. . . I guess, technically, that was a success. . . .

Note to self: when brewing yeast-fermented sodas, that method of jump-starting the yeast? Actually works.

[Wipes homemade ginger ale off of face, hands, shirt, counter, and sink.]

I've just started reading Harold McGee's On Food And Cooking

I am loving this book, and I'm also frustrated by it. I'm only on the first part of the first chapter -- milk and cream; I've not even gotten to yogurt let alone cheese -- and there have already been several places where McGee is saying that the mechanism behind basic things is yet unknown -- like what exactly it is that keeps casein in separate micelles, and which is removed by rennet allowing the casein to coagulate into curds. Or exactly how butter forms.

The thing is -- this is a book from 1984, and is one of the very first systematic treatments of the subject. So in the last quarter-century, I'd assume that a lot of progress has been made in this stuff -- I know that in general, the development of chaos theory has vastly helped with the modeling of turbulence and foams, so I'd assume that we have better models and tools to understand things like whipping cream and churning butter.

Has there been a follow-up to this work, or an expansion filling in the gaps that McGee is listing as "Here There Be Dragons?" I mean, I'd assume that many thousands of scientifically and mathematically minded folks who are interested in food have read this book. So I'd assume that many thousands of people have been frustrated by this exact thing. So I'd assume that at least a few thousand people have tried to do some research to answer these questions over the past quarter-century.

A quarter century of work by thousands of curious people can uncover a HELL of a lot of new knowledge. Has this been collected anywhere in a second volume or an appendix or something?

On why ONG-BAK: THE THAI WARRIOR worked in every way that TRANSFORMERS didn't.

Ong-Bak was a 2003 film that I'd intended to see in the theaters, but never got around to. It was on sale for pretty cheap, so I picked it up, and I'm glad I did.

I was thinking about what makes a good movie, or, really, a good story for me. For me, I need at least one protagonist who I respect -- someone who has something noble in him or her or itself. I need people to not be overtly stupid in ways that are TOO out of character for them. I need actions to have consequences -- if you're going to have a car chase through a city with cars flipping all over the place, I want the ramifications to be clear-- I don't want to see three buses blow up, and then be expected to be happy because the one minivan in which we can see the face of a little kid and a puppy DOESN'T fall off the cliff, although forty other cars just like it did . . .

That doesn't mean that I can't like a movie in which forty cars DO blow up, or in which cities are destroyed, or in which 95% of the population of the Earth is killed -- I just want those things to have effects on the characters and on the world. I want acknowledgment that people in the world who don't actually have names in the credits are still people. Hell, I've even been mollified by a little talking head on the news saying something like, "In the aftermath of the city-destroying battle, three people were treated for minor scrapes and bruises, and a small kitten needed its tail splinted. We'll be keeping you updated on the kitten's condition . . . " You know -- just SOMETHING so I don't have to imagine all the death and horror that the movie itself doesn't care about. And I don't have to wonder why the filmmakers don't care.

TRANSFORMERS has characters who I'd started out respecting, but everybody acted enough like an idiot that, by the end of the film, they'd lost that part. And everybody acted like an idiot. And lots of innocent people died, some for laughs. (Shia LeBeauf is running through the city, with the All Spark, which has the power to bring machines to life -- the problem being that, if this is done in an uncontrolled manner, they're just mindlessly hostile. He falls against a car. Cut to inside the car, where two Valley Girl types are. "Did that dork just dent my car?" And the steering wheel grows claws and reaches out to rip off her face. Now, THAT'S comedy, right?)

I'd have to time it, but I would bet that ONG-BAK has the same amount of violence and action as TRANSFORMERS. It also has two people who clearly die, and two people who might, all of which are dramatically appropriate. The bad guy's death is thematically appropriate, poetically just, and ironic. Now, of course, in REAL life, that much blunt trauma causes permanent damage or death, but, for a martial arts film in which the characters are NOT using lethal attacks, I'm willing to accept that it's all "stun damage" as we say in HERO system.

There are, I think, five guns in the movie. Three are taken away from goons with a surprise attack; one is just shown. Only one is fired. Guns are FAR more menacing in this movie -- the good guy has to back off at one point because a bad guy just shows one. No matter how superhuman he is, he's not bulletproof and he knows it.

The weapons used are knees, elbows, boards, tables, chairs, and, once, a big bowl of ground dried Thai hot peppers. (Yeah. You ever wonder how to make that "sand in the face" trick REALLY effective?)

And then, let's get to the huge, glaring main thing here.

I remember when CGI was awesome. 1986, for instance with "Luxo, Jr.". Yeah, seeing that baby lamp playing with that ball? That was cool. 'Cause we were sitting there going, "WOAH! Look at the RAY TRACING on that! See? They've got SURFACE REFLECTIONS! And SHADOWS!"

Yeah. THAT was cool.

But CGI hasn't been awesome since 1995. Sure, TOY STORY was awesome partially because it was CGI. But nobody went to see TOY STORY 2 because it was CGI -- you went for Buzz and Woody and the story. CGI, by that point, was just a tool.

Hollywood hasn't seemed to realize this. I'm pretty sure that Michael Bay still thinks that CGI is awesome.

It's not.

However, a person running at an obstacle that is higher than their head, and jumping, and twisting their body so that they get over the obstacle through sheer athletic ability?

Awesome.

It was awesome when the Minoans and Etruscans did it, it was awesome when it was a qualification for entry into the war-band of the Fianna in Celtic mythology, it was awesome when jongleurs in the Middle Ages did it, or warrior monks in ancient China, or acrobats in the nineteenth century United States. It's awesome when Jet Li, David Bell, Jackie Chan, or Tony Jaa does it.

It will continue to be awesome as long as unmodified human beings exist. If, at some point, the only way to HAVE an unmodified human being is to call up the template for one, build it, and download your personality matrix into it, if you do that, then exercise that body enough to be able to do this, and then do it -- it will STILL be awesome.

Real live people demonstrating real live athletic skill, showing their ability to push real live human bodies to do things that are within the bounds of physics, but only just -- that will ALWAYS be awesome.

And that's why ONG-BAK is a good movie, and TRANSFORMERS isn't.

Nine years ago today:

I stood under a chuppa, and I said the following things to Lis:

I pledge myself to you -- body, mind, and spirit. I promise to respect, honor, and cherish you. I promise to listen to you and be trustworthy towards you. I promise to be honest with you. I promise to support you physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

I promise to stand by you and to back you up. I promise never to shame you. When we fight, I promise to fight fair.
I pledge that, as of this day, I shall put us as a couple, and any children that we have, above all else. I pledge that our family will be my primary concern. And I pledge to provide a Jewish household for our family.

In all things, I promise to be your equal and opposite -- the other half of our now-mended soul that was split at the beginning of time and is only today being made whole.

Without you, I am not complete.

Every year at this time, I look back at these promises, and try to check how I'm doing, and what needs work. Obviously, a lot of this, Lis needs to grade me on, but I need to check myself against these things, too.

It's too obvious to need to be said, but it nonetheless needs to be said: making those vows was the best thing I ever did.

I think I do well with the first two sentences: I AM pledged to Lis, and I do think that I respect, honor, and cherish her. I listen to her, and it's sometimes difficult -- when I screw up and hurt her, she has to tell me, and I get defensive. It's something I work on, and I think I do pretty well, actually listening, understanding, and incorporating what she says, even if I'm feeling defensive. Being trustworthy I'm also doing better at. When I was seriously depressed, I would find myself lying, saying that I was doing better than I was. . . "Of COURSE I made those phone calls. But, um . . . nobody was in." I've stopped that.

And being honest with Lis is, in some ways, the counterpart to listening -- I'm responsible to tell Lis if I think there's a problem. And I think I'm doing fairly well at that, too.

I do well supporting Lis emotionally and spiritually, but I need to be bringing in more money to be keeping up my part of the "supporting physically" part.

We have decided that the "standing by you and back you up" part DOES allow me to, in private, tell Lis when I think she's wrong in a conflict -- that's part of the "being honest" part. But I CANNOT, and do not, cut her down in public by telling her she's in the wrong, unless both parties ask me to be a judge. And that is also part of the "never shame you" part.

I've screwed that one up occasionally. I have put Lis on the spot where she's ended up looking bad -- it's always accidental, but it's something I watch out for and try to do better.

"Fighting fair" is hard. It is so difficult to not pull in outside topics when we're arguing about ONE thing. "Yeah, I failed to do X, but there was this one time that I was doing something completely unrelated and something totally unrelated to that happened and you were wrong back THEN." When I'm fighting, I want to win, and that means that I want to prove that I'm right and that Lis is wrong.

But I do it. It's hard. But I manage it mostly. If I have a problem, it's that I tend to sit there and just take it in like a lump in arguments rather than fighting back, until I figure out something I can yell about that I think is actually RELEVANT to the problem. It ALSO means that I have to 'fess up when something IS my fault, and that sucks. So, given the level of difficulty of this vow, I think I do DAMN well.

We don't have any children, but I do prioritize Lis above everything else. I think I've got that one nailed.

Providing a Jewish household . . . I don't know how well I do about that. We don't do Shabbos dinners; we don't go to shul very often. We do keep kosher within the house. I think that's an area on which I really need to work.

I also need to be doing more in order to be a proper opposite half to Lis. My depression is largely under control, but in order to be a proper other half to Lis, I need to be taking on more. She does more than half the work in this relationship -- she brings in the money AND does some things around the house. If I did a better job maintaining the house, if I maintained the house to the standard which Lis deserves, we'd be a lot closer to managing this equality. OR if I worked more OUT of the house and brought in more money, that could ALSO be a way to manage equality.

The trick here, the important part of this vow, is to be a person that Lis can, and does respect.

These vows require me to be a good enough, competent enough, and skilled enough person to match up to Lis. And that's a pretty high bar. But she's worth it.