On shallow skillets and crepe pans

I cook.  I fry potatoes, grill beef and make crepes and omelets.
So I'm in dire need of good skillets and crepe pans.
As I mentioned before,  I use ceramic-glass smooth cooktop. 

Now right to the point. There are two approaches I see for pan selection.
1).  You buy an expensive pan with lifetime warranty, hope that your grandchildren will inherit it with gratitude, in two years figure that unlike kitchenware from your childhood these things don't last, but since it was ridiculously expensive, you hold on to it, curse and keep using it once in a while. Meanwhile you use approach numero dos.
2). You buy a cheap pan and unless it burns your food right from the start (in which case  you either 2a) return it or 2b) curse and send it to the dump), you 1c) use it happily for at least half a year, if you are lucky - for two, then dispose of it and buy something else using approach 1) or 2).
Both are annoying 'cause this way you spend too much time cooking with the pans that are not good for the job (and wasting too much time and money on shopping) .
There is a middle ground:
3) You buy better pans at random stores for lesser price and use them for at least 2 years.  This way you save the money and use it to travel the world. Not funny? Sorry. This way you at least don't spend that much money exploring.
If you are happy with your pan for 2 years and you are lucky, next time you can buy the same pan at random store and save money or at speciality store and save time.


Once in  a while I buy a speciality pan at a speciality store. I bought a decent Calphalon wok with gift certificates from Crate & Barrel 10 years ago (interestingly enough, the sound price of $100 stayed the same through the years)  and still use it. I buy crepe pans at Williams-Sonoma or Sur La Table. My last find is de Buyer® Blue Steel Crêpe Pans from Sur La Table. They sell this skillet with pancake mix & spatula as a gift set at Williams-Sonoma but I make my own batter and I have the best  selection of spatulas on East Coast (I bet so do you), so no good reason for purchasing this set unless you are looking for a boxed gift.
I bought the biggest  - 9 1/2'' but won't mind a bigger one.

Blue Steel shallow Crêpe Pans, $$20-25, made in France

I recently bought a very good quality anodized aluminium pan at random store, says "made in China",  "Comfort cooking" and "Dishwasher safe" on the back.

Disclaimer: I own the aforementioned  steel and aluminium pans for half a year. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. I'll keep you posted. 

Pans buying guide 

So long, comrades (2/2)

Part I 

We never go anywhere. On vacation, in a place that does not look different from home, we yearn for the routine of the days at home. On business trips we run from airports to offices to hotel rooms convinced that work is enabling us to see new horizons, but while in the past we only needed to travel small distances to arrive somewhere, today we spend a day in a plane and we are still in the same place. Our conversations are made of identical phrases. Companion, our existence is so standardized that I could take your place and you mine and nobody at work or at home would notice the swap. We would not notice ourselves. The history of mankind is the history of man in relation to his work. First, there was hard physical labor which was necessary for our mere sustenance. Later, there was repetitive office work that was however recognized as such and which we, the workers, tried to escape either by demanding better working conditions or by at least distancing ourselves from work during our off-hours. Now there is repetitive office work that the system has handed us down in such a way that we think it holds the key to our freedom. 

As if being clones of each other were not enough, we are also clones of the same one-dimensional being. That being maintains that the universe bound by today’s work ethics and conventions is the only possible universe. Our limitations are clear. Our working hours are incestuously tied to our spare time. Our day revolves around work: there is the commute, the long working hours, and the commute. It becomes hard not to think about what occupies such a central part in our life even if instead of working we are meeting a person, watching a movie, or reading a paper. It is understandable: we can make sense of new experiences only by comparing them to known ones. The conversations with the people that we meet, the books that we read, and the movies that we watch are a mirror of our limited experiences. The experiences are limited because for the most part we are surrounded by people like us, who, like us, commute and work and commute. 

Mastering the rules of the system has become synonym with being good in a moral sense. But why the stated objective of the system is excellence, the rules that the system has adopted work against the objective. The initial objective itself has been forgotten. The requirement of our job is no longer quality or perfection, but learning perfectly well how the system works. And so we take a course in business practices, a seminar in project management, and at the same that we cannot finish all the mediocre work that we are assigned because on purpose we were given more work that we could handle so that we would not slack off. And we lack the ability of judging critically our assignment. Today, our inability to get away from work and even the lack of a desire to escape show that we are subjugated but content. Our contentment, however, is double-faced. Any day they can hear us bitch in the elevators, in the halls, around the water-coolers about how much work we have, how an ordinary sandwich at lunch break is the highlight of yet another day, and how we do not recall the last time that we saw a sunset live. 

Comrade, you sit on the other side of this partition wall and we are so close that I can hear you breath. We share the same neon light and the same filtered air. We are one body and one soul, in good times as in bad times. I can hear you sneezing and coughing. The same cold that you caught from the comrade sitting two cubicles away from me, I am now catching from you. The flu or a headache, every day sees us here at our combat position. We would come to work even with the chicken-pox or the scarlet fever, if the company let us. There is so much work to be done. Back in college we worked whole nights and we took extra-credit courses so that one day we could have a house in the suburbs. Now we work like dogs so that one day we will be able to play golf in Florida. It is the future what we are living for. I remember when we used to slave away for nights in a row so that we could handle at least those math problems that the professor had assigned during previous midterms. From midterm to midterm the problems kept consistently similar. I doubt that we had a good understanding of mathematics then, like today we do not have a good understanding of the issues facing modern technology. Comrade, I hate to admit it, but we are not very smart. It is not for nothing that we are stuck in a cubicle the size of a rabbit-cage. If it is true that our salary has gone up consistently since we were handed our diploma, it is also true that our increasingly more expensive purchases have kept us in a position where for the next few years we are committed to work just to offset already made expenditures. As soon as we were offered a job, even before receiving the first pay-check, we went out and bought a car. Later with a promise of a higher salary, we bought a larger car and a house. 

Comrade, I look around and I see 156 of us on this floor. I see 19 floors like ours in this building. I see thousands of buildings like ours in this town. I see thousands of towns like ours in this country. Ours is the 14th floor of a new building located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The floor is a perfect square where everybody has a standard-size cubicle assigned to himself, that is, everybody with the exception of those six workers who live in the famed corner offices. How they squeezed 6 corners out of a square is a mathematical mystery. The people in the corner offices are copies of the inhabitants of the cubicles. They are special only in the sense that they are the ones who decide where everybody else sits. They also have other small privileges: we cannot hear their personal phone conversations and they do not catch colds while sitting at their spacious desks - they catch them at meetings. 

One Grammy winner with no name

One Grammy Award You Won't See On TV
February 12, 2012

...Ken Shipley, who's nominated for two of those: Best Historical Album and Best Album Notes.
The album that got him into consideration, where he's up against the likes of Neil Diamond and Paul McCartney, is Syl Johnson: Complete Mythology. It's a compilation of the veteran Chicago soul singer's music. Shipley is one of the founders of the record label Numero Group, which finds and preserves obscure musical recordings.
"Syl Johnson is one of those guys who fell through the cracks of — not only the Chicago soul scene — but the national soul scene as well," Shipley says. "He lived his entire career in the shadows of two of soul music's largest names." He's talking about James Brown and Al Green<...>
Shipley calls the set a "five-year labor of love." Though he's been nominated for a Grammy before, he says it would be special to win one for this project — not least because Syl Johnson himself will be in the audience.


About Numero Group

About Numero

Founded in 2003 as an archival record label by Tom Lunt, Rob Sevier, and Ken Shipley, Numero has evolved into a multi-format media company, devoted to dragging brilliant recordings, films, and photography out of unwarranted obscurity.We re on a dirty, labor-intensive mission... and it's urgent as all hell. Time kills off precious bits of passed-over sound, story, and ephemera every day, just as fast as we can haul this sprawling archive of under-heard recordings along with the musicians, writers, and entrepreneurs who created them out of exile.

Every Numero production more than 60 titles in our diverse catalog of LPs, CDs, cassettes, 45s, 12"s, and DVDs is a modest miracle of localized sound creation, shedding fresh light on the efforts of men and women who sang, played, recorded, and peddled to shallow rewards, if any. Each track lives and breathes at the nexus of story and song, preserving human work and hope gone lost into freshly etched grooves. Every recording we unearth is painstakingly re-mastered and carefully researched, with obsessive attention to narrative and factual detail unmatched in the so-called reissue field. By self-imposed law, everything numbered by Numero is a stunning new artifact of image and word, tailored to the sounds it safeguards.

Eccentric Soul, our flagship series, has documented lovingly mishandled soul labels from Columbus, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Miami. Our Wayfaring Strangers compilations collect the privately issued song-fruits of wandering folkies. Each Cult Cargo release visits the sonic shores of some tiny, isolated nation, while Good God! titles seek the spiritual, as enshrined on reels of audio tape neglected until now. And with Local Customs we investigate isolated, mom-and-pop recording outfits, each operated by a homespun Alan Lomax who gave neighbors and friends studio time, a microphone, and a shot at being heard a generation later. We've even crossed the street from time to time to deliver hidden worlds of unsung power pop, kitchen-sink New York disco and rap, kid-group soul, fiery rockabilly gospel, Franco-Belgian electro-samba, phantom blaxploitation funk, psychedelic heartland pop, orchestral UK chanteuse folk, decaying art-soul and Southside funk-blues club life captured in glorious black & white.


This Grammy award winner box set was painstakingly re-mastered by Peerless Mastering / Jeff Lipton. 
No mention in the article, no mention on Numero Group website...


Happy Valentine's Day, Jeff!  

P.S. Lost to Sir Paul McCartney in best Historical album nomination which was a noble competition, to say the least.

Us females

Source: http://campuscanoodling.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/princesses.jpg

So long, comrades (1/2)

Below you'll find e-mail sent to ALL  via UNIX routers. 

ALL not as in "the whole world" but as "Company employees listed in ALL mailing list as of February 4, 1998". As you will see from this go-away letter, it was e-mailed to people not close to the author who was employed with the company for few months. I take the liberty of sharing this historical letter with ALL as in "my readers". I also took the liberty of inserting some line breaks to make reading experience less painful.
 

I looked up the author in Linkedin and since he is apparently not listing the company he left on his terms on 1998 after few months and since there are dozens of people with this name, I kept his signature, so it's up to him to claim this old text as his or completely dissociate himself from it. 

Fourteen years ago. 

If you, the reader, agreed with it back then, what have you done to change your life? If you haven't agreed back then, have you had similar thoughts at one or other point of your professional life? 

Subject: Comrade SendTo: All From: CN=[censored censored]/OU=Ops/O=[censored] PostedDate: 02/04/98 03:25:25 AM  RouteServers: CN=Davinci/O=[censored] RouteTimes: 02/04/98 03:25:25 AM-02/04/98 03:25:28 AM DeliveredDate: 02/04/98 03:26:14 AM Categories: $Revisions: 

When one leaves, there is this irresistible urge to leave a message behind. I always think that the best way to walk out is in silence. I do not possess that much style. Comrade, Good morning. I thought I would beat you to work today, but you are here already. I hear you typing away on the other side of this flimsy partition wall. From the speed of your keystrokes you sound pretty sure of yourself: you know what to say and how to say it. From the power with which you hit the keyboard, it seems that you want your colleagues to notice both your presence and your self-assurance. You do good work; we all do good work. The big boss said it himself, “You have all been working very hard. You have done a great job and I know that you are willing to go the necessary extra mile”.
I am surprised of how successful we are.

In fact, when I look around I see the same faces that I used to see in college: the faces of people who would get A’s only because of the professors’ acquiescence, faces who were incapable of elementary work and who called cramming all weekend long studying. Now, stuck with the same faces, we, today’s office workers, are cramming all the time and we revel in being office workers with two degrees of seniority in the same way that we used to be proud of telling a freshman that we were juniors. How can it be that we, mediocre students inept at remembering simple mathematical formulas because unable to master the learning method, are now doing quality work? Bill, the average student, is now our bi-spectacled boss and he tells us how to do the job. He is the one who sets the standard for quality and who tells us that we have done a good job. When he does, we rejoice. Over the years, our two gaping eyes have turned confident as we have restricted our area of inquiry from advanced mathematical concepts to spreadsheets, from what we knew little about to the little that we know about. That problem that we know how to solve, we think we know how to solve it. Unfortunately, behind these confident eyes there is the same thinking power that was behind those gaping eyes during the week of final examinations. Then, the awareness of the magnitude of that power would send us in a panic. 

I am going to the kitchenette to get a cup of coffee and then I, too, will start working. The little personal rituals - coffee as soon as I get to the office, a quick look at the newspaper during lunch - and the standardized practices of the job give me a sense of security. It is in the regularity of these movements that I rediscover the same certainty that characterizes the world that we are part of. We know what awaits us: work, weekends, work, shopping, business trips, work, vacation, work, golf, work, Thanksgiving, work, retirement to Florida, some consulting on the side, more golf. First, we get used to and then we get comfortable with anything that is repetitive. The repetitiveness of the daily routines, which have become as faithful as the rising sun, makes life seem natural, and if it is natural, then it must be right. 

Comrade, your mannerisms get on my nerves: the gurgling sounds that you make when you drink coffee and your habit of occasionally cracking your knuckles. But then, I think that you must have a similar attitude towards my idiosyncrasies : my chronic coughing and my constant bumping of the chair into the desk And then, when I hear your too ready laughter at the big boss’ jokes and your assertiveness when you speak to a subordinate, I recognize you as a brother. In your servility and pretension I rediscover my servility and pretension. You are a good copy of me. Oh, comrade! The capitalist system has succeeded in shaping us exactly the way the communists had planned it but had failed at. It has made us into people who are just like each other, obedient to the rules of the system, and without a will to rebel or the consciousness of their condition. It did all this under the false pretenses of preserving, heightening, and recognizing our individuality. The results: on the job we can be easily replaced and we live unending similar days in identical offices, off-work we walk around dressed alike - blue jeans and sneakers - and we return from expensive weekends and exotic vacations with the same comments and observations. 


Part II which provides more personal details, e.g. the size of the company and location - along with more social critique.