Dan’s Blog

If you’re like me, you’re a Will Shortz junkie. You’ve several of his crossword books, and even remember fondly his time at Games magazine. You’ve also got a subscription to the New York Times crossword puzzle, but you don’t remember to download the puzzle on a daily basis. So you’re like, “Hey, I wish the puzzle would download to my computer every day, or, better yet, I wish it would show up in my inbox.”

I wrote a small perl script that does just that — it downloads the current puzzle, saves it where you want it, and emails it to addresses you specify. It’ll work best for OS X and Linux users, as it’s written in perl and requires a few external but fairly standard libraries that can be installed via CPAN. Download it here: NY Times Crossword Puzzle Downloader.

Short Directions:
Rename the file from .txt to .pl, make it executable, customize the variables, and add it as a cronjob.

Longer Directions:
…When I get a few minutes.

License: GPL, of course.

Jenny posts on how to have a spicy weekend. Apparently, it involves rock and roll, dancing, and roller derbies.

Alec — the man responsible for introducing me to indie rock and mix tapes — posts an animal-related mix over on his blog. The high point is, I think, “Ride Me Donkey”, which is surprisingly innocent, given the title.

This morning I realized that have everything necessary to create YouTube content (a MacBook with iSight and iMovie), so I decided to make a short clip. Being fairly lazy about the whole thing, it’s a clip of my cat drinking water. Enjoy!

In a startling throwback to the half-assed vegetarianism of my early twenties, I made a pretty decent jerked seitan appetizer for an Oscar party Jessica and I hosted last Sunday. The basic idea was to make small seitan cubes, and serve them with pineapple cubes of a similar size to create a nice spicy / sweet contrast. Since it’s all cube-style, toothpicks can be involved, meaning that the preparation is suitable for cocktail parties where people are standing around and don’t have easy access to utensils. And since it’s seitan, the preparation is suitable for cocktail parties where vegans are standing around and won’t eat animal products. (Will I travel great rhetorical distances for the sake of parallel sentence construction? You bet.)

The first step is to follow the seitan recipe from the post punk kitchen. They don’t include any pictures, because if they did, they would look like this:

Go ahead and pretend that that’s something you want to eat. It looks more like the end result of a particularly excruciating round of any number of bodily processes than food. That said, it’s tasty.

The next step is to squeeze out the liquid and cube your seitan. You want your seitan deeply jerked, and the drier you get your seitan prior to adding the marinade, the deeper the jerk flavor will penetrate, so don’t be shy with your squeezing and pressing.

Now add a jerk marinade of some kind (I used the jerk seasoning from Penzey’s, which definitely saved time) and bag up the result in a nice ziplock. Let it marinate for a day or so.

Finally, cook it up in a pan over high heat, or, if you can, on the grill or in the broiler. You want a nice crust on the outside — which is easier in a regular pan than a non-stick pan — and you want them to be dry-ish in the middle, or they’ll get soggy and mushy as they cool. Plate ‘em up with some pineapple cubes of roughly equivalent size, and stick toothpicks in them. Enjoy.

While shopping at the Giant this weekend, I noticed a bunch of bruised, green oranges under plastic. Upon closer inspection, it appears that Giant has has a sense of humor about its nastier products:

Jessica has put together a Valentine’s Day card for y’all.  Enjoy!

Last week I finished up a website for One LA, which is an Industrial Areas Foundation affiliate located in and around the City of Angels. It was a fun site to work on, and it adds to the relatively small set of public-facing html sites that I’ve worked on that are still standing.

I recently finished reading Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy, and I was impressed enough that I wrote a review of it, which I posted on Amazon.com. And now I’m posting it here:

Female Chauvinist Pigs is really about two things: sexual pleasure and freedom. Specifically, Levy wants to know why “post-feminist” freedom and sexuality — epitomized by Girls Gone Wild, Playboy bunnies, and the glorification of porn stars and strippers — looks so much like its opposite: a pre-feminist world in which women try their damnedess to please their partners (or crowds, or video cameras) without a strong sense of their own sexual desires.
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Okay, so I only watched 10 minutes of the Bachelor, but I’ll tell you this: Moana is “America’s Sweetheart”. Like that lady in a different Bachelor season whose family member died during the filming, thereby forcing her to cancel a precious date. I think the Bachelor — maybe his name was Bob? Maybe he’s “reality TV famous”, and married a soap star? — felt that going to a family funeral was a sign that she wasn’t serious about dating him. It was also kind of a downer, and it took away from his camera time. That lady — whose name I can’t remember — now she was also “America’s Sweetheart”, but America has a short attention span and is constantly in need of new sweethearts. And now it’s Moana’s turn.