Tiled With Pentagons

There is a place in Brooklyn, in New York State just outside Manhattan; a little plot of land deep in a Jewish neighborhood.  I know it, because a piece of me is buried there; a piece that existed long before I was born. There is a bit of mythology in my family, you see: I share most of my name with my great-grandfather - the one in my direct paternal line, the Jewish side of my family. Because I resemble him so closely in temperament - an aesthete, an epicure, an ideologue, a traveller, a polyglot - the story goes that I am his reincarnation, giving this whole "living" thing a second crack. I've traded an MD in internal medicine for a PhD in math, and I can't enjoy pistachio ice cream anymore, but I'm in better health and don't have to contend with a world war. So once a decade, I join my father in a visit to the buried part of me whose nameplate I share and thus inherited, right down to the "Dr.".   I visited it on a fine Saturday much like this on...

  (Epistemic status: what, you thought that this somehow wasn't a recipe blog?)   This is a recipe blog. It always has been, at least in part. I'm not going to give you the recipe until the very end, because that's what recipe blogs do, right? I'm going to tell you a whole bunch of irrelevant-feeling personal context about the food and then finally actually drop the recipe. But unlike most recipe blogs, that personal context is actually really quite relevant. You ever think about lost recipes? They're a tragic microcosm of lost information in greater generality. There's lost plays like Love's Labours Won, lost books like the second volume of the Poetics, lost music like Karelia Music, and lost film like Bulgasari. Each one is a wound in human culture that will never heal. There's entire lost libraries, too - the House of Wisdom during the sack after the Sack of Baghdad, the Library of Alexandria (whose books fell apart - they largely weren't bu...

(cw: Weird, personal, heavy, and high-context again. There’s a point to it, I promise. Dedicated to Grandma Kim on the occasion of her 86th birthday.)   You've been through so much. You escaped North Korea, survived the Korean War and the loss of your father - my great-grandfather - and got married terribly young. You uprooted completely in pursuit of more stability and better education for my mother and her siblings, showing them all the best schools in the nation. You ran a department store for decades, mostly on your own; I will never forget the days I spent at 5 W 32nd Street when it was still yours.  You're canny and willing, even wanting, to learn, even in your old age; you're a good deal smarter and more alive than more people are at your age. The ESL courses you took for years, ending up with a much better grasp of English, are evidence enough of that. You've got grit to you, persistence, as well, even now - more so, again, than most people do in their late 80s....

Because I feel like it, I'm putting up a list of every single project I have not just an idea that I'd like to do, but even have a reasonably well-worked-out plan for what I'd do, how I'd do it, and even a vague sense of how much it'd cost. Feel free to steal these ideas for your own; I'm a consequentialist about them, and I'd largely rather that they come into existence by someone else's hand than that they never arise. I've grouped some of them together when it seemed natural, and then given a sketch of what I want to do and why. Assorted microtonal arrangements: there's a few decently well-known songs that I've listened to and gone "yes, delightful, but what if they were weirder and better?" and I still haven't got around to arranging, let alone recording. Several songs in 31-edo, which I often prefer to call "modernized quarter-comma meantone". (Because that's what it is.) I think that something like the richne...

Here are a few more delicious and mostly scalable recipes that I’ve made repeatedly with great results which I mostly haven't committed to text. Unfortunately, it's still true that none of them are vegan, though the desserts at least are vegetarian. This is a recipe blog now, I guess. (It’s not. Don’t worry. Or do; I’m not your parent.) No pictures this time, as I'm travelling; maybe I'll add some later. Roman Showup Stew: An excellent lentil-based stew of the kind that ancient Romans might recognize, except for the part where it's got a bunch of unfamiliar but superior ingredients in it, was cooked using exceptionally fine tools, has a few absurdly expensive (for the time) spices and ingredients in it, and also it'd be too spicy for them to eat. Take that! 1 can lentil soup (I favor Progresso) 3 large slices of Spam or equivalent mass of bacon (optional but highly recommended) 1/2 a large red onion 8-12 cloves garlic  1 large russet potato (opt) 1 medium carrot...

Here are a few delicious and mostly scalable recipes that I’ve made repeatedly with great results. Unfortunately, basically none of them are vegan, though the desserts at least are vegetarian. This is a recipe blog now, I guess. (It’s not. Don’t worry. Or do; I’m not your parent.) Healing Surge Stew: A delicious ~beef stew, halfway between boeuf borguignon and an English-style beef stew. I made it for Grandma Rapoport in her convalescence in early 2022 and it perked her up considerably; it remains one of my favorites, as it freezes well. Best eaten with good fresh bread and some ketchup on top as a crema. Notably, almost everything in the dish gets cooked twice. Per kilo of beef/other ungulate red stewing meat: (The meat should be in cubes ~2 inches on a side; beef is what I’ve used so far, but I get a sense that venison would work excellently.) 1/4-1/2# bacon/spam/fatty pork tomato paste (for browning) Fry the bacon in the stockpot briefly. Slather the tomato paste over the beef, then...

(cw: Weird, personal, heavy, and high-context. There’s a point to it, I promise.) You were born on April 13, 1940 in the Taeryong River Valley at the northern end of Chōsen - that is, Korea as invaded, colonized, and annexed by Imperial Japan. You were the youngest and last of nine children of a landholding family, the Shims, their estate part of Pakcheon County, bounded - as you’ve told me on a few occasions - by the Taeryong river and “a big road”, the finest and most cleverly placed of the five estates that made up the county. You claim that your episodic memory - the scenes that make up your life - is near-perfect, especially of your earlier life; it is from that memory that you paint me impressionistic pictures of a life alien to my own: a courtyard that it took you 15 minutes to walk across in a straight line; rows on rows of fresh cucumbers and tomatoes and grapes that you loved to eat, all fresh off the vine; a servantry that your family treated with humanity, their children ra...