Daily Science Fiction (great new online magazine!)

Posted on October 4, 2010 by Kristin

If you haven’t seen Daily Science Fiction yet, they’re publishing some great stories. You can read them at their website; or, if you want the stories when they first come out, subscribe to their mailing list, and they’ll e-mail you a new story every day (they publish both science fiction and fantasy).

I have to admit that I don’t read every story that shows up in my Inbox. Maybe if I had more time. So far I’ve especially liked Therese Arkenberg’s “The Fosterling” and the current featured story, Matthew Johnson’s “Long Pig” (for anyone who’s an afficionado of fine dining).

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The Tabasco sauce factory and Jungle Gardens (alligator pictures!)

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Kristin

I’ve gotten behind in blogging about my trip to Louisiana to visit Donald’s parents, back in early September. But I do keep promising to write about our visit to the Tabasco sauce factory.

Apparently, the entire world’s supply of Tabasco sauce is made in Avery Island, Louisiana (although most of the peppers are now grown in Latin America, since the climate is more stable down there). Avery Island is south of Lafayette, in the heart of Cajun country, a couple hours west of New Orleans.

Here are a few fun facts about Tabasco sauce:

1) The queen of England likes it. Or, at least someone in the royal family does. See, here’s proof:

God save the queen!

2) Tabasco sauce is made from one particular kind of pepper that seemed to be some sort of obscure Mexican heirloom variety before the founder of the company was given some plants, and started to make a seasoning sauce out of them, in the 19th century. I always thought it was made from habanero peppers. But it’s not.

Carefully guarded from wandering, pepper-snatching fingers!

3) The Tabasco company (actually, I should say the McIlhenny company) used to make a wide assortment of products, including many canned and pickled vegetables. Although you can still get a few, such as pickled okra, in the company store, most of these products are no longer made. They do, however, make a spicy Tabasco dark chocolate–not as good as some of the gourmet chili-flavored chocolate bars you can get, to be honest, but the tin is really pretty.

4) Tabasco makes 6 sauces: Original, Green (from jalapenos), chipotle, habanero, garlic pepper, and sweet & spicy. Green is a bit milder than original. Garlic pepper is even milder than that. Habanero is much hotter! Chipotle and sweet & spicy are actually less intense, and can be used directly as a steak sauce or dipping sauce. (I bought samples of all of them in the company store, except for original, because I already have some at home, and green, because I see it everywhere in the grocery store.)

5) Habanero Tabasco contains banana! I didn’t realize this before I tasted it, so I like habanero Tabasco. I don’t think you can taste the banana.

I guess there are all sorts of facts about how Tabasco sauce is made and bottled, but honestly, I didn’t find them as interesting as shopping in the company store, and these random factoids I’ve assembled. This is why I’m a blogger instead of a real journalist. Anyway, in case you’re curious, they take the peppers and mash them up with salt, and let the mash age in old whiskey barrels until it’s ready to be strained and mixed with vinegar. The salt they use comes from the Avery Island salt mine, also owned by the McIlhenny family (Tabasco is still a family-run company); Avery Island is the peak of an enormous underground mountain of rock salt that would dwarf Mt Everest if the two were lined up.

Oh, and the peppers are all hand-picked, because they haven’t been able to invent a machine that can tell when they’re properly ripe. The field workers are given a red stick, and they’re supposed to hold that next to the peppers to make sure the colors match before they pick them.

If you go on the tour, they give you a couple of very cute 1/4 oz bottles of Tabasco, one of original and one of green (you can also buy these in the company store; also the tiny bottles of the other flavors). You also get to watch a rather hagiographic 10-minute movie about the McIlhenny family and the founding of the company, but the hairstyles and clothes looked like they were from back in the 90s. Then you walk past a long window through which you can see the bottling plant.

I think my favorite part of the tour was the self-guided visit to the company store, as I’ve already hinted. In addition to the products I’ve already mentioned, I bought a Tabasco apron, because I’m always spilling food on my clothes when I cook. They have free samples of all the sauces, plus Tabasco ice cream!

If you don’t think a visit to the Tabasco company store is worth such a long drive, never fear, there’s also the Jungle Gardens! These are just down the road from the factory. I think they’re also owned by the McIlhenny Company, but I’m not 100% sure (and too lazy to Google it and find out). The Jungle Gardens are sort of an arboretum built up around a migratory bird sanctuary (lots of herons and egrets). And they have alligators!

Do you think they like to be petted?

There were initially only one or two alligators, but as we stood there taking pictures, more kept swimming over

This is the biggest alligator we saw

Donald thought that perhaps his mother and I weren’t taking the alligator threat seriously enough, but really, we were being quite careful, and keeping our distance. And we didn’t poke at them or anything.

For tourists who don't have Donald to remind them

Between Avery Island and Lafayette, they grow a lot of sugarcane. It looks like this:

Sugarcane fields on the way back from Avery Island

Hard to believe that refined white sugar comes out of these plants, isn’t it!

On the drive back, I was playing around with my camera settings a bit, and kept getting Donald to pose for pictures.

Old-fashioned Donald!

Since we were driving right through the heart of Louisiana’s Cajun country, we couldn’t leave without sampling some Cajun specialties. All along the highway, you’ll see signs advertising boudin and cracklins. Boudin is a spicy sausage made of ground pork, rice, and a bit of green pepper. Cracklins are basically fresh pork rinds, without all the preservatives that you’ll find in the ones at the convenience store.

It tastes better than it looks

Yummo, as Rachael Ray would say. Yes, those are indeed deep-fried hunks of lard.

It was a long day, but a very enjoyable trip!

On September 8th, Donald and I went to Natchez, Mississippi for the day. It was nice, but maybe not exciting enough for its own blog post. One of my main reasons for wanting to go was so I could check another state off on my “visited” list. Then on the 9th, Donald and his mother and I went to Baton Rouge, the state capital, where we saw some cool museums. On the 10th, we drove back to Houston, and stayed overnight with a friend of Donald’s from college, and her family (thanks again to Joya for hosting us!). And then on the 11th we flew back to Boston.

Okay, that was a very anti-climactic penultimate paragraph. But this has been a very long post.

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Facebook is watching you!

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Kristin

I recently joined Facebook, within the past week. I know, I know. A bit behind the times. I still don’t have a cell phone.

I probably have my privacy settings too high (considering I frequently post the sort of information most people put on Facebook on my blog, on the internet, for everyone to read). But Facebook is scary! What really disturbs me is that, immediately, right after I’d joined, before I’d tried to add any friends at all, Facebook already had a list of people that it “thought I might know,” and suggested I add as friends. And I did know most of them! How does Facebook know?

My theory is that these were people who had previously searched for me on Facebook, before I was on, and that Facebook saves records of all those searches. I hope that’s true; the alternatives are a little too disturbing to contemplate.

Facebook has already suggested one ex-boyfriend to me as a potential friend. (“Face-your-past-book”) But at least it hasn’t suggested anyone I actively dislike (nor have any of those people tried to friend me). I have also discovered that Facebook provides all sorts of new opportunities for my raging insecurities about myself (“Why hasn’t that person accepted my friend request? Do they hate me? What did I do? Maybe it was [X]. But that doesn’t make sense. I must just be a horrible person….”).

Now we just need to get Tallulah on Catbook.

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“Sons of God, Daughters of Men” accepted for publication

Posted on September 26, 2010 by Kristin

I just found out that my short story “Sons of God, Daughters of Men” has been accepted for publication by the online magazine Strange, Weird, & Wonderful. It’s currently slated for publication in their April 2011 issue. They’re a free PDF publication, in case you’d like to check out some of the stories they’ve already published, in the meantime.

I’m not a horror writer, but “Sons of God, Daughters of Men” is probably one of my creepiest stories, about a young woman and her demon lover, and the man who tries to come between them. Unless it’s all in the woman’s head….

I’ll let everyone know once it’s published!

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Fundraising month at Ralan.com!

Posted on September 20, 2010 by Kristin

I just wanted to put in a plug for Ralan.com, seeing as how September is Ralan’s annual fundraising month. This is mostly for those of you who are fantasy or science fiction writers (though I’m sure Ralan wouldn’t turn away donations from anyone). Ralan.com is an incredibly useful site for finding information on magazines and book publishers that might publish your stories. It’s all entirely free, and he only asks for money once a year. So, if you’ve used his site in the past to find information about new places to send your fiction, and if you can afford to contribute even a small amount, please at least consider donating.

Duotrope is another good free site for fiction market listings, and they also rely on listener–er, user support.

Yes, I recognize the irony in posting this immediately after my last post. (“Have you ever held court at a party because you were a published author?”) But I’m pretty sure you won’t get any letters from Ralan or Duotrope, offering to put your name on a plaque (Actual size shown!) in exchange for a $1000 donation.

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What’s wrong with NPR

Posted on September 18, 2010 by Kristin

Okay, I still have to write about my visit to the Tabasco sauce factory, but it’s really late and I’m too tired for a long post with pictures.

I just got a letter from WBUR (Boston’s NPR news station) asking for money. Don’t get me wrong, I like NPR, and listen to it almost every day. I’ve even given them money in the past. I wouldn’t claim they’re an unbiased news source, but I don’t think any news source is, and for the most part I find myself in agreement with their politics (otherwise I probably wouldn’t enjoy listening to them so much).

There’s one line in the letter though, that just encapsulates what most irritates me about them. They’re trying to point out how the reader of the fundraising letter relies on NPR (and hence should give them more money), and they ask:

“Have you ever held court at a party because you could talk with confidence about the complexities of the recession, not just in the U.S., but also in Spain, Germany and Greece?”

For one thing, the only parties I go to where people would be impressed by my ability to parrot back whatever I heard on NPR last week tend to be attended by other people who also listen religiously to NPR, and probably also heard that same news segment.

For another … “hold court”? Maybe there’s a target audience for this letter that does see themselves holding court, entrancing all the other cocktail party attendees with their knowledge and insight. Not that I never try, but I usually look back afterwards and think, “You know, I sounded kind of full of myself.”

This was the letter from WBUR in Boston, so maybe the NPR fundraising letter in other regions of the country sounds a little less pretentious.

As one of my roommates pointed out, lines like that are why many people who don’t listen to NPR think those of us who do are a bunch of smug assholes.

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Spiders of the south

Posted on September 16, 2010 by Kristin

This post isn’t entirely about spiders. However, I have to say, if they have spiders like this in Georgia, Kira’s comment about how spiders would keep her away from camping is a lot more understandable. When I talked about big spiders in New Hampshire, they were nothing like this one! Yuck!

Look at the size of that thing!

On Monday (September 6th; i.e., Labor Day), Donald and I went to see Rosedown Plantation, one of the antebellum plantation sites in the area where his parents live (St. Francisville, LA). Many old plantations have been replaced, over the years, by heavy industry–chemical plants and the like, between Baton Rouge and the Mississippi state line. But some of the old properties that have the big houses still standing have been turned into museums, open to the public.

Rosedown is quite beautiful, with extensive gardens. We did get caught in the rain briefly; I noticed that it was very common in Louisiana to have a brief thunderstorm sometime between 2:30 and 4:00 pm, but then it would clear up. (I guess this is only the case during the summer; I don’t remember it happening last time I was in Louisiana, for Thanksgiving.)

A view from the side of the house, sort of sheltered

The house, with live oak trees on either side, Spanish moss hanging down

A view of some of the gardens, from the house

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The wrong lesson?

Posted on September 15, 2010 by Kristin

I feel the need to interrupt my day-by-day recap of my Texas-Louisiana vacation, in order to talk about an interesting team-building exercise I participated in today at a work-related event.

I usually make it a policy not to talk about my job on this blog, at all. Because, you know, you can get fired for that. However, since I’m not revealing any confidential information, or disparaging anyone, I think I can make an exception here.

The exercise was as follows. Each participant was given a sheet of paper with 12 multiple-choice questions about wilderness survival (i.e., “Given scenario X, would it be best to do a, b or c?”). After answering the questions individually, everyone was asked to form groups of 6, and then use a “consensus-building” approach to come up with group answers to the questions. (“Consensus-building” means that you have to get everyone in the group to agree to the group answer before moving on; you can’t just have a vote and put down the most popular answer.)

Most of the groups scored better on the exercise than most individuals did. And, with the exception of one group (if I’m remembering this correctly), no one individual had a higher score than their group. It seems to me that the obvious lesson has to do with the value of a consensus-building approach to problem-solving.

However. Another interesting observation was that no one group had a higher score than the highest-scoring individual within that group (EDIT–See note at bottom). Also (this is the part I hope I’m remembering correctly), in the lowest-scoring group, the individuals tended to have higher scores than the group score arrived at through consensus-building.

I’m not an expert on these sorts of studies. But it seems to me that, at least in this exercise, while a majority of people did better on the test by working on it in teams, the teams didn’t appear to gain anything from the contributions of the less-knowledgeable team members. And, in the lowest-scoring team (presumably the one that coincidentally ended up with fewer knowledgeable people), most people ended up doing worse as a result of pooling their knowledge.

I wouldn’t conclude from this exercise that a consensus-building approach is bad. But I might suggest that the reason it’s effective (when it is effective), is that the people on the team are able to recognize who the “experts”* are, and defer to them. And I might further suggest that, if the team doesn’t have any experts, there isn’t much to be gained by pooling their expertise (rocket science, I know).

Donald suggested that one lesson of this exercise might be that a dictatorial leadership style is more effective than a consensus-building approach. Assuming that your dictator is the most knowledgeable person in the group, of course. I don’t think I agree. Or, at least, I don’t entirely agree. The thing is, most real-life situations, at least in scientific research, are more complicated than the fairly simplistic wilderness survival scenarios we were presented with (each with only 3 possible answers). So I think it’s less clear, among scientists, who the expert is. On cross-disciplinary projects, a single person is even less likely to be the expert in every aspect of the project.

So, hmm, maybe I did come away with the right lesson after all?

I still maintain, though, that (A) you have to have experts, and (B) people have to recognize when someone is more knowledgeable in a certain area, and defer to their expertise.

Another thing I noticed: With questions that I wasn’t absolutely 100% sure about, the group convinced me to switch from a right answer to a wrong one just as often as they convinced me to switch from a wrong answer to a right one.

In any case, an interesting exercise.

* I use the term “expert” loosely, when refererring to the success enjoyed by members of our department in identifying the best wilderness survival strategies. The highest score was 8 out of 12. (“Dammit Jim, I’m a chemist, not a Sherpa!”)

(My score was 7 out of 12, in case you’re wondering. Group and individual.)

(EDIT–Okay, I remembered only after I wrote this that there was actually one team where the group score was higher than any individual scores. I don’t know how much higher it was. So perhaps synergy can occasionally work. There was only one team out of 5 or 6, though, where this was the case. I suppose the lesson here is that it’s easy to forget about data that doesn’t appear to support one’s hastily drawn conclusions.)

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Houston to Louisiana

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Kristin

On September 5th, we drove from Houston, Texas to St. Francisville, Louisiana. St. Francisville is about an hour north of Baton Rouge, and I guess about an hour (maybe less?) south of Mississippi. The Mississippi River runs right by it.

The drive was pretty uneventful. We saw a lot of signs for boudin and cracklings (or cracklin’s), going through Cajun country. Boudin is a spicy pork and rice sausage. Cracklings are basically pork rinds, only fresh-cooked, not the preservative-laden ones you get in those little plastic bags. We also saw a lot of signs for “adult superstores.” And those signs that say “Still a Virgin? For Help, Call [X].” No one we know can figure out what those signs are about. What sort of help are they offering? Do they have anything to do with the adult superstores?

I’m getting over a cold, and have to get up early tomorrow, so I’ll write more later. Stay tuned, to read about our exciting tour of the Tabasco sauce factory!

Here’s a cute picture of Donald with the kitten his parents have adopted:

I did warn him that people with cat allergies tend to be most allergic to gray striped cats

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Houston and Louisiana trip, Stage One

Posted on September 13, 2010 by Kristin

On September 2nd, Donald and I flew to Houston to attend my friend Christina’s wedding. The wedding wasn’t until September 4th, but since I was a bridesmaid, I had to be there early enough for the rehearsal dinner, not to mention all the various sorts of primping that being a bridesmaid requires. Hair, makeup, manicures and pedicures … a few years ago I might have been horrified, but I’ve become much more girly in recent years, and actually own makeup these days. So I actually sort of enjoyed the whole process.

Christina is a friend from grad school, back at the University of British Columbia. We weren’t in the same program–she was doing a PhD in geology, I was doing an MSc in chemistry–but we got to know each other through the graduate Christian fellowship group we both attended (Dwight and Kate, other good friends from the GCF group, were also at the wedding, along with their respective spouses). That was a kind of a long time ago–I left Vancouver in 1998–but we’ve kept in touch since then, visiting each other, and calling occasionally.

The wedding was very beautiful, and quite large. There were about 400 guests. The wedding ceremony was at the West Houston Chinese Church, which Christina attended, and the reception at the Ocean Palace Chinese Restaurant, where we were treated to a delicious 10-course banquet. I’m not sure if I can remember all the courses … there was an assorted cold cut platter (including jellyfish!), shark fin and chicken soup, fried prawns in a sweet honey sauce with honeyed walnuts, Peking duck, a beef dish, assorted mushrooms with Chinese vegetables, lobster, noodles … hmm, okay, I might be missing a course. Not to mention wedding cake. Everything was wonderful! Christina looked beautiful in her dress, too. (I’d post a picture, but I’m not sure Christina wants pictures of herself splashed across the internet.) Christina and her husband Jerry actually had 4 outfits over the course of the evening, during the reception. First they wore typical North American wedding attire. Then they changed into traditional Chinese formal outfits. Then Korean (Jerry is Korean-American). Then evening wear. They both looked great! But you’ll just have to imagine it.

Like I said, there was a lot of primping involved in getting ready for the wedding. I had my first ever manicure and pedicure. I’m not sure I would get manicures on a regular basis. The nail polish was pretty badly chipped within a week, and I was on vacation that whole time, and not really doing much with my hands. I can’t imagine that this would work with my usual routine, which involves a lot of cooking. Not unless I want to be ingesting a lot of chips of polish that flake off as I’m chopping. The pedicure, on the other hand, I’m still undecided about, at least for summer. I usually paint my toenails anyway during the summer, because they look so disgusting otherwise (I won’t gross you out by going into too much detail about my foot fungus). But I end up having to remove the polish and repaint every week, because it chips and flakes so much. And, although it’s been a week and a half since I got the pedicure, my toenails are still looking pretty decent. Better than they look a week after polishing them myself. So I’ll see how long it lasts.

As for the makeup, although I do often wear makeup these days, I’ve never worn anything like the high-test industrial-grade stuff they applied at the salon! They sprayed on the foundation and blush with this little sprayer thing. And I’ve never had my eyelashes curled before. (“I’m going to go with a nice, natural look,” the lady said, before she started.)

All this makeup, and they still couldn't hide the zits on my forehead!

It actually looks much closer to “natural” in the photographs than it did in real life. I guess that’s why they did it that way, for the official wedding photographs, so I didn’t look washed out. But I still think they could have toned it down a little.

Here’s a picture of me and Donald:

This is the only picture in which one of us is not making a silly face, or looking like they want to escape from the other

On Sunday, after attending the English-language service at the West Houston Chinese Church, and sharing a lunch with Christina and Jerry, their families, and other out-of-town wedding guests, Donald and I headed east on I-10 for Louisiana, for the next stage in our adventure.

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