crime college chickens

"Since 1984, California has built one new college and twenty-one new prisons." -- The Spirit Level, inexact quote.

Or, one could say, California has built twenty-one new colleges -- for crime. Yeaaahhhh.


I never made fried chicken often; while really good (my way), it's a hassle. I've discovered that baked chicken, while not as good, is much easier: tin foil on pan, drumsticks on pan, pan in oven at 425, wait 35 minutes, eat chicken, sop up schmaltz with bread, throw away tinfoil. No flour, almost no cleaning. And chicken's cheap!

Vegan Thai and MIT

Someone's birthday in the Grendelscrowd today, or at least the celebration was.
You'd think the Big Dig never happened, the way it's pretty intimidating to get into North End.
Once I had, I was told they didn't find a restaurant with enough capacity, so we were going to My Thai in Chinatown. This is a vegetarian/vegan Thai-ish restaurant, big on the "veggie-chicken", -beef, -scallops, -duck, -squid, etc. Lots of gluten, I guess, though the "chicken fingers" were openly just fried tofu. But the sauces were good.

At least one person has watched Mahou Shoujou Madoka Magica because of me, and really liked it.

Then over to MIT, on rumor of fireworks. I passed a building with an interesting looking wall inside, it turned out to be the Media Lab. The wall was on "Product Space" some analysis of trade and country development I guess, with the wall comparing Chile and South Korea. Chile was richer per capita PPP in 1973. In 2000, Chile was $10K and SK $14K. This seemed low to me, but another site said so. Now SK is $25-28K, Chile $15K. Lsst 40 years were a good time to be exporting manufactured goods, not fruit and copper.

Ran into Grendelscircle people there, and we went to what was part of the whole MIT 150 celebratory sequence. The Prudential building had its window light set so as to display MIT 150 across the Charles. There was reportedly a giant cake model of MIT campus, and many cupcakes. There were corny speeches, and a speech by astronauts on the ISS -- all MIT alumni? Live? Not sure. They did zero-gee backflips at the end, though. Music was eh. Fireworks were pretty cool.