Filed under: Naturalism, golf culture, golf food, golf news | Tags: bread, homemade bread, no knead bread
In my quest to master the basics of post-industrial cooking, bread has been a bit of a mystery. I grew up with rice and can tell the basic qualities and provenances of rice with ease, but bread I just like to eat. I think the difference is that I never saw my mother bake bread, and therefore, it is mysterious.
I used a simple no-knead recipe from the NY Times(link here). This is my second try -my first was a gooey mess. The results above are my second effort, and it looks really edible. The crust cracks fiercely and there is wonderful topography to this bread. It took very little effort, and I think this is how we’ll make our bread from here on.
The crust is wonderfuly crisp and the center is fluffy and chewy. It is bread heaven.
Filed under: Golfist Art, Golfist Cinema, Golfist Wintertime Diversions, golf culture, golf news, golf personalities | Tags: bobby brown, britney spears, karaoke, lady gaga, my prerogative, rising star, universa studiosl
Okay. So I’m off key -I was suppose to sing Proud Mary which is my song, but the crowd at Universal Studios responded.
Filed under: Golfist Art, Golfist Wintertime Diversions, golf equipment, golf news, golf philosophy | Tags: comfortable shoes, Crocs, keds, marketing, microbrand, OR shoes, PR, self brand, Shoes, sneakers, zazzle
the docpark OR shoe
As the winter drags on, I find myself now dabbling in fashion design. I have decided to release a line of lifestyle related sneakers. Actually, you too can launch your own blingy shoe line at www.zazzle.com.
And why not. Why is it that celebrity athletes get to get on cereal boxes. Why do they get the shoes? Why aren’t we supporting the mail carrier, the school teacher, the soccer mom, and the hospital nurse in the same way? Where are our priorities?
This guy will no longer wear other people’s labels. You are welcome to buy mine.
Filed under: Golf politics, Golfist Art, Golfist Cinema, Golfist Wintertime Diversions, My Bidness, Naturalism, golf culture, golf news, golf philosophy | Tags: admissions video, glee, Yale, yale admission office video, yale admissions musical, yale glee video, yale university
This made the rounds a few weeks ago, including a nice article on The New Yorker. Watching it, I had to smile. As a Harvard Alum, I can tell you there is no amount of glee at 86 Brattle Street that can match this gleeful video. You either get it or you don’t. They want to select for an even creamier crème de la crème. This goes beyond being able to understand and appreciate pink polo shirts, munching on pistachios, grapes, and brie with a Gewurztraminer, or liking to sing show tunes in the shower while being completely heterosexual.
If you don’t get it, you will snigger at this video and apply to Princeton. If you really don’t get it, you’ll stop watching when the singing starts and you’ll apply to a Big Ten School. If you get it, but don’t get in, you’ll be perfectly happy at Amherst. And so on.
This inspires me to hark back to college, to the time when I hijacked the microphone at Naples Pizza in New Haven and proclaimed, “Yale Sucks!” And now, we have proof.
Filed under: Golfist Wintertime Diversions, golf culture, golf food, golf news | Tags: comfort food, foodie, home cooking, instant noodles, Ramen
Homemade hand milled ramen noodles
After a few years of mental preparation, I have decided to go for it.My life goal for the next 10 years is among other things, to create a perfect bowl of ramen from scratch. Not the instant stuff that college students eat dry. No, not even the fast-food stuff that people slurp down in train stations in Tokyo. This is the real deal -stuff made from the heart and soul. I am Ramen Man -and this is my first try.
The noodles have been a riddle for a while because reports on the internet are that the package ramen noodles are fried before they are cooked. I created a basic egg noodle dough ball of flour, eggs, and water with the addition of an ingredient taken from the KBS documentary Noodle Road. Turns out, the Central Asian heartland from when ramen (lo-mein, laghman) came had very alkaline water. This and the arrival of wheat cultivation created the noodle over five millenia ago.
Though the water here in Iowa is already pretty hard, I added some baking soda to raise the pH. This causes the gluten proteins to bond into long, tenacious strands.
The noodles were pressed out using an old Atlas pasta maker from Italy. I had grown up making kal-guk-soo from the age of 10, so getting the noodles out on the finer setting was no big deal. The picture above shows the work -a softball sized dough ball makes enough for 4 people.
The noodles are boiled then quickly rinsed in cold water, and over this the broth is added.
Ahh -the broth. This is where the journey begins. My first effort is with a basic da-shi-ma (seaweed and dried anchovy broth) added 2:1 to pork/ginger broth. Some pork cutlet was added, as was thin cut green onions, but for this effort, I wanted just naked noodles and broth.
The noodles were in fact perfect. The baking soda -a reflection of the hard desert spring water of Central Asia, allowed the noodles to have a perfect springiness.
Naked ramen
The broth itself was without distinction and this is where all the hard work will go -it was clear and clean, but better suited for a mushroom soup or a fish soup than for ramen. And the ramen I am stalking is hakata ramen -the clear white broth the result of days of boiling pork (could it be the head?).
I did get a thumbs up from my critics.
Filed under: My Bidness, Vascular Disease, golf news, golf photography | Tags: Iowa, ottumwa, radar o'reilly, mash
Am on the road to Ottumwa Iowa for my first away clinic there. there was a whiteout ice storm the past two days and the roads were iffy, but too many people are waiting. Many cars in the ditch.Ottumwa is the home of the fictional Iowan, Radar O’Reilly.
Filed under: Golfist Wintertime Diversions, Naturalism, golf culture, golf equipment, golf news, golf personalities | Tags: breast augmentation, christina hendricks, fake boobs, how to tell, Mad Men, neolithic venus, plastic surgery
Every time I watch Mad Men, I get floored by Christina Hendricks. She captures the vavoom esthetics of the late 50’s and 60’s as personified by Sophia Loren. The standards of beauty shift and change over time, but 
the large mammaries and the male obsession with them are unique to humans among terrestrial mammals.
Neolithic hunter-gatherers, when they figured out how to shape stone into figurines, created an industry around figures of women with curves.
Breast augmentation is a large industry driven by not only popular tastes but probably something innate in our psyche. When I was an intern, the plastic surgery clinic was an eye opener, with perfectly healthy patients willing to undergo an operation at some risk to their health to sculpt themselves.
It was a time of transition away from silicone implants which were popularly (and erroneously) believed to cause autoimmune disease, to saline implants, and the quintessential moment for me was in filling what were plastic bags to the “correct” volume which was a subjective process. The whole OR got to voice their opinion with the surgeon having veto power.
With the recent red carpet productions, Christina Hendricks came up and it hit me that she looked different from when she was on Firefly, my favorite cancelled science fiction series. In it, she is incredible as an interplanetary highway robber and grifter. Five years later, she presents an entirely different profile.
At first, I thought she achieved her transformation with girdles and a few extra doughnuts a day, but the picture at the very top convinced me that some augmentation has occurred. When I mentioned this among my Facebook friends, TW, an old buddy from high school and a physician, categorically felt that these were real.
After intensive research, I would have to disagree. The tipoff are the bald men hiding in her dress. The placement of prosthetics causes a lifting of the skin and sometimes muscle which changes the profile from the “natural” which in profile looks like a nice sledding hill to the “augmented” which looks like a bald pate. 
This convexity is a giveaway, and with the lift and separate presentation bras, this convexity is enhanced. Gravity flattens this top area with time and no convexity is seen in latter day images of the all natural Sophia Loren who looks like she underwent some reduction.
That said, Hendricks is amazing in bringing her character to life, a Sad Woman among Mad Men.
Filed under: Golf and Computers, Golfist Wintertime Diversions, My Bidness, golf computers, golf equipment, golf news | Tags: cost, data plan, Dell Mini 10v, hackintosh, HTC TouchPro 2, internet access, iPad, iPhone, iPhone 3G, iTunes, netbook, Verizon, walkinghotspot, Windows Mobile
The iPad launch yesterday was not up to the hype -you needed the device to have time travel capabilities for people to be satisfied. That said, the question for this first adopter among first adopters is, “Where does this fit in my man purse?”
I need portable internet access for many reasons -I write a lot and am working on several research projects as well as need to keep in touch with a vascular team -the iPhone (now disconnected from AT&T) still serves as my primary email device because the HTC TouchPro2 that I have from Verizon has a maddeningly inconsistent email app that jumps between HTC’s beautiful interface and the horrible, ugly Windows Mobile 6.5 bones underneath. Despite this, the TP2 has earned a semi-permanent place because of the $30 app called WalkingHotSpot which will turn the TP2 into a Wifi hotspot.
I have a maxed out dataplan and tethering plan through Verizon, so I am just using the data that I have already purchased, just not for a Windows laptop but also for my iPhone which I can now use again for my golf GPS apps.
The middle spot between a big laptop (my 15inch Macbook Pro) and the iphone is the need to have a bigger screen than my iphone especially for iTunes movies and content, but at the same time having a keyboard, with at least 5 hrs of battery life. The netbooks do fill this niche in terms of hardware very nicely, but the software just isn’t there. I have become very used to iLife and iWork -thinks look prettier and works nicer through these than anything in the Windows or Linux environment.
The solution came in the form of Hackintosh. The Dell Mini 10v is a netbook which seems to have been designed solely for Hackintoshing. Hackintosh is a non-Apple computer made to run Mac OS X. This technically is a breach of the software license, but I own the computer and I own the shrink wrapped software license for this Hackintosh.
With this, I have a portable internet solution that goes 5hrs on battery, and more with the additional battery, all for a total of $400 bucks for the hardware. If you choose to go this route, you should buy the OS license.
The instructions are here: link.
This works nicely for now, because Apple didn’t have something that effectively served my needs in this space. Now they have iPad. We won’t be able to get our hands on one for 59 days, 89 if you want the 3G/Wifi version. Maybe my netbook days are numbered.
I’ll tell you why. The trackpad, designed by Dell, is one of the worst pieces of industrial design ever created by humans. Dell, after I ordered the netbook, took my money but didn’t acknowledge I even ordered the netbook until I spent two hours on tech support. It was only through the graces of a very nice lady in India, that I eventually got a netbook 10 days later than promised. The next OS upgrade to 10.6.3 may break the netbook again, requiring another round of hacking, which I used to enjoy, but not so much anymore. The 10inch screen is adequate, but I know, compared to the OLED screen on iPad, it will be like night and day. I see that a lot of people are giving up their netbooks on eBay, and this is most likely because the hardware being, well, not Apple.
So I wait, with my proverbial tent pitched outside our local Apple store.
Filed under: Golf and Religion, Golf politics, Golfist Wintertime Diversions, Naturalism, PGA, golf culture, golf mysticism, golf news, golf personalities, golf philosophy | Tags: affairs, Cheating, divorce, elin, ethics, rules of golf, Tiger Woods
I have changed my mind about Tiger because I thought the man and the player (of golf) could be separated. I have decided that Tiger is no longer the greatest to have played the game. Through his actions, he has shown himself unworthy of the game which values moral and ethical behavior. The Rules of Golf are not just a list of crimes and punishment, but assume an internal moral compass that guides player. Players who abide by these Rules elevate themselves in the process. This includes players who call penalties on themselves on trangressions witnessed only by them. This valuing of honesty and ethical behavior is unique to golf where players have famously penalized themselves out of championships or, tragically, tour cards.
If Tiger behaved this way off the course, who knows what guided his behavior on the course in relation to golf. You can obey the law out of fear of punishment or out of internal ethics and morality. Tiger is no golfist, but revealed to be the golfing equivalent of Deep Blue, the chess playing supercomputer, a soul-less automaton. The events of the past several weeks shows that Tiger has no moral compass, and excels at this great game for entirely banal reasons of conditioning and training from childhood. By this measure, the average golfer who takes stroke and distance for going out of bounds even when playing by himself is a greater custodion of the sport than Tiger.
Filed under: Golf and Computers, My Bidness, golf news | Tags: AT&T, HTC Touch Pro2, iPhone, Verizon
I have agonized over this for a while, particularly after being on call and dropping 3 consecutive calls that left me awake and irritated. Luckily, they weren’t critical, but the iPhone, which I love, works very poorly in my house with AT&T. There is a nearby cell tower, and I should get 5 bars of coverage but we are behind a hill and as you enter its shadow, the bars go to zero, and in my house, 2-3 bars is a good day. I know never to take calls from the kitchen but rather run outdoors if the call is critical.
Therefore, I am quitting AT&T and moving to Verizon. I used to be a 10 year Sprint veteran, but their coverage is equally poor. AT&T in its greed sets their phones for almost no roaming and so won’t switch towers even though there are GSM towers within site (T-mobile I guess). So to Verizon I go with their miserable top down approach to smart phones.
They apparently were offered the iPhone but did not want to relinquish controll over the apps.
I know I had sworn off WinMo, but fact is that HTC has hacked up WinMo 6.1 to work almost like the iPhone with its “flo”-ing user interface. What I like is the fact that you can tether the phone or even better, download a software that will let you make the phone a WiFi hotspot which is nice for my laptop. The irony will be that my iPhone will still be in my pocket for use to call out via Skype over Wifi -this works very well.
I’ll review the HTC Touch Pro2 as soon as I get my hands on it. It’s screen is larger and has higher pixel density than iPhone and it has a real keyboard. It has Bluetooth 2.1 which should let me pair all kinds of gadgets to it including a stereo headset and my earpieces (Plantronic Pro 950 which I consider incredible for cancelling outside wind noise).
Verizon will have to change a lot of things to get iPhone and may not have it in its DNA to undergo this change. AT&T deserves a bag of poop delivered on its doorstep on fire for its negligence of establishing bulletproof coverage. These phones are mission critical and need to be on and reliable.
AT&T had its chance -I asked the customer service rep for microcell -to set up a local in-house micro cell tower. But this would only be an admission of defeat for AT&T and it has not release what would be an enabling technology.
So I ring AT&T’s doorbell, light that paper bag full of steaming poo, and run down the street!
