my toxic omelet — best ever

According to this urban legend/recipe, if you can boil water, you can make an omelet. All you need is a couple eggs, the chopped-up ingredients you want in your omelet, and a quart size Ziploc baggie (same size they want to see your toiletries in when you fly).

The recipe has apparently been circulating on the interweb for some time:

Crack 2 eggs (large or extra-large) into the quart size Ziploc bag (not more than 2) and shake to combine them. Put in a variety of ingredients such as: cheeses, ham, onion, green pepper, tomato, hash browns, salsa, etc.

Make sure to get the air out of the bag and zip it up. Place the bag(s) into rolling, boiling water for exactly 13 minutes. You can usually cook 6-8 omelets in a large pot.

Open the bags and the omelet will roll out easily.

Because I’ve never successfully made an omelet–it turns into scrambled eggs every.single.time–I knew I had to try this. “But is it safe?” was my nagging, second thought. After googling around, I’m pretty sure the short answer is no, not really. That’s why you don’t do it every day. Just like you don’t microwave your leftovers in Tupperware and don’t drink from plastic water bottles every day…. right?

So anyway, I didn’t take pictures of the process, but I tried this with olives, tomatoes and mushrooms inside and came out with the fluffiest, most cohesive omelet I have ever made! tah-dah!

Only one minor mishap: the bottom of the baggie split open at the end of the cooking time, and the eggs got a little soggy. Maybe cuz I used generic Ziplocs? Some sites recommend the freezer baggies, but I don’t buy those in that size so, whatever. My toxic omelet had a deformed lump on the side because I cooked it with part of the baggie under the lid of the pot in an effort to keep it from touching the bottom. Next time I guess I’ll just put a metal strainer down.

Oh and that purple poo on the side? Potatoes. When I bought em I thought they just had purple skin but they were purple all the way through. Not sweet tho. Fried em up with some onions and rosemary, yes yes.

pressurizing the local

The band was in-between songs and there were still tables open when I walked in to the Dragon Upstairs last Saturday, just behind a group of retiree-aged hipsters. “C’mon in,” boomed a voice from a dimly-lit corner; the band gestured for us to do the same. I gamely follow a white-haired man in a pin-stripped fedora into the intimate, match-box sized club.

Ideas from the class reading bopped around inside my head:*

Stressing and pressurizing the local as a site of “critical resistance” posits a more dynamic way of imagining the relationship of a region, nation, and globe in which difference is not subsumed nor reified but circulated and affirmed” (Wilson 14).

I side-stepped the bell of a trumpet held close and low, nodding to the band while snaking past the potentially expectoration-flecked front line, to the raised seating area where Rowen, Miki and Hank sat holding court at the best table in the house.

It was only the second time I’d met Hank, the owner of both the Dragon Upstairs and Hank’s Cafe, another live music venue downstairs in the same Nuuanu Street building. Last year was the first time we’d met, I’d interviewed him for an article for Hawaii Luxury magazine. He’d impressed me with his charisma and passion for music. I’d sat at the bar drinking chardonnay, asking questions and scribbling notes for my story. Eventually he leaned in and spelled it out: “I want Hawaiian jazz.”

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The Grouch - Artsy

This is a fun video from a poet of hiphop, hot off the front page of youtube. It reminds me not to accidentally turn into too much of a hippie and to take time to nurture art regardless :~j

$1.99 download on iTunes

The Grouch myspace

kawaii desu nee!

Added to list of things to do in Japan: visit a cat cafe… c’mon! this is adorable! It’d be like if they served coffee at the cat house at the Humane Society, only more comfortable.

Love the intro to the story in the Christian Science Monitor*:

Just around the corner from the pulsing blare and brightness of the Akihabara electronics and anime district, cafe Neko JaLaLa is an oasis of calm. Past the brass, paw-handled door to the inner sanctum, denizens loll on the thick carpet, drape over couches, and almost purr with pleasure in the quiet atmosphere.

And that’s just the humans.

The article goes on to explain that playing with cats, or even just watching them, is a great stress reliever. Apparently the cafes are kept quite clean, too, so it sounds great.

Here’s a little clip from one of the cat cafes

* Don’t hold their name against them like I did for a long time, this is an excellent publication.

earth day every day: plastic bags

It’s a pet peeve of mine how bag-happy the local grocery stores can be. Does the 12-pack of soda–with the handle–really need to be double-plastic-bagged?? I think not. Sheesh. My theory is they use as many bags as possible so you feel like your $80 worth of groceries got you something, but canvas, mesh and reusable plastic bags tell the truth, well, at least, they hold more and don’t require double-bagging.

A few years ago, I was too shy to bust out my own bag at the store. I didn’t want to be that granola chick holding up the line at Long’s offering a funky net bag or tote bag to the cashier. But when I got three of these bags for Christmas, I figured I’d at least use em at Kokua Market where the organic-loving clientele wouldn’t blink. Now I’m so used to carrying them around, I have no shame to bust em out at Safeway or the corner liquor store. Sometimes the clerk even thanks me.

Apparently normal plastic bags take like 1,000 years to degrade (or a few decades, depending on the source) and require obscene quantities of crude oil to make. When you combine that with the huge number we go through and the damage they can do in marine environments, it def becomes a problem–but a solvable one. You can easily find out more, it’s a trendy topic right now. Regarding that last link, I personally don’t see the need to make a fashion statement out of a shopping bag, I think it kind of misses the point that if you only have a few things to carry, any old bag will usually do, messenger, backpack, tote bag, whatever, but yea, whatever.

At the same time, banning plastic bags outright doesn’t seem totally necessary. They’ve recently done this in San Francisco and are discussing it in Hawaii and in a number of cities elsewhere. I think charging for (biodegradable) plastic bags would be fair and offering recycling for plastic bags seems like a great idea.

Of course if a store choses to ban them, more power to to them. But paper isn’t really environmentally that much better and there are a lot of ways to reuse plastic bags, from garbage to lunches, and my lil sis tells me that they’re essential for picking up dog poo. Or even these crazy lil craft projects that I’ll never do.

The Nation on Hawaiian sovereignty and resistance

A special issue The Nation is dedicated to the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and ongoing resistance to U.S. control. Elinor Langer’s article “Famous Are the Flowers: Hawaiian Resistance Then–And Now” is, according to the editors “a probing exploration of the annexation of Hawai’i by the United States and of the issues of sovereignty and indigenous rights that persist in the wake of that seizure–accomplished not by treaty but by threat of force and unilateral act of Congress.”

Every article is not accessible without a subscription, but the main story is, as are some editorials and historic pieces of note linked from the Hawaiian Independence Blog. I thought the main feature was an informative read, tho I kind of kept expecting to hear about the armed resistance that took place at the time of the overthrow, because I wanted to know more. I remember something about rebels hiding out in Palolo Valley?! The armed resistance was apparently short-lived, but obviously worthy of consideration alongside the weighty petitions of protest.

Doug at Shaka Zine thought there might be some larger problems with the reporting, errors larger than the couple typos I noticed. Will be interesting to see the scholars and activists respond to this. Also the comments look like they might get good…

BTW Shaka Zine is by old school zine-ster, performance artist, poet and _________ Doug Upp–the man has many talents. (I’m so glad you’re blogging!! everybody needs more Doug Upp in their lives. Big fan. *smooches*)

s’alright shrimp fried rice

There are about 282,000 ways to make fried rice and there doesn’t seem to be much consensus on the steps or the ingredients. The more I look around, the more I am convinced that an “anything goes” approach to the dish is just fine.

So last night, pressed for time again and my stomach rumbling, I threw together some shrimp fried rice using what I had on hand. It came out okay, but it was bland. I solved that problem with some hot sauce, but I would rather have the shrimp be more savory.

Next time I’ll do a quick marinade of the shrimp in some kind of garlic/ginger/shoyu sauce and include red pepper or hot sauce while cooking. I’d love to hear how other people make it… holla at me in the comments if you have suggestions?

I did use Jasmine brown rice instead of traditional white rice (no, please, keep reading!). And I really messed up because I added the egg to the same pan as the rice (doh!), which coated the rice and looked bleh. Next time I’ll scramble it on its own, set aside, and mix it in at the end. Finally, I didn’t have any green onion, and it was seriously missed.

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blogrollin

Pretty much every blog that ever blogged in the blogosphere has a blogroll, a list of links to other blogs. Making this list is a task I’ve long put off because there are just so many cool sites to link to, I know I’ll miss someone. How could it ever be complete?

But I finally added linkage to some sites of interest in the far right column, under the Twitter updates, above the Flickr pictures, under the title Hi, Friends.

I’m starting with links to people who commented on this here humble site (many thanks!) and including a few news sites I like (tho Under The Radar Media and Lorelle on Wordpress actually each count as both). The blogroll is capped off with an Airspace Workshop link since I’m like their #1 mixtape fan and happen to be listening to their "called off because of rain" mix as I write this.

Watch that space, it’s gonna grow. And comment if you have a site and want to quickly link up with jeelago.net :~j

I’m forgetting something important….

it’s a wrap

Global food prices have risen dramatically, adding a new level of danger to the crisis of world hunger…. In the United States there has been a 41 percent surge in prices for wheat, corn, rice and other cereals over the past six months.

This according to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, as part of an interview where she introduces the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System,” Raj Patel.

Patel outlines a perfect storm of conditions that are causing food shortages and riots globally, including:

• bad harvests, possibly related to climate change
• biofuels and ethanol driving up the price of commodities like sugar, corn, wheat
• increasing demand for meat leading to an increasing demand for grain to feed livestock, not people, and driving up the price of grain
• rising price of oil

Other stories in the news talk about how jobs are leaving and inflation is hitting everyone. Those stories scare me, even tho it hasn’t gotten to riot levels in the United States.

I see my grocery bill creeping higher and higher for the same amount of groceries. But I’m also becoming more savvy about wholesome, cheap meals and I feel like blogging about that :~j

I think of myself as a vegetarian with omnivore tendencies–I’d eat anything if I HAD to, most likely, or if it would be especially rude not to, or if I’m just curious about the dish. But I prefer not to for the most part. Officially I’m an ovo-lacto-pescatarian, meaning I will happily consume eggs, dairy and seafood in addition to starches, veggies, fruits and grains. I prefer simple foods.

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flower drum song, the musical

I’m always down for a live performance. Regardless of event type, seeing things live always adds a new dimension to appreciate, be it a baseball game, stand-up comedy routine or concert of any genre. Last week, I experienced a Broadway style musical, Flower Drum Song on an extended run at Diamond Head Theatre. These performers are working it, singing, dancing, acting… they have my full respect. Having a live, mini-orchestra there was also unexpected and fun.

This youtube clip of a 2006 performance looks like someone snuck it in the theater. Minus the thong(!) it is very much like what we saw at DHT. (The last minute or so appears to be some… thing… else….. perhaps was under the recording?)

The dailies of course loved the show. They love everything that’s locally produced; it’s the CODB in Hawaii. (see comments) Me I’m not really a “musicals person” (and yea those are “scare quotes”). LoL. But I tried to put that aside since I was there for a class assignment to think about the performance in terms of the reading we had done the previous week in a book by Coco Fusco called English is Broken Here.

The task was to consider what Fusco would say about the Flower Drum Song performance at DHT. As concerned as she is with Latino/a issues, I do not think Fusco would speak too directly to the content of a supposedly reappropriated (re-reappropriated?) performance of Asian otherness in a United Statesian* style in the illegally occupied Kingdom of Hawaii. But that’s an admittedly presumptuous guess.

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don’t look, I’m naked

I’ve decided to expose my <body> on the internet in honor of Naked Day ‘08 on April 9th. Thousands of other people are doing it, too, so I figured, why the heck not. You heard right: I’m stripping off my styles and going bare on the internet… that is, my website will be going bare on the internet, for all to see. What were YOU thinking? ;~p

My purpose in participating in Naked Day ‘08 is three-fold:

• Advocate web standards This is the official reason for Naked Day and a cause that I am fully down with but am much too lazy to explain here, mainly cuz I do it all the time at work! That’s what a good link is for anyway, right?
• Celebrate good design Trying to pick matching link colors and backgrounds and fonts for a site is not fun for me as a non-designer, and the results always underwhelming. The industry has come a long way, baby, and now hundreds of beautiful, free templates are available for Wordpress alone. The design I currently use is called Bluebird and it’s by Randa Clay. Many thanks, design people!
• Show off Wordpress The code for the Wordpress software that powers the blog is clean and standards compliant, meaning that even when you strip away the pretty work designers do, the site still makes sense.

Wordpress makes participating in Naked Day ‘08 super easy by providing a plugin that will automatically turn off my CSS template. The result should be a text-based, bare-bones-looking site. Not pretty but very usable…. at least I hope that’s what happens LoL… it’ll be a good experiment.

On the jeelago.net index page, which is not powered by Wordpress, I manually strip-teased out the very minimal amount of CSS I’ve used to do things like align the text and set the width. Were my site more complicated and I more adept in php, I could use a script to strip, but that won’t be necessary this year.

Nirvana live at Pink’s Garage in Honolulu 1992

I was always kinda sick I missed this show. What you can see of the crowd in the flashes of light looks crazy. This is “Negative Creep” off their first album, Bleach.

grounds of turpitude

A few weeks ago Sebastian Horsley was headed to the U.S. to begin a media tour for his recently published memoir Dandy in the Underworld, in which he “chronicles his life as an artist, a junkie and a self-professed dandy. . . . painting himself as a misogynist, a sexual deviant and a narcissist.” [Publisher's Weekly] He was questioned by U.S. officials for eight hours at Liberty International Airport in Newark, New Jersey before being sent back to England.

Lucille Cirillo, a spokeswoman for the New York office of United States Customs and Border Protection. . . in an e-mail message, said that under a waiver program that allows British citizens to enter the United States without a visa, “travelers who have been convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude (which includes controlled-substance violations) or admit to previously having a drug addiction are not admissible.” [NY Times]

The “utterly appalling” nature of this denial is noted by the writer at the powerofnarrative.blogspot.com:

And now you are “not admissible” if you have been convicted of a “crime involving moral turpitude” — even if you have already suffered whatever penalty might have been imposed and are now free, although you are not free to enter the United States — or if you “admit to previously having a drug addiction.” Obviously, you should lie about it.

But obviously, if you’ve written a book about said turpitude, it becomes more difficult to lie, even, apparently, for a man who has gone on record saying, “It’s better to be quotable than honest.”

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