Mark Bittman, in an interview with Time Out New York:

Question: “What would you say is the most important skill to develop in the kitchen?

Answer: “The ability to go in there and start. I am the least impressive cook you will ever see. I am completely without knife skills, I screw things up all the time. When I’m in the kitchen I’m not obsessively trying to create the perfect dish; I’m trying to put dinner on the table. Comparing yourself to the people who cook on television is like comparing yourself to Andre Agassi. If you can drive you can cook.”

I think I’ll print this and put it on my kitchen wall.  Or, better yet, take up embroidery and stitch it, and then hang it up.  This is precisely what I need to hear.  I love you, Mark Bittman (and you, too, Christopher, for the link).

xoxoxo,

Leslie

On the list for today:

• Sale at my favorite Cherry Creek North store
• Personal statement writing for grad school applications
• Also: no freaking out about grad school applications and/or the cost of the programs.  It will all be okay/I can worry about it later
• RAAP hotline shift
• Cleaning
• Making dinner for someone (given my lack of skill/confidence in the kitchen, it is ridiculous that I ever attempt to do this, but I think it will be okay).  Oh, and this is the plan.  Tried and true with Melissa in Portland.

First: More Love of Blogs…

Maybe it’s because I’m largely into art and information, maybe it’s geeky, or maybe it’s just human, but I think Information is Beautiful is great!  Author and visualizer David McCandless uses the blog to present his own infographics as well as other “infographic morsels” he finds.  Here’s a recent favorite:

Take that, news media!  I think what I love about these is that, while anyone can make a graph of pretty much anything he or she wants, graphs are usually made to support whatever viewpoint is in the article they accompany, glossing over or completely ignoring the bigger picture.  McCandless puts things in perspective, places things in their broader context, and tells us to stop freaking out about the freaking HPV vaccine and start focusing on our driving.  Or something like that.

He recently asked people to draw their souls and send them in (no diabolical intentions — note that these are merely representations of souls, not actual souls — soul surrogates, if you will).  I’m really looking forward to seeing the results of that project.  Here’s mine (it was a sad day, and I spilled coffee on it):

Okay.  Shop, Write, Clean, Cook.  Happy Saturday.

This woman is going to be famous.  Allie Pohl, who I know as a graduate student in DU’s eMAD MFA program (how’s that for acronyms?), has created these lovely lady charms.  She doesn’t have a name for them quite yet (and is taking suggestions) is calling them Ideal Woman Necklaces, but at work we’ve nicknamed them “crotch necklaces,” and they’re modeled after Barbie’s midsection.  Allie’s work examines femininity and the female “ideal” in a way that is at once beautiful and dripping with satire (check out her Ideal Woman series for a great example — porcelain figurines with strategically-grown chia sprouts).  Her jewelry line launches tonight at the grand opening of Illiterate,  82 S. Broadway, as part of the much-anticipated Where the Wild Things Art show:

I haven’t ever read one of his books in full, but I’ve seen George Lakoff quoted a lot, especially in library science literature, in terms of categorizing things and creating metaphors (most recently in Ambient Findability).  Apparently lawyers like him too, and he’s speaking (as a “political communications expert” — who knew?) at DU’s Sturm College of Law on Monday at 4:15.  Kind of a big deal.

Looking forward to this almost makes up for missing my #1 Geek Crush, Lawrence Lessig, at the Educause conference this morning.  Almost.

Everyone everywhere who has ever been in love should read On Love by Alain de Botton.  The cover tells us it’s a novel, but it’s kind of a novel-as-vessel for a couple hundred mini-essays on love and human nature.

Today feels like it’s already lasted at least 40 hours.

I’m thinking of moving this

to my bedroom.  I think it would look nice on the nightstand.  You know, hotel-style.  All those years of dorm-room and studio living, thinking more than one room would make me sane, and this is what I long for…

I was looking at my Google Reader trends this morning and discovered I subscribe to an almost embarrassing number of blogs — probably more than any rational person would ever care to keep up with.  But I love them so.  I’m grateful to technology for allowing me to keep up with people I might otherwise have lost touch with, keep a pulse on trends in art, design, music, literature, psychology, visual resources, educational technology, and library and information science, drool over recipes I’ll likely never use, and laugh sheepishly at low-brow humor.  The blogosphere makes me feel wonderfully enlightened (in some ways) and connected almost every single day.

I think in the past almost three years of this blog, I’ve started a few “series” that were short-lived (c’est la vie, right?).  It’s possible this will be another one, but my plan, as of this November 2, 2009, is to occasionally share blogs I’ve been particularly loving lately (or for a long time).

Without further ado…

Erie Basin is a blog that makes me want to have a lot of money and a hobby of spending it on antique jewelry.  I would wear long fur coats and heels and broaches and rings, and I would research provenance of everything and write short stories featuring each object.  The blog primarily features items from an antique store in Brooklyn by the same name, and, while I haven’t been there, it looks to be a very well curated collection of items — mostly jewelry, but also strange faux-taxidermy things and links to interesting stuff elsewhere in the world.  It’s like a little museum that is itself a gift shop.  Sigh.  Sigh.

Louis Stanley Jast:

Perhaps the two most valuable and satisfactory products of American
civilization are the librarian on the one hand and the cocktail in the
other.

Hooray!  It’s back!  Mark your calendars — Fancy Tiger’s Holiday Handmade is December 4th and 5th!  (Just five weeks away!)

I catalog some weird stuff at work.  The other day I had a handful of slides of 18th century relics.  A relic, for those of you who have forgotten your art history, is thought to be an actual part of a saint or someone special and holy, or some kind of personal effect of such a figure.  They’re often housed in reliquaries — special cases made of special materials that are much, much prettier than the disintegrating object itself.  I don’t actually know much about all of this, but it seems that in the 18th century, people said to heck with the special cases — they just adorned the rotting bones.  The results are creepy and gross.  But I have a favorite…

Readers, meet Saint Munditia:

Not only is she breathtaking as she reclines in her glass-walled abode, but she is also the patron saint of single and unmarried women, which makes me love her more.  You can be her fan on Facebook if you’d like.  I love the Catholics.