Happy Halloween!

"This is considered a most excellent and nutritious meal for invalids."

Pish-pash is yummy! Recipe available here, from an English-language Indian cookbook from the late 19th century, along with other recipes for bhahjee, dal, pickle, and, uh, brain cakes.

Well, the East End, anyway. (Zing!)

Pittsburgh gets top billing as a "brainy city."

Nice Face. I Think I'll Take It.

At the risk of putting all the other photos on this blog to shame, I'm posting this beauty, taken by our friend Sarah Olbrich, a professional children's photographer here in the 'burgh.

What I've been reading.

Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, by Adrian Desmond & James Moore. You made a monkey out of me, Charles. At 680 pages, this was actually the lighter option in Darwin biographies, versus two volumes of more than a thousand pages. Pleasantly, though, this was not at all a fact dump - more in the old-timey English biography tradition. Very good. Does anyone have any clue as to what Darwin's gastrointestinal problem was? Poor guy. 

Benji's Summer Pursuits

We'll miss the warm weather -- the spontaneous backyard get-togethers, the improvised construction sites, and just the general shirtlessness of it all.

Party with young children = Ingmar Bergman movie.

My photos from parties lately have all been the same: a bunch of adults, each looking intently downward, each in a different direction. Only connect, people. Only connect.

New Crib

Just wondering.

What is the difference between hi-jinks and shenanigans? Discuss.

What I've been reading.

Traffic, by Tom Vanderbilt. For a popular quasi-science book, this was really, really well-researched. I highly recommend the footnotes and the sources cited therein. Oh, and the main text was good, too - nice balance of a broad overview of different problems and characteristics of traffic, with just enough detail in certain areas to allow you to dive in. It was useful to me that the author is a cyclist, since that gave him a special perspective. Oh, and hey, speaking of cyclists, can you say $20 a month tax credit for bike commuters? WOOOOOOOOO!!! WOOOOOOOOO!!! $700 billion bailout? TOTALLY WORTH IT.

Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk. Pretty funny in parts, actually. Unfortunately, I think having seen the movie kind of ruins a certain something about the novel, but still. Having said that, I do not think there is any part of me that understands the impulses driving the men in this book. It's presented, I think, as a kind of universal - or at least widely spread - impulse among men, but no. Just no. Where is the book about being a man for us big babies? Don't say The Ambassadors. Though actually, I think Lambert Strether, if properly motivated, would surprise a lot of people in fight club. (I should add I do understand the impulse to populate one's living space entirely with Ikea products.)