This is one of the Carolina Wrens that lives in the wren box on our porch. He comes out for mealworms each morning.

They started laying eggs two weeks ago so they should be hatching soon.

A very cool set…

1. “Stagger” - Underworld - Second Toughest in the Infants
2. “Georgia vs. Yo La Tengo” - Yo La Tengo* - Summer Sun
3. “Shiny, Shiny Pimpmobile” - East River Pipe - The Gasoline Age
4. “Cactus” - Pixies* - Surfer Rosa
5. “Blindshore” - 7% Solution - All About Satellites and Spaceships
6. “All Apologies” - Nirvana* - In Utero
7. “My Enemy” - The Afghan Whigs - Black Love
8. “Green Light” - Sonic Youth* - Live at the Continental Club in Austin, TX
9. “Shakedown Street” - Grateful Dead* - Shakedown Street
10. “99 Red Balloons” - 7 Seconds* - Scream Real Loud (Live)
11. “The Ballad of Mike Scovil” - The Fence Sitters - Mission to Mars
12. “The Kindness of Strangers” - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Murder Ballads

Well, that’s twelve, but it was a good set.

*’s by the artists I’ve seen live

Right now, my favorite cookbooks are all from Austin. It’s part the recipes, but more than that is the shared philosophy that food and eating should be more than just a way to get the necessary calories to make it through the day while expending the least time possible. Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of great cookbooks for great meals in a hurry, but cooking, like a good road trip, is as much the journey as the destination.

These three Austin cookbooks celebrate the journey in the kitchen, the thrill of using great ingredients and the soul-lifting joy that comes from savoring a lovingly made meal and finding that place where food and art make life just that much more wonderful.

The Soup Peddler’s Slow & Difficult Soups: Recipes & Reveries by David Ansel is about as fun as a cookbook can get. If Seinfeld’s New York had the soup nazi, then Austin has its own soup hippie. In the book, Ansel describes his dissatisfaction with his cubicle job and how he left that to start his business making soup and selling it to his south Austin neighbors off the back of his bike.

Ansel’s philosophy about food seems to be that the process of cooking should be as fulfilling as the eating. His recipes lead to huge quantities of soup, the better for sharing. I’ve made the South Austin Chili, a vegetarian chile which is the most unusual (there’s chocolate in it) and exquisite smelling chili I’ve ever made. Not particularly hot, but very good. The Chompy-Chomp Black Bean Soup is great for those nights when you need to cook with what you’ve got. As fun as the recipes are, the reveries make for great reading while standing in the kitchen watching the soup cook.

Though I haven’t tried it yet, you can still order his soup online and have it delivered, but probably no longer by Ansel on his bicycle.

If you’re interested in eating in season, try Eating in Season: Recipes from the Boggy Creek Farm by Carol Ann Sayle. I like the idea of eating what’s locally available as much as possible. The food tends to be better and it’s better for the environment and the local economy so this book really excites me. The Boggy Creek Farm itself is an urban farm located here in Austin that uses organic farming practices. I’ve never been to their market stand, but I’ll have to go pretty soon.

The book is divided into two parts, one for hot season recipes based on vegetables grown in the harsh and bitter ”winter” of central Texas, the other half is for the hot season, or as I like to think of it, the other 360 days of the year. Flipping through this book makes me dream of fresh summer vegetables and fills my head with all kinds of exciting things to do with them.

Last week, I made Larry’s Roasted Chile-Roasted Tomato Gazpacho, even though those things aren’t quite in season. I’d never made gazpacho before, but it turned out quite well and gave me something to do with some of the green chiles that are still filling up my freezer.

Finally, Fonda San Miguel: Thirty Years of Food and Art is a stunningly beautiful cookbook that belongs as much on the coffee table as in the kitchen. I have yet to make any recipes from this one, despite the fact that Fonda San Miguel is one of my top five Austin restaurants. Even without having tested it in the kitchen, this is one of my favorite cookbooks. A good cookbook should be as much fun to use as browse and this is a true stand out.

Austin is a great town for people who love food, and these cookbooks, taken together, revel in three of the other things that make Austin so wonderful, be it the weirdness of the soup peddler, the environmental awareness of Boggy Creek, or the art of Fonda San Miguel.

Do you have a favorite Austin cookbook that I should check out? If so, let me know in the comments.

This is our new cat, Simon. So far, he likes to lounge around with his eyes closed. He’s about 2½ years old and is very friendly. The dogs are fairly ambivalent, and they seem to respect the power of the raised paw.

My wife has more about him on her blog, including how she found him (or did he find her?), but here are the highlights:

• He’s very friendly and mellow. He has rolled over on his back several times to have his belly rubbed, and has been lying in the middle of the floor.
• He can open cabinets and drawers, so we are getting some child locks today.
• He’s very curious and likes to explore.
• He’s young enough that he still plays.
• He likes to be held and purrs a lot.
• He follows us around to see what we’re up to.

And, he doesn’t like to open his eyes for pictures, so most of them look like this…

I’ve been meaning to get back into Old Photo Fridays, but since we had the floors done, we haven’t got eveything put back and the old photos aren’t too accessible. And then, the screensaver served this one up, which is only a year old, but old enough, I guess.

I took it from the back of the boat on the morning we cruised up the Canyon of the Eagles. The view is looking downriver, below the canyon, looking towards Lake Buchanan, all glass early in the day.

It was a quick snap off the back, but I really like the flat colors and that bird who just happened to fly into the picture while obeying the rule of thirds. Smart bird.

I wrote two posts about that trip with more pictures. They’re here and here.

And, now for today’s ten…

1. “Save Me” - Aimee Mann - KGSR Broadcasts Vol. 11
2. “Country Death Song” - Violent Femmes - Hallowed Ground
3. “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise” - Miles Davis - In Person: Saturday Night at the Blackhawk
4. “Charles III” - Charles Earland - Funk Fantastique
5. “Lose Control” - Missy Elliott - The Cookbook
6. “Groover” - Funki Porcini - Triphop & Jazz Vol. 3
7. “El Condor Pasa (If I Could)” - Simon & Garfunkel - Greatest Hits
8. “Seven Skies” - Erik Truffaz - The Walk of the Giant Turtle
9. “Desert Song” - Stanley Clarke - School Days
10. “Changer” - Stereolab - ABC Music-Radio 1 Sessions

I love “Save Me,” and this version is wonderful. It’s jarring leading into that Femmes tune, though, about a guy who kills his young daughter in the spooky “Country Death Song.”

I used see the Violent Femmes pretty regularly when I was in college. Great shows. It was a fascinating thing to hear Gordon Gano imploring the crowd to go to church  before launching into this or “Add It Up,” on which he usually let the audience sing the “fuck”’s. And then they’d play ”Jesus Walking on the Water.”

Everyone always bought and knew the first album, but Hallowed Ground was a fascinating look at one man’s love/hate relationship with religion, or perhaps I should describe it as the diference between religion and faith. And then, of course, there’s that crazy jam in the middle of “Black Girls.”

From there, the set, while good, kind of drifts off into the world of long jams and improv. “Charles III,” though is pretty smokin’, but I wasn’t really paying attention as I was looking forward to putting on Hallowed Ground after not having listened to it in ages. Those reminders are the magic of the ipod.

This guy has been coming round here in the mornings to beat the wrens to the mealworms. Early bird and all that.

He’s a black-crested titmouse, similar to the tufted titmouse, but found only in Oklahoma, Texas and Mexico. Apparently they used to be considered a separate race from the regular tufted titmice, not a separate species, but now they’re a separate species. The species also apparently hybridize where their ranges overlap, such as here in central Texas.

I finally saw him while I had happened to have my camera handy, but the focus is a bit off. Part of that is the distortion of shooting through the window. Part of that is the focus being off.

I’m enjoying trying to ID and photograph the birds that come through here. It’s a fun little hobby combining photography, research and blogging. Plus I can do it from home, which is nice when you don’t really feel like doing much after work.

Visit Transitions for a nice shot of a regular tufted titmouse.

Also, I and the Bird #45 is up at Journey Through Grace. Check it out.

Update: This post has been edited. I originally ID’d this bird as a tufted “black-crested” titmouse, but my bird book is seemingly out of date since the black-crested are now a separate genetically distinct species. Thanks to Mike at 10,000 Birds who called my attention to this in the comments. More can be found about these birds at The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds site or Wikipedia. When I mentioned this to the actual bird, though, he told me just to call him Roger.

While browsing the local blogs, I came across the looney bin and this delicious little warning:

For him that stealeth a Book from this Library, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with Palsy, and all his Members blasted. Let him languish in Pain crying aloud for Mercy and let there be no sur-cease to his Agony till he sink in Dissolution. Let Bookworms gnaw his Entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final Punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever and aye.

–Curse against book stealers, Monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona

It seems these monks didn’t mess around with library fines, opting instead to get downright medieval, which seems appropriate as they were medieval monks and all.

When I googled the curse itself searching for a source, I found it included in an interesting list of quotes about libraries and librarians on the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions website.

I think I’ll have to post a copy over the library in my classroom.

When I set out to read the books that appear on ABC’s Lost, I started with the books that were either shown onscreen or directly referenced. I will make exceptions, however, for books I always inteded to read anyway and so it was with Robert Heinlein’s 1961 classic Stranger in a Strange Land.

I feel that I truly grok the fullness of Heinlein’s sci-fi tale about Michael Valentine Smith, a human who was raised on Mars by Martians and returned to Earth to grok the humans. Along the way Mike Smith (what a great name for a Martian) teaches humans about growing-closer through water sharing and he teaches them the importance of grokking.

Smith winds up starting a free-love cult that would have made many a hippy proud, and I can see why this book was so popular in the counterculture of the late ’60s, even lending the word grok to the hippy lexicon. Heinlein’s Smith teaches Martian ways to humans and takes the best thing humans have for creating happiness (sex, baby) and mixes them with the best of Martian culture (grokking, happiness, spiritual completion, mind reading, teleportation, immortality, cannibalism) making many an enemy among Earth’s politicians and megachurches along the way.

This is a book that requires a pretty serious suspension of disbelief, not just to swallow the Martian angle, but also the notion of humans being able to truly put aside all jealousy and selfishness in order to be happy. Most of the characters are thin and the book seems more than anything an outlet for Heinlein to ponder and argue with himself about social values, art, liberty, and religion. If you like a sort of wacky, semi-lighthearted philosophical novel with a sci-fi background, you’ll probably enjoy this. I did.

As to its status as a sci-fi classic, I suspect it makes so many of those kinds of lists not so much on its own merits as because of the way that it was picked up and embraced by the 1960s counterculture a few years after its publication. It’s one of those rare books where the author seems to have gotten ahead of the zeitgeist just enough to already be there waiting when the rest of the world caught up with him.

The connection to Lost comes in the title of the of the ninth episode of the third season, “Stranger in a Strange Land.” The episode is about Jack. The flashbacks find him in Phuket, Thailand, where he is, yes, a stranger in a strange land. On the island, Jack is still being held by the Others, but by the end of the episode, he seems to have joined them. We also learn that the tattoo Jack acquired in Phuket was gotten in violation of some mysterious taboos and says, “He walks among us, but he is not one of us.” In every way, we see Jack as stranger in strange lands.

We knew that though. The most interesting connection between Heinlein’s novel and Lost is in what it suggests about the Others. Minus the cannibalism and sex, the Others seem to have a quasi-religious cult based on attaining happiness, spiritual completion and possibly, teleportation, mind reading, projection and immortality. No wonder they seem so happy on the island.

Lost, as it it wont to do, turns the dynamic on its head, when the stranger in a strange land is not the man bringing the new and better way to live to humanity, but rather Jack, who seems to represent everything the Others are trying to escape in the real world. The question, then, becomes, will Jack drink the Kool-Aide? Based on the end of last week’s episode (“Par Avion”) it looks like he might have, making him no different from Heinlein’s Ben Caxton, the earthly cynic who joined Mike Smith’s Church of All Worlds and within forty-eight hours found a better way to live.

Of course, the title may have nothing to do with Heinlein’s book, Instead, it could be a reference to the Iron Maiden song, which is found on their Somewhere in Time album. That’s interesting enough when you consider that lately Lost has been playing up the question of whether or not the Oceanic 815 surviviors are lost somewhere in time. Some of the lyrics, which seem to tell of an Arctic explorer losing his way and dying, also bear a striking resemblance to certain issues of Lost:

Night and day I scan horizon sea and sky
My spirit wanders endlessly
Until the day will dawn and friends from home discover why
Hear me calling rescue me
Set me free, set me free
Lost in this place and leave no trace

Stranger in a strange land
Land of ice and snow
Trapped inside this prison
Lost and far from home

Strange how often a show about a tropical island has so many references to things Arctic, but there it is. The lyrics also speak of being gone for 100 years. I don’t know if we should start a Lost listening list, but the music and songs featured on the show are probably as meaningful as the books.

The last connection is biblical. “Stranger in a strange land” is a quote from that classic book about escape, Exodus 2:22: “And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.” Lost also references the Bible quite a bit, and this could be another instance of that.

So there it is: Stranger in a Strange Land, be it book, Bible or Iron Maiden tune, there are as many clues and suggestions as one cares to find.

For further reading:

• TheOrangeSlayedTheRake has a collection of interesting quotes about art and sex from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land
• Electronic Cerebrectomy’s TV Report: A Half-Season of Lost (check out the comments for some interesting theories about Watership Down)

For an index of all my Lost book posts, click here.

I see these little guys all the time, crowding around the spilled seed beneath the feeder. I have a tendency to name any small brown bird a sparrow so I was pleasantly surprised to learn that these guys really are sparrows, chipping sparrows to be precise.

According to my bird book, chipping sparrows are nicknamed “hairbirds” because they use hair in their nests that they steal from unsuspecting horses and sometimes napping dogs. Perhaps - gasp! - even lazy greyhounds.

Apparently, they are also one of the signs of spring in northern climes where they replace the American tree sparrows that move up to the Arctic to breed.