RAVE - The Large Hadron Collider Explained

RAVE - Sign Jamie Oliver's Petition

When the cheeky chappy first came along he - in my opinion - completely changed the face of cooking. Not only was his attitude and demeanor a refreshing change from the rest of the TV Chefs, but his bish-bosh-bash approach to cooking, and the food he made, definitely changed the way I cook.

We have several of his cook books, and even though they sit between Nigella Lawson in the comfortable corner of the market, Raymond Blanc in the posh French corner, and Heston Blumenthal in the super techno corner, you just have to look at their sauce-spattered pages to see which ones get the most usage in our kitchen.

Our Jamie stood the restaurant world on its end when he took disadvantaged teenagers from British streets, put them through basic training and then narrowed them down to fifteen, the core staff for a new restaurant, also named Fifteen.

A recent venture of his is described at his web site like this: Jamie has made a new series for American TV about food – how families eat, what kids get at school and why, like the UK, the diet of processed food and snacks is causing so many health and obesity problems. The series was filmed in Huntington, West Virginia.

Jamie's challenge was to see if he can get a whole community cooking again. He worked with the school lunch ladies and local families to get everyone back in the kitchen and making tasty meals with fresh ingredients – no packets, no cheating. He's started a Food Revolution: to get people all over America to reconnect with their food and change the way they eat.

When this was featured on The Late Show With David Letterman a few weeks ago,  the host joked that it was unlikely Americans would take to this. However, just last week it was revealed that schools where Jame Oliver's diet was implemented not only saw healthy improvements, but academic test results improved too!

Now, there's a petition to sign at Jamie's web site. You can sign the petition to SAVE COOKING SKILLS AND IMPROVE SCHOOL MEALS here in the USA.

Pork Pie-tastic!

REVIEW - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

I read this at the recommendation of our friends Jen and Sue. They were having dinner with us, talking about the books we were reading, and Jen suggested I read this. I ordered it right there at the dinner table, on my Kindle, and finished it today.

I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a great read. It's an intriguing story, just not written in a particularly exciting way.

Henrietta Lacks was a poor African American living on a small, family tobacco farm in the 50s, when the family started migrating to find work in the steel mills around Baltimore. It was there that she was diagnosed with Cervical Cancer, and during one examination doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital routinely removed tissue samples for analysis.

The practice at the time was not to get the patient's permission to remove a tissue sample. Normal cells last a couple days outside of the body, then die. But Henrietta's cells continued living and multiplying. Very quickly, doctors at Johns Hopkins realized that Henrietta Lack's cells (called HeLa, for medical shorthand), could be used as a consistent and renewable platform for testing drugs, and a multi-million dollar business was born from culturing, storing and selling HeLa cells.

The fact that Henrietta's family never benefited financially from this business is neither unlawful nor unique. So, while it's an interesting slice of medical history, it's hard become animated about the issue.

REVIEW - District 13 - The Ultimatum

I remember trying to convince Amo and Gareth to come see this with me a few weeks ago when it was briefly showing at one tiny theater in San Francisco, mainly because I had enjoyed the first film (the one where there was no "ultimatum").

I loved that first film - although curiously hadn't posted a review here - because it was the first movie to focus on parkour, l'art du déplacement (English: the art of moving).

Parkour basically involves using objects: buildings, vehicles, or other obstacles in ingenious ways to get around.

I'm glad they didn't listen to me, because this sequel has a lame (i.e. no) plot, made lamer by a ridiculous threat by the French president to launch an air assault on District 13 to raze it to the ground, thereby disposing of all the criminals using that part of Paris as its base of operations.

The parkour itself was interesting, albeit somewhat ridiculous - requiring far too many conveniently placed railings, buttresses, poles and assorted detritus to a) enable the vagabonds to dodge les flics and b) help them do it in an exciting and apparently impossible manner.

This second film will probably appeal to those who like martial arts movies. Perhaps un-surprisingly, I'm not one of them.

RAVE - Green Zone

I know I'm in a minority of those (one or two) who thought Hurt Locker sucked liked a turbocharged Dyson.

Green Zone is what Hurt Locker coulda, shoulda been - fast, exciting, intense and insightful.

The film tells us what we already know - "intelligence" that stated Weapons of Mass Destruction were hidden in Iraq was fabricated in order to justify the invasion of Iraq by the US and its allies.

The story imagines how close Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) came to bringing in the alleged source of that faked intelligence, and exposing the invasion for the sham it was.

Aside from the non-stop hand-held camera judder, the film was very watchable; not quite up to Bourne standards, but definitely worth seeing, and definitely definitely better than Hurt Locker.

RAVE - Health Care Reform

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the Public power monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water authority.

After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be, using satellites designed, built and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. 

I watched this while eating my breakfast of US Department of Agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US Congress and kept accurate by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads built by the local, State and Federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank. 

On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US Postal Service and drop off the kids at the public school.

After work, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to a house which has not burned down in my absence because of the State and Local building codes and Fire Marshall's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local Police Department.

I then log on to the internet which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) and post on freepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the Government can't do anything right!

Thanks to 'anonymous' for posting this. I couldn't work out how to resize the image to show the posting in its native form, so had to re-type the excellent rant.

REVIEW - Tut Tut, Tutankhamun

First of all, this is a beauty of an exhibit.

There's no denying that the Egyptians knew how to whittle.

But - and this is a big "but" - if you've been looking forward to seeing the King Tut exhibit at the de Young Museum, THERE'S NO KING TUT THERE!

The images you see in all the ads, of a golden masque from his famous coffin, suggest that what you'll see at the de Young is, er, the famous sarcophagous. What you see instead, is a selection of artefacts removed from the burial chamber, and projected images of the coffin.

It's like going to NASA and seeing moon rocks and spacesuits, but only slide shows of rockets and landing craft.

I have to be careful because my lovely cousin-in-law bought me the ticket, and sometimes when she's not shopping or having coffee with her friends she looks at this blog, and I don't want her to think I'm not grateful for the ticket and company. I was and I am.

To be honest, I think the 3 of us felt a little let down by the non-appearance of the coffin.

That curse must be true.

RAVE - 32GB storage, Then and Now

We've all heard about Moore's Law - the notion that certain areas of technology double in power, or halve in cost every 2 years.

We've seen processor speeds, bandwidth and digital camera resolution increase exponentially, or the cost of new technologies like flat screen TV, drop dramatically.

This has certainly happened with computer storage, but like most things it's not until you see it expressed in pictures that you genuinely grasp what's happening.

RAVE - Blending Party at Turnbull Winery

Mrs. Page and I have been members of Turnbull Winery in Oakville, Napa, ever since stopping by there after arriving an hour early for a lunch reservation at Bouchon, in nearby Yountville.

Bouchon was fabulous, by the way.

Today's outing was for a members only blending.  With my lady en route to India for a 10-day visit with her pops, Gareth was my hunky companion for the day.

There were around 50 guests, each of whom was given an apparently inexhaustible supply of 2008 Turnbull Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc, plus a ton of pipettes, measuring tubes, glasses and plastic jugs.

We each then tried out varying percentages of the wines, until we were happy with our blends.

The Cabernet Sauvignon boasted red fruits - strawberry and raspberry; the Merlot blackberry and cherry; the Cabernet Franc had a curious black tea aroma, and was definitely the edgiest of the three. Most people therefore led with Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot, with just a hint of Cabernet Franc.

There was plenty of time to experiment with a number of blends - I tried at least 5, and ended up with my favorite - 60% Cabernet Sauvignon, 30% Merlot and 10% Cabernet Franc. Gareth's favorite was 35% / 50% / 15%.

Everyone then got to bottle their blends, and design a label.

Cue an excellent lunch outside in the shade (it was very sunny today), and a prize-giving for the best labels. Neither of our efforts impressed the judges - I'm certain Gareth won't be offended if I reveal that his label might make a podium finish at a kindergarten art class) - but they will definitely be the talking point of whatever dinner party we serve them at.

I bought a selection of Turnbull's excellent reds and shipped them to Bill and Margaret in Houston - it works best if I send Napa wines to them, rather than them send Texas wines to me - and then we scooted further north to Calistoga, picking up several bottles of Zinfandel from Laura Zahtila's tiny vineyard there. These will add to the fun at next weekend's Zin tasting and pulled-pork BBQ at my good friend Will's in San Jose.

Looks like I'll be swapping marital bliss for booze over the next couple of weeks. If today's blend tastes good enough, maybe I'll not notice.

RANT - The Fourth Kind

Like most of the episodes of the X-Files, and virtually every movie M. Night Shamyalan has delivered, this was a monumental let down.

The trick of blending alleged 'actual footage' and 'actual recordings' made you think, for a while at least, that something was actually happening. When you realize nothing has happened, and nothing is likely to happen, you start thinking about filing this along with The Day The Earth Stood Still and The Happening (possibly the least accurately named film of all time, seeing as absolutely nothing happened).

(Close Encounters of the) Fourth Kind refer to alien abductions, so the complete absence of Aliens, or Abductions somewhat invalidates the entire movie.

The fact that this is set in Nome, one of the bleakest and dullest parts of the USA, goes some way in explaining the movie.

RAVE - Baker and Banker

1701 Octavia Street has had a charmed life.

When we moved to San Francisco 12 years ago, we were wowed by the Elisabeth Daniel restaurant that occupied that address. 

Then came Quince, which we also loved. Quince has moved to a larger space near Jackson Square, making way for Baker and Banker (like Elisabeth Daniel, the restaurant gets its name from the 2 partners).

David and Felicia (another partnership, sadly yet to open a successful restaurant) treated us to dinner there last night, and it was sensational.

I can't remember what everyone had, but the tempura asparagus and pate appetizers I tried to get all to myself, and the Rib-eye was perfection. A couple of glasses of medicinal vino and yours truly was a very happy camper.

Thank you David. Thank you Felicia. 

RAVE - 360 degree view of Paris

Paris 26 Gigapixels is a stitching of 2,346 single photos showing a very high esolution panoramic view of the French capital (354,159 x 75,570 pixels).

It's not just a panoramic view of Paris, but one that allows you to zoom in on any street, building, vehicle or person!

I should shut up and just let you look at it.

REVIEW - RN74

RN74 (Route Nationale 74) will take you and your Bentley through Burgundy, admiring villages like Morey-St-Denis, Nuit St Georges, Pommard, Gevrey-Chambertin and more.

You get tipsy just reading the map!

RN74 the restaurant is Michael Mina's "bargain" at the foot of the Millenium Tower. See my review of our meal at his main restaurant in town.

I had been led to believe that RN74 was a hip and happening place, but it fell way short of that. The clientele - albeit on a Saturday night - averaged 60 years old; a real blazer and blue rinse crew. At first I described it as cougar central, but Pavey reckoned none of the women was trying hard enough to warrant that label.

The food was perfect, more approachable and perhaps even better than the main Michael Mina place. My cauliflower, prosciutto, pecorino and potato appetizer was crisp and very tasty, while my Confit de Canard was straight outta Concorde (Paris); Pavey's Pork Belly and Clams were perfect, and her Sturgeon was meaty and marvelous. This all came as a pleasant surprise, because when you first look at the menu all you think is "where's the rest?" Compared with the wine selection, the food menu is strikingly gaunt.

If the food hadn't been perfect, I would've been really annoyed at the place.

First of all, it's overpoweringly and distractingly noisy. Immediately inside the door you're pitched into a melee of loud-mouthed drinkers; the bar area covers as much space as the restaurant. The shape of the room - long and kinda narrow - means the noise from the bar hammers along through the restaurant, making diners shout to get heard. Maybe this was RN74 at its Saturday night worst, but I can't see the place ever being described as romantic or relaxing. Or happening.

The strangest, and most annoying detail of all were the burly waiters. The regular staff wear blue shirts and white aprons. The "senior" staff manage the wine, and for some inexplicable reason they're all fat and wear their own ill-fitting semi-casual jackets, jeans or shabby pants, and sneakers. I could care less what they wear, but with these porkers milling around in the middle of the restaurant, constantly squeezing past the staff delivering food, the back of my chair was repeatedly knocked by one fat fart or another.

In one comical but out-of-place-for-an-allegedly-classy-restaurant episode, the waiter clearing our table stepped on my left foot, and one of the aforementioned corpulent sommeliers stepped on my right foot.

Maybe "sports bar sans TV" is what Mina is aiming for, but he'd better start advertising it as such in order to avoid disappointing his customers.

RAVE - SXSW Music Downloads

While the SXSW (South By Southwest) festival may not be the best known music event in the world, it's probably the single best source for cutting edge live music in one event.

Next best thing to being there in Austin, Texas, and certainly easier than attempting to see every one of the 1,200 + bands performing during the 4 days, is downloading the thousands of featured tunes from those bands.

That can be achieved, legally and free of charge, by going to the unofficial home of the SXSW torrents.

In the main frame you'll see just over 1,000 songs - 5.43gb - to download as torrents. In the left hand frame you'll see torrents for 2005-2009. Torrents are sets of pointers to peer-to-peer network locations from which the actual MP3s are downloaded.

In order to manage the Torrent content download, I use Vuze.

Having installed Vuze, you can click on each Torrent name in your download folder, and Vuze will fetch each song from the network into your download folder. Once there, you will need to move the thousands of MP3s into your regular music folder, and then into iTunes.

I'm what's colloquially known as a "leech", in that I download then move and delete the originally downloaded files, so as not to keep them around as a "seed" to other people trying to download the same music. Shoot me, but I don't trust leaving music on my machine for just anyone to access.

"And how good is the music?", I hear you ask.

Schmoozing through the 2010 showcase tunes, most of the artists are currently little-known (Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly anyone?) Therefore, you'll need to sample the entire selection in order to get to the jewels.

What's more interesting, in some respects, is looking back at previous years' showcased tunes, spotting bands that you now know and love. The Octopus Project, The Pigeon Detectives, Gossip (for heaven's sakes!) from 2009; The Von Bondies, Noah and The Whale, from 2008; Voxtrot, Scissors For Lefty, MuteMath, from 2007; The Magic Numbers, The Duke Spirit, Noisettes, OK Go, Nine Black Alps, Drive By Truckers, Corinne Bailey Rae, We Are Scientists, Silversun Pickups, Okkervil River, Of Montreal, from 2006; Wolfmother, Kaiser Chiefs, from 2005.

And if you don't like that lot, well, the music's free.

REVIEW - Marlowe (nee South)

One of those SF restaurants that has undergone a "re-imagining" (see my Who'd Want to be a Restauranter? posting in January).

It's changed from an Antipodean theme (that's Australia and New Zealand, for you non-colonials) to an east coast Butcher theme.

I'm not sure it worked before (and clearly its early closure testifies to that), and I'm not sure the new theme is any better.

When I think of "butcher-themed", I think of places like Harris' or McCormick & Schmick's, places where example cuts of meat are displayed in a butcher's display cabinet near reception.

Marlowe (aside from having an eminently forgettable name) shouldn't boast a butcher's affiliation when there's no meat dish you can't find on the menu of most restaurants in town.

My Poulet Vert (chicken with herbs, olive and potato salad) tasted strange - not spicy, not savory - and I didn't feel like finishing it; Pavey's Lamb Mixed Grill tasted good, but for me, lamb chop and lamb sausage doesn't deserve the "mixed grill" nomenclature.

The real problem was the overpowering heat - there's just no air in the place, and for me that made it a thoroughly unpleasant 90 minutes.

Nevertheless, I won't give it a RANT, because Mrs. Page liked it so much.

REVIEW - Formosa Betrayed

This could've gone either way. It was one of those cases where we just wanted to go to the movies, and I'd rather have white hot needles inserted under my fingernails than go and see Alice in Wonderland (does Tim Burton have a problem with making "proper" movies?)

Japan originally acquired Taiwan (aka Formosa) from the Qing Empire in 1895, but was ordered to renounce all claims to sovereignty over its colonial possessions after World War II.

In 1945, governance of Formosa / Taiwan was therefore taken over by the Republic of China. Four years later Chiang Kai Shek's Republic lost the Chinese Civil War to the Chairman Mao-led Communist Party and retreated from mainland China to Taiwan.

The political status of Taiwan is complex because it's claimed by the People's Republic of China which was established in 1949 on mainland China and considers itself the successor state to the Republic.

Them's the basic facts. Now, why was Formosa "betrayed"?

Accepting that the film is honorably biased, it shows how Formosans have been screwed by their proximity to China, whether it was when 80 million native Taiwanese were repressed by 2 million Chinese immigrants, or how their own government, paranoid about spies from mainland China, developed into a police state.

Political science aside, was it a good movie? Kinda. It was more of a rousing history lesson than a thriller - even though it aspired to the latter.

The evening was capped by dinner at Straits Cafe, with Dave Chappelle sat alone at the next table. He didn't laugh at any of my jokes!

RAVE - Daemon, by Daniel Suarez

If the notion of a Cyber novel doesn't leave you cold, you'll find this book downright exciting.

Even though I've worked with cyber wotsits for most of my career, I'm the first person to cry foul when fiction goes too far in claiming what can be done with computers.

Of course, as time goes on and things we once thought impossible are now commonplace, I have to be more careful with those cries.

Matthew Sobol is founder and CEO of a wildly successful online games company, but he's dying of cancer. So, he uses his fabulous wealth and intellect to design a daemon - a computer program that runs in the background - to infect computer networks after he dies.

It's not really explained why he did this, but the results are mind-blowing.

I kept on wishing someone would make this into a movie, Matrix meets Terminator.

RAVE - Red Riding Trilogy, 1983

The third in the trilogy of films covering the UK's most prolific serial killer, The Yorkshire Ripper.

This story features some of the nastiest and crookedest cops you could imagine, some of the biggest twists, some of the most depressing characters to poison any plot.

I know it's a cliche, but if you'd made this story up, no-one would believe it.

I also know I'm in danger of trivializing the whole thing by wondering how crimes were ever solved without computers, how teams that traveled across the country ever achieved anything without cell-phones, and how anyone survived when everyone smoked all the time in every location.

RAVE - Red Riding Trilogy, 1980

It's awkward having to admit that "this is just the kind of film I love" when it's about a serial killer in gloomiest Yorkshire, but you know what I mean.

It's gritty, honest, dripping in local atmosphere, and despite its subject matter and almost impenetrable accents (even for an Englishman), very accessible.

This is the second in the Red Riding Trilogy. I'm planning on seeing the third tomorrow night, thereby going to the movies 3 nights running, celebrating having no kids and an understanding wife.

Anyhow, back to the plot ...

The film starts with the drafting in of a new team to investigate the work already done by the local force. Since 1974, the Ripper has murdered 13 women (at least 4 children were killed by the same evil bastard up to and including 1974), and police have no idea who they're looking for.

There's animosity toward the new team, either because the existing team doesn't like being spied upon, or because certain "bent" officers have ulterior motives.

For example: "If someone kicks down your door, kills the dog and rapes your wife, who're you gonna call?" asks Assistant Chief Constable Hunter. "Definitely not the West Yorkshire Police", replies Reverend Laws, "they'd already be in there, wouldn't they?"

 

This film is moodier and less frenetic than 1974, allowing the investigative process to be more carefully examined.

 

And twist-wise, it puts Shutter Island to shame.

RAVE - Red Riding Trilogy, 1974

An ultra-tense, ultra-bleak trio of films covering what became known as the Yorkshire Ripper, a serial killer operating in the equally bleak north-east of England.

The title, Red Riding is a twist of the Yorkshire Ridings (North, West and East Riding being the geographical divisions of the county of Yorkshire, since the 8th Century), and the story of Red Riding Hood, where young girls are accosted by the Big Bad Wolf in the forest.

Each film covers a particular period in the Ripper's spree, 1974, 1980 and 1983. Each film has a different director and camera crew, and were shot on 16mm, 35mm and digital respectively.

1974 deals mainly with the young reporter for The Yorkshire Post, who believes there's a connection between the disappearance of 3 young girls from towns around Yorkshire, but suffers at the brutal hands of the local police, who are in cahoots with a property developer who has promised to cut them in on the profits from his projects.

Red Riding belongs up there with Traffik, The State Within and many other British made-for-TV but given theatrical release movies that regularly out-do mainstream fare.