Chris & Cathy Miller

It’s time to retire Unquiet Desperation. I want to spend some time exploring my writing in a new way, something that reflects where I am now, instead of where I’ve been. It’s been a good run, and I want to thank everyone who had read or listened over the years: your thoughtful comments and support have meant the world to me.

I will be starting up a new project over at http://ctmiller.net early this winter. Please head over and subscribe if you’d like to know more when the time comes.

I bring you my final podcast episode, a discussion with my good friend J.C. Hutchins. It’s about a lot of things, but mostly, it’s about change.

Thanks, everyone.

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For those of you who were unable to make it to this year’s PyOhio, the talks are now online:

http://python.mirocommunity.org/category/pyohio-2010

I’d like to thank the staff of this year’s conference for all their hard work, and thank the speakers for donating their time and talents toward the community’s betterment.

And yes, we’ve recorded our podcast’s review of the conference and it will be up this weekend.

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Yes. Yes I am.

The above is a picture of my wife for some publicity shots for her new website.  She’s been playing out around town with both Jim Gill and Uzuzi of late. We’ll be ready to show off her new site and her full performance calendar in a few days.

Now, if you’ll excuse me…I’ll be in my bunk.

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The usual band of miscreants…taken in 1989 or 1990 by my friend James (not in the picture).

I’m the guy on the left.

Good Lord. Where did these kids go?

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When Robert Fulghum’s book came out, I dismissed it as claptrap. Three years later when I received a copy as a gift, I read it and grudingly admitted that I liked it. These days, I find his little list to be one of the more useful anchors in my life.

Keep these around. You’ll be surprised how they apply on a daily basis.

• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Don’t hit people.
• Put things back where you found them.
• Clean up your own mess.
• Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
• Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
• Wash your hands before you eat.
• Flush.
• Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
• Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
• Take a nap every afternoon.
• When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
• Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
• Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.
• And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.

[Source: "ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN" by Robert Fulghum.  See his web site at http://www.robertfulghum.com/ ]

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In the Words of Natalie, our Secretary of Artistic Propaganda:

You can never have too many squirrels. Or was that lizards? Maybe I’m thinking of giant syringes. I forget.

Anyway, if you like squirrels and/or lizards and/or giant syringes you should check out the latest The Secret Lair comic.

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One of the things that greatly reduced my satisfaction in writing code for a living was the realization that I could not share it.

Coding is one of those things that can be terribly interesting to a very specific portion of the population, and to everyone else, it is arcane knowledge either from On High or from The Pits of Hell, depending on the listeners’ outlook¹. Early in our marriage my wife learned the fine art of smiling and nodding encouragingly especially when she had no idea what I was talking about. It was impossible for me to really share what I was doing because the set of people who could appreciate it and the set of people I spend time with has little or no intersection.

I like to share my joys with people. Ask anyone who has had to suffer through my skimming thru an iPod while I play music for them², or who has come by after a trip to the book- or game store.  I like to to share the shiny stuff I find, and like a small child, I hope that they like it as much as I do.

This has been one of the reasons what I’ve pulled away from writing code during non-work hours: I want to focus on creating things which can be shared. It might be working up some ice cream with the new ice cream maker we received as a housewarming gift. It might be brewing beer or cooking a meal for my family. It might be gaming with friends…sharing time with likeminded folks can be the best sharing of all.  Code does not do this for me. Even podcasting does not do this for me. Social networking is a pale substitute³…I prefer the physical world to the Internet any day of the week.

What is it in life that brings you the most satisfaction?  Is it something you like to share, or do you keep it to your self?

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1. Even my own outlook varies from day to day.
2. An exercise my wife has come to call Chris’s Top 40, and not in a good way
3. Social Networks are to Real World Interaction what Tofu Cheese is to Sharp Cheddar.

This past weekend, my brother brought over a box of old toys that migrated from my parents’ house to my other brother’s house and now to his.  We  unpacked the box and there was a great deal of Ooohing and Ahhhing from my kids who had never seen anything quite like the toys we were unpacking.

The biggest hit was the Star Wars Death Star playset, which, despite needing to be cleaned and having a few pieces missing, was still in pretty good shape. My brother generously allowed us to keep it along with a number of action figures and the next day my kids could not get enough of playing with it. It’s been nearly a week and it’s still in the living room; they are still enjoying it.

The Death Star set has no electronics. Nothing beeps, talks, or fires at you. Everything is manual. No batteries needed.  All my kids had was the setting (The Death Star) and the characters (the Action Figures¹). They played there for hours.

This was a reminder of two things to me:

• They really did make things differently when we were kids. True, this is because the tech was not there for certain things, but the quality and durability of the action figures and the playset surprised me, especially when compared to today’s Start Wars figures. The modern ones feel cheap and insubstantial. These…well…they’ve lasted through my and my brothers’ childhoods, and now my kids have them.
• It’s a great thing to listen to children as they use their imagination. Give it a try sometime. It’s a wake-up call.

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1. No. They are NOT dolls. They are Action Figures

At the risk of being repetitive, here’s who we had over for coffee and birdseed this weekend.

And, that greatest of midwestern traditions, the Garage Sale.  We’re finally rid of all our old stuff. Thanks go out to James and Heather, who were our erstwhile and exhausted partners in the little venture.

Happy Monday, people. Let’s be careful out there.

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Welcome back to Unquiet Desperation. This is Chris Miller, your host.

This is the view from my new backyard this morning.  A deer and her two does, grazing on the weeds at the back of the yard. While it means gardening will be a challenge, it was still an enchanting sight this morning as I drank my coffee on the back porch.

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I’m about to take a vacation to Kure Beach, North Carolina for a little rest, relaxation, and time with the family. Before I go, I wanted to let you know about some changes that will be coming soon to this, my precious little blog.

Unquiet Desperation is going to be shifting focus in the month of July. I’ve been using this as a personal blog for years, but I find that I want to take the time to explore new things here, and split some of my other interests off into other areas.

Unquiet Desperation: The Blog

I’ve said that I want to write essays, and my goal for this site will be to host those essays. The areas I want to cover here are:

1. Exploring living a simpler life in a rapidly-changing technological society
2. Using creative disciplines and ingenuity to make sense of and enhance the world around us
3. Examining the creative process in relationship and as a reaction to the pressures of daily life
4. Touching on the care of the soul via aesthetic experience

Unquiet Desperation: The Podcast

The renewed focus of the podcast will keep the exploratory tone of past incarnations, while veering sharply away from the well-worn geekly tropes.  I envision it as monthly exploration of a single topic, via essay, interview, music, or whatever else suits. The first episode of the new podcast will drop in late July.¹

Geeky Topics Live In The Secret Lair

The Secret Lair is a perfect outlet for  discussions about the entertainment, geekdom, and other topics I like to tackle. They belong there, not here.

Internet Memes, Video, Short Posts, Etc are Trinkets

Sure, I like to pass things along as much as the next guy. Those items will move to my Tumblr, Trinkets in a Coffee Can.

Programming Discussion

I consider this part of my personal creative life. Essays on programming will live here, as will topics in other creative disciplines, like writing or brewing.

* * *

Along with all of this, I’m working with Mick Bradley on a new look and feel for the site, and I’m looking forward to unveiling that once we’re done.

I will be restructuring categories and such over the new month, so if you see weirdness in the feed, please excuse it. It should only be temporary.

I want to thank everyone whose feedback and friendship have inspired and enabled me to gather this focus, especially Kris Johnson, Thomas Gideon, Mur Lafferty, J.C. Hutchins, David Moore, Jay Lynn, John Cmar, Natalie Metzger, Mick Bradley, and, my ever-patient wife, Cathy.

See you all when I return from my vacation. Try not to wreck the place while I’m gone.

-Chris

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1. This will include the contributions of all the folks who have sent me audio already.

There are new episodes of both The Secret Lair and From Python Import Podcast available for your consumption.

• In Episode 0036 of The Secret Lair, we discuss Iron Man 2, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who, and a few other assorted bits and pieces.
• In Episode 004 of From Python Import Podcast we learn why Dave hates Decorators, and discuss whether the Standard Library is the place where code goes to die. Additionally, Mike Pirnat joins us for a revelation about the Zen of Python.

Note: Apologies for the sound quality on both of these shows. My studio equipment is packed for the move, so we had to us my Zoom H4.

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The special Nerd Merit Badge which Thomas ‘cmdln’ Gideon issued for supporting his podcast just arrived. I will be sewing it on to my laptop bag in the next week.

Behold the wonder.

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Podcasting pioneer and all-around nice guy Ray Slakinski had his Twitter account suspended today. According to the video interview he did with Robert Scoble (see below), he received no warning, no reason, and when he tried to find out why, he received only canned responses.

Three thoughts:

• This has to be a mistake. Ray’s hardly a troublemaker. He doesn’t do spam. He follows the rules.
• Twitter really needs to have a better way of notifying people when they are suspended, just so they can appeal.
• Twitter, as a private company, can do whatever they want. Unlike Scoble, I don’t think they OWE us anything. but boy, it would be nice to have some recourse in cases like this.

I’ll be curious to see how this is resolved. Good luck, Ray.

UPDATE: He was back online as of 4:09pm EDT.

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To those of you listening to From Python Inport Podcast, we recorded ep 004 yesterday and it should be dropping this weekend.  Sorry for the delay…my purchase of a house and all that goes with it (packing, etc) has made it difficult to get all of us in one room to record. However, the next episode is made of 24-karat WIN and we think you’ll enjoy it.

Possible titles include Dave Hates Decorators or The Standard Library: Graveyard of Code.

Look for it to drop this weekend.

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The only way a creative project can be completed is by Progressing Forward. Common sense, but it’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking that research, consulting with peers, or reading articles like this one will somehow help complete the project.

At the end of the day, you’re either motivated to work on Progressing Forward or you’re not.  In a comment on the last article, Jared Axelrod put it this way:

Seriously, though, one of the most encouraging words I’ve ever heard is the phrase “If you really want to do something, nothing can stop you; if you don’t want to do something, anything can stop you.” Which has had an effect on me. Now, whenever I feel something pulling my attention away from the project at hand, I say “No, I really want to do this,” and I snap back to what I was doing. Or, it’s clear that what I am doing isn’t something I really want to do, and then I am content to let it fall by the wayside.

He makes three excellent points:

1. Know what you want to do.
2. Do it.
3. If you get distracted by something else, see point #1.

I think that Jared’s comment strikes at the core of the problem. Progressing Forward requires Motivation.  The word means progression, coming from the Latin movere,  ”to move.”

So how do we move ourselves? It’s too easy to say we are motivated by something interests us; an interesting project is one thing, but it needs to go deeper than that.

Motivation is born of Aspiration, which is born of Fascination.

You can find something interesting, then pass it by. It will not hold you.  Something that fascinates you, that hooks into your psyche and will not let go…now that’s the stuff from which great things are created. You aspire to do something with the fascination, and that is the motivation to work. While it is possible to work on a project that does not fascinate you in some way, keeping the motivation will be more difficult¹.

A Fascination is a tricky thing: they come in all sizes and shapes. some might be good for a single song, shortstory or painting. Others grow to become something epic. Most fall somewhere in between. All of them resonate. All of them have an authenticity to them that cannot be faked.

What subjects fascinate you?  Have you worked them into a project?  If you’ve worked on a fascinating vs. non-fascinating project, how did the two compare, and what did you learn from them?

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1. Money, of course, can help with this…we’re all fascinated with the possibilities of having extra cash on hand.Freelance work, anyone?

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After a call from Earl Newton tonight, I realized that I might not have written about our move. To stem the confusion, here are the facts:

• We bought a house.
• It’s in Medina, OH, which is about forty-five minutes from where we currently live.
• There is no job change for me involved.
• My wife is taking a faculty position at the Music Settlement, where she will be teaching fiddle.
• The kids are very excited.
• The parents are also very excited.
• We got it for an excellent price.
• It’s in a wonderful neighborhood where the kids can walk to school.
• Lots of mature trees.
• I have a shed I will be transforming into an office.
• We take possession on June 30th.
• We move in on July 2.

I will post pictures as I’m able.

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Ken asked, “What’s on your summer reading list?”

Why, Ken, I’m glad you asked.

My Summer Reading List for 2010

• Ilium by Dan Simmons: For years people have been telling me that I need to read Dan Simmons’ work. I’ve been told this because my friends know The Canterbury Tales is a favorite of mine, and Simmons’ Hyperion uses a similar storytelling style which I’d likely find interesting. However…I decided to skip Hyperion for now, mostly because I think I want to read it this winter, when I have time to sit and absorb the nuances of the text. Illium struck me as the sort of story I’d love to digest while on vacation: a modern Ph.D. finds himself reenacting the Trojan War on Mars, and takes steps to remedy the situation. That’s summer reading gold, baby.
• 1776 by David McCullough: McCullough’s style has always been accessible, and the fact that he starts the book talking about the situation in Britain after the battles of Lexiginton, Concord, and Bunker/Breed’s Hill caught my attention. It’s a sad state that, in the tale of the American Revolution that is taught in these United States, Britain is just The Villain; we never hear what the situation was over there. Once my attention was caught, I knew I had to see how the author retells the tale.
• Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance: My friend Dave Lockwood gave me this book just before we moved back to Cleveland from Los Angeles, and I’ve been meaning to read it since I put my hands on it. I’ve purposefully left it out while packing my library for the move, and I hope to get to it over vacation.
• The Nights Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton: The trilogy is made up of the novels The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God. I’ve heard nothing but good things about Hamilton’s work, and I found a gorgeous version of the trilogy at Barnes and Noble that I must possess. Once possessing, reading them seems to be the next logical step.
• The Hero with A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell: I’ve been listening to Campbell’s Mythology and the Individual lecture series, and I’ve found it to be stirring some of my creative juices. Stores are beginning to present themselves. Following this with Campbell’s seminal work on the monomyth is a slam dunk.
• The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon: Yet another one from the “You Gotta Read This” list, I borrowed this from my good friend James, and I really should read it before I’m forced to return it. I read the first chapter, and Chabon’s use of language is just glorious. I am able to lose myself in the style. I anticipate that I’ll finish this one in late August, just as the summer ends.

And now, to echo Ken: what are you reading this summer?

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Not so terribly long ago, Overlord Miller and I gathered an elite group of minions in a conference room and asked them a very important question: Who is Jared Axelrod? We were informed that Mr. Axelrod is responsible for, among other things, The Voice of Free Planet X, Aliens You Will Meet and Fables of the Flying City. As is often the case, we were not entirely confident that the information our minions provided was accurate, so we took it upon ourselves to consult a more authoritative source, that being the man himself, Jared Axelrod. Little did we suspect that Jared Axelrod would use his Tricksy Mind Rays to distract us from exploring his innermost secrets, subtly veering the conversation toward other topics, all the while making us believe that it was our intent to discuss said topics in the first place. Beware! Should you dare to listen to this episode of the podcast, you, too, may be entranced by Mr. Axelrod’s Tricksy Mind Rays. No one is safe…

• Overlord Miller’s plans to attend GenCon were ultimately foiled, possibly by rampaging mega-nanobots.
• Overlord Miller recently finished reading Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies).
• Overlord Miller’s beard currently resembles a Recognizer from TRON.
• Overlord Miller also read The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer.
• Overlord Miller is researching the history of Medina County.
• Overlord Johnson accidentally learned about William Stinchcomb, founder of the Cleveland Metroparks.
• Who even knew Billy Squier had a castle? Oh, Squire’s Castle. Well, that’s different.
• Overlord Miller has been re-watching The X-Files. That Charles Nelson Reilly episode? It’s called “José Chung’s From Outer Space” and it is made of win and bleeping dead aliens.”
• Nuketown’s Monster Week.
• Overlord Johnson recently listened to A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin.
• Overlord Johnson is reading Boneshaker by Cherie Priest.
• …and On a Pale Horse (Book 1 of the Incarnations of Immortality) by Piers Anthony.
• Overlord Miller recently listened to The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. [Link goes to YouTube trailer.]
• Overlord Johnson stumbled across an unaired trailer for Power Pack.
• Overlord Johnson recently watched the first (and thus far only) season of Gravity, an original series from Starz.
• Both overlords have seen Inception, which is not a documentary about how babby is formed.
• Overlord Johnson really enjoyed Between the Folds, a documentary about origami and paper-folding.
• Not to mention Helvetica, a documentary about a font.

Discussion: Kids’ Movies That Appeal to Adults vs. Movies for Little Boys Who Never Grew Up

• Show notes coming soon. Honest!

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It’s a good thing the Bad Doctor always has a stock pile of kaiju sized tranquilizers.

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Is Mr. Kenneth Newquist’s so-called Monster Week 2010 an examination and retrospective of movie monsters or a damning, behind-the-scenes exposé that will bring all of the Overlords’ schemes into light? Is Jaws a ground-breaking horror film that set the trend for summer blockbusters or a misunderstood documentary? Just how blurry is the line between fantasy and reality? Answer: Not Blurry Enough.

• No one, not even SyFy, has made a creature feature spotlighting a havoc-wreaking shetland-bonobo hybrid, but the Overlords may be willing to option them for the screen.
• Overlord Miller reveals the shocking true origin of St. Patrick’s Day.
• Technically, it’s DOCTOR Mega John Cmar.
• “ant fungus exploding head” can be simplified to Cordyceps.
• Cat sharks and chipmunk spiders. You’re welcome.
  
  
• Did we miss any Monster Classifications?
  • Mythical Monsters (hydra, minotaur)
  • Natural Monsters (Jaws, Lake Placid)
  • Science (Man-Made) Monsters (Godzilla, Sharktopus, Them!)
  • Extraterrestrial Monsters (The Thing, Critters, Predator)
• Perhaps we shall do a monster contest. Nominate your favorite monster in the comments.

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Monster Week has kicked off over at Nuketown and the esteemed Mr. Newquist has posited that Jaws (1975) is the “prototypical modern monster movie.” That’s all well and good, but as terrors of the deep go we here at The Secret Lair feel that Spielberg’s shark lacks a little something; a little something we call Science.¹

Now, as Mr. Newquist rightly points out, there is a scientist in Jaws. Richard Dreyfuss portrays one Matt Hooper, an ichthyologist whose expert knowledge of Carcharadon carcharias and its ilk is…well, downright dull. Hooper is strictly a small-s scientist, not at all interested in turning sharks into more efficient killing machines or creating bipedal man-shark hybrids. You know: Science! Instead, Hooper is all about bite radius and feeding habits. Boring!

Nor is the shark any more exciting. Sure, it’s big—maybe even bigger than any great white man has ever encountered—but in the end it’s just a shark, and we can do better. Just ask Dr. Preston King (Jeffrey Combs), who fused human and shark DNA in Hammerhead: Shark Frenzy (2005), or perhaps Dr. Susan McCallister (Saffron Burrows), who genetically enlarged shark brains in Deep Blue Sea (1999); while their motives differed, both doctors used capital-s Science to create deadlier, more dangerous sharks. King’s hybrid shark is bipedal and amphibious, allowing it to kill on land as well as in the water, while McCallister’s sharks can swim backwards and are intelligent enough to kill even Samuel L. Jackson.²

As impressive as these genetically-modified sharks may be, they pale in comparison to the shark-cephalopod hybrid killing machine created by Blue Water Core for the U.S. Navy in Sharktopus (2010). Crossing a shark with an octopus? That’s capital-S Science at its finest.

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1. You might be more inclined to call it “Mad Science,” but that’s just the sort of judgmental shortsightedness we’ve come to expect from you.
2. Spoiler alert!

As if there weren’t enough eReaders in the world, Borders recently released the Kobo eReader. While not as spiffy cool and full of magical pixels like the iPad,¹ nor as hip and trendy as the Kindle, our crackpot team of crackpot scientists² at the Secret Lair’s test lab annex thinks the Kobo is a pretty cute device in its own right. I was lucky enough to be selected to prod and poke³ at the Kobo. My report is as follows.

Pros:

• It has open format support, specifically EPUB. It will also accept PDF format.
• The display is an e-ink display. I really like this as my eyes tend to freak out easily.
• It has an SD card slot which is also a bonus. No one likes running out of space. I imagine you could also use this device as a thumb-drive as well as that’s how it shows up when plugging it in via standard USB.
• Simple, intuitive navigation makes finding what you want relatively painless. There are three buttons on the side (home, menu, display, and back) in addition to a direction pad. Home takes you to a list of what your currently reading (or have looked at recently). Menu displays a bunch of options depending if you are home or in a book. This is where you can configure the Kobo, or if you are in a book, change chapters. Display lets you choose between five different font sizes, and two different font types. There is also a decent library function where all your loaded books are listed in alphabetical order by title.
• Slip resistant back is a nice little after thought sort of feature. It does a decent job on keeping the device stationary when it’s set down.
• The battery life claims to be two weeks or 8,000 page turns. I haven’t had mine long enough to require a recharge, so I can’t really confirm these claims. So far the battery seems to be doing really well (from what I can tell from the indicator).
• The screen is a nice size. It’s just about as large as a standard softcover book.
• It’s very thin and light, but it doesn’t feel fragile or cheap. It has some mass to it despite its size, while still being quite comfortable to hold.
• It also has bluetooth capability. From what I’ve read, the purpose of this is to sync with a data phone in order to purchase books on the fly. I don’t have a data plan on my phone, so, again, I’ll just have to take their word for it. It’s still nice to know it has this ability (not as cool as the Kindle 3G access, but still nice).
• It comes preloaded with approximately a butt-ton⁴ of public domain books. So if you were meaning to catch up on all the classics, Kobo has saved you the effort of hunting down everything and loading it yourself.
• Lastly, the price is fairly reasonable (at $149.99) considering the competition. Also, as of this writing, Borders is giving folks a $20 gift card with each Kobo purchase, so, yay!

Cons:

• It’s not the speediest of devices. The boot up is a little sluggish (about 30 seconds). The loading of a new book can by quite slow. For instance, it took about two minutes to load On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, while it only took a few seconds for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I’ve heard a few complaints about the speed of page turning (about a second), but it hasn’t bothered me. So, while not a fast device, I’m generally not in a hurry when reading. It might bother the more impatient among us.
• The Borders ebook software is a bit lacking. I was a little bit disappointed to see that most of the books that came pre-loaded don’t show up in the library list. Also, there doesn’t seem to be a way to add existing, non-DRMed titles that you may already have (which were not purchased through Borders) to the Kobo via this software. Granted, you can just copy the files over to the device itself, totally bypassing the software. For library management, I would recommend Calibre over the included software. It will convert pretty much any document you have into either epub or pdf format and load it onto your Kobo for you. It also has a nice library organizer.
• No light for night time reading.
• Rumor has it the bluetooth is only supported with Blackberry devices. Alas, my phone isn’t cool enough to test this out.⁵
• Directional pad placement may be awkward for lefties.

Conclusion:

Despite the slowness, so far I really like this little device. It does exactly what it was meant to do which is store books and allow me to read them easily. In this task I feel it does a very good job. I am using Calibre for my library management, so any issues I had with the included software is null. I’m able to load files and manage them without any issue using this method which is perfect for me.⁶ All in all a pretty nice little device for the money. I would recommend this for anyone looking for a simple eReader that allows for a lot of flexibility of content without a lot of bells and whistles.

Rating: 4 out of 5 robots⁷

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1. Yes, all you technical technicality technicians, it’s technically not purely an eReader. Whatever. It’s still full of magical pixels.
2. They’re the crackpottiest!
3. In a purely scientific fashion, of course.
4. That’s Imperial butt-ton units.
5. What? Really? Ah well. It’s not like I was going to use that feature anyway.
6. And the fact that I can use 3rd party software with this device is another bonus.
7. If the loading was a smidgen faster and there was a light of some sort, in my opinion, it would be perfect.

Happy Bastille Day everyone!¹ Here at the Secret Lair we like a good overthrowing, so long as the Overlords are the ones doing the overthrowing.² It also warms the cockles of the Overlords’ hearts when possible overlording competition is removed, even if said competition is over 200 years in the past.³

In celebration of this fine occasion, the Overlords proclaim that there should be cake. Cake that must be eaten.⁴

Without further ado, we present The Secret Lair Let Them Eat Cake Cake.⁵

The Secret Lair Let Them Eat Cake Cake Recipe⁶

Ingredients:

• 3-3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3 packages or yeast (3/4 oz)
• 1/3 cup milk
• 5 large eggs
• 12-1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
• 1 cup bittersweet chocolate chips (the darker the better)
• 1 package cream cheese frosting, divided into three batches
• red and blue food coloring

Instructions:

1. Combine the flour, sugar, salt, and yeast in a bowl⁷.
2. Add the milk and eggs, mixing until all the flour is incorporated.⁸
3. Knead the dough until it’s uniformly mixed and smooth and sides o f the bowl become clean (5- 10 minutes).
4. Cut the butter into small pieces. Add the butter to the dough slowly, only a few pieces at a time, mixing the dough until everything is incorporated.
5. Knead the dough until there are no more chunks of butter, and the sides of the bowl become clean. The dough will become very smooth. This may take up to 15 minutes. You may need to add a little bit more flour, one tablespoon at a time to achieve this.
6. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and place it in a warm place (room temp.) for 2-3 hours or until the dough doubles in size.
7. Gently punch down the dough to deflate. Sprinkle a little bit of flour on the surface and place a piece of plastic wrap against the surface.
8. Cover the bowl well with plastic wrap again and place in the fridge until the dough doubles again (another 2-3 hours).
9. Deflate the dough again, extract it from the bowl, form it into a ball an d wrap with plastic wrap. Leave in the fridge for at least 6 hours or overnight.
10. Hooray! The dough is ready to be formed!
11. Butter a 9″ x 5″ loaf pan.Roll out the dough into a large rectangle that is about 7-8″ on its shortest side and 1/2″-1″ thick.
12. Sprinkle the chocolate chips over the surface of the rectangle, leaving some free space at one of the short ends. Roll the dough in on itself (like you’re rolling a rug⁹ ), covering the chocolate chips with the dough. Once you reach the end, pinch the dough to seal the ends.
13. Place the loaf in the pan. Cover with plastic wrap and place in a warm spot until it doubles in size (again 2-3 hours).
14. Preheat the oven to 375°F.
15. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, or until dark golden. Turn out onto a rack. Thump the bottom – if it sounds hollow, the loaf is done. If not, put back in pan and cook for another 5 minutes.
16. Cool to room temp. on a rack.
17. Add blue food coloring to 1/3 of the frosting and mix until the color is uniform. Add red food coloring to 1/3 of the frosting mix until the color is uniform. Leave the last 1/3 white.
18. When the loaf is cool to the touch, frost the top of the loaf with one stripe of blue, white, and red like the French flag.
19. Et voila! C’est magnifique! Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!

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1. Or at least those of you with an ounce or two of French-ish heritage. Or at least those of you that wished to had some sort of French-ish heritage. Or at least those of you who enjoy a croissant now and then.
2. As opposed to underthrowing. Although I hear those are fun too, but not as noisy.
3. Our scientists tell us they almost have all the bugs worked out of the Pogo Time Ball
4. OK. So for all you technical technicality technicians, the historical quote was actually “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche“. We know and we don’t care. I mean, brioche is sort of cake like anyway.
5. Or TSLLTECC for all you acronym junkies out there.
6. Technically brioche. You win this time, technical technicality technicians! Also, our scientists haven’t actually tested out this recipe yet, so, good luck. We’re fairly certain it’s non-explosive.
7. If you have a mixer with a dough hook, that will save you a lot of time and avoid cook’s cramp.
8. If using a mixer, you may need to stop it and scrape down the sides to get everything mixed in.
9. or a toilet paper roll

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is the 2010 Locus award winner for Best First Novel. The story takes place in the 22nd century; petroleum is a distant memory and giant agricultural conglomerates fight wars and wipe out local crops with genetically-engineered plagues to create markets for their genehacked grains. Thailand is the last holdout against these Calorie Companies, maintaining a closely-guarded seedbank that contains what may be the last natural food-bearing flora on the planet.

The Calorie Companies want in and the Environment Ministry wants to keep them out. Making matters difficult is the Ministry of Trade, which is doing all it can to loosen border restrictions and open up trade with the rest of the world—in direct conflict with the goal of the Environment Ministry.

In the middle of the mess, and soon to become a far more important part of it than she would ever imagine, is Emiko, a windup girl (genetically engineered “New Person”) whose very presence in Bangkok is illegal. Emiko works in a brothel, a toy for those with more exotic (and perverse) tastes than are easily satisfied by the real girls. She is a prisoner of fear, knowing that the Environment Ministry White Shirts enforcers are kept at bay only by the bribes her patron pays. Should the bribes stop, Emiko would surely be mulched, processed and turned into the methane that provides so much of Bangkok’s energy.

This was, simply put, a fantastic book. The post-petroleum world Bacigalupi created is complex and compelling (a great exploration of what the world might look like after the petroplague in Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason’s Ill Wind or simply the depletion of the world’s oil reserves) and the idea of genehacked grain and a food supply that is largely controlled by companies in Des Moines is fascinating (especially after reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan). Then there are the characters: Emiko the windup girl; the White Shirts, Captain Jaidee “The Tiger” Rojjanasukchai and his Lieutenant, Kanya; Anderson Lake, the Calorie Man looking for a way to undermine the Environment Ministry; and Hock Seng, the Yellow Card refugee from a China torn apart by religious conflict. Bacigalupi winds their separate stories together expertly, creating distinct voices for each and making them all sympathetic, even though their motivations often counter one another.

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In this episode of The Secret Lair podcast, the Overlords get together to discuss a couple of recent movies starring Robert Downey, Jr. Note that both Overlords were in their new powered armor suits while recording this episode, which completely explains the tin-can quality of the audio in the recording. Really.

Discussion: Iron Man 2 and Sherlock Holmes

• Iron Man is Overlord Johnson’s OMG Best Superhero Movie EVAR, so the sequel had a lot to live up to.
• Holy analogy, Iron Man! Iron Man 2 : Iron Man :: The Dark Knight : Batman Begins
• Hey, Black Widow: Vere is your aksent, comrade?
• Overlord Miller would have preferred Nick Fury: Agent of M.E.N.A.C.E.
• Justin Hammer was a good California millionaire.
• Overlord Miller felt that Whiplash was a little shoe-horned into the story.
• Overlord Johnson thought Whiplash was pretty cool, but his demise was weak.
• Gwyneth Paltrow, Jon Favreau and new-Rhodey (Don Cheadle) had a lot more to do this time around.
• Howard Stark is Walt Disney.
• Overlord Miller seems to think that Robert Downey Jr. will be relegated to a cameo in the upcoming Avengers movie; Overlord Johnson disagrees.
• War Machine was pretty darn cool.
• The new Iron Man armor was pretty cool, too. Let’s avoid the West Coast Avengers version (AKA Silver Centurion), though, okay?
  
• How about that Iron Baby?
• We take a slight tangent to discuss:
  • Chris Hemsworth as Thor.
  • Chris Evans as Captain America.
  • Jake Wyler is another Chris Evans role (Not Another Teen Movie).
  • Do not do this with Captain America’s shield. Ever again.
    
  • Overlord Miller is looking forward to the Green Lantern movie, but we have some concerns about how the power of the ring will be realized on-screen.
• And finally we get to Sherlock Holmes, which Overlord Johnson felt was a bit reminiscent of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
• Overlord Miller was relieved, as it could have been much, much worse.
• Holmes’ fighting strategy brought to mind Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.
• Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) appears in the very first of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia.”
• Was the movie too “steampunk-y”? What have we got against steampunk, anyway?
• Madam Overlord Johnson felt the plot lacked any sort of mystery.
• Who will portray Moriarty in the sequel? Perhaps one of Overlord Miller’s man-crushes.
  • And now we’re on a Doctor Who tangent. That’s the royal “we”, where Overlord Miller is the royalty and Overlord Johnson is a bloody peasant.
  • Are we really talking about a porn parody of the old Batman television series? Apparently so, but we say “cultural touchstone,” so it’s okay. There’s a fully-clothed trailer for Batman XXX: A Porn Parody on YouTube, of all places.
  • Finally, Overlord Johnson isn’t quite ready to declare steampunk a complete failure as a genre of fiction just yet; he very much enjoyed Gail Carriger’s Soulless, a review of which can be found on this very site.

Lairkeeping

• The podcast will be on hiatus for the next six weeks or so, but we’ll be updating the blog between now and then.
• Our theme music is “Skullcrusher Mountain” by Jonathan Coulton.
• Visit us on the web at trip-dubs dot thesecretlair dot com.
• Try StatusNet for those short updates. This service is invite-only, so send us a note if you’d like to join.
• Got something to say that 140 characters just won’t cover? Say it on our community site.
• Coming up on The Secret Library, The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell. Really. Any day now.
• The Secret Lair blog is powered by WordPress.

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This morning. we bring you a little something to ease you into your week. Remember Pachelbel’s Canon? You know…they play it at weddings, graduations, all manner of social gatherings.  No?

Let us remind you. Here are some of the best performances, remixes, and re-imaginings of the classic we could find on the interwebs.

A bit of commentary from Rob Parovian:

An arrangement by the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet:

A song and dance(?!) from “Le plus grand cabaret du Monde” via TVFrance 2:

Now, as Ms. Jackson said, gimme a beat:

And finally, some talented hands:

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