Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, October 27, 2025
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15 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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The headline of he day- Cigarette-smuggling balloons force closure of Lithuanian airport
For the pasta in red sauce, I looked up how to incorporate basil in it. Online advice was all over the place: whole leaves in the sofrito, whole leaves just before it’s done, torn leaves at several stages, bruised leaves at several stages, even liquefied in the blender along with the tomatoes.
So I did all of the above.
I’m not sure it’s the best pasta sauce I’ve ever done, but it was better than my usual of tomato puree plus garlic, onion, and spices.
More or less I did the following:
Blended one can of tomatoes with several cloves of garlic and some basil leaves*, sauteed half a chopped onion in olive oil, then added a few torn basil leaves and some tomato paste, added the mix from the blender, added additional spices and more basil leaves when it began to simmer. The additional spices included a half tsp of chicken bouillon powder, cinnamon**, dry oregano, paprika, and a little black pepper.
If you save the pasta water, there’s no danger of reducing the sauce too much. You can always dilute and emulsify it with some pasta water.
That was just the side dish. I also made a chicken stew with white beans, chickpeas, split peas, and lima beans
*Getting basil was a bit of an adventure. Saturday at the supermarket I found some easily enough, but the leaves were black. I figured they were well past their use by date… I had to try a second store, where I found green leaves.
** Cinnamon adds a sweet note without adding much sugar. It’s complicated that most simple carbs are sugars of some sort, but not all sugars are glucose or sucrose or even fructose.
I got tired of watching TOS episodes, but also didn’t feel like browsing the streaming services, nor starting a new series. So I began to stream TNG ahead of schedule.
I had seen the infamous pilot/Farpoint Station ep, and recalled it as mediocre. About halfway through the first part (while it may have aired whole as a series premiere, it’s s a two-part ep), I wondered how the series kept going. In particular, the separation of the Enterprise’s saucer section felt like they were making too much of it. I mean, the theme music blaring, the reaction shots, the civilians moving all over the ship for some reason.
It doesn’t help that 1) they never really did much with the ability to split the Enterprise in 2 parts, 2) the saucer doesn’t seem to have warp engines, wo it would take millennia to travel between stars, and worst of all 3) the star drive section alone looks like a headless chicken.
Then it gets a bit better, especially the second part when there’s a mystery Picard and the crew can do something about. A lot of it feels off, which is normal for a TV series finding its format and path forward.
But, IMO, what saves the show is the set design and visual effects. Yes, they look dated now, going on forty years after it premiered, but at the time they were of better quality than anything seen regularly on TV before.
I’ve never said anything mean about people who adapt other people’s work, but I’ve had inner sneers. Now, however, I’ve been stuck with the job of adapting one of my wife’s books to graphic novel. It is the hardest damn writing I have ever done.
I regret my inner sneers.
@Michael Reynolds:
Writing someone else’s idea into a book or just adapting one like in your case would be impossible for me. For me, the story has to be my baby. Back when I contributed stories for free to 2 websites, I was approached by someone with a story idea and I agreed to write it but changed my mind.
So I can understand the situation you are in now.
Sticker shock at our local grocery store today. A small box of raspberries were $8, as were blueberries and blackberries. A larger box of strawberries were $10. A bag of mandarin oranges were $8. Bagged lettuce was almost $5 a bag, regardless of type.
Sticker shock at our local grocery store today. A small box of raspberries were $8, as were blueberries and blackberries. A larger box of strawberries were $10. A bag of mandarin oranges were $8. Bagged lettuce was almost $5 a bag, regardless of type.
Show me some history.
Missouri Governor Kit Bond rescinded Executive Order 44 in 1975.
WikiP
And now there are two.
Last week, OpenAI launched an AI browser. Now Perplexity has followed.
Apparently their AI browser, Comet, has been online for a while. Today I got email telling me it’s now open to the poor, unwashed masses who are too cheap to pay for premium AI subscriptions. I’m not sure what OS it can work on. I’ll probably try it out when I get home (know your enemy).
This might be a better use of AI than the LLM generative AI model. Not that I’d trust an AI to, say book airfare and a hotel for a vacation. Suppose it hallucinates the air fare or city you want to fly to. But they may be able to find options I wouldn’t consider. Or maybe not. but it’s worth trying it out. Same when searching for books.
What I’m worried is that search engine optimization (SEO) did a great dela of harm to the quality of search and of websites. I don’t even want to imagine what AI search optimization will do.
“I’m not worried ChatGpt can do my job. I’m worried some manager will think ChatGPT can do my job.” Anon. c.2024
@Michael Reynolds: Starting in Junior High a good friend’s (we’re still in touch) dad was a writer who wrote for TV series (like The Waltons) and adapted screenplays (movies) into books. Benji was one (pretty much a kid’s book) and I remember him talking about a decision was whether to write it from the perspective of the dog (which made the dog have deep thoughts), or from an outside perspective. His best known book was “The Sting.” I heard the best paying were the ghost written books – with the Producer/Director’s name on it. How he could do that on an electric typewriter is beyond me today, too much typing with all the rewrites and editing – different world from today.
@Kathy: My Basil is starting to die back from the rain and suddenly colder weather (8C, 45F). Most fresh herbs are expensive in the store so I grow many. I’ve also gotten large bags of basil at restaurant supply stores (some are open to the general public) and emulsified the excess with olive oil, then freeze in an ice cube tray, then into a zip lock bag (do not add garlic (pesto) as it turns bitter after a couple of months frozen). Dried basil loses some to the flavoring oils, not as good.
I generally trust the recipes and discussions on the “why” at seriouseats.com – lots of pasta sauce discussions. I’ve made their Armenian Green Beans (stew) many times (in Instant Pot) and everyone loves it.
I went to a potluck of 60s food recently and made Andrew Zinmmern’s Tomato-Salmon Aspic (Jello) – half the folks did not like the appearance and avoided it, and the other half loved it – like a seafood Bloody May Dip (changes to the recipe, I added chopped up celery and some Worcestershire Sauce, making it more Bloody Mary). Finding unflavored gelatin was a slight challenge (zero at Safeway). Canned salmon of course for the 60s (this doesn’t need high quality salmon – you could also do with shrimp or octopus (I haven’t made pulpo tacos in awhile))..
OMG! The mRNA conspiracies were right!
It turns out mRNA shots have a widespread side effect: it lengthens the survival time of lung and skin cancer patients.
Ok. Caveats: it’s one study, it’s rather preliminary, more data is needed.
One proposed mechanism is that the vaccines activate the immune system, which then attack the cancer cells. Years ago I read something similar regarding bacterial infections leading to tumor shrinkage in some cancer patients.
It is intriguing, but we still have to find out if there’s any there there.
@Richard Gardner: @Bill Jempty:
We used to rewrite with scissors, tape and a copying machine. And the worst of it was that this was in ghostwriting and the editors were all freshly-minted Seven Sisters grads for whom we did not develop a great deal of respect. We did however develop our editorial triage: 1) The shit that was so fucking stupid we could not do it, period. 2) The shit that kind of a, ‘meh, sure, maybe,’ for which we – I believe invented – ‘phony compliance,’ in which we’d tell them we did it, and then wouldn’t do it. Or maybe change a word. Sometimes we’d just change paragraph breaks and they wouldn’t clock that we had ignored them. And the final category, the rare, 3) ‘OMG, they’re right!’
And then we got our first computer, an old IBM. (Cue heavenly chorus.)
That plus the ability to send the manuscript via email, oh my god, it makes me tear up to remember. Unfortunately by that point we’d developed a distrust of editors that never went entirely away. But I got very lucky with my Harper and Egmont editors and we were extremely lucky with our Scholastic editor, all very hands off. OTOH my wife got the Newbery from her most involved editorial relationship.
Been there, done that, with tech writing, procedures and proposals. Sometimes with a committee and customer reviews. When it got six or eight plies deep we’d ask a secretary to retype it and start over. Xerox machines were a new and wondrous technology.