"She realized... how many applications there are for a panini press: griddling onigiri, charring cabbage, searing onions."

"Because there’s a lid to press down, she said, nothing requires flipping — unlike a plancha or a flattop. Without a fryer, Ms. Maeda bastes chicken wings with brown butter to 'mimic the unctuousness of fried items,' she said. There is no hood ventilation system, so she designed main courses that don’t produce much grease: rice cakes with mushrooms, broccoli and asparagus and brothy beans with garlic chive pistou. The slow cooker has been repurposed to marinate olives in fennel and citrus for an appetizer."

From "Hot-Plate Heroes: How 5 Restaurants Work Wonders With No Kitchen/Tight spaces with minimal equipment — often not even a stove — are loved by chefs who leverage the limitations to turn out thrilling dishes" (NYT)(lots more, plus pics, as that free-access link).

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "I'm reading 'Hot-Plate Heroes' in the NYT and wondering about the general situation of taking advantage of limitations. What are some other areas of human endeavor where the limitation is an inspiration? An obvious example is poetry. You don't have to write in the sonnet form, but you might do better with it. And also in living your life: Having a family."

From Grok's answer: "MUSIC. Constraints like using a single instrument or a short time limit inspire creativity. The 3-minute pop song format forces musicians to craft catchy, concise hits. Lo-fi genres, limited by basic recording tech, lean into raw, authentic sounds—think early Beck or modern bedroom pop."

Bedroom pop? Never heard of it. I went to Spotify and searched for "Bedroom pop" and was, at first, astounded to see that someone had assembled a 100-song playlist titled "Bedroom Pop." But then I saw my name:

"Made for Ann Althouse." Spotify assembled the list — in one second — just for me. "Dreamy melodies and hushed vocals." Could I have put any 2 words together and generated a playlist in that newly invented genre? I don't think so. I tried "Cruel Neutrality." I think Bedroom Pop is an actual genre. I go back to Grok to ask but wonder if Grok and Spotify are robots in cahoots and yanking my chain.

Chain yanked, I ask Spotify for music by Robots in Cahoots.

"In non-question mark [NYT crossword] clues, I think I actually laughed, or at least internally chuckled, when I finally got AFFAIRS at 32D: Business, either personal or otherwise."

"It seemed like such a dull clue at first, but then AFFAIRS gave 'Business' a sexual implication that I was not expecting. At least that's how I read the 'personal' part of the clue."



Text and video reference from Rex Parker, who always blogs the NYT crossword. I've watched that video before but still laughed about 20 times in less than 4 minutes. As for the crossword, it took Rex 9 minutes and 9 seconds of crossword time. Is that it? I took my time and kept it going for 13 minutes and 34 seconds. Why do men think it's better to get it done fast?

"The specter of Dickens’s ranting spinster — spurned and embittered in her crumbling wedding dress, plotting her elaborate revenge — casts a long shadow over every woman who dares to get mad."

Writes Leslie Jamison — in "I Used to Insist I Didn’t Get Angry. Not Anymore. On female rage" (NYT) — invoking Hillary Clinton:

In “What Happened,” her account of the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton describes the pressure not to come across as angry during the course of her entire political career — “a lot of people recoil from an angry woman,” she writes — as well as her own desire not to be consumed by anger after she lost the race, “so that the rest of my life wouldn’t be spent like Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations,’ rattling around my house obsessing over what might have been.”

Miss Havisham was "rattling around" over a marriage that never happened, so it's irksome to see her used as Hillary Clinton's point of reference. Hillary Clinton is all about a marriage that did take place, and it would be interesting to know what she would have been without Bill.

But the topic here is female anger.

If an angry woman makes people uneasy, then her more palatable counterpart, the sad woman, summons sympathy more readily. She often looks beautiful in her suffering: ennobled, transfigured, elegant. Angry women are messier. Their pain threatens to cause more collateral damage. It’s as if the prospect of a woman’s anger harming other people threatens to rob her of the social capital she has gained by being wronged. We are most comfortable with female anger when it promises to regulate itself, to refrain from recklessness, to stay civilized.

That's the discipline. If you're set on looking beautiful and commanding empathy, you've accepted the subordination and made yourself small. I think this is an important topic, and I like the photo illustrations at the link, but the essay is not to my taste. Quoting Hillary. Quoting this wretched nonsense from Audre Lorde: "I have suckled the wolf’s lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter." Wolf's lip??

Here's the whole Lorde essay, in case you think more context will help.

Wait a minute! I googled "wolf's lip" and got some major help from Urban Dictionary ("Picture the side of a dog's mouth, the back part with wrinkly skin and folds of dark moist flesh"). Did the NYT understand what it was quoting?!

IN THE COMMENTS: Rob said:

"[T]he sad woman, summons sympathy more readily. She often looks beautiful in her suffering: ennobled, transfigured, elegant." Now we know why Cory Booker publicly anguished about hurting and having tears in his eyes.

From last night's Cory Booker comments thread, Hoodlum Doodlum says "This one goes out to Corey and T-Bone" and points us here:



You might be asking, yes, but who's T-Bone. Answer: "Cory Booker’s Imaginary Friend" (National Review).

"If I had my druthers, Meet the Press would revert to the pre-Tim Russert formula of a panel of journalists interviewing newsmakers."

"I am at a loss as to why the show couldn’t revert to that (albeit with a roundtable discussion at the end). It would instantly win viewers from the right if that panel had right-of-center journalists in on the questioning (I have no doubt that one of the main reasons Gregory’s ratings have slumped is that he has zero credibility with right-of-center viewers."

Says Jonah Goldberg, and I guess I might agree but only because I miss Tim so damned much and I don't believe anyone can replace him. But David Gregory is sitting in Tim's seat without seriously trying to do what he did. Gregory is insipidly into his niceness. He doesn't belong there. It's painful. Can Chuck Todd get closer to the Russert ideal? Who knows?

I still think Chuck Todd looks like Murray on "Flight of the Conchords":

"The foolish leader, the two normal people who realize how foolish the leader is but are inhibited from saying so, and the creepy suck-up."

A template for fictional characters proposed by my son John in an iChat discussion about "Flight of the Conchords":

When I first saw the show, I felt like, "well, I'm not that interested in the two main characters, so I probably won't like the show very much."... It's weird for those 2 characters to be so central, yet I see almost no differentiation between them. In any given episode, Brett might be acting differently from Jemaine. But it doesn't seem to be part of any larger character trait — "oh, that's so Brett!"

I said: "sometimes having a bland center works as a plot device. i learned that when I studied 'tom jones' in high school." John said:

[Brett and Jemaine are] kind of like Jim and Pam on The Office. And Michael Scott is like Murray. And Mel is a lot like Dwight. Those 4 fit the same basic template.

So there's the more general idea of the dull central character (or characters) and the more specific idea of 2 bland central characters with 2 livelier characters, one of whom is the foolish leader and the other who's some kind of weird suck-up. Examples?

"Separated at Birth: Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords and Young Newt Gingrich."

"Woody Allen glasses, great lips, Davy Jones hair, and sideburns that refuse to play by the rules: we’ll take two, please! Gross! Just kidding, sort of."

"I'll go outside and get some leaves and pretend to be a tree..."

"You can be a squirrel and store my nuts for me."



"I Told You I Was Freekie"... just a Flight of the Conchords thing I thought you'd like... brought in by my "squirrel" Google alert.

"I feel like you're describing, you know, it could be Green Bay in Wisconsin."

That's what NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd said tonight responding to this word picture painted by Chris Matthews:

"Now imagine a town that's deindustrialized. You have the rotted, the rusty factory shell as you come into town. The Blockbuster and the diner being the only thing there with the gas station. Everything else is basically done. People living on checks. They don't really have jobs anymore...."

Green Bay is the third largest city in Wisconsin. A recent report in the Green Bay Press-Gazette was positive about the local economy. ("Northeastern Wisconsin manufacturers have adjusted well to competing in a global economy, providing continued opportunities for commercial and industrial lending... Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota... are not Michigan and Ohio, Midwestern states with more serious economic issues.") Yet these clowns picture nothing but a Blockbuster, a diner, and a gas station! Incredible! They're trying to provide fine-textured analysis of voting patterns in the state, but they seem to be reporting from an East Coast fantasy.

ADDED: Watch this "Band Meeting with Murray" clip from "Flight of the Conchords."



Doesn't Murray look just like Chuck Todd?

David Bowie and "Flight of the Conchords."

Since David Bowie popped up for almost no reason in the previous post, I thought I'd talk about how much I like the new HBO show "Flight of the Conchords" where David Bowie just popped up in Bret's dream:



Then, later, Bowie's in space:



Questions raised/issues spotted:

1. Do you like "Flight of the Conchords"?

2. What are some other songs about space? We've already implicitly cited this one:



And there's "Rocket Man." I was just listening to Elton John's "Rocket Man" the other day on my iPhone and thinking about William Shatner's "Rocket Man," when I walked through an archway into a courtyard and happened upon a gamelan performance. That was rather spacey.

3. Bret or Jemaine?

4. Hey, Mr. Spaceman, won't you please take me along for a ride?



5. What are the top 10 reasons why stories of alien abduction must be false?

6. Did you know that that the lyrics to "Mr. Spaceman" contain a key word for answering question #1 in the previous post?