I can get used to it, but I am not a very good IM-er anyway, so I am not sure. 

But that's not even the coolest thing anyway. This "wave" within which Cesar and I were chatting could have been used for a lot more stuff. For example, I could have passed a document over to him. If we had wanted to collaborate on an edit of said document, we could have done that right there in our wave. If some other people that we know had appeared online, we could have invited them to join us live. And the wave, when "done" or not in use, remains in existence, like a document, unless you delete it, so you can keep going back to it to add to it or review it or change it.  But I still don't know what I think of all of this, despite how great it seems it could be. I need to learn a lot more about how to use it. For example, there exist a host of add-on apps that you can use to do things like send content from your wave to your blog or to Twitter, but I can't figure out how to activate any of them. Advice in the "help" directory seems kind of spotty. And I am generally fairly impatient and easily irritated when things don't do stuff for me the way I want them to. But I suspect that with a little more time, I will get the hang of it and discover some more uses for it.  I feel it in my blood that there is some way that this Wave thing will be of great use in building the M-Brane empire. But I have no idea how yet.  I'll report on this again some day. 

 Some random thoughts on blogging tools and social media:

It's only been about a year that I have had a decent enough computer to really involve myself seriously in the wonders of the internet. I did have a high-speed connection before, but I was using an incredibly old and decrepit PC that really didn't have the processing capability for power-use of the interwebs. I couldn't even download files or play any videos without some kind of glitch or crash occurring, and this was after I actually installed more memory into it (and an ethernet port) from cannibalized remains of yet another dead computer. But about a year ago, my dad kicked in a bunch of money toward the cause of upgrading my tech, and I got this MacBook that I do all my work on now. That's about when I launched the M-Brane blog, also, and started the run-up to publishing the zine. I wouldn't even have tried any of that with the old machine. It was a good word processor and email receiver, but that was about it.

So I now have experience with three of these free blogging platforms. I started M-Brane on Blogger, where it still sits. I have this Live Journal, started just a couple months ago. And I am an admin on two WordPress blogs, Outer Alliance and GreenPunk (poor GreenPunk, how I've neglected you lately--new post coming soon!). My experience with WordPress is still fairly limited. I'm still learning its capabilities, but overall I feel good about it and think it's a quite good way to go. I have to say, however, that Blogger has really stepped up its game lately. The new post editor is fantastic, with a whole bunch of new and/or easier to use functions, not the least of which is easy placement and sizing of pictures within a post. It's much easier to lay out a post with more than one pic in it than it used to be.  On the other hand, Live Journal, where we are right now, is the clunkiest one as far as things like pics and layout go. It wants pics to be either linked to the post by URL from elsewhere on the web (like a Flickr folder or something) or linked from one's LJ Scrapbook. This is different than both Blogger and WordPress which allow for easy no-hassle uploading and inserting of pics directly from files on one's computer.  Also, it is very difficult (at least for me)  to achieve satisfactory placement of pics within a post here. Blogger, if using the new post editor, is hands-down the best nowadays for this, even easier than what I have experienced on those WordPress sites so far.

But that doesn't mean that I don't like LJ. Quite the contrary, it has its own kind of appeal. It has a social network feel to it that is a thing all its own, and I like that. It's fun to click on my friends page and be able to scroll through everyone's journals all on one page. Its aesthetic failings are compensated for, at least for me, by a sort of casual rough-and-ready ambience. This is probably partially a thing in my head caused by my own segmentation of my venues: when I started this Region Between journal, it became a kind of catch-all for thoughts that I wanted to express that did not really fit that well at the M-Brane site. So now the M-Brane page feels to me a bit more businessy and formal than it used to, while when I open up this LJ I feel like like I am kind of kicking back and being real casual.  This may be somewhat to the detriment of the other page, however, if it becomes too dull. But I have some thoughts on that and will be trying to get some more user-interactive content on there, like more discussion topics and guest bloggers and things of that nature. 

As for the social media stuff, I have become a lot more engaged with that than I ever expected I would, but the utility of it for supporting M-Brane and my other interests has become undeniable. So many more people know about me and what I'm doing because of Twitter than anything else.  Also, I have really been warming to Facebook. I really didn't like the look of it at first, did not want to get caught up in it, didn't really see the point of it, but bit by bit I have been getting more used to using it.  Also, it is very easy to use in a sort of auto-pilot mode by making it pick up your blog posts and Tweets (though there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to when it picks up a new LJ post, so I usually end up making a specific entry on my wall for those or sending them to Facebook via Twitter, using the Selective Twitter Status app).  I am now kind of glad that I was a bit late in coming to social media party, thereby missing the height of the MySpace period and the feeling that I ought to use that as well. I understand that it's still a very active place for some kinds of activities like music, but I find that I have less and less patience for it when someone gives me a MySpace link as their website and I have to wait and wait for the page to load because there is so goddamned much crap on it. I have a fast computer and a fast internet connection, so if it's taking an excruciating amount of time to open a page, it usually means that there is all kinds of crazy graphics and embedded music and a hundred big photos and fifty embedded YouTube videos and a lot of streaming marquees and the like. So I'm glad that MySpace is for what it's for, but that I don't really need to set up in it as part of my Media Empire.

And then there's Linked-In, which I know nothing about yet. I have an account on it and some people have friended me on it, and that's it so far. I haven't even looked at it for more time than it took to accept my friend requests. I keep forgetting about it (note to self: look at Linked In and see if you can figure out what's up with that.)

Wow. That was really boring in a real talking-about-websites kind of way. I wonder why I have so badly needed to write that for the last few days. Well, it's out of my system now!