Ed’s corner of the web

What a crazy few weeks it’s been.  For those of you who know me personally (and I think almost everyone who reads this blog does), you know that we are in the throes of a tricky move.  Moving is enough of a pain when it’s uncomplicated.  But for this move, we’ve had a six-week gap of homelessness to fill.  The lease at our old apartment ran out on 7/31, and our landlady refused/was unable to give us an extension to get us to our condo closing date on 9/14.  If it was two weeks, we could’ve crashed on couches of local friends.  But a six week term left us no alternative but to find some kind of temporary housing.   Not wanting to move into a place and then move again in six weeks, we planned on putting the vast majority of our stuff into storage, finding a furnished apartment, and living out of suitcases until we moved into our condo.

The first part was easy - thank you Gentle Giant.  The second part, though, was an unanticipated complete pain-in-the-butt.  Having two cats whittled down the number of available places considerably.  Not wanting to pay over $3000/month in rent whittled it down considerably more.  I went online to try to find prospects.  Craigslist was mildly productive, but nothing fit our needs.  I reluctantly paid for access to Sublet.com and found their listings to be both skimpy and completely out of date - worthless and a rip-off.  An online site designed to help people on sabattical find housing gave me a couple email addresses, but nobody replied.  I finally thought I had found a place right in the Back Bay, but the realtor I dealt with there was the most flaky, impossible-to-reach, unprofessional, non-committal person in that industry I have ever had the misfortune of working with.  As you can probably guess, that fell through.  After a couple stressful days where I made sure our tent and sleeping bags were in good order, I managed to grab a little one-bedroom furnished apartment in Allston in a place that specializes in short term furnished rentals.  Whew!

After a lot of packing, cleaning, heavy lifting, cursing, and unpacking, we’re now more or less settled in our temporary digs in Allston.  It ain’t the Ritz, but it’ll work for the next several weeks.  We’ve already enjoyed exploring some of the great ethnic eats in Allston and are looking forward to more yummy food in the weeks ahead.  Carisa has also taken a great liking to the gas stove, which enables us to have the wild luxury of multiple pots cooking at once.  You have to realize that on our old derelict electric stovetop, we had four burners, only three of which worked and only one of which was full-sized.  When you put a normal-sized pan on that one full-sized burner, you couldn’t fit anything else on the other burners.  And as it was, that one full-sized burner was tilted enough to prevent any more than a fraction of the pan from coming into contact with it.  We weren’t channeling Julia Child so much as Lewis and Clark.  And don’t even get us started on the oven.

So it’s been a crazy and stressful last few weeks, but we now have a little lull before moving into our real home.  The last few weeks haven’t been altogether unenjoyable, either.  We got to see Shakespeare on the Common (at least until the second act got rained out), we’ve been out picking wild blueberries, Carisa’s mother and sister visited, and we even got to eat at L’Espalier while it was still at Gloucester St.  I had no home internet access for a while, which was actually delightfully liberating, but now I’m able to blog again with abandon on my laptop.  Apologies to those of who missed seeing more frequent updates (all 2 or 3 of you).  I didn’t get sick or go on vacation, although I think a vacation sounds like just the thing right now!

I gotta hand it to the Chinese - with their remarkable Olympic opening ceremony this last week, they showed just what a strong authoritarian regime directing a large population acculturated to obedience and uniformity can accomplish.  And I truly don’t mean that in any negative sense.  China’s amazing display was all the more amazing because we all knew that such a thing could never be replicated anywhere else in the world.  I’m not sure what London has planned for 2012, but I think the planners for that event just started sleeping a lot more poorly.

News broke earlier this week about the fake firework “footprints” that were part of the opening ceremony.  Most people were either not terribly surprised or not terribly concerned.  Now today we have news that the cute pigtailed girl in the red dress singing “Ode to the Motherland” was, in fact, lip-synching.  Why?  Because the seven-year-old with the wonderful voice, Yang Peiyi, wasn’t as pretty as the nine-year-old Lin Miaoke that we all saw on TV.  The solution to this non-dilemma was to dub Yang’s voice over Lin’s singing.

To me, this is much more upsetting than some computer-generated fireworks, not the least because you’re teaching a little girl that it’s not true talent that matters, but good looks.  The corollary lesson is that you can cover up deficiencies with a pretty veneer.  But why stop there?  If you’re going to make a substitution with these two girls, why not have Chow Yun Fat at the piano dubbed with a Lang Lang recording?  Or have Zhang Ziyi become president while Hu Jintao continues to pull the strings in the background.  Why not?  Because it’s ridiculous, that’s why.  It’s ridiculous and it rails against the values we should be promoting in a society (crap - now I’m sounding like a Republican), not to mention in seven-year-old girls.

Much talk has been made of the pretty facade that China has worked so hard to place over the country in the workup to the Games.  Every now and then we scratch or rub away the gold plating and are disappointed by the leaden core we glimpse beneath.  This definitely wasn’t the first peek, and I’ll be shocked if it’s the last.

You might say I’m a well-traveled vomiter (vomiteer?). I’ve puked in several different countries around the world, not to mention over international waters, and I’ve had some sort of GI distress in 6 continents (only because I haven’t been to Antarctica yet). I love to travel, but somehow the damn food gets me every time. I don’t go out of my way to eat chilled monkey brains or day-old street food, but I’ll be damned if I travel somewhere just to eat American peanut butter and energy bars for two weeks. I think one of the strongest expressions of culture is via food, and I would feel shortchanged if I didn’t have the opportunity to taste the native flavors of a new destination.

You can imagine my dismay, then, at a recent report from the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, which demonstrated persistent contamination of vegetables with coliform bacteria despite cooking.  Coliform bacteria are those bacteria which normally reside in the gut but can end up in unwanted places, like on your dinner plate, due to poor food hygiene practices.  These are the guys that gave Montezuma his revenge.  Turns out that these buggers can persist in cooked veggies, even when served hot.  So it seems like I’m doomed to playing Russian roulette with my gastrointestinal health even if I forgo the fresh salad for a side of steamed vegetables.  Sometimes you just can’t win.