As the hours tick down to Election Day, I am getting increasingly nervous. I am considering avoiding my Google Reader account for the entire day; I suspect that instead I will check it compulsively.

This is my last chance to remind all those of you who live in CA to VOTE NO ON PROPS 4 AND 8, the centerpieces of my fear.

To calm myself down, I am thinking of less scary things that will happen later in the week. For example, on Wednesday Inga and I are going to go see Repo! The Genetic Opera. Anthony Stewart Head repossessing people’s livers while Sarah Brightman sings and Paris Hilton wanders around the set is ::much less frightening:: than a world without gay marriage but with Sarah Palin as Vice President.

Have a good election day, ya’ll. May your lines be short and your decisions easy, and may the people of your state and this country agree with you.

Ok, I really only want them to agree with me, but it was a nice thought, right?

Last night I had the best of intentions to go out to one or more Halloween parties. However, it was a long week, and so I went home and slept instead. To make up for it, tonight I did what all the cool Mission-dwellers do on a Saturday night:

I baked Theresa Nielsen Hayden’s Sausage, Leek and Apple Pie and watched the Alex Cox Revengers Tragedy. Then I followed it up by cleaning my kitchen.

Notes:

I used one of the fancy vegetarian ground soy substances instead of sausage, but it was still a bit meaty for my taste–anything with ground stuff in tends to raise my hackles even if I’ve put the soy substance in myself. It was still tasty though. Tomorrow I will try the leftovers on meat-eaters and see what their reaction to the ground soy stuff is.

Following Theresa’s proportions, I wound up with enough filling for two pies. Maybe her 9-inch pie was a lot deeper than mine–I wound up purchasing a pre-made piecrust, and it was definitely on the shallow side, but very tasty–I will definitely buy the brand again the next time I make pie. I’ll have to be careful to remove the top crust from its pan before it thaws–I wound up with a glop of crust on the top of my pie since I have neither a rolling pin nor a good rolling surface. I also have a couple of pie shell recipes I want to try out soon, so I may have to bring my pie-cooking to another household the next time.

If you have whole pepper and no pepper grinder, a coffee grinder works admirably for the task. (We shall see if I cleaned it out well enough that my next cup of coffee doesn’t taste peppery.)

I made the following substitutions:

For the full celery-root, half a celery root and half a turnip. I think that next time I do this, I’ll leave out the Smart Ground and just do a general sliced root vegetable pie, with parsnips and beets added for good measure. This was the first time I’d cooked with celery root, and it was really yummy–it will defintely make it into my future root vegetable creations.

For the saffron, I asafoetida, with a bit of curry thrown in for good measure. It still wasn’t quite as flavorful as I would have liked–I ended up sprinkling more curry on top of my pie before I ate it. Mmmm, curry. (It has become obvious that I can’t cook English food without adding a lot of curry to it. Clearly India was the best thing that ever happened to the British Empire. The sun still hasn’t set on India.)

I also picked up a sharp cheddar cheese, which I totally forgot about when I was done baking the pie. I think I’ll try some of that with the pie tomorrow.

The Cox Revengers Tragedy is excellent. Fantastic, even. I would definitely recomend it to anyone who likes either the post-apocalyptic or the Jacobean, as it does both well at once. Chris Eccleston was costumed weirdly like his incarnation of the Doctor as Vindici, which was a bit distracting, but I can sort of imagine Nine running around killing people and being a ventriloquist with skulls so it was totally ok?

It also had Eddie Izzard as Lussurioso and Derek Jacobi as the Duke, and a soundtrack by Chumba Wumba, and basically the fact that it actually got made is kind of a mystery to me. But the best kind of mystery, where the universe hands you a really excellent film to watch. PS Alex Cox also directed Repo Man, which makes it ::even more mysterious::.

The special features were also a welcome surprise, primarily watching Eddie Izzard explain earnestly that the period of drama should have been called “Jamesian” and not “Jacobian.” And learning that the producer (Tod Davies) was Marjorie’s mannerisms doppelgänger! (Really Marjorie, you are required to see it all for the 5 seconds in which she describes Eccleston as “intense,” and then waves her hands, makes big eyes, and follows it up with  “like that.”)

The Yes on 8 folks just won’t stop. Not satisfied with blackmailing major No on 8 donors last week, last night they launched a DoS attack on NoOnProp8.com . The site is still down as we speak.

Classy, Yes on 8, classy. You were supposed to be the ones on the side of “morality,” right?

Today is Mountain Day, the Mount Holyoke holiday of canceling classes to eat ice cream and consider going up a Mountain.

I may not be able to skip work today, or climb Mount Holyoke, but with the aid of my accomplices Inga, Rohit and Andrew, I do what I can.

I’ve been watching hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com closely, but so far it hasn’t.

It turns out that this is because Martha Jones and Torchwood saved the world again, complete with questionable science.

Meanwhile, here in California SLAC has no funding until November, and they won’t even listen to my advice to make an awesome rap video to rival the one those dorks at CERN made.

I just downloaded iTunes 8, and so far it has been a less than ideal experience.

First of all, I can’t play any of my videos from the iTunes music store until I upgrade to Quicktime 7.5.5, which Software Upgrade tells me does not exist. This includes videos I’ve had since before I upgraded–and I wanted to show Dr. Horrible to Inga, damnit!

I also set up Genius to see how it does with my music. I paused and considered the personal privacy issues and decided it was worth it to see what sorts of music iTunes recommended to match my admittedly quirky tastes.

Beyond the jump, see how they did.

iTunes fails to recognize the Beatles. Click for bigger version.

As it turns out, iTunes isn’t so hot on things like, say, really indie not-too-known albums. Like, for example, this album called “Abbey Road” by some group called, the Beatles? Or something like that?

I realize they only launched yesterday so they don’t have a huge amount of training data yet, but that seems like a pretty big gap. (For the record, both Dar Williams and Monty Python gave me recommendations for more music by the same artist in the iTunes Music store, at the very least.)

I’ll keep using it to see if it gets better, but so far, color me unimpressed. Certainly nothing on Pandora.

There’s something unsettling about the fact that the De Young museum allows photography of its exhibits. It turns the accustomed relationship between the art and the viewers on its head and fills its galleries with visitors who are seeing the exhibit not with an eye for the compositions that the artist created but with an eye for the compositions they can make out of it. (And most of them are doing so badly, snapping photos with their camera phones and with point-and-shoot cameras on which they need instructions to turn off the flash.)

That said, I’ve seen some pretty incredible photography of the Chihuly exhibit at the De Young over the last few months, and today I made my pilgrimage there to take my own photos. I went during a long-awaited museum trip with Mormor, Aunt V. and my cousin B. (who is off to college in another week).

I started making composition jokes at the expense of impressionist seascapes. I really am that silly.

We started at the Palace of the Legion of Honor to see the Woman Impressionists, which Mormor was excited about. I am, I’m embarrassed to admit, not especially interested in the Impressionists (I blame early and often exposure), but the woman impressionists were pretty interesting. Given my interest in the meta, I was fascinated by relationship the women in the exhibit (Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès and Marie Bracquemond) had with their subjects, with their gender, and with the male impressionists they worked with. With the possible exception of Mary Cassatt, all of them were mentored by more famous Impressionists and served as models for their mentors. In a particularly interesting painting, Gonzales recreates a painting of Manet’s in which she herself was the original subject; she replaces herself with another and takes on the role of the artist.

Light through a ceiling of Chihuly

Still, the paintings for the most part stuck to what I expected–women with children, women alone, children alone, neat little harbor paintings divided evenly into thirds for sky, sea, and land. After a painting featuring a grayhound named Laertes, I started entertaining myself by coming up with an appropriate Shakespearean character for each painted dog. (Later, in the Dutch section of the permenant collection, B. took the cake while we were looking at a painting of a dog and a table of game: “That one’s Horatio, because he’s the only one left alive.”)

B’s favorite pieces at the Legion of Honor were the Chihulys, so he was as excited as I was when we arrived at the De Young to see the Chihuly exhibit. Once we were in, I whipped out my camera and became one of the dorky people too busy looking at the trees to see the forest of the exhibit. I have some fun glasswork photos, but mostly I (as usual) got suckered in by all the parts of the exhibit that weren’t the glasswork–the reflections, the shadows, the light filtered through the lens of the glass. In short, I had a lot of fun, but I need to learn to balance the way I look at art when I don’t have a camera on hand and the way I interact with it when I do.

More photos at Picasaweb

From the ever-clever folks at “A Softer World” comes this gem.

Delightfully enough I found myself thinking: “But I have hope again! This would have been much more apt during all those years of the Bush administration without hope.” But given the speeches I’ve been hearing all week during the RNC, maybe it is apt after all.

I’m back from Mendocino County after a weekend visit to my hometown. As tends to happen with every visit to the Emerald Triangle these days, I’ve got marijuana on the brain. Figuratively, not literally— my of youth spent desperately plotting to get away from there means that I’m one of the few people my age I know who has never once smoked pot. But marijuana’s influence on everything about my hometown stands out and lingers on the brain even after I’ve left.

I guess Mendo has been a center of US marijuana production for at least as long as I’ve been alive, but it didn’t really stand out to me until I went to college, and the impact seems to have increased every time I go home. To be fair, it wasn’t until I moved away that I realized how very unusual some of the basic features of my childhood were. “Trespassers will be shot” signs that meant just that and more. Relatives and family friends who count their income not in paychecks but in crops.

The hardest thing about going home is seeing the ways that there are increasing signs of income (nice homes, new businesses that don’t require profits, teenagers with fancy cellphones and ipods) while the town as a whole stays so poor. If there is one single reason that I think marijuana should become legal, it’s so that all the growers in town would have to pay taxes and we’d be able to afford the improvements that our schools, our hospital, our streets desperately need. As growers get richer and richer, they keep sending their kids to the same underfunded public schools where they get a crapshoot of an education (sorry mom) and know that they have two options for success in life: move out or start growing.

Last week my dad sent me an online survey from the County, which is collecting feedback on where we’re going to go with the relative legality of marijuana, and as I answered question after question I realized just how contradictory my opinions on the subject are.

I hate marijuana and judge marijuana smokers… but in the same way that I hate tobacco and judge tobacco smokers. I think it’s riddiculous that such a relatively harmless drug is illegal, but I’m sceptical of “medical marijuana” in California and the even laxer laws in Mendocino County in terms of how they stack up against National law. How can a substance be both legal and illegal?

My opinons get even more complex when my hometown comes into it. Undoubtedly the economy has improved, but at what cost? And since social services and education haven’t come with the improvements, while a complete dependence on an illegal substance and the resulting addiction among a large part of the populace has, what good is it?

I know growers well, I know dealers well. I know a boy who is funding his college education at an elite university by selling pot, and I applaud him for that. I’ve also noticed the high percentage of news about my high school graduating class that involves incarceration, arrest, or drug-related injury (not to mention the drug-related relationships and unplanned pregnancies).

I get angry when I see druggie San Francisco hippies arguing for the legalization of Marijuana, not thinking about how their high is impacting my community. But would legalizing marijuana make these problems worse? Or would they relieve them by evening them out with the rest of the state and the country? I just don’t know.

ETA: A trailer for this movie was featured content on the Apple start page over the weekend. Interesting coincidence.

I am well-known for my tendency to listen to some… unusual music. This isn’t the “I have lots of indie cred” sort of listening to music other people haven’t heard of*; it’s the “what in hell IS this, Molly?” sort of listening to music other people haven’t heard of. But some of the stuff I listen to is really good, and you should be listening to it too. To that end, a post of music that I like, that I think you would like too.

Max Vernon: He was popular on the internet quite recently for his jazzy cover of “I Kissed a Girl,” and the rest of his stuff is even better. He’s a great pianist, and a swank singer, and his lyrics are awesome. Check out The Hypochondriac Blues . Several songs are available for download on Max Vernon’s myspace page.

Bonfire Madigan Shive: Ever since seeing her as a bass-cello-playing angel in the heavens above ACT’s production of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore I’ve wanted to hear more of her music. (Listen to her play Lady Saves a Dragon From the Evil Prince, which she composed for ‘Tis Pity and you will want to too.) I am waiting for her retrospective I Bleed to arrive in the mail, and I am desperately hoping that she will release a ‘Tis Pity soundtrack. No downloads, but you can listen to more of her stuff, at Madigan’s myspace page.

Hey Young Believer: I have become one of their groupies in recent months. I’m especially fond of some of their earlier stuff when they were still The Landing and writing sad girl piano music, but their new happier songs about death are pretty cool, too. They’re a little bit more traditionally pop-y than the other stuff recommended in this post, but they’re very musically solid (Lilly and Alex both have music degrees from Stanford), fun to listen to, and they put on a great show. Downloads on MySpace and HeyYoungBeliever dot com .

There now, aren’t you totally convinced I listen to music other than Broadway? Haven’t I totally made up for the fact that instead of going to Outside Lands like all the cool people, I’m going to see Sing-Along Little Mermaid tonight?

* Except that I’ve totally fallen in love with Sigur Ros over the last couple of weeks. But if I’m more than five years late to the party, it doesn’t really count.