Author: Josh

As mentioned yesterday, last night I made kringle.

In my family, by tradition, the men make the holiday treats. I come from a line of Norwegian settlers, who, at the holidays, traditionally have made caramels, peanut brittle, lefse¹A type of flatbread of a crepe or tortilla thickness, made from potatoes, and kringle²I’ve seen others spell it as kringla, which is how the word is pronounced, however for my family, it has always been kringle. Also to note, not Danish kringle, which is a flat ring with ingredients stuffed inside, then frosted.

For years, my grandfather and my father both would make kringle right around Christmas time, and I first recall eating them very young. The first time I can remember making kringle myself, however, was after my father left. There was a school project about family histories and tradition, and as part of it, I decided to try and make kringle. My mother, who had never made it herself, stood by to assist, as I was at best 10 or 11, and not yet to be trusted unsupervised with an electric mixer.

The most distinct thing I can remember is how sticky it was, and how impossible mixing it seemed. Kringle are sort of a doughy cookie, and its dough is made similar to many cookies, with sugar, butter, eggs, and vanilla, plus flour and baking powder. What sets kringle apart is the sour cream, into which is mixed baking soda, to cause a chemical reaction that induces a bubbling rise into the mixture, before blending in with the sugar-creamed butter and eggs. After mixing in the flour, what you’re left with is a dough the thickness of cookie dough but the stickiness of pizza dough. It’s the worst of both worlds to handle, and without experience or the right tools, my first attempt was a nightmare. I remember my hands, coated in dough so thickly that I couldn’t separate my fingers. They came out well enough in the end, and my classmates seemed to like them³Though, being in 4th grade, they didn’t have the most discerning palates., though were clearly missing something by way of technique.

Later in life, while visiting my father’s family at Christmas, I got my opportunity to learn at my grandfather’s side. I saw the benefits of a floured cheesecloth board and how it took much of the pain of rolling the dough away. I learned the importance of mixing the baking soda in with the sour cream, letting it bubble and froth before mixing with the other ingredients. I sieved flour in with baking powder, getting a thorough mixing. There are things a recipe card, Xeroxed and copied and photographed and digitized, will never contain. That must be learned at the knee, watched and ingrained in the timbre of one’s forebears.

I still hear my grandfather’s voice in my process, though he’s been gone for years now. I still hear my father’s as we laugh over how his father would grouse about our pretzel shapes instead of his figure-eights, as was tradition as he learned it. Both men are gone now, but they’ve passed on a legacy. I make what they made, how they made it, when they made it, and for whom. As I watched the first batch cool last night, while rolling out the second, I twisted one into a poor infinity, a crossed loop, in my grandfather’s memory, and his son’s after him.

I miss them, and I’ll carry their lessons with me. And I’ll teach them to the generations to come, the way they were taught to me. With patience, love, expectation, and reverence for those that had taught them before.

What I read

A Robot the Size of the World, which is an essay from Bruce Schneier on the longer-term implications of IoT combined with networked AI and where it might lead. A lot of the initial discussion around Internet of Things applications was regarding straight algorithms. I’m curious to see what the implication around more intelligent, morphological neurally networked algorithms open up in that space and that line of technological advancement.

What I watched

After the talk about the First World War yesterday, I finally caught They Shall Not Grow Old this morning. The resonance of the stories about the conflict told only through the voices of those that fought, and the recordings of their lives, was incredibly poignant. To hear a chorus of men from varying backgrounds all share their similar experiences, focus on the little details that still stuck with them decades hence, and to think back on events that rhyme even now with those of the soldiery of the present, was something to behold. It’s definitely earned its accolades, and I’d highly recommend trying to catch it before Netflix lets it go at the close of the year.

What I listened to

The latest episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out, the new show by the inimitable Pablo Torre. His show is an explosion of his inner self portrayed audibly and visibly externally. And then more than anything, I was thrilled to listen today because my absolute favorite sports talker, Katie Nolan, was on the show.

I’m a long-time Katie Nolan fan, back to her days recording YouTube shows in her time between shifts at the bar. I’ve followed her from the internet to Fox and her time teaching Regis Philben about the future and launching Garbage Time (which might be the most she was ever herself on screen) , to ESPN and the COVID casualty of her time there (where I listened to every episode of her podcast and watched every episode of her show, even as their leadership flailed around trying to find the right way to user her talents), and even to her time cohosting Apple TV’s Friday Night Baseball (which she took more seriously than most veteran broadcasters).

Wherever I can find her work, I’m there, and wherever she ends up next, I’ll be there. Katie helped me learn more about myself, showed me new ways to think about topics I’d not given enough thought, and was one of my vital points of connection to the wider world during COVID.

Projects In Progress

This thing: I made an executive decision to go with a Monday-Friday schedule, so we’ll seeya back here after the weekend.

Notes:

• 1
  A type of flatbread of a crepe or tortilla thickness, made from potatoes
• 2
  I’ve seen others spell it as kringla, which is how the word is pronounced, however for my family, it has always been kringle. Also to note, not Danish kringle, which is a flat ring with ingredients stuffed inside, then frosted.
• 3
  Though, being in 4th grade, they didn’t have the most discerning palates.

I get real windy below, so I’ll go short here, in anticipation of a longer graph tomorrow:

Made (Norwegian) kringle dough last night, will be baking kringle this evening. More on the topic mañana.

What I read

There Once Was An Empire, by Anton Cebalo, which discusses the nature of collapsing empire and how the cosmopolitan nature of the Austro-Hungarian Empire allowed it to be observed more thoroughly through modern eyes in its fall, and in the transition between the seemingly permanent world before and the aftermath of a raw new world emerging amid the glacial ruin of the First World War.

A common refrain these past twenty years has been about the perils of living through history and how it’s difficult to keep an outside perspective on current events. Much of the past from which we might hope to learn is undiscovered, the contemporary catalogs lost to time and tide.

Dan Carlin’s series on WWI does many things well, but the piece that most stuck with me was the belief among every stanchion of society entering the war that it would be just another conflict like those that came before. That there would be the glory and triumph and honorable sacrifice that their cultural experience both allowed for and cherished. The unforeseen effects of the automation and industrialization of machinations scoured both the physical and cultural plane.

The generation of artists, writers, and poets that emerged has long been studied for their style, tone, and vantage on the era. It is important that their historical perspective also be learned from, in a time where it feels like we could be on the verge of a renewed crumbling of empires. Lessons forebear and lessons abound.

What I watched

I wrapped a rewatch of Enterprise, which was probably the least loved of all the Trek series, but the one that most resonated with me. It bloomed in the days after 9/11 and spoke in a voice that was still reeling from and reflecting on a new world we had stepped into after the collapse of a status quo coming out of the fall of the Soviet Union and what seemed like a new era of (generally) calm on a geopolitical stage. (As in the previous block, history rhymes.)

Enterprise¹Later Star Trek: Enterprise, but premiering with the mononym, unlike the shows that came before and after, dealt with a humanity still within living memory of their last world war and the darkest times of their history. Hunger and poverty and homelessness had been conquered, but through the work of peoples they knew, through institutions and actions that had living resonance with them, as opposed to the achievements of some ancestral age. They were still struggling to get their heads above water and to step out into unknown space beyond the solar system. To go was still inherently to do so boldly, and the show wasn’t afraid to demonstrate a humanity that was not yet as enlightened or free from internal conflict as Roddenberry would portray.

It had its faults, certainly. An eye that was happy to appeal to male gaze, an instinct to follow the “ripped from the headlines” trend of other hour-long television programming, and a finale that was far too happy to try and pull from a Next Generation fandom for ratings rather than staying true to the voice of the show itself, leaves a hastily wrapped run to a show tied in a sloppy knot. Also, don’t get me started on the damned temporal cold war and how much it weighed on what could have been a straightforward narrative arc.

Still, it was a show willing to be itself and allow interpersonal conflict and growth in a canon that was all too willing to let humanity off lightly as the peacemakers and the anodyne middle ground. It was mostly fun, and let an able Scott Bakula dig his teeth into a Right Stuff role out among the stars.

What I listened to

The newest episode of RIP Corp from Ingrid Burrington and her stellar team. RIP Corp is a podcast about the failure of businesses and what we can learn from the various avenues, experiments, and attempts at building something, and what both the opportunity and the failure can teach us about our society and ourselves.

This ep was on Fansteel and tantalum, which is a “rare metal” whose mining and use in various applications make for a great framework to examine intended and unintended consequences behind profit motives and human behavior. Ingrid focuses on the geographic interplay of a corporate desire for economic certainties and the willingness to cause chaos to achieve them. Listen wherever you get your podcasts these days.²For the record, I’m an Apple Podcasts app guy.

Projects In Progress

Webapp: Played around a bit with v0.dev, which is pretty damned remarkable, especially as someone with no React chops. A big part of the Why behind this project is to try and learn the modern web stack after learning a bunch of it in my late teens/early 20s, letting that atrophy for two decades, and coming back to an entire world that evolved in the meantime. I’m reminded of The Genesis Tub bit from The Simpsons, in that I fell asleep and woke up into a world of massive change beyond my absent eye. I’m not sure who Bart is in this stretched metaphor. Probably Facebook.

Anyhow, time to lean in hard and learn how Node works!

Notes:

• 1
  Later Star Trek: Enterprise, but premiering with the mononym
• 2
  For the record, I’m an Apple Podcasts app guy.

Weird day today, as I had one of those nights of constant thought while trying to sleep and found that I could not. Too much background noise in my own head, too many thoughts about a dozen different tangential lines. Too much noodling over possibilities, avenues, right and wrong pathways to take. At two different points I sat up defeated, tried to do something more concrete, felt myself tiring, set it aside, then slipped right back out of that sliding consciousness and into the miasma of thoughts.

Tonight, we’ll try better not to drink the late coffee.

What I read

I spent some time this morning reading the newest issue of Capital Gains, from Byrne Hobart. I came to read Byrne as the natural step from reading Matt Levine and then Patrick McKenzie, who form a sort of cabal of interesting thought on capital, finance, money, and tech. I can’t say I read every thing thoroughly, or that I thoroughly understand everything I read, but building their insights into my wider understanding of the tech world has helped me immensely to understand flavors of Why behind What that I wouldn’t otherwise have any insight into.

What I watched

The final match of the UEFA Champions’ League group stage. International soccer is weird for an American to try and get into, and for most fans, there’s a story at some level of depth about how they came to the team they support. Many are the fans of Real Madrid or Manchester United, who came to that fandom the way Cowboys fans outside central Texas came to root for the star. For others, there’s some ancestral tie, or a love for a team shared with a friend or family member that brought them also into the fold.

I chose to root for Manchester City out of spite.

I’m a Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan, which happened before I lived in Tampa, adopting the hometown team of the town my father relocated to after his divorce. It was a way to bond with him from across a country, to have a shared rooting interest in something.

The owners of the Buccaneers, the Glazer family, first purchased shares in the storied club Manchester United the year after they won a Super Bowl, then steadily increased their ownership over the next two years. After pumping all of their funding into United, suddenly their desire to improve the Buccaneers began to wane, to where the team felt like an afterthought.

Right around 2006, after I first moved from Florida back to Wisconsin, I began spending a lot of time with friends who’d grown to be significant soccer fans. Through them I saw the beauty and the appeal of the sport, and after a time, looked for a team of my own to root for. And lo, did I find, that United was not the only team in Manchester. They, the new jewel in the eye of the owners I despised, had a cross-town rival. An upstart with a long history of struggle, who had recently found their footing again in the top division of English soccer, and who would prove to be a thorn in the eye of the Glazers’ jewel. I became a fan of Manchester City.

Not long after I chose the club, so did new owners. Deep pocketed oil wealth was still a fairly new thing in the sport, and suspicion was not unearned. They did, however, do what the Glazers had seemingly refused to in Tampa. They invested in building a champion. In came new players and new managers, and a winning attitude. A revitalization of style and substance, and a growth into what now stands as a dynasty of success. It’s the one way I feel a connection to fans of teams like the Patriots. I had a front row seat (from 4000 miles away) to the carving of a monolith of success.

Soccer, for me, has been an experience that built from ignorance to fervence over the course of the last two decades. It wasn’t a natural fandom, not one inherited or inculcated at birth, but one I came to in adulthood, by way of connecting with friends and with a wider world. And so, at the bleary hours of weekend mornings, or on an otherwise quiet Wednesday afternoon, I find myself, for 90 minutes (plus stoppages), watching a wide green swath of turf, and the murmuration of 22 men across it. A beautiful game indeed.

What I listened to

A bit of Penelope Scott’s two new EPs, who I started listening to from TikToks. Modern music discovery’s weird for me. I was never a big magazine guy and haven’t ever had the kind of wide-ranging taste that brought new bands and musics to me organically in the way others seem to. But now that radio is in decline and algorithmic discovery is so oddly dissonant, I end up finding new music in ways I’d not imagined before. Like as backgrounds to 30 second videos leading to crawls down ladders into catalogues of unknown depth.

So yeah, Penelope Scott. Pretty good!

Projects In Progress

Webapp: As part of that recurrent insomnia, I did register a new URL for the project and get hosting set up for it. So there’s something, I guess?

Writing: I have this scene, that I have no idea how it connects more widely, or to what, that’s been kicking around my head for years now. It’s set in a future that, when I first had it, felt farther off, but for which I keep coming across random reference materials as the present catches up with that imagined future. I really wish it’d go tie itself to a longer plot line, or at least tell me how it becomes a more substantial vignette so I could stuff it into a short story, or something. Instead, just this recurring thought about a mechanical pigeon that doesn’t flutter off with the rest of the organic flock it has hidden within, at the loud report of a gunshot, from an office across the way, that it has sat staring at for hours.