For some reason I am thinking of Zelazny. Tonight Ms. S. and I should finish the ‘Alien’ movies.
Earlier in the week I opened a can of pumpkin for some purpose.
I’m sure it will come back to me.
I.
Now it sits in the refrigerator, a bit sad and deserted. That led me to the IntarWebs in search of a few things I could do with it. I already had a few things in mind, mind you, such as:
- pumpkin-chocolate/cocoa pudding
- pumpkin waffles (for tomorrow)
- pumpkin soup
- pumpkin (nut?) muffins (or muffin bites)
- … pumpkin with berries in my oats
What do the IntarWebs suggest?
- “I’m Seriously On the Verge of Tears About The Canned Pumpkin Shortage”
Luckily this is from 2009. - “Pumpkin Applesauce – After School Snack”
No actual ‘recipe’ provided, but you can play with the proportions yourself. - “Healthy Snacks Made with Canned Pumpkin”
… it promises more than it delivers: it’s really just yogurt, pumpkin, honey, and cinnamon. But it makes me want to make a honey-cinnamon-pumpkin ice cream - “Top 10 Low Fat Pumpkin Recipes“
- “HG Salutes: Canned Pumpkin!“
- “41 Yummy Pumpkin Recipes from Better Homes & Gardens”
Glazed pumpkin pie cheesecake? Yes. Ads and the slideshow? No. - “Here’s How to use up your Canned Pumpkin”
Ah, the arbitrary capitalization in titles … but I digress. Lots of tasty ideas … ideas for tasty things, not that the ideas themselves are tasty. And so on.
Seven, not eight, is enough.
II.
Ms. S. is off to campus for a good afternoon run-walk; I contemplate cooking dinner. Tempeh it will be! We often go for I.C. Moskowitz’s preparation in Vegan with a Vengeance, or at least a variation of it: I tend to let the sliced tempeh, post-garlic-rub, sit in a mixture of Braggs or soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, and tomato paste.
I like a slow preparation of pearled barley, first toasted and then cooked in vegetable broth, frequently stirred, until it eventually takes on that risotto texture. Finish it with a little butter or parmesan and cracked pepper.
Butter and Parmesan would probably deepen some roasted squash, which could be brightened with some balsamic. Or replace squash with sweet potato.
III.
Over the past year one of my favorite pieces of software has been Calibre. I bought an ebook reader over a year ago, and it syncs up nicely with Calibre, which does a good job of managing various ebook formats, especially EPUB and PDF, though all the common ones and even some uncommon ones are supported.
At first I did not care for Calibre and applications like it … in particular iTunes. These are, from a certain standpoint, monolithic beasts that like to take control and manage things their way, not your way. As with my audio files, I’ve had my own way of naming book files and the like. Calibre and iTunes manage their own databases; they have their own directory tree naming schemes. But the similarities actually stop there, which is why I love Calibre and still despise but grudgingly use iTunes from time to time.
I also had to learn to give up control. It’s an ironic liberation: freedom through a loss of control.
Calibre will place its library and database wherever you ask it to, for one thing. It allows you to have multiple libraries. And it’s hardly monolithic; its architecture is open, based on Python, and there are many plugins for it. Blah blah blah, yada yada yada, one might say.
It’s hardly perfect. It’s database schema leaves a lot to be desired. I’ve a great fan of FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) and of the WEMI — Work, Expression, Manifestation, Item — model of abstraction and separation (in short: an Item is the physical or digital copy; a Manifestation is a specific publication or such for which one Item could substitute for another; an Expression is a realization of an intellectual endeavor, such as an edition or translation; and a Work is that intellectual endeavor at its most abstract form … but this is not precise enough). Most pieces of software, like Calibre, merge the Work, Expression, and Manifestation level into one, the general bibliographic record; the Item is the copy kept on the file system. You have multiple versions? You have multiple records. You have an anthology containing another work? Sorry, but there’s no real linking of works, related or otherwise; you instead have “Poe’s Collected Stories” or similar, and have to have a non-semantic field somewhere tell you what the contents are, and so on.
But ‘imperfect’ is still better than basically all the options.
And a non-Calibre detail I now love? The free, old, public domain books you can get from Google or archive.org tend to have functional if imperfect metadata, as do the files (at least the EPUBs) you can get from Project Gutenberg … those files import quite nicely into Calibre with minimal manual fussing.
Articles and reviews you download from JSTOR do not import nearly so cleanly. It’s not exactly JSTOR’s fault, as the files themselves are provided by various publishers who have probably digitized in any number of ways, but the long and the short of it is that JSTOR articles often but not always get the ‘Title’ at least 50-75% right, often skip the ‘Author’ (or authors), and far too frequently embed XML rather than plain or Unicode text in the PDF metadata fields.
Calibre perpetuates the brain-dead approach to authors, editors, translators and the like I encountered at an editorial job years ago; namely the use of a single field to represent zero or more instances of these various types of agents, though it at least does a better back-end job with the SQL schema than do other products, and at least separates “people” from “works” into two different tables. But in the plus column it is flexible and allows custom database fields; while I cannot overhaul the architecture, I can accomplish some improvements from within it.
