Little Baby Calendar was a young prodigy, much like Mozart, only smarter. Legend has it that when Little Baby Calendar was very young (they didn’t know how old he was, since years hadn’t been invented yet), he invented time. Then, continuing his master work, he went on to invent days, weeks, months and years. In his playful times (since he was a baby, after all) he invented leap years. As he grew older, he invented hours, minutes and seconds, and dictated to the world the proper times to eat the daily meals, and when to have tea. Before this, people just shoved food into their mouths whenever they were hungry, instead of using the civilized concept of the meal, as we do today.

So as you can see, we all owe a lot to Little Baby Calendar, and if we continue to celebrate his birthday once a year, on the beginning of each of his years, he will bless us, and not rain fire upon us. For he who takes Little Baby Calendar’s name in vain shall suffer the ultimate curse of the 16 hour work-day.

Now its time to get drunk, bye.

Have a good day, remember what you are thankful you have, and how you’d feel if it was all taken away from you.

As “Billy”:http://www.billyk.com says, “i hope everyone eats a lot and has their land taken away from them”.

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Click for larger image

Different taste systems evolved to help us get the nutrients we need. Our sweetness receptors let us know when we are eating enough sugars. We crave them because we need it. Salty sensors let us know if we are getting the required minerals with our food. Sour and bitter detectors help us identify potentially hazardous substances, such as poisonous fruits or bugs, which are likely to be acidic or alkali. Umami is our ‘protein’ taste. It is the flavor of free amino acids, particularly glutamates. In fact, MSG (monosodium glutamate), the sodium bound version of the glutamate molecule, was originally invented to enhance umami flavor. It makes sense that we would have taste receptors for umami, because our bodies need these amino acids, since they are the basic building blocks for proteins our body needs. To detect them and find them ‘delicious’ helps us get enough.

Umami is hard to describe in part because it is hard to identify compounds that are umami tasting. Salt is easy, we have pure table salt (sodium chloride) to taste. For sweet we have pure sugars, like glucose, fructose and sucrose. For bitter, alkaloids like those found in coffee are easily found. For sour, we have the acidic juice of a lemon. The numerous compounds that all contribute to umami are not as well understood, and not as readily isolated.

For comparison, imagine if pure sugar did not exist, and the sweetest things we had were carrots and milk. In that case, ‘sweetness’ would be as difficult to pinpoint and describe as umami is. Definitely there, and definitely playing part, but difficult to separate from its surroundings. There are few things in which umami is the dominant taste, and hence it is hard to clearly identify in the mind. But once aware of its presence, you can begin to taste more discriminatorily, looking for the similar taste in various umami rich foods.

If you wish to taste umami, look to fermented products. One of the richest sources of umami is fermented fish sauce, common in asian cooking. The sauce has a terribly pungent odor that feels like getting slapped in the face with a fermented anchovy. However, when cooked, the odors all cook off, and you are left with a very large quantity of amino acids, giving a strong umami flavor to the food. This accounts for much of the richness and savory flavor in what would be an ordinarily bland Thai dish. Umami is also found in some wines, aged cheeses, fermented soy sauce, aged meats, mushrooms, and certain vegetables, like asparagus. If you’ve ever wondered why anchovy is in caesar salad dressing, then now you know the answer. Simple vegetables take on a much richer and complex flavor with just a little umami. This is why caesar is one of the most popular salad dressings in the US.

This evening, as an experiment with umami, Barb, Dennis, Berg and I made a batch of Pad Thai noodles. Normally fish sauce is used (to give an umami flavor to normally not-very-savory tofu, noodles, and onion), but as a vegetarian, I needed another source of umami. We experimented with mushroom sauce, which is a salty, umami rich sauce derived from mushrooms. Used like fish sauce, it is very pungent, but leaves behind a rich flavor that is quite delicious.

Next time you are cooking a meal, think about your sources of umami, meats, aged cheeses, mushrooms, fermented sauces like fish sauce, mushroom sauce, fermented soy products like tempeh and soy sauce, and vegetables like asparagus and to a lesser degree, tomato. For a good non-asian example, imagine the goodness arising from pasta, cooked tomato sauce (cooking brings out much of the umami flavor in the tomato), and aged parmesan or romano cheeses. What would be pretty ordinary flavors come alive with the rich, savory flavor of umami. A little knowledge of this newly understood flavor can make your cooking experience much more effective.

Eat with pleasure.

He will be remembered as a hilarious and entertaining aspect of punk rock. He embodied persistence, individuality, and the spirit of doing what you love, no matter what people think about it. Rock on Chicago, rock on Wesley Willis.

Saturday night however, Berg and I engaged in another sort of fun. On a whim, we went out and bought airbrushes and some paint. The airbrushes were aquired at “Harbor Freight Tools”:http://www.harborfreight.com for 5 bucks a piece. A few more dollars for fittings and paint, and we had them connected to my air compressor, and were doodling on a big piece of oriented strain plywood in the back yard. After some more practice, our next project will be to paint my bicycle. The bike is good, but it has no paint, since someone decided to remove all the paint with a sander long before the bike entered my possession. The frame is aluminum, so the lack of paint isn’t a problem, but it presents a nice blank canvas for some airbrushing. Disassembly will be necessary in order to protect vitals such as brakes and drive train, but the drivetrain needs serious work anyway, and the hubs all need rebuilding, so those can be done at the same time.

If you’d like to see our oh-so-pretty practice board, here are the photos. You can tell that we only have two colors of paint so far. Black and blue. However, flourescent colors are going to be purchased for the bike.

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Click for larger image

The dream itself was of me reading a book in bed. In reality, I had recently been reading one, but it wasn’t in my hands anymore. The strange thing though was that it was a pop-up book with 3-D pictures of women. The women were wearing old fashioned clothing, and were posing as if modeling it. I started to get disturbed when I realized that every single woman had the face of former president Dwight D. Eisenhower. The founder of our national interstate highway system was smiling back at me from numerous images of posing pop-up women. It was very strange, but the dream ended as soon as it began. The whole dream was probably encased within a less than 60 second block, but it felt like a long time. It was very real, and I experienced a strong sense of confusion as I slid out of the dream and back into a more wakeful mindset, and I realized that I was no longer holding the book. I tried to remember where I had set it down, when I realized that I didn’t have a pop-up book of Ike Eisenhower wearing women’s clothing, not to mention the fact that such a book probably doesn’t exist anywhere.

P.S. If you have such a book, or know where I could find one, I’d be much appreciative.

I need to go over to Billy’s to test some video stuff for this weekend, and then I would like to go see Caroline and Dan and probably Barb over at Caroline’s place. However, the beer I consumed requires a delay, during which I will make this post and do other crap around the house until I am sober enough to drive to Billy’s. Oh yeah.

Also, Barb, if you read this, you should “email me”:/contact.shtml your phone number so we can hang out. I have no way of contacting you right now! There is chilling that needs to be done, and snacks that need to have us get them on, etc.