And I made an excuse
You found another way to tell the truth
I put no one else above us
We’ll still be best friends when all turns to dust (more…)
Archive for March, 2010
The Morning Benders
Thursday, March 25th, 2010A somewhat gentle man
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010
What a movie! Dark, funny gangster movie from my gray neighborhood in Oslo. Made me laugh out loud several times, and gave me a good handful of quotes that simply must go into the Norwegian film history books. It is almost painful to watch the characters and their miserable lives, but we always believe that our “hero” – the somewhat gentle man (Stellan SkarsgÃ¥rd) that just got out of prison, will do the right thing in the end.
A Prophet (FR) is also an excellent gangster movie – but this time we get a story from within the prison walls. The film is not dark and funny. It’s just daaaark. No laughing out loud, but I was close to vomiting once. Just 2.5 hours plain tragedy including the worst scene ever. Keywords: razor blade, battle, blood, blood, blood. Ugh. What I learned from the movie? Take a language course. Do not look other people in the eye. And STAY AWAY FROM PRISON.
Writing Without Words
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010Wow! Just stumbled upon the work of Stefanie Posavec. She has made literature into beautiful art by counting words, sentences, paragraphs and categorizing the content in different classic novels. She represents her findings visually in a a project called Writing Without Words, and has explored On the Road by Jack Kerouac in great detail. Below you see a portion of the novel visualized by the length of each sentence, and the color based on what the sentence is about.
Sentence drawing for On the Road by Kerouac.
The “doodle” above explained.
Various authors’ writing styles emerge from these weird abstract doodles when she visualize the first chapters of their books.
Another kind of visualization of On the Road using a tree structure. The tree divides Part One into chapters, then into paragraphs, then into sentences, and finally sentences are divided into words.
Some of the hard work Posavec did in On the Road by Kerouac to structure the content.
By Posavecs’ systematic approach, she has made a lot of different visualizations, and I admire both the idea and the excellent design work. Luckily, I can put a poster on my wall to remind me of what great ideas and hard work can lead to. Check out Stefanie Posavec’s Writing Without Words project:
Panna Cotta
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
I celebrated my 25th birthday this weekend. Happy, smiling, lovely friends – they all came to an Italian three course meal at my parent’s place. With 14 guests, a functional toilet and general space is essential.
The menu:
- Salmon carpaccio
- Pasta with pumpkin or amatriciana (tomato, bacon, chili++) sauce
- Panna cotta with raspberries
Some of my friends came early to help out (thankyouthankyou!!). But I made the dessert all by myself the night before. A nervous dessert-making session. I am not good at baking or making desserts – probably because I generally prefer eating a starter rather than digging in to this sweet stuff. But panna cotta is the exception that proves the rule. Not when it comes to the making of it, but when it comes to the eating. I simply LOVE panna cotta, and figured that I just had to try to make my favorite dish although my last attempt did not work out at all. After all, every recipe I looked up would mark this as an “Easy” dish to make. And this time it actually was!
PANNA COTTA WITH YOGURT
3 sheets of gelatine
3 dl whipping cream
2 dl plain yogurt
1 dl sugar
1 vanilla beam
RASPBERRY SAUCE
5 tablespoons of sugar
1 dl water
250 g rasberries
1 vanilla beam
Limejuice
Split the vanilla beam lengthwise, Scrape out the seeds with a knife. Put both beam and seeds in a pan with the cream and sugar. Heat it while stirring, but do not bring to boil. Remove from heat for 20 minutes. Put sheets of gelatin in cold water for about 3 minutes. Put the pan back on the stove on medium heat. Remove the vanilla beam. Take the sheets of gelatin out of the water, and squeeze them gently to remove any water before adding them to the pan. Stir until the gelatin is completely dissolved. Turn off the heat, and add the yogurt gently while stirring. Pour the panna cotta mixture into 4 glasses. Put in fridge for about 4 hours.
The raspberry sauce is just one of many ways to add flavor to the panna cotta. But rasberry sauce – how to: put water and sugar in a pan, stir while bringing to boil. Remove the pan from the heat, add a split vanilla beam, the seeds, the berries and some drops of lime juice to enhance the taste. Let the mixture rest for an hour before removing the vanilla beam and put the whole berrysaucethingy in a blender or something. Add some tablespoons of sauce to the panna cotta before serving – just to cover it. Too much sauce will ruin the delicious yogurt/vanilla flavour of the panna cotta. So. Less than on the crappy iphone photo above, then :)
Yummy!