Phrenology of the Whale

I was very excited today. My brother showed me some concept sketches for the front page of my Web site. Initially, since so much of my writing deals somewhat with anatomy and medicine—they are of a theme—I was hoping to use something like a picture out of an old anatomy book. This was quickly toned down, on the grounds that most people who aren't me find anatomical drawings creepy, and my writings on the subject are absurd, rather than scary. So I decided to go with a phrenology chart, and my brother—being brilliant as he is—took that one step further and came up with the idea of a phrenology chart for a sperm whale. He sent me a rough concept sketch today and I loved it. Fantastic, my brother is. I should add that he came up with this idea and executed it, all in a matter of hours.

Sunday I went to a potluck at my friends Mark and Adrienne's apartment. The theme for the party was "soul food," which immediately made me want to make collard greens, which immediately after made me realize I have absolutely no idea how to make collard greens. So I settled for making strawberry shortcake. I had absolutely no idea how to make an actual strawberry shortcake, mind you, but I had a reasonably good idea for how to improvise one. I started out by making a biscuit dough and adding about a cup and a half of sugar, instead of the teaspoon of salt that the recipe called for: my logic, of course, was that biscuits are really just a kind of shortbread and that, with enough sugar added, shortbread would become shortcake. It was flawless logic, except when I added the milk to the flour, rather than getting a nice sticky mass of gluten and butter chunks, I got a wet soupy glop. So I kneaded in a few more handfuls of flour until I had a sticky ball of something that was not exactly biscuit dough, but not cake batter, either.

When I was done with that I went to whip the cream for the filling, and since I don't have a mixer, and I didn't want to spend a half hour whisking at high speed, I decided to do it in the blender. This worked fine for the half-pint of heavy whipping cream that I bought, but it didn't whip enough air into the mix to cover the strawberries. So I bought another pint of lighter whipping cream, and started on that. After a few minutes, I heard a nice thunk from the blades of the blender, followed by another, followed by the appearance of ugly clots floating in the milk. "My God," I thought, "what on earth is that? That's the weirdest thing I've ever seen." So naturally, I tasted it. Butter. I had churned butter in my blender. It was like that parable with the two frogs in the milk, only substituting a blender for the frogs.

In the end, I went out and bought some RediWhip and the cake turned out fantastic. The bread portion, while not as biscuity or flaky as I had hoped, wasn't too dense either. It had something like the consistency of a scone. And the potluck was fantastic fun. A good mix of people, food, and wine.

The e-bay fiasco resolved itself yesterday. Well, it wasn't really resolved, so much as the Universe called a reset. I found the money order in my mailbox, marked Return to Sender. The guy selling the computer decided to relist it on e-bay, and under the advice of my roommate, I decided not to bid again. So I cashed the money order and deposited back into my savings today, and that leaves everything more or less back where it was when I started. Which is a good thing, I suppose. I kept wondering what I would do with two laptops.

Some links
I found A Softer World on Neil Gaiman's site a while ago and spent an hour or so addicted to their archives. Some of the cartoons are just sublime. They make me think that whoever makes this cartoon would be the kind of person to think they are better than me. I'm not entirely sure they'd be wrong.

I like the children's art exhibit at Dream Anatomy. Not to play favorites, or anything, but I especially liked Jacqueline Kantor's and Jenna Kantor's pictures. Jacqueline's reminds me of Alex Grey, whose paintings inspire a lot of my writing. Jenna's looks like a Basquiat painting; I'm not sure if that says a lot about Jenna's talent, or if it says a lot about Basquiat. Either way, I liked her drawing.

And if anyone is reading this who lives in Evanston or nearby, Tantalus is performing "Sinister Puppetmen of the Fabrication Gallery" at the Evanston Lakefill at 2:00 and 4:30 p.m. on this coming Saturday. If you can be there, please go. It's a fantastic show, and deserves to be seen.