Roasted Brussels Sprouts

Starring: brussels sprouts, RantMom, RantWoman and RantWoman's home tech support services, miscellaneous kitchen equipment, and idiosyncratic interactions with the world-wide web and the general culinary milieu.

RantMom was holding forth this morning about a roasted vegetable dish she was served with a cafe lunch special The Roasted Vegetable ensemble included brussels sprouts, rutabagas, turnips, and RantWoman thinks carrots. RantMom opined that she really did not see the point of roasting brussels sprouts. RantWoman thinks roasted brussels sprouts sound GOOD but RantWoman conceded that it probably would not have occurred to her to try that combination together.

The conversation digressed for a bit about roasted root vegetables; RantWoman is aware from some friends of Finnish extraction that there is a famous Finnish dish involving carrots, rutabagas, maybe nutmeg and cream or butter. In general RantWoman would probably rather roast the turnips and rutabagas separately, not just dump them into stew as RantMom was formerly wont to do. The conversation could have digressed further about purchase of a custom vegetable roaster, but, sorry marketers, RantWoman and RantMom both being of modest circumstances, we like as not would just use the broiler pan or another decent baking pan.

But back to brussels sprouts: RantWoman and RantMom both like brussels sprouts fine just steamed with maybe a little salt, pepper, possibly lemon juice if desired. RantWoman even recently steamed up her latest brussels sprout supply just like this for an afternoon snack. RantWoman also recently heard a guest on The Splendid Table talking about pickled brussels sprouts with a hint of mustard. Maybe RantWoman will go dig up that recipe; maybe not.

Here we come to various realities of the Rants' lives: RantMom gets a lot of recipes from printed editions of the newspapers. This is, cough, increasingly difficult as the economics of printed newspapers go way south and RantMom also was forced to cancel her subscription. RantMom also shops the remainder racks and sometimes gets cookbooks, but actually setting foot in a real bookstore MIGHT be just too much temptation for RantMom.

RantWoman knows the public library also has lots of cookbooks. RantWoman suspects that RantMom could use a little cheerleading about interacting with one of several easily accessible branches of the Seattle Public Library . However, besides RantWoman's lately acquired difficulty reading most cookbooks, the other problem about checking out cookbooks is that actually using checked out cookbooks is conceivably incompatible with anything in RantMom's or RantWoman's order of messmaking while cooking.

(We further digress: there exist large print cookbooks. RantWoman can usually read them, but they offer nowhere near the variety of the mainstream cookbook market. There also exist Braille cookbooks, assuming RantWoman wants to give her halting Braille-reading skills a workout, but these suffer from the same problem as the large-print selection, Braille cookbooks embossed on paper suffer the same durability in a kitchen environment problems as printed library books, but at least they belong to the cook...)

Enter the Internet, the search bar, assistive technology and sundry related issues. For instance RantMom is using an outdated, quite underpowered machine with a relic of an operating system. RantWoman is not a fairy godmother on the system replacement front. RantWoman sometimes does cheerleader sessions telling RantMom what to look for on the screen and what to do once she finds it. Anyone who thinks this sounds easy should put on a blindfold and try it with your own parents.

Sometimes RantMom needs to call tech support for something or other. RantWoman in fact encourages her to do this since RantWoman considers "user-friendly liveware" part of what one pays for with the DSL bill. Outsourcing tech support to places where the local English vernacular would best be called foreign grad student is all the rage. RantMom is mostly proud her offspring have spent a lot of time in the company of imported educational consumers, but RantMom herself is just not so flexible about capacity to comprehend the worldwide phonetic and philological stew that is modern English.

RantMom usually makes it through just a couple rounds of eccentric accents and hold menu hell. Then she calls up RantWoman with an offer of bribery, say homemade soup in exchange for English-to-English interpretation and futzing.

The most recent round of all this had to occur because RantMom's DSL decided to exit for some unknown reason, so there was not even any search bar for RantMom to be challenged by. RantWoman thinks RantMom tends to do pretty well if someone emails her a link. Sometimes RantMom will even remember there is a search bar to help her find things on a website. Most of the time though, RantMom would definitely rather interact by phone and leave the searching to RantWoman, who of course cannot Google at top speed because it all gets fed through the screen reader.

Take our Brussels sprouts which RantWoman actually meant to editorialize about a bit before posting but now will simply be content to proofread properly.


http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Baked-Brussels-Sprouts/Detail.aspx


http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Brussels-Sprouts-in-Mustard-Sauce/Detail.aspx


http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Brussels-Sprouts-and-Chestnuts/Detail.aspx


http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Brussels-Sprouts-Supreme/Detail.aspx


http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Brussels-Sprouts-Salad/Detail.aspx

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Browned-Brussels-Sprouts-with-Orange-and-Walnuts/Detail.aspx

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Brussels-Sprouts-Stir-Fry/Detail.aspx


All these variations, the online recipes wind up being like a figured bass in Baroque music: we look at the concepts and then just adapt to our tastes. For instance RantWoman and RantMom know how to make a cheese sauce we like. Red Peppers and potatoes sound like good things to combine with brussels sprouts; so do blue cheese and a variety of nuts. NO matter what Julia Childs says about butter, there just is NOT going to be much of it in RantMom's kitchen and olive oil will roast fine, thank you very much! And so on....

The World Wide Spray Can

RantWoman is cataloguing lexicography:

Crip: gang-banging thug, member or wannabe member of gang-banging formation by this name. Known for secret handshakes (see gang signs and refrain from lexicographical digressions about other uses of "sign"), coded clothing, vicious induction rituals and other disagreeable behaviors, some directed at members of the public, and periodic bouts of witless gunplay mainly directed between themselves and rival formations

Crip: historically derogatory term for some categories of people and now appropriated by some denizens of the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing for, well, obvious reasons unrelated to geography or turf wars or mindless gunplay.

Tagging: graffitti. Application of graffitti to buildings, signs, public and private property to demarcate territory or occasionally out of allegedly artistic motivations

Tagging: assignment of labels to visual or structural elements of webpages or documents to make descriptions available to visually impaired users or other computing processes.


Interpretation test: now interpret the following sentence into the target language of your choice. (If the interpretee actually says it, the interpreter is of course exempt from all contaminations of political incorrectness.)

A bunch of crips on the way to a workshop about tagging ran into a bunch of Crips tagging the bus stop.


For the culinary-minded:
Orzo: small rice-shaped pasta

Ouzo: anise-flavored liqueur
Which do you suppose is more likely to be on the lunch menu at RantMom's weekly volunteer gig?

Metro: the sky is indeed falling

Hot off the Metro website, this week's release about possible cuts in Metro's service.

February 23 News Release on Metro budget situation

Misery does NOT love company and the long list of other places facing similar problems is cold comfort. RantWoman thinks cuts in bus service for the 50% of riders who depend on the bus to get to work are ducky if there are no jobs to go to anyway, but is generally scratching her head about how on EARTH anyone plans to have an economic recovery if people cannot get around to work and spend money.

On the POSSIBLE upside, would cuts in Metro services suck any more air out of some overheated real estate prices or would the cuts just bubble up prices for stuff in some locations to even more ridiculous levels? RantWoman does not even want to guess.

RantWoman does recommend that fans of Metro find the comments pages and send in any and all testimonials. Who knows what will finally get people's attention?

Plug in the television?

Tonight RantWoman is reading less-than-critical email. It's not that RantWoman lacks other things she should be doing. It's not that RantWoman doesn't even have things due TOMORROW. But RantWoman already put in an almost full day and is unwinding slightly. Turns out she is also rebelling against the Obama speech. That of course would totally be fair game, but thanks to the miracles of email, RantWoman is recycling the old doings of some other politicians.

The topic of RantWoman's reading: the February email newsletter of Lighthouse International, called At-a-Glance. The fact that February is almost over is the least of the problems. RantWoman is vexed not to be able to figure out a precise link to the monthly newsletter and will have to make do with the home page Lighthouse International in NYC RantWoman highly recommends wandering this site at your leisure because there is a lot of good material here.

The good news is that while wandering around trying to find the newsletter, RantWoman found a link she had misplaced full of suggestions about how to make material more visually accessible. Lighthouse International Recommendations on Accessibility RantWoman thinks many people who perpetrate visual presentations would do well to make this page and the links on it a religion. Enough said?

The other thing RantWoman found, the thing that set off this post was references to a December 2008 sketch on Saturday Night Live featuring well-known legally blind NY Governor David Paterson as rendered by one of the current SNL cast.

SNL Does David Paterson--the actual clip

RantWoman confesses, she missed the sketch the first time around not only because she tends to be asleep at the time SNL comes on but also because, well, RantWoman does not even plug in her television. The sordid details of this reality might be grist for another post. Tonight we address humor.

RantWoman notes that the sketch got mentioned in the newsletter because a lot of people seem to think it is not funny. Google SNL+Paterson for details. The governor himself was quoted as saying he does not mind if people make fun of him personally, but the problem, when the unemployment rate among disabled people is several times even current recession levels among most workers, is anything that tars all disabled people with the same brush.

RantWoman thinks not only is the sketch funny, it's hilarious, tasteless on multiple grounds but hilarious. Making fun of New Jersey is a well-known staple of New York humor. RantWoman has spent a good bit of time in NJ, more actually than in NY. RantWoman has lived in NJ long enough to be able to tell the difference between an urban Joisey accent and a south Jersey accent. RantWoman knows what people mean when they ask "Which exit?" RantWoman has even been to Trenton, the state capital, and more than once at that. The NJ references in this sketch crack her up--although she supposes in this context she should be careful about overusing the word "crack" too.

Then there are the bits about disabled people. Some of the denizens of the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing say much more tasteless things about themselves and each other to our own faces on a regular basis. The Friendly Neighborhood... does not have a massive media machine pouring its sludge into people's living rooms every week, but we do believe in regular laughter enjoyed as often as possible.

Next we come to personal life and Gov. Paterson's numerous personal confessions upon taking office. As much trouble as some people, blind or not, have getting dates, Gov. Paterson not only managed extramarital wanderings--which we GUESS we are glad he confessed to right up front--unlike his multimillionaire predecessor in the job, he did not even have to pay for them! As for the SNL line about Paterson being unprepared for the job, first of all, he is the son of a politician from Harlem. That better count as preparation for something. Second, his predecessor financed a lot of his campaign with his personal fortune and by comparison, Paterson got the job on the cheap. RantWoman KNOWS we are all supposed to be spending our way out of this recession, but she always admires thrift!

In short, as far as RantWoman is concerned, laugh away all of us together. Hire people based on what they CAN do and learn to laugh and the world will be a better place.

Petition to make the Kindle 2 Accessible

RantWoman is SO happy! Someone else is put out by the lack of accessibilty of the Kindle 2. Someone else has even done something RantWoman had no time even to think of doing. Voila. A petition to Amazon to make the Kindle 2 more accessible!

Petition to Make The Kindle 2 Accessible

RantWoman says sign it of course!

Money and Tables

Who knew that simple things like interacting with a financial statement or dealing with a table of numbers could be such an adventure? RantWoman's takeaway from wrestling with the issue: there almost certainly are blind people who interact in different more high-powered levels than does RantWoman. However, a surprising percentage of the time, what turns out to be important has little to do with whatever RantWoman first identified such as the actual visual informaition presented.



A couple weeks ago, RantWoman was at a meeting where they were going over the organization's quarterly financial report. RantWoman has been hearing this organization's financial reports for years. Although the current treasurer does not make nearly as much use of demanding technical accounting terms like "peanut-buttering costs over a couple periods" as previous ones, the report does not change much.



RantWoman understands the basic issues. This time there also happened to be a fair number of people new to the report who were asking cogent questions. Further, the organization is prudently run and there are only a few lines of this particular report that have Big Questions attached to them so this time RantWoman did not even bother fishing out a magnifier to look at actual numbers. RantWoman did not even regret this decision a few days later when someone called RantWoman to talk about a matter involving her personally and the number in one of the lines. RantWoman still did not bother with a magnifier; she just asked her caller what the number was and the conversation proceeded accordingly.



RantWoman's other technique is overrated comment arose in connection with her public participation project. The last couple weeks, all the participants in the project have been going over some information that is just a lot of text in Word documents as well as some tables of numbers. RantWoman thinks she did a tolerable though not always superior job of absorbing the content of the texts, at least at the level needed for volunteer effort. RantWoman might have to reassess this if she were getting paid.



RantWoman also had to decide she would concentrate on parts of the picture where she has intimate on-the-ground knowledge and not stress out or even shut up and try to learn something about big sections of the project where she has negligible knowledge



Then it came time to read the tables, most of which were a number followed by a percentage. The numbers were more or less in descending order for each data group. The problem, after reading just a few lines from the tables was that the percentages were bogus in RantWoman's estimation because they were based on the wrong denominators. Okay, so RantWoman is spoiled by the visual ease of Excel pivot tables or things she knows code to write for other ways of doing easy slice and dice with data.

Kiss off Kindle?

Twice in the last couple weeks, someone has stuck a $300 full QWERTY keyboard book-sized all the purported functionality of a full PC thing-a-majiggy in RantWoman's face.

Forget the Kindle. Now RantWoman wants to crash-test one of these new gadgets, check out key parameters, envision Skype including a videio camera anytime she wants.

Well RantWoman does not want to crash-test the device herself. She wants an exuberant knowledgeable IT enthusiast to test for RantWoman's big bugaboos including more especially behavior with RantWoman's favorite flavors of assistive technology. Then she wants someone else to check out the welter of issues behind the hidden reality of the e-book standards battles. Then who cares what the Kindle will or won't do: RantWoman could have even more bliss for about the same money. What's not to like?

Metro bus cuts looming

The sky is falling. The sky is falling. The sky is falling. There is definitely an epidemic of reports that the sky is falling, and RantWoman is not even going near her opinions about how to tack it back up.

The landscape will soon be overrun by zombie banks. If we keep giving them more and more money, they will still be zombie banks, but....

The nation's infrastructure is crumbling but projects to fix it must be shovel-ready and that sounds better than investing in transit to make better use of multiple kinds of infrastructure.

The state has no money and the governor uses words like "dire." Too bad she does not use words like "fair taxation."

The county and therefore Metro has no money and there are suggestions of 20% cuts in service. RantWoman's bus service prognosticator function is broken, but she hopes anyone contemplating cuts to service will read the Municipal League Report on Metro and make cuts in the places with the highest cost per rider or maybe the highest cost per rider mile. RantWoman suspects this might make some people in the hinterlands howl. RantWoman is also aware that Metro interacts with several municipalities and transit agencies and that different horse-trading occurs on different questions. In short, the sky is probably falling somewhere. RantWoman is not prepared to fly into full panic mode quite yet, but she does recommend that anyone who rides the bus or uses Access, the paratransit service find the online comments section at
transit.metrokc.gov/ to tell Metro how much bus service means to you. If you leave your name and contact info, Metro might gratefully contact you too.

Testimony

Someone gave RantWoman a ride home tonight and asked how RantWoman's testimony went last week. Testimony? RantWoman had almost forgotten. The short answer: most gratifyingly along with a Fun with Vision Loss moment.

The longer answer: this was testimony before a state senate committee on two pieces of legislation where RantWoman feels need of more research but also felt confident that she could say something cogent. RantWoman is trying not to let the heady experience for the first time ever of offering live testimony in such a venue go to her head. Unfortunately, since the issue is still live and this is just not that sort of blog, RantWoman wishes to keep her readers guessing about the exact material. RantWoman is also hovering between a total complex and just laughing really hard about the Fun With Vision Loss moment.

The even longer version: RantWoman has been writing public officials about this and that since high school. One of the officials RantWoman used to write in those hoary mists of prehistory before the worldwide web is still in office and his long tenure comes with specific perquisites. So once in a great while in fact RantWoman writes in typical forward RantWoman style and says something along the lines of "...not your constituent anymore...your entire party needs your leadership...this is how RantWoman wants you to lead...." RantWoman is not in a position to comment about whether her words have any impact.

RantWoman used to fill pages with heartfelt scrawl about a number of related topics. In one case over a period of several months, she was rewarded with several copies from the addressee, a different politician than the one above, of the same word-processed boilerplate about his view of the policy with maybe a customized dismissive paragraph about the particular aspect of the topic RantWoman had written about.

It did not take RantWoman long to catch on about the boilerplate. Then one time she was comparing notes with other constituents and everyone learned we were all getting the same boilerplate. Well, one time the boilerplate came in an envelope stamped with something in a foreign language that caused RantWoman to think her name had probably gotten onto a list somewhere. Since RantWoman also writes letters to the editor she decided merely to note the circumstance, but she did note it.

Then RantWoman moved out of state and got a new set of public officials to write to and put aside thoughts of that politician until the recently-ended reign of The Worst President Ever. By comparison with those surrounding The Worst President Ever, RantWoman's former correspondent is a voice of complete sanity and clear-headed perspicacity no matter how many times he sent RantWoman the same boilerplate!

These days in the age of anthrax and Homeland Security and automated e-mail counters, RantWoman seldom fools around with pen and paper. Whenever possible, RantWoman is happy to tick a box on a pre-written electronic missive. Once in a while, RantWoman still composes her own email, but the exigencies of time save everyone, sender and recipient from laboring long over their work.


The same actually goes for live testimony! RantWoman had a chauffeur who had invited her to the festive occasion and helped her find the right list to put her name on about testimony. RantWoman's chauffeur actually has a more impressive job title than chauffeur; he advised RantWoman just to keep it short. RantWoman explained that she does not do wall clocks and really cannot tell for instance by judging facial expression whether, perhaps, just maybe, possibly she could conceivably be boring her listeners silly and suggested her chauffeur might just give her sleeve a good tug when her time was close to running out.

RantWoman wound up nowhere near someone who could have tugged her sleeve. When called, RantWoman found her way to the designated seating and mics for those giving testimony. RantWoman briefly introduced herself including mention of how RantWoman probably benefited from what the state lege did last round. Then RantWoman advocated spending at least as much money this time around as last and including the voice of disabled people in decisionmaking about how to get the work done. Then RantWoman launched into some topical whines she figured the funds might possibly assist in amelioriating.

This was going swimmingly until the Chairman of the Committee said "Thank you very much. We got your point about inclusion. Please suggest some wording to...." RantWoman was thrilled by the reception especially since she had put her point near the top nearly as an afterthought. RantWoman also permitted herself a twinge of embarrassment though only a twinge of embarrassment to possibly have been boring the Chairman of a State Senate Committee and not even to have been able to tell.

Fried Okra

Yesterday, RantWoman kept missing Da Bus. RantWoman minimally just needed to wait for One Bus, though that bus runs every half hour and there are a few other combinations of buses that might get RantWoman home faster than just waiting for the next One Bus. If RantWoman had been willing to wait on One Bus, though, she would not have encountered Fried Okra!

After the nth iteration of just missing Da Bus while walking from one stop to the next or stopping for a short errand, a hungray RantWoman just gave up and succumbed to the blandishments of one of her favorite calorie hazards, Ezell's Chicken . RantWoman knows that fried food is bad for you. RantWoman sets foot in the place about once a year and even horrifies the super svelte exercise set who live or hold walking tours near the neighborhood location by suggesting they also set foot there once a year and that they, like RantWoman most certainly are allowed just to throw away the skin and all the grease it involves. It's a neighborhood business with a long history in the community. In addition to regular and spicy chicken, there is also the livers and gizards option.

Besides if you don't want chicken the coleslaw, baked beans, and even fluffy white dinner rolls just rock. Okay fluffy white dinner rolls are also a once a year treat and then you can go back to the whole grain, 9-grain, extra bran 10 kinds of seed colon-purifying norm which you will of course need after the chicken.

This trip RantWoman discovered the menu has been enhanced with whole kernel corn, apple pies, and the piece de resistance, fried okra. RantWoman loves okra. RantWoman usually just sautes it with a few tomatoes, taking care not to cook it long enough to turn the dish into total slime, unless making gumbo which actually is not in RantWoman's repertoire anyway.

RantWoman was dining at a slightly off hour so fried okra came with a 10-minute wait, but it was worth every second. The okra was young and small and crisp but not woody. The coating was the usual chicken coating and the 10-minute wait meant it was piping hot! RantWoman was sold though she admits next time she will both ask for ketchup and take a buddy to share with.

Soup du Jour

RantWoman wishes to take a break from several strands of geekiness on her mind and to celebrate Valentine's day. This is not as straightforward for RantWoman as perhaps it is for others, though she sends warm exhortations to lovers everywhere to enjoy the magic and maybe even a little extra on her behalf.

First, the Facebook option "it's complicated" does not even begin to cover RantWoman's relationship status. RantWoman and the ferrener husband are long separated and happily so though yesterday along with some other favors he brought a package of chocolate almonds. RantWoman very seldom refuses chocolate. Today at lunch while munching a couple chocolate almonds RantWoman was reflecting on a number of things she learned while living with ferrener husband and perhaps he while with her also judging by certain indications, though soulful conversational ventures into such zones are not necessarily either of our strong suit. Ferrener husband has rough spells from time to time for different reasons, some of his own doing and some not. We remain friends so it is not always the most fun in the world to hear of ferrener husband's latest travails though they come with fewer commercials than some soap operas.


And there is Someone Else. Someone Else lives in another state partly because of needing more winter light than Seattle provides. We are both in different ways awkward around the idea of living together. Someone else is an artist and a deeply spiritual person and is dealing with a horrifying and fascinating personal circumstance in a way that RantWoman deeply admires even if that also has its own logic and momentum. RantWoman is also in awe that RantWoman and Someone Else still have the most amazing phone conversations and some other synchronistic psychic connections. Someone Else has a life in another state and RantWoman has a life in Seattle and we neither one of us have any claim on the other, and in fact it would be perfectly reasonable for RantWoman to go out and try to woo someone closer. It would be reasonable, but for now RantWoman's life is kind of full and she is not making it happen.

Then, this weekend there is Mr. GG whom RantWoman is due to drop in on. Depending on RantWoman's desire to be spin doctor, GG is short for either Gato Gracioso, Mr, Portly Cat, or Gato Gordo, Mr. Fat Cat. Mr. GG is the sort of boy who sneezes and even drools a little when petted, especially if he has been left alone for awhile. However, he seems to like RantWoman and also not to vomit in annoyance when RantWoman calls him things like"G-gerissimo!" Mr. GG's human is away and Mr. GG is left with water, food, and cat litter, all of which will need augmentation at least once before the human returns. Despite the boy's undeniable charms, that will not happen tonight.

Why? Because RantWoman promised to make soup at RantMom's. After a day of running the nephew / grandson at a birthday party and a good bit of walking to and fro, RantMom was TIRED and wanting nothing more than for RantWoman to keep her promise and come over and brew soup--even if there is a chance RantWoman will make a mess in the kitchen and then make RantMom choose between a backrub and a clean kitchen. RantWoman learned her kitchen mess philosophy at RantMom's knee: make only as much mess as needed and then clean up afterward, but RantMom knows her children all know how to do dishes and so now she makes exceptions sometimes.

Now RantWoman is heartily glad to have had Valentine's day supper at RantMom's and RantWoman congratulates herself on a fine brew in the ad hoc soup improvisation department.

(Confer with RantMom about the strawberries for dessert. RantWoman already knows she just wants to wash the berries and serve with a little powdered sugar for dipping. Thank heaven RantMom is quite agreeable.)

1 quart or so broth of choice. Tonight's was turkey from RantMom's freezer
1 15-ounce can of chicken breast meat
2 cloves garlic
1/2 teaspoon or so fresh grated ginger
2 carrots peeled and cut julienne style
a handful of fresh mushrooms
3-4 scallions minced and set aside for garnish
1/2 a lime cut in quarters and set aside with the scallions for the table
a pound or so of fresh soba noodles
3 heads of baby bok choy
a scant handful of fresh spinach torn
roasted sesame seeds at the table for garnish


Pop the frozen broth out of its container by running the container under hot water and put the frozen broth into a soup pot. Rinse the container with a little tap water and pour into the pot.

Open the can of chicken. Break apart the chunks of meat and pour the whole thing into the pot. Rinse the can out witha little water and put that into the pot. (The meat is optional. It is more optional for RantWoman than for RantMom.)

Peel and slice the garlic cloves and put them into the pot.


Grate the ginger into the pot.


Peel and slice the carrots julienne style and put them into the pot. (if the carrots are fresh and clean, say good organic ones that don't taste like detergent, skip the peeling. Any darn fool can make food taste good with fresh ingredients. If the carrots are vegetables of good intentions that have sat around the refrigerator for too long already, peeling them will help.)


Slice the mushrooms and put into the pot.


By now the frozen broth should all be melted and the pot should be simmering nicely. Add the soba noodles and if needed a little more water just to cover the noodles.


Slice the stem part of the bok choy thinly and the leaf part more broadly. Put into the pot along with the torn spinach. The soup will be ready to serve as soon as it returns to a boil. Ladle the soup into bowls and serve. Add minced scallions, fresh-squeezed lime juice, sesame seeds as desired at the table.


After the soup has been served and savored, enjoy the strawberries, chocolate hearts and a coconut macaroon bomb from the package that leapt into the shopping cart when buying berries.

Linger still longer over big cups of green tea, but don't feel that every single Big Issue must be discussed tonight.

The Kindle Conversation, part n+1

RantWoman just opened her email and came across another round of opinion about the new Kindle, this time from the self-proclaimed Voice of the Nation's Blind

NFB Response to Authors' Guild Statement on the Kindle 2

RantWoman herself has 5 or 6 divergent opinions about this topic so she is trying to figure out how one organization in far-off Baltimore can presume to speak for her, let alone for all the other opinions of blind people out there. Nevertheless, onward.

RantWoman has no reason to quibble with the National Federation of the Blind view about current audio reading processes and copyright law.

RantWoman agrees that it would be absolutely wonderful to be able to buy books as soon as they come out just like real people. Well, Amazon.com is happy to take RantWoman's money whenever RantWoman wants to throw it at them, but RantWoman insists on being able to do her reading on her own, independently, in the privacy of her own cave. Amazon does have audio books and RantWoman believes ebooks, but suffice it to say that for now RantWoman is not spending very much money at Amazon.

RantWoman fully supports the rights of authors and creative talent, blind or sighted, to negotiate the best deals they can get when publishing their work. RantWoman knows this is no mean feat.

RantWoman is a musician's kid and has complicated opinions about the audio performance issue. First, many blind people consume their audio materials at playback rates of speed that leave untrained listeners' heads spinning. Second there are big differences between sound produced by live humans and sounds produced by machines.

Speech delivered by humans, say live readers producing an audio book has many qualities including speed, tone, accent and other characteristics that can be quite important to the experience of reading an audio book. Speech produced by text-to-speech engines can have very different characteristics.

In addition, while listening to human voices at high speeds can produce severe audio distortion, RantWoman supposes based on limited impressionistic experience that TTS engines incorporate algorithms to preserve more of the features that make words recognizable without the distortion that would occur in voice files at high speed. Also, the underlying text is searchable in a way that RantWoman is not sure a current, commercially available produced audio book would be.

RantWoman supposes that while the Author's Guild advocates one possible approach to the audio rights issue, there might be some live audio book producers who could be put out of work. RantWoman would tell them fear not: there are many people who will still probably prefer human readers for many reasons.

RantWoman does not regret in the least failing to provide additional free consulting about the subject of keyboard shortcuts or spoken menus to the woman from the Developer Team that she met on the bus long ago.

RantWoman does possibly regret not being a competent enough capitalist or a scary enough intellectual property / ADA lawyer to tell developer team woman, look it's mumbledy-mumbledy HOW MANY years after the enactment of the ADA? Amazon is a how many billion dollar company with how many more than 5 employees engaged in interstate commerce in how many states? Do you perhaps have any blind people or people with other disabilities on your design team? Would you perhaps consider adding some because gosh darn it, it's time your products were accessible and it will be a lot cheaper to do that if you include diverse views early in the design process as well as throughout development and testing. Okay, so RantWoman knows some approaches to accessibility cannot just be instantly turned on like water from a tap and involve their own development effort, but....

Okay, so RantWoman strives to be a little calmer than this in person. Perhaps she should not try so hard. Meanwhile, maybe she will send this post off to a buddy of hers who is in fact an intellectual property lawyer and might possibly be able to make use of it.

Streets for People

RantWoman is having one of her RantWoman moments having to whine and grumble, complain, moan and generally rain on the parade of something she would really like to support .

RantWoman was thinking of going to something called the Streets for People Kickoff Forum tonight. Well RantWoman was thinking about it until she was overcome by inertia, possibly irrational skepticism of things she cannot find info about anywhere but Facebook and healthy desire for pedestrian self-preservation.

This event hosted by The Seattle Great City Initiative and sponsored by The Cascade Bicycle Club Feetfirst , and the Sierra Club is just oozing with worthwhileness. It is all about cheerleading for campaigns to make cities more friendly for pedestrians and bicyclists. See Streets for People
Oops. Finally. RantWoman finally interacted with enough of the Facebook entry to find the link Streets for People Kickoff Party link.

The inertia needs no excuse. It's just inertia. RantWoman is not crazy about it, but it happens.

The problem finding the link is illustrative of RantWoman's general problem about relying on her eyeballs which she already has ample reason to realize are highly unreliable and her general hurry and impatience with reading whole webpages with her screenreader. Whine.

But the real problem as far as RantWoman is concerned is that an event all about pedestrian and bicycle friendliness was held at the The Armory on Lake Union which is a strong contender for most pedestrian-unfriendly venue in Seattle. There is a bike trail there. RantWoman thinks, from having encountered railroad tracks there once previously in the summer time when evenings are long that The South Lake Union Streetcar may go nearby in at least one direction. Once one gets TO the building across a giant parking lot and other impedimentia, there is a lovely gentl park with some frontage on the lake. The building itself is a tolerably pleasant venue with nice wood floors and a nice feel.

Unfortunately, The Armory on Lake Union isllocated right in the middle of the Mercer Mess, a vast exercise in getting cars on and off various freeways, state highways, city streets. This area is long on cars doing God knows what in all directions and short on sidewalks, marked crosswalks and pedestrian-friendly traffic signals. Except for the The South Lake Union ...(never mind) all of the bus routes that stop nearby involve at least one alarming street crossing either going or coming from the venue. In other words, despite the obvious defacto exhortation to work harder for one's cause, careless pedestrians face severe risk of... while on their way to cheerlead for pedestrian-friendliness.

Or they stay home and whine in their blogs.

Upon sober and better-rested reflection, RantWoman admits that imagining anything about pedestrian friendliness in the same sentence with the Mercer Mess may define quixotic. That is what imagination is for!

So close yet...

RantWoman would like to want Amazon's new Kindle 2.0, she really, really would. She would like to carry around hundreds of books in a device that would also handle email and download publications. RantWoman is even trying to figure out how to put her hands on the new model to test her faint hope that a much-desired feature no one has mentioned in all the hype is indeed there. RantWoman fears the hype does not mention this feature because it indeed is not there. More on which exact feature in a moment.


RantWoman met someone from the development team for the first Kindle one time on Da Bus. We were both riding an express south into downtown and she was playing with this amazing thing that indeed looked like a book. In other words, riding Da Bus and playing with interesting gizmos is PART OF HER JOB. RantWoman peered for a few minutes and when Developer Team person noticed RantWoman was peering, we had a conversation and RantWoman even put her hands on the thing and tried it.


Well, first RantWoman ask Developer Team person to make the print as large as possible which turned out to be, we think, 16 point type. Backlit on that particular screen in the variable daylight on the bus, that was definitely not enough for RantWoman. The display was not terrible at that size, but RantWoman still decided it would not be very comfortable for long bus rides. I think RantWoman may even have asked about a way to read things aloud, as well as some other questions about content and connectivity costs.


RantWoman did think Kindle 1's reasonably tactile, full QWERTY keyboard would be cool and definitely preferable to the things other gizmos make do with. RantWoman was distressed to learn that the first Kindle wasn't really robust enough to handle ordinary household encounters with gravity. On top of the interface problem, this was more than enough reason for RantWoman to move on and look for the next form of temptation.

Months, years pass and along comes Kindle 2.0 now being hawked as a way to read aloud in bed or in the car. But wait: RantWoman does not want someone in the car having to look away from the road and fiddle with the Kindle any more than she wants them looking away to fiddle with anything else. RantWoman's idea of being read to in bed includes having her glasses off and not wanting to have to fumble for them if she perhaps does not want the thing to read her all of War and Peace in one night.

Here we come to the question on RantWoman's mind: can the thing be made to speak the menu items so that RantWoman or another user could move around without having to put her eyes on the thing? Or could there be a nice table of keyboard functions equivalent to the menus so RantWoman would not even have to look at the thing to make it do what she wants? Oh, pretty please. That would ALMOST make RantWoman want to hurry out and buy the thing!

Well, okay RantWoman is resilient and if the menues talked RantWoman could probably come up with yet more cool features on her design wishlist, but start with the talking menus! Try me.

The Big Red Button

RantWoman likes to visit a place she often calls her friendly neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing and today's visit featured The Big Red Button!

The Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing is not really about gaunt sleep-deprived and well-refrigerated geeks in worn-out T-shirts from Value Village tending some massively parallel supercomputer and crunching algorithms with millions of variables. RantWoman could theoretically be at least mildly interested in the doings of such a place but she suspects feeding all of that through a screen reader would be more fun than even she can handle.

Despite wanting to hold forth all over the internet RantWoman also feels protective of the people involved in the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing so RantWoman is going to pick gingerly through the actual doings there and leave key details to her readers' imaginations. For the last few days whenever RantWoman has visited, one of the denizens of the Friendly Neighborhood... has been working away on a computer using only a big red button. Well, there is a connection box and some wires and the option of adding a small rainbow of other equally enormous buttons, but there is one button and it goes up and down. The big red button is huge. It is something a Dr. Strangelove would swoon for.

RantWoman thinks that other things happen on the screen too, but it did not really occur to her to investigate that. The point is that everything that a user makes happen on the computer happens through the big red button. Forget launching a nuclear attack! This is for people who cannot even take for granted being able to move much. A few years ago it would not have occurred to RantWoman to think about such things. Now she is both humbled and awed in the presence of such realities.

Today when RantWoman went by the Big Red Button Tester was working with another neighbor. This neighbor is the sort of person who, in fact, really cannot move much except a hand up and down. She and the Big Red Button Tester were trying different things and moving the big red button around on the table. Rant Woman came back by a little later and was asking the Big Red Button Tester how things went. He said, well for today they had one simple goal: to decide where on the table it would be best to put the Big Red Button. Amd the genius of the Big Red Button Tester is that he knew where to start. RantWoman would not have had a clue.

Email while sleeping

RantWoman's main email, the one on all her business cards is most foully dyspeptic this morning. Usually this is just a transient condition, and RantWoman could not care less about the propeller head details of the dyspepsia du jour: Rant Woman just needs to send OUT some email, and the email provider refuses to produce the required email body field.

One reason RantWoman needs to send out email is that last night she had an attack of sleep email--on a work-related matter no less. RantWoman sometimes pounds away at her email late at night. RantWoman's body has fairly fixed ideas about when RantWoman should just become horizontal because sleep will shortly occur one way or another. RantWoman was working on one of her brilliantly insightful but still in need of sarcasm filter masterpieces and she THOUGHT she had hit the button to Save Draft rather than Send. RantWoman was WRONG, as she discovered sheepishly when she finally woke up enough to go to bed.

Let's just say sleep email is not nearly as lethal as drunk email or email while alone on shift at long-ago computer lab gig while sarcasm filter is severely malfunctioning. Sleep email is embarrassing and impolitic and RantWoman did have to send a very obsequious note promising not to try to fix the problem while prone to falling back asleep. Now of course would be a good time to fix the problem, but RantWoman's email is dyspeptic.

RantWoman could call her correspondent. She could take to heart his comments about email being forever and use the phone. Well, email is forever but RantWoman's brain is not: writing things down even in email, even in all of email's possible stark misconstructions, misperceptions, miscommunications is a huge helpfor the perpetual brainstorm in RantWoman's head.

Plus in terms of immortality, RantWoman could be trading arms for hostages and using the proceeds to finance Latin American (cough, cough). Or she could be subverting the Constitution from an undisclosed location. Or she could be trying to make insightful contributions to a very worthwhile project. Choose Option C and just live with email, but STAY AWAKE.

Another One!

When a British television personality calls the British Prime Minister a "one-eyed Scottish Idiot," WHAT should a conscientious blogger who regularly wanders into blindness issues do?

First read the article and consider the source.
Top Gear Presenter Apologizes for remark
To quote Charlie Brown, "Oh good grief." Turns out the Prime Minister is hardly Mr. Clarkson's first or even most tastelessly offendable target. Oh good grief. RantWoman is even sometimes a fan of British humor, but oh good grief!

(RantWoman special note: the bbc websites are on RantWoman's list of examples of things done right as far as accessibility. The site behaves well with screen readers. It has links to low-graphics or enlarged text views. Alas, the printable option does not appear to offer the option of fond enlargement, but RantWoman being a versatile girl, she could think of ways around this. All this is probably the result of efforts by the Royal National Institute for the Blind, RNIB and has little to do with the Prime Minister's vision issues.)

What next? Thunder to the Prime Minister's defense? Cluck about oh those wacky Brits who keep a stiff upper lip except when they let fly all over the Prime Minister? The first thing RantWoman did was head to Wikipedia to see what the aforementioned television host was talking about. RantWoman does not mean about the economic crisis.

Gordon Brown's early life according to Wikipedia

Turns out the future prime minister suffered in his youth from an excess of rugby or at least one too many feet hitting his face during a rugby game. This is a classic recipe for a detached retina, and the risk of such during contact sports is one reasons RantWoman's brother had to fend off repeated overtures by school football coaches. In fact just the other day RantWoman was lecturing the triplets' father who says he is severely nearsighted about how he should never, ever play raquetball without eye protection, a promise he had already made himself after getting hit once rather painfully in the eye.

But back to Gordon Brown and rugby. At the time the preferred therapy was still one of the things RantWoman's grandfather endured: lie in a darkened room for weeks with blocks around the head to prevent movement of the head and further motion disconnecting the retina from the optic nerve. Wikipedia thankfully spares us the medical details of further surgery except to say that vision in one eye was lost, When the future prime minister started experiencing similar symptoms in his other eye, the doctors were able to save vision in that eye, but Wikipedia does not mention whether more lying around in a darkened room was involved.

RantWoman really has no basis for speculating, but how much vision one gets back after retina detachment and how many grow-your-own-lava-lamp bubbles or pangs in bright light can vary a lot. Despite ravings from a tv personality, Prime Minister Brown is obviously a bright well-read, accomplished guy. Or maybe he covers well for any discomfort.

So, should blind people claim him even if he himself might not see things that way? Or to put it another way, are one-eyed idiots any more or less problematic than two-eyed idiots? Are one-eyed Scottish idiots somehow more scandalous than idiots from elsewhere in the British isles? Remember, RantWoman is not going near the substance of debate about economic policy, but as long as big-mouthed commentators think of the prime minister as blind, I think blind commentators should stick up for him! Just don't ask RantWoman about the economic crisis.

Virtue

RantWoman has come to work with a brain that really wants to go play in the park. This is a problem because:

--RantWoman's body did not get nearly enough exercise yesterday and it needs to go play in the park or something too as soon as possible.

--RantWoman is her own boss and knowlingly got herself into a couple projects "for the experience" even though they are not always her favorites.

--RantWoman is not the most disciplined employee on the planet.

--RantWoman is not the fiercest taskmaster or boss on the planet.

--RantWoman's life still feels like a whole lot of data collection and trial and error which looks to some outside observers like it is not on a linear path to workplace success. RantWoman being at heart a data nut disagrees but that just adds another layer to the task of managing RantWoman.

--RantWoman has a bunch of tiresome, pissy, and even aggravating tasks she needs just to get done rather than build up giant neuroses about while she procrastinates. RantWoman needs to feed bureaucracies some paperwork. RantWoman needs to finish a contract her teammates have already done most of the heavy lifting about to hire someone else. RantWoman needs to move another project along to its next phases. RantWoman needs to read some more email about a third project and prepare for something related to that project tomorrow morning. RantWoman also needs to get her rear end out the door to do some actual exercise and MAYBE go pick up a check she can then feed into other bureaucracies.

--RantWoman is spending a lot of time on a really cool public participation project. RantWoman even wants to post about something idiosyncratic and personal slightly related to this project. However, since RantWoman is conscientious in her efforts to serve the public, RantWoman dutifully read the blogging guidelines. These basically said don't post or post with EXTREME caution. RantWoman would think to run the threads of what she wants to say about her personal experience by her agency contact. However RantWoman's agency contact is swamped with a data assembly and distribution phase of the project and RantWoman expects her not really to be available to comment for a few days.So RantWoman either gets to scrub very carefully herself or....

So how does RantWoman get to virtue out of all this?

RantWoman just went online and paid her rent and phone bill. This is practically virtue overload!

Puntitas

RantWoman is slowly acquiring a public and in the process collecting blogs by people she admires. Today's treasure is Puntitas, whom RantWoman knows from many insightful and hysterical and extremely helpful posts on a couple email lists we both read. Puntitas is among other things a published writer with aspirations to publish even more. Enough said. Read her yourself!

http://puntitas.wordpress.com/

Make me Glow

RantWoman is strangely allergic to getting run over. She has had this problem for quite awhile ever since she suddenly realized one dark and stormy night in the middle of winter when Seattle gets by on about 8 hours of daylight a day that a driver probably actually could not see her crossing a street in a navy trench coat even if she was crossing at the corner early one evening in a marked crosswalk at a place she had a perfect right to cross.

While Thwack the Badly-Behaved White Cane would happily weigh in about numerous instances of Driving While Stupid, Driving While Out to Lunch, Driving While Texting, Driving While Rude. Driving While Observing as Few Traffic Laws as Possible, and numerous other offenses against public order on our nation's roads, tonight's rant is about pedestrian responsibility, and all the fabulous options (or not) available to be visible at night.

First, a memorial moment for the latest event evoking this rant, and a promise AGAIN to harangue a couple wheelchair users I know whose vanity and lack of attention to visibility is, well, frightening. Tonight's newsppaper update includes a very sad story of a guy in a wheelchair who was struck by a car and killed while crossing a 5-lane highway after dark at an uncontrolled intersection, that is one without any kind of stoplight or marked crosswalk north of Seattle. WA state law says pedestrians have the right of way at places like this. WA State law appears not to reckon with the laws of physics.

The newspaper presumption is that wheelchair users qualify as pedestrians, although an excellent case could be made that these folks would be safer if the law treated them like a vehicle and required some standard of lights and reflectors whether just stickers or full-blown bike / automotive quality, as well, perhaps as extra reflective warning flags. Making wheelchairs easier to see is only half the problem though. Drivers also have to be able to see something soon enough to be able to stop or take evasive action. RantWoman is not feeling public-spirited enough to go look up stopping distances for cars traveling at different speeds. RantWoman is however fixated on nighttime visibility and herewith presents a few different sides of that story.

RantWoman is the kind of nerd who bookmarks highway engineering / Department of Transportation sites about how little drivers can see at night outside the cones of light created by their headlights. In other words, people operating large masses of moving metal really cannot see much at night, but unlike RantWoman, they are not necessarily aware of this. Alas, RantWoman is not always the kind of nerd who can find things like this that she has previously bookmarked.

In terms of nerdy reflective looks, nothing beats running a Google search for "Safety Vests." These are highly functional and come in numerous models guaranteed to make one feel like a proud construction worker. RantWoman even knows a few different blind people who use different models of safety vests. RantWoman herself keeps thinking about going that route though she still has fantasies about clothing that is functional but does not scream "outdoor exercise freak" even at formal occasions.

When RantWoman needs sudden low-budget foreign travel opportunities, she visits websites in England or in Finland that specialize in reflective items to help schoolkids get safely to and from school in lands of even less winter daylight than Seattle. The stock tends to run to zipper pulls with cute animals and minimalist vests. Those bookmarks seem to have gone the same way as the nerdy headlight cone ones above!

RantWoman can say she has a friend who taught for many years in Denmark. This friend says it is really quite the thing for nearly everyone to have a reflector tied into their winter coats and to pull it out anytime they go out walking. The one RantWoman's friend has is simple and clear/ white like a front reflector for a bike, simple enough.

RantWoman has bag envy. Every time RantWoman meets someone on Da Bus who has an especially easy to see bag or backpack, she has to ask where the bag was purchased. Lots of bike messenger bags come with one reflective tag. RantWoman considers this barely adequate; she swoons for bags with an entire flap of reflective material. The last such bag she saw reportedly came from REI . Tonight's search for "reflective" on the REI site yields a number of interesting items though no bags.

The current Lands End site has a reflective collar and leash for pets but nothing for their humans.

A favorite RantWoman shopping fantasy site, Junonia has one or two really stylish reflective items in almost every catalog. Of course, one part of RantWoman's shopping fantasy is that even more clothing manufacturers would include reflective features in stylish outdoor wear

The truth is that RantWoman more often than not winds up doing a do-it-yourself approach

RantWoman buys a wide variety of reflective pants clips, stickers, and vests at any of several Seattle bike stores. Some of these places also stock reflective clothing although the clothing tends to run in sizes that fit exercise gods but not necessarily the likes of RantWoman.

Despite Seattle's wintertime daylight limitations, it is also the land of bicycle commuting. The most dedicated bicycle commuters favor combinations of clothing and lights that make them look, basically like space aliens who have landed and somehow taken up bicycling perhaps due to malfunctioning jetpacks or tractor beams which for some reason are inoperable in the Seattle environment.

RantWoman assumes her readers are bright enough to find their own bicycle stores. RantWoman knows of several in different parts of Seattle and does not want to play favorites, especially since the exact stock available tends to vary in each one.

RantWoman does want to sing the praises of one of her very favorite sources of assistance for do-it-yourself visibility, Seattle Fabrics on Aurora. Seattle Fabrics stocks all kinds of materials to sew your own camping or outdoor gear. It has never really occurred to RantWoman to want to sew her own camping gear, but it just now occurs to her that there might be some interesting fashion apparel options featuring ripstop nylon and RantWoman's favorite item, reflector tape sold by the yard, in a variety of widths and colors, plastic tape, grograin ribbon with reflective stripes, and some kind of stick-on tape that RantWoman never buys!

RantWoman usually pays a visit about once a year and buys several yards of tape in different colors. RantWoman uses some to make zipper pulls. She sews some on canvas shopping bags and sometimes attaches the tape to jackets. RantWoman has a few other ideas she keeps meaning to try, but you get the idea. Oh, and the navy trenchcoat: it got the full treatment: reflector tape on epaulets, cuffs, pockets, the back cape, and a couple places along the front button line. That was years ago and the coat is long worn out, but drew notice all the way from Seattle to St. Petersburg.

Okay, so RantWoman is resourceful and the marketplace does indeed serve up a number of wonders. RantWoman stil wants MORE, more stylish reflective clothing, more canvas shopping bags that might come with reflectivity imbedded, more bags with serious visibility enhancers, more , more, more. Come on world, make me glow!