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[AugustWest]

So our band, OTIS, has its first gig on Saturday.  Very short notice, I found out at about 7 tonight.  We've been practicing, off and on, for about 3 years now and it looks like the big night is almost here.  I'm nervous cause I'm pushing the envelope a little bit with this, playing leads and gulp singing.  But what the hell?  We're going to rock our (tiny little) city.  One more thing checked off the bucket list.  If you happen to be within a few hundred miles of Frankfort, KY on Saturday night, stop on in!

Now I must return to frantically memorizing Neil Young lyrics.  Damn his meandering!  Anybody spare some Adderall?

[wombat]

I think three years of rehearsal is more than adequate. Have fun!

[Carlos del Vaca]

Do you like big butts? Don't lie to me.

AW, I'm sure you'll be awesome. In my return to playing live music I've found that about half the battle is showing up, just being willing to get up there and do it. The other two quarters are preparation and talent. You've definitely got the prep covered, and I'll wager you all have sufficient talent as well. Do it, have fun, people will dig it.

We played an open mic last night and ended up being out until 1 AM, which kind of sucks this morning. But we got invited back to do an hour next month, and possibly a full Thursday or Friday night gig to follow. So that's coming along.

[theinevitable]

I like the butts, yes.

AW, you are gonna rock it. I don't know if I've ever been as exhilarated as when I've played music in front of people. Doing it with people you've practiced with for years should be even better.

My roommate saw me unpacking groceries and expressed the opinion that it's impossible to make good Indian food at home. I must finally be kind of confident in my cooking because that just made me smile and say "wait 'til you taste it."

[pmcd9]

My roommate saw me unpacking groceries and expressed the opinion that it's impossible to make good Indian food at home.

I wonder how the Indians do it.

[Carlos del Vaca]

My roommate saw me unpacking groceries and expressed the opinion that it's impossible to make good Indian food at home. I must finally be kind of confident in my cooking because that just made me smile and say "wait 'til you taste it."

I can make good Indian food at home, but not great Indian food. I have a couple of Indian cookbooks, and while I get decent results, everything tastes like "Indian food" and the dishes don't have distinct individual tastes. I'm sure if I made a couple of them and had them side by side I could tell differences, but on a meal-to-meal basis I might as well be making the same thing every time.

Paul, that's just it, I don't know how they do it. I have NEVER made butter chicken or chicken tikka masala that was as good as what I get at a restaurant. But I got to try a homemade version from a friend of a friend and it was freaking perfect. Apparently he doesn't measure his spices--he just has this big spice rack next to the stove and dumps in whatever he thinks he needs as he goes. That can't be taught, really.

[AugustWest]

I wonder how the Indians do it.

They go next door to cook.

[theinevitable]

This recipe is awesome. But I also bought a bunch of cumin seeds and coriander seeds and other whole spices from the cheap international grocery store, so curry might be in our future.

[pmcd9]

Fuck dude, makes me want to visit just for the cooking smells.

No, not the smells. I avoided trying Indian food for probably 20 years because of the cooking smells. When I traveled for work I spent many a night in Indian run hotels. Often their living quarters were just behind the lobby. Ugh, that smell! How can something smell so rank, yet taste so delicious? It's like the inverse of coffee, which smells delicious, but tastes horribly bitter.

[theinevitable]

That has not been my experience when cooking Indian food. It always smells great to me.
The one cooking smell I can't stand is giraffe sauce. And even that turns into a much better smell over time.

I wonder if it has to do with the source of the smell. Maybe when it's coming from your own kitchen it smells great, and when it's from someone else's it smells bad.

[theinevitable]

Today, I was told to look up my record collection (especially early 2000s stuff) on ebay and discogs (an online record-auction site). I am rich, you guys. Everyone wants early 2000s garage rock singles. I have one record that I never even opened that is worth $100.

OK most of them are worth $1 and a few are worth $10, mostly just that one surprised me.

[pmcd9]

That has not been my experience when cooking Indian food. It always smells great to me.

Now that I love Indian I don't. Notice  the bad smell anymore. I'm not sleeping in fleabag Indian run whorehouses anymore so I'm not really exposed to it anymore. The Indian restaurants I go to don't smell bad to me so maybe it's something else and not the curry. I can't imagin what though.

[theinevitable]

Went to meet up with a friend in Queens for the New York Art Book Fair. Being a country bumpkin, I naively assumed it would be people selling books about art. Maybe I could find some cool architecture or planning books. Nope. That is not what it was. Good people-watching, at least.

Spent a lot of time on the train or the subway train or a bench in the subway reading this History of Planning textbook. Good job, textbook, you have successfully convinced me that city planning is pretty bad. Also that there are some good reasons to hate the suburbs, but most of them are just being a snob. Still struggling with that one.

[wombat]

You said something a while ago on Twitter about reading a terrible article that I wanted to reply to, but couldn't get it down to 140 characters, and now I can't remember what you said, but what it made me think of was this - I didn't realize till much too late that reading bad articles is a really important part of graduate education. I didn't realize it till after I'd left teaching and one of my grad students told me many years later that they'd had this conversation and realized in retrospect that what I did wrong as a teacher was that I only had them read great articles. The thing is, sure those articles are role models. But you actually also have to have role models for what is terrible, if you're really going to know the difference.

And also - the thing I really get now - they felt like they could never write articles that good. Because they weren't seeing what's out there that it is so easy to exceed. And now basically this is what keeps me going as a writer through repeated rejection - I know for a fact that people much worse than me are getting published. But I didn't realize at the time how important that was, despite the fact that many of my memories of grad school are about sitting around tearing apart some article we thought was garbage.

[theinevitable]

Oh, I phrased that ambiguously-- this textbook is well-written, and is tearing Planning apart as a discipline. It is successfully convincing me (and I already largely thought this) that Planning does a pretty bad job of the things it wants to do. There was a long chapter on the theory of planning that basically concluded "we have still not figured out, on a philosophical level, what planners should do and how they should do it." People do better if they have free reign than if things are planned completely, but not as well as if there were some guidelines, but whatever guidelines you make are going to distort things and only create new problems. The problem of planning is that different people want different things, and you kind of have to pick who gets what they want. If you try to avoid picking, the default is "poor and possibly also middle-class people lose."
Also, planners don't actually have that much power to decide things, and mostly implement politicians' decisions. I had thought about these problems before, but reading hundreds of pages about it was discouraging even if it was interesting.

But yeah, we did that a lot when I was a cognitive science major-- read papers and talk about what was wrong with them. It is definitely a great way to learn.