These Big Picture pictures, clickable to allow you to see the before and after for last weekend's Earth Hour, are interesting because the smaller lights that don't go out completely change the composition and focus of the image.

A chance encounter hipped me to the fact that it was four years ago yesterday that Hargo built The Somerville Gates. At which point, the internet went crazy and 4 million people looked at The Somerville Gates' website in a week. The site had to be taken down to cool the viral internet's greedy bandwidth needs, but the entire installation is now happily back online where it should be. More coverage from The Boston Globe, Big RED & Shiny, msnbc.com, The New York Times, and of course Boing Boing.

Submitted without comment.





(Thanks, Alex.)

'We're All Gonna Die' is a photograph by Simon Høgsberg that is 100m X 78 cm. That's not a typo, 100 meters. "There are 178 people in the picture, all shot in the course of 20 days from the same spot on a railroad bridge on Warschauer Strasse in Berlin in the summer 2007. Only few of the people on the photograph seemed to know I was taking their picture.” I hope this gets installed somewhere sometime. It would be amazing to see. Check it out.

Some of Simon's other projects look really interesting also.

Actually, no. Tilt-shift photography from Flickr user B Tal.

(Edited to add: here's a review I did of the talk and the exhibit.)

Shepard Fairey is going to be at the ICA in Boston for his first solo museum exhibition from February to August, 2009. To celebrate, he was in Boston today laying some groundwork including the below at Grand in Union Square, Somerville. Right around the corner. I'm going to go check it out when I take out the garbage. Right now.

Day Time by Hargo.


Night Time by me.

Hmm. "Candied kumquats" sounds vaguely inappropriate.

Well, it's not! I was in a bizarrely citrus-y mood at Whole Foods yesterday; perhaps I have a vitamin C deficiency I don't know about? Whatever the reason, my shopping basket ended up looking like Carmen Miranda took a header into it. (Are Carmen Miranda fruit jokes deprecated yet?) I bought blood oranges, some kind of pink-fleshed orange called Caro Caro, Meyer lemons, and a pint of kumquats.

Elise from Simply Recipes posted a recipe for candied kumquats which turns out to be almost too easy: make a sugar syrup and cook some kumquats in it. The result? A Mason jar full of shiny, gooey, orange love. The kumquats taste like the best marmalade you ever had, and the syrup ain't too shabby in a cup of tea.

Yesterday was a big day. For one thing, it was my first day of school. Hooray for school! I'm feeling more educated already.

However, yesterday was also my third wedding anniversary. Yes, three years ago this morning Rachel and I were jumping in a lake. Three years might not seem that long, but since we'd been dating for seven years before we got married, 2007 is in some senses our tenth anniversary, which seems like a biggish deal. Just like last year, we decided to have a nice dinner in rather than a nice dinner out, and so I turned to my fanciest cookbook, The Elements of Taste by Gray Kunz and Peter Kaminsky.

(This is a really cool book, by the way. I picked it up for a song at a used bookstore in Northampton, and every recipe in it is guaranteed to impress the hell out of your guests. Last night was my second time making a recipe from the book: about a year ago I made the Braised Short Ribs of Beef with an Aromatic Barbecue Sauce. I'm kicking myself that there are no pictures of that meal, since the recipe is four damn pages long and people seemed to like it.)

We got another ridiculous haul of incredible tomatoes from Ledge Ends, so it was clear they'd be involved. I happened to flip the book open to:

Two-Tomato Coulis with Three Basils

Except here's the thing: I couldn't find purple basil, or basil flowers, but I did have a bag of fresh Ledge Ends green basil, so I just made:

Two-Tomato Coulis with One Rather Delicious Basil

The recipe for this is pretty ludicrously simple. Just chuck a whole bunch of red cherry tomatoes in a blender, and puree the crap out of them. Then do the same with some yellow tomatoes, and put both purees in a bowl with some basil, white pepper, and kosher salt.

The recipe called for 2 pounds each of red and yellow cherry tomatoes, which is ridiculous, so as I was only trying to make two servings I used a pound each, and supplemented the cherry tomatoes with some fabulous heirloom globe tomatoes. I also left out the sugar because, uh, I forgot it, but it didn't need any. Delicious, sweet, and garden-y.

This was by far the most visually striking thing I've ever prepared. So cool. When we started eating, we discovered that the colors stay separate even as you move them around a bit, so if I ever make this again I might go for swirlier patterns instead of just the yin-yang.



When we were in Maine a few weeks ago, Rachel reminded me how much she loves lobster so it seemed clear that would be in the main course. Kunz and Kaminsky provided:

Lobster in Syrah Reduction with Aromatic Grits

I mean, delicious, right? Not even too difficult to make.

The sauce is a piece of cake: sauté onions, garlic, shallots, carrots, and celery until soft, and then pour in a bottle of red wine. Reduce, strain out the vegetables, and reduce again until the sauce coats the back of a spoon. Whisk in some butter at the end, and you're good to go.

The grits were also easy and delicious. I couldn't find the quick-cooking grits the recipe calls for, but a pretty standard 4:1 milk and water to cornmeal ratio produced what I wanted. A little nutmeg and white pepper and butter go in at the end.

Finally the lobster: the hardest part was buying them, since Whole Foods apparently doesn't sell live lobsters any more. However, I was pleased to discover Captain's Catch in North Providence, which does, and has a pretty good looking seafood selection. Once I got the doomed fellows home, they were blanched in boiling water for 5 minutes, shocked in ice water, and relieved of their shells. (I now have a Ziploc back full of lobster parts ready for the stockpot.) Five to ten minutes in a 350 degree oven (with butter, of course) finished the cooking.

'Twas damn good, and we even had room left over for dessert:

Lemon-Basil Sorbet

I'd bookmarked this recipe for Lemon-basil vodka gimlets as they looked delicious and refreshing, and indeed they were, but the fact is I don't drink anywhere near enough vodka to use up all that syrup. As soon as I tasted it, though, I said: sorbet. Now, the syrup is way too sweet to make a sorbet on its own (and yes, I went through the trouble of making a batch to find that out) but with the juice of about four lemons added to it, it because perfect. Light, tart, with a subtle herbitude.



So, that's three years. Believe it or not, Rachel just gets better and better. Don't think for a second I fail to realize how lucky I am to have a wife willing to support us while I quit my job and sleep in every morning go back to grad school. A plate of lobster and a song are the least I can do.

Geek alert. I love my RSS feeds. Every blog needs a linky post and I've been charged with developing one for Unlikely Words. I promise the links contained in the semi-regular link posts were at one time interesting to me (and might be interesting to you) and I promise to post the link posts semi-regularly. (The previous sentence has already proven false as this post was started 3 weeks ago and I already have enough tabs for another post, let alone most of this stuff being outdated). Hopefully, most of these links will come from places other than Lifehacker, Boing Boing, and Kottke. I can't promse that, but maybe I can take solace in the idea that I’ll read overpublishing blogs so you don’t have to.

• I know Unlikely Words uses Word Press. But I started AABA on Blogger and Blog This makes creating linky posts very easy. Does Word Press have this?


• I hate 90% of the posts from Xeni on Boing Boing. She’s recently become a vegan and is fighting (I’d volunteer successfully) her desire to preach. This article is from Rolling Stone and talks about how nasty pig farms are. The excerpts were riveting. (Boing Boing)


• Rich people can do what they want with their money, but they should be helping out more. Even if Oprah’s school is over the top, at least she’s trying to make a difference. The counter to this argument is that she could have a bigger impact spending her money more wisely. (AMERICAblog)


• The Gates Foundations invests in companies that cause problems for some of the people they are trying to help. When the CEOs of Halliburton, Exxon, and Chevron give away giant percentages of their wealth to foundations that strive to make change in the world and those foundations don’t hold questionable financial positions, this story will OUTRAGE me a lot more. (I can’t remember.)


• I normally wouldn’t post a link about a guy asking for donations for a frivolous cause. But this guy got a bum X-Box and then had a hard time with the Customer Service. His goal now is to buy the biggest box he can afford to send his X-Box back for repair. This type of consumer ingenuity fills me with glee. (Consumerist)


• I don’t really go see live music anymore, but maybe I’ll start again. iConcertCal just might be the coolest iTunes add-on since… well, forever. Once a week, iConcertCal searchs your library and finds concerts in your area. (Lifehacker)


• Companies can’t keep paying skyrocketing health costs for long. Eventually, they’ll just get their own docters. Brilliant. (Marginal Revolution)


• If you’re afraid of giant rabbits, think you might be, or don’t want to read about how they might get used to end North Korea’s hunger problems, don’t click on this link. (Boing Boing)


• I aspire to be a better photographer. If I read this link, I might have a chance. (I can’t remember.)


• I asked Matthew to change Unlikely Words a bit so that I could better document my life. I have deep desires to document my life more fully. Feltron’s Annual Report is an inspiration to me. (Kottke.)


• These food rule models might be good for you if you want to become a more efficient food orderer. (Marginal Revolution)


• Ahhh, Rhode Island. (Boing Boing)


• This site allows me to create a map of all the states I’ve visited. Be careful, because I just might. You can also do countries as well, but that was less interesting for me. (Marginal Revolution)


• I wanted to read this article on the media documentation of a few New Yorkers, but I’m not as interested anymore. I might get back to it some day. (Kottke.)


• If we start needing to make energy out of corn will there be less corn in everyday food? Will that make us skinnier? (Freakonomics)


• The TSA has guidelines to help its staff ensure that helper monkeys are not carrying bombs. They let helper monkeys fly on planes? (Boing Boing)


• I don’t have enough pictures in Flikr for this to work well for me, but Matthew probably does. It was very slow, but very easy. (Lifehacker)


• Help charities without donating money. You know you want to. (Lifehacker)


• If you heard about this on NPR’s This American Life a couple weeks ago, now you can watch it on Youtube. A guy shoots the same movie 3 times with 3 different actors in the early 80’s. Incidentally, each of the 3 became stars. (Boing Boing)


• This article seems interesting, but I haven’t read it yet. Vanity Fair always seems to have long articles I want to read, but for which I don’t make the time. That says something about either me or Vanity Fair.