by Jaime Green

I have a baking sheet of radishes in the oven, hopefully transmogrifying from little red-ringed slices of a vegetable I don’t particularly love into rich, crispy, salty little chips, which I hope I will at least like. Heat, oil, and salt-the same magic that makes almost every other vegetable delicious. But a preparation that’s a little more finicky this time. And it’s one of the last evenings it’ll be cool enough for baking all summer.

I have never been a big fan of a radish-it’s at once flavorless and too peppery, as pretty as it might be-but something, one of those internet somethings that slips through your mind-sieve and leaves just an untraceable residue behind, reminded me recently of my first year or two shopping at the farmers market. I reached into bins of strange vegetables with enamored abandon. I took them home like adopted pets or science projects, to try to love and to see what would happen. Also the radishes were a dollar a bunch. So I would figure out something to do with them.

I’ve been back at the market for weeks now (though I never really left), eager for the first spring produce and then before the asparagus was even gone-and when it finally was, I failed to notice its final showing-anxious for summer bounty. The anticipation feels greedy without the old naïve mystery of what each trip to the greenmarket would yield. In a few weeks there will be raspberries. Next time the strawberries might taste better and be a little cheaper. Where are the string beans? I want to cook eggplant. (Never mind the beautiful kale and lambsquarter in the bag over my shoulder that I’ve already bought and whose delicious ends I could be planning.) I didn’t get around to that asparagus pesto recipe. I never figured out what to do with rhubarb, so now I’ll have to wait another year.

I’ve been seeing abundant stinging nettles for weeks but it’s too Harry Potter, too Plants vs. Zombies. Too much work, and I don’t even know if they taste good. I’m just not gonna buy food I’d have to wear protective gloves to be able to handle.

Three summers ago I borrowed a big, green book from the library, with the sort of un-hip, momish cover design that comes from either the 70s or the early 90s. It cataloged vegetables simply and alphabetically, explaining how to choose them, how to store them, and basic preparations. Armed with that (and the internet), every Saturday I took home whatever vegetables were cheap and lush. Our caveman brains still know what’s good to eat, like the very pretty onions this past weekend, smooth and hard, golden and the size of my fist.

But radishes, I don’t like radishes, so of course this weekend I bought them. Because otherwise I can buy the same things I bought this time a year ago, and continue on like that until all that’s left are the apples and winter squash I faced wearily in February. (The apples are still at the market, but so are the strawberries, and even if the berries a few weeks away from their heart-stoppingly delicious peak, they are strawberries, and so we buy them.)

If you slice your radishes even and thin (this and shredding cabbage make a mandolin very worth it) and toss them in a little olive oil and sprinkle them with salt, you can lay them on a baking sheet in a 300-degree oven to bake and crisp for an hour or so. (This is a time to use parchment paper.) It’s a stupid thing to do in the summer, to run your oven that long, but before the radishes are out of season there will be a few more cold nights-they are a late spring vegetable, really, all gaudy magenta and, did I mention, just one dollar for a hefty bunch.

In the oven the radishy bite melts and mellows into something almost sweet. They are unattractively shriveled, and some make it to the burned side of golden, but even those are delicious and just see if you can stop yourself eating them all plucked from the hot baking sheet while you stand in the kitchen in pajamas. It’s not really a meal, and you should probably go to bed. But you figured out something new to do with a vegetable, and you are young enough that you should keep doing things like that.

Jaime Green knows how fast summer passes.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez stopped a speech yesterday to sing a song about Hilary Clinton yesterday. “I’m not loved by Hillary Clinton,” he sang (in a rather dulcet voice) of the U.S. Secretary of State, who is currently touring South America. “And I don’t love her either.” You know Hilary’s crew will tell her to just brush it off, that Chavez isn’t even on her level and so putting his name in a rap would only give him some shine and help his career. But as a music fan, I’m hoping she comes back with a response as hard as this.

“He ate, slept and drank Voltron.”
-A former business partner discusses Peter Keefe’s obsession with “Voltron: Defender of the Universe,” the show he created and produced. Any number of American TV-watchers of a certain age (ahem) might very well be able to say the same thing. Keefe passed away late last month at the age of 57. He was buried in five small coffins which combined to make one unstoppable giant casket.

Rich Person Does Nutty Thing, Heirs Sue Everyone

I could spend 20 minutes semi-explaining why the legendary lawyer Arthur Kramer (known better to you artsy folks as brother of Larry, regarding whom, no comment at this time) engaged in complicated maneuvers near the end of his life to bundle and resell seven life insurance policies, worth $56.2 million, to investors, over which the family is now suing and being sued, but can we just go with RICH PEOPLE SURE IS CRAZY and leave it at that? (On the upside, this mess may smooth out some conflicting little bits of law in New York State! Perhaps that’s Arthur Kramer’s real final legacy.)

“Rather than forge a coalition on reform, Obama is content to use the issue to secure Latino votes-if not for Democrats in this fall’s contests, then for his reelection. He willingly mischaracterizes the Arizona law because doing so benefits his party and himself. But on matters involving race, the president’s obligation is to unify America, not add to tensions. Obama’s political handling of this sensitive issue is shameful.”
-Do you think Karl Rove ever has a moment where he’s just about to click “send” and looks back on what he’s just written and says to himself, “You know what, Karl? This time you’ve gone too far. There’s no way you’re gonna get away with this one. In the annals of all the deeply hypocritical, blatantly partisan self-serving nonsense they’ve let you run before, you’ve finally crossed a line of cheap mendacity so glaring that even the most amoral person in the world would rediscover the sense of intellectual honesty that he had been suppressing for so long and say, ‘This is a bridge too far.’” I mean, he probably does just click send, but isn’t it pretty to think otherwise?

Not only does the Miami Herald employ government-paid anti-Castro operatives (well, really!), it’s also now an bonafide arm of the Disney World Propaganda Ministries. This photo, sent in by this morning one of our local operatives, shows the full glory of the enormous Toy Story 3 advertisement that adorns the gorgeous Miami Herald building. Well, it’s a business model. (We’re not adverse to billboards on our own headquarters, by the way! Inquire within!)

Leave it to Swiss engineering to save the day. Now that we’re killing all the birds and making our oceans too oily for fish, the folks at Switzerland’s federal design lab EMPA have developed a cool new machine to replace both things at once. The Airfish is a flying contraption that will remind us of a time when actual carbon-based living creatures soared through the sky and swam in the seas. It’s cool to watch. And it seems to be quiet enough for governments to use it to surreptitiously monitor their citizens from above. But most importantly, maybe the guys who built it can make a really, really big version that can travel through space in five or six years, and take the last few remaining humans and the cockroaches to a different temporarily inhabitable planet.

Near the end of the work day yesterday, people posting a link to an old video on Twitter caused it to be viewed more than 5000 times in an hour. “No plz! WATCH this” and “Omg this is some funny ish” and of course, that old stand-by, “Yooo watch this lol,” people wrote, as the only warning before disseminating a link to hardcore porn to all their Twitter followers-just as thousands of people recently did with another x-rated video. This is a really interesting development in the history of sharing things on the Internet! Here is a link to the Twitter search page for the video link; clicking on any of the links on that page will take you to graphic images which are not safe for work. (Warning: also, if you then do click through, you can never unsee this video! Eesh.)

I’m not entirely sure why the Absolut Vodka commercial featuring a version of Joy Division’s “Ceremony” bothers me as much as it does. I’d thought I’d gotten over my outrage at the notion of musicians “selling out” to ad firms pretty soon after Neil Young sent up a final gasp of indignation with the great spoof video for “This Note’s For You.” What was the last instance I remember upsetting me? The Beatles’ “Revolution” in that Nike ad, maybe. By the time Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” hit that yuppie Volkswagen spot I was just like, Oh, that would be a fun, driving around with some friends listening to that song. (And then maybe a nice glass of rose.) And when the Who’s “Baba O’Riley” welcomed everyone to the dawn of Cisco computer network’s new age or whatever, you know, fine.

But this Absolut ad sucks. Every time it comes on, it just bums me out. Even though all those bottles hanging in the forest look really cool, I think. Hearing “Ceremony” in this context just seems very, very wrong. Maybe its because Ian Curtis is dead, and there’s no way to be sure he would have been okay with the usage? But Nick Drake was dead long before that Volkswagen ad, too. I guess it just has to do with the supreme awesomeness of “Ceremony.” And how the song does sort of seem, well, sacred in a way, since Curtis died so soon after recording it. (And probably also because it’s called “Ceremony.” Duh.) This new version, by the Brooklyn band Fall On Your Sword, hews very closely to the one New Order did soon after Curtis’ death. Too closely for comfort, I guess. It’s been covered lots of times before, by Radiohead and Xiu Xiu and, best I think, by Galaxie 500, who slowed it way down, allowing for full reverent appreciation of its breathtakingly beautiful melody. I’m all for the covers. The more people that get to know this song the better. But please, keep it out of television commercials from now on. Thanks.

If there’s one thing you should read by Vladimir Arnold-who died last week at the age of 72, and who is memorialized by the Times today as “a founder of singularity theory, or, as it is sometimes more ominously called, catastrophe theory”-it’s his January, 1998 article “Innumeracy and the Fires of the Inquisition.” While Arnold’s work was what we laypeople would regard as a completely incomprehensible math, he was cognizant of the problems of the gulf between the state of written and taught mathematics and the ability of common people to understand it-and also extremely observant regarding politics, particularly sensitive to the presence and history of antisemitism, and greatly interested in the drift of Russia as a state concerned with an intellectual populace.

Here are some bits of that piece (available as a cached pdf here), which was, really, quite vicious (and came at a fascinating time):

We live in an insane world, in which most governments behave like the pigs under an oak tree in the fable by Krylov, both eating the acorns and digging up its roots, thus destroying the source of their very sustenance.

With the (temporary?) cessation of military confrontation between east and West, the funding of science in Russia has been virtually discontinued. Experts say that during the last 10 years it has decreased seventeen-fold and stands now at one-fourth of the level required for its mere survival. The spending on education decreased from 7% of the GDP in 1970 to 0.6% in 1997 (with further reductions planned for 1998).

[…]

It is somehow ridiculous to have to prove that every civilized person needs to be numerate: only savages think that bread comes down from the sky, that cars have always existed, and that there are no benefits from having airplanes.

Even more important than the ability to add fractions is the fact that a basic acquaintance with mathematics allows one to distinguish a correct argument from a faulty one. Without this ability, a society turns into a herd, easily manipulated by demagogues. According to Western experts, in the current situation in Russia, the assumption of power by a Hitler is even more likely than it was in Germany in the 1920s.

[…]

Whether our next ruler will be the Mafia or a charismatic nationalistic extremist (as is predicted by the head of the Department of Political Science of the MSU, who also calls for a struggle against the US, a struggle which “will require great courage and the ability to take risks”, and which will most
likely be of a “military-strategic” nature (Vestnik RAN, 1997, p. 1017)), the basics of fractions and percentages are absolutely essential in modern society. The future of a Russia in which the study of fractions is replaced by macrame appears bleak.

MACRAME, PEOPLE.

Let us leave you with a bit in which he took a look at the applications of real-world mathematics. That a complex mathematical thinker was also such a concrete thinker on politics and the applications of science is highly unusual.

All mathematics is divided into three parts: cryptography (paid for by CIA, KGB and the like), hydrodynamics (supported by manufacturers of atomic submarines) and celestial mechanics (financed by military and by other institutions dealing with missiles, such as NASA.).