For today, I refuse to get worked up about cartoons in the New York Post where the punch line is apparently “Black people are monkeys” or how depressing it is for the Obama Administration to continue some egregiously malevolent Bush anti-terrorism policies or how Goldman Sachs executives are openly stealing bailout money or how Detroit will have a population of 500 by 2020.
Here are links to nice things.
First, the EPA may regulate carbon dioxide. Really, they just have to or we’re all fucked. This is technically a minor good thing that relates to a strongly terrible thing, but we’ll take it.
Second, NYU students have occupied a floor of the Kimmel “student center.” I got my entire secondary education at that school, and Kimmel is a hideous trainwreck whose real purpose as the student union at a university with no campus is to boot students out for donor luncheons and special events, because NYU is actually a vast real estate empire with auxiliary teaching duties it maintains to keep up appearances.
I was on the speech and debate team and my freshman year (’99-’00) we had a practice space and an office — the bad old days. By the time I was in grad school (’04-’05), I had to coach the kids in an open lounge where everyone was talking and moving around. The more buildings NYU erects or conquers, the less space there seems to be. They’re like Robert Moses, building highways to eradicate traffic.
The students’ demands are a greate combination of considerate, radical and achievable. Opening Bobst Library to the general public is especially progressive. As of now, it’s a hermetically sealed Borg cube perched at the corner of Bloomberg Square Park. (When you graduate, you’re permitted to return only once.)
Third, the inebriated fun of the Bay to Breakers race might not go the way of Halloween in the Castro. (I realize the possible laziness of linking to the NYT from SF about an SF event, but googling it and searching wordpress didn’t come up with anything better).
Finally, delicious things. I want to make this.
And I’ve been making chocolate chocolate chip cookies compulsively since finishing the lemonade cleanse, and I think I’ve achieved jouissance. I follow this recipe with some variations.
First: instead of 1/4 tsp of salt I add a heaping 1/2 tsp. I swear nothing comes out tasting salty and the ability of salt to intensify the taste of everything is particularly effective with the butter.
Second: double the vanilla, from 2 tsp to 4. This enables you to cut back on the sugar by maybe 1/8 – 1/4 cup.
Third, I also substitute some brown sugar for a bit of the white, so that the total amount of sugar is a little more than 1 1/4 cups, of which at least half a cup is brown.
Fourth, nuke the butter till half of it is liquified. You really need to watch the microwave; no multi-tasking during this part! I like to compare sticks of butter melting to the implosion of the Twin Towers. Once it’s clear that the FDNY are all dead, stop the microwave.
Fifth, mix it by hand. It’s not hard, you have fewer utensils to clean and I really believe that a heterogeneous mixture–i.e., with little lumps of butter–is the shit. If you can’t tell, I love butter.
Sixth, refrigerate the batter until it’s as cold as the fridge. Sure, it’s a pain in the ass waiting and having stiffer batter, but if you’re like me, you actually make cookies as an excuse to eat raw dough anyway.
Just ate the last cookie.
Suck the Rainbow 