This is probably my favorite recipe. I got it originally from Smokejacks, a really cool restaurant in Burlington, Vermont which unfortunately now seems to be closed. Well this dish will live on.

Equipment-wise you will need a cast iron pan and a mandoline slicer. I got this one for my birthday which does the trick using the smallest setting.

Here’s the recipe, I’ve bolded the ingredients.

Cucumber noodle salad

Slice cucumbers lengthwise with the mandoline. You’ll need the European seedless cucumbers (they come wrapped in plastic), about one per person.

Slice some napa cabbage into 3/4″ strips. The green leafy part is better than the white part. I do about 2-to-1 cucumbers to napa.

Now, before you make the dressing, turn the oven on broil and put your cast iron in so it captures a lot of heat.

Dressing

1/4 cup rice vinegar
1/8 cup fish sauce (try to get some that looks dark brown, not black)
1/16 cup sesame oil
1/16 cup peanut oil
1/2 cup olive oil

That’s enough for 3 cucumbers worth. You can also toss in some powdered garlic and powdered ginger. Adjust to taste.

Throw the dressing on the cucumbers and napa so it can sit for 15 minutes.

Seared Tuna

Cover the tuna in olive oil and sesame seeds.

Take your red-hot cast iron out of the oven and put it on high heat on the stove. Cook the tuna a little less than a minute on both sides, and also sear the sides. You can adjust the cooking time depending on how fresh you think the tuna is. The idea of searing is to kill any bacteria on the outside, while keeping the inside raw. Go for the thicker pieces of tuna at the store. After searing, slice the tuna into 1/4″ strips.

Poppadom

Poppadom is the chip you get at an Indian restaurant. You will need to get this at an Indian grocery store. My brand has a creepy bunny on it. Just fry these in olive oil on medium-high heat until they look right, a little less than a minute per side.

Presentation and Tuna Squirt

If you want to be fancy, you can arrange the tuna on the cucumber salad and put a cracked poppadom in the middle sticking up.

Also combine soy sauce and citrus juice (orange juice, lemonade, whatever you have) in 2-to-1 ratio along with some wasabi powder. It’s nice to use a squirt bottle to put this on the tuna, but you can also just spoon it on if you can’t find your squirt bottle.

Hooray! You’re eating one of my favorite meals. Once you get the hang of this it’s actually really quick, and easy to parallelize.

The best instance would be United Colors of Benetton’s sponsoring of a young David O’Reilly who would later become inventor of the iHologram and my favorite animator.

Today I came upon this Louis Vuitton-sponsored short by Takashi Murakami, though Murakami is surely not hurting for patronage.

The sweet house music is Fantastic Plastic Machine, of course.

It took me forever to find this EP. Foreign music is so hard to find on the internet, mainly due to alternate alphabets. And then once you find it, it’s impossible to buy/download.

The results of my search: there is a neo-Shibuya Kei label in Bangkok called Small Room. I have some compilation CDs making their way across the Pacific. For now, this guy seems the most interesting:

Yuri’s Nominee - One Two ~ Three

Some asides:

The Thai alphabet is quite nice looking. According to my files, แล้วจะนัดกันยังไง means something like Pen Pals. The language sounds good too.

The Small Room compilations use a three-digit year suffix. With triple-digit lifespans becoming the norm, I think this might catch on. It is certainly a good time to introduce the convention.

More frequent use of the Grave/Tilde key (`~) is the closest thing I have to an 009 resolution.

I used to read this blog sometimes. It’s where I found out about Scissor Sisters and later Hot Chip. This was before Hot Chip was popular in the US but way popular in the UK, when Coming on Strong was their only album. I went to go see Hot Chip at The Middle East, where most of the crowd was there for Fourtet, the headliner. Hot Chip said usually people dance more. They finished by singing Over and Over and Over and Over while playing synth solos. After this show I ran into Dan Jacobs whom I had met at a previous Steer Roast. This lasted about a year.

I’d like to do some future posts on the coming (already here?) age of sampling. In the meantime, I recommend this recent article on Girl Talk and related phenomena.

Technology obscures the fact, a simple one to me, that “mashing up” is the fundamental process for music making: i.e. combining and recombining different sounds into pleasing and/or at the very least hopefully-not-boring configurations. Lynyrd Skynyrd were known to mash up guitar and bass and drums into the configuration of “Sweet Home Alabama.” Weezer had a pretty good mashup called “Say It Ain’t So.” Some people/bands make terrible mashups. Other people/bands make pretty good mashups!

Incidentally, Marxy has got to be my favorite music writer/cultural analyst. I’m sure you’ve heard me play the Radio MXUT podcasts (episode 1, episode 2). Also I imagine his Westerner-in-Japan account of Shibuya Kei (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) is the most accurate English piece on the subject that’s out there.

Download .mp3

I want lightweight, low-power, cheap (!), thin screens that I can use to browse the internet. I think a good size would be about the size of a small, paperback math book. I should be able to use it in my hands while lying on my back. It should be as durable as a cordless telephone.

Extras:

A fingerprint scanner would allow users to load up their previous session or authenticate. In case personal RFIDs don’t catch on.

I don’t think a keyboard would be right. Instead perhaps you use a thumb to slide through a prefix tree where branches are bigger when they’re used more often (like autocomplete).

Additional accessories hook up various things in your house to your wifi so you can control/access them with the screen (music, lights, cameras, whatever).

Magnets so it sticks on the fridge. Maybe it could somehow draw power from the fridge also.

[Inspired by The Computer of the 21st Century (1991).]

Economics usually assumes that all players in the economy act rationally. This is surely a fallacy but it’s not entirely wrong either. Certainly there is some sort of logic to the way people act, though every person may have her own logic based on the context of her life.

This introduction of context into economics is advocated by Robert H. Frank which is why I’m currently digging his work. Indeed my own work involves creating tools to track context in the “soft” sciences (to a degree: medicine, sociology, climatology, economics, etc.).

Clearly the value of goods depends on context. Many goods we would value as substandard in the US would be prized possessions in most of the rest of the world. A bedroom might seem too small in suburban America and too big in Tokyo.

However, our valuation for some goods depends more on context than for other goods. This can be illustrated with a thought experiment:

Say you can choose between two worlds. In world A, you will live in a 4000-square-foot house while the median house size is 6000 square feet. In world B, you will live in a 3000-square-foot house while the median house size is 2000 square feet.

Despite the fact that the absolute size is smaller in world B, many people would still choose it due to its relative size. People don’t buy bigger houses for the space so much as they buy the benefits of better schools, neighborhoods, perceived social rank, etc. that come from having a bigger house than everyone else.

But now consider this choice: In world A you have a 30 minute commute while the median commute is 20 minutes. In world B you have a 40 minute commute while the median commute is an hour.

Now most people would pick world A because it’s better in absolute terms, despite being worse relative to everybody else.

Obviously it’s not black and white like this, but the idea is that for some goods, context matters a lot and for others context matters less. Maybe a better example of the latter would be health care. If you could choose between a world where your life expectancy was 80 while the median life expectancy was 120, versus a world where your life expectancy was 60 but the median was 40, I think almost everyone would choose the first.

Frank calls the goods where context matters a lot, positional goods. His thesis is that positional goods lead to expenditure arms races which divert resources from non-positional goods, resulting in widespread welfare losses (that is, an inefficient use of our resources).

This certainly seems to be the case in the US. Goods whose value is largely determined by what everyone else has demand more and more of American consumption. Spending on houses, cars, clothing, home entertainment systems, etc. increases while spending on public transit, public health, education, etc. decreases.

This is not to say that consumers should have a moral responsibility to spend less on positional goods. We ourselves can choose to spend less but we can’t force others to spend less. And if buying the more expensive house is essential for a good education, or buying the more expensive suit is essential to land a job, then we certainly can’t blame the buyers.

In fact, we can’t even change the system. People will always compete, always find new ways to “keep score”, even if we were to ban houses above a certain size or the wearing of certain clothing at job interviews.

Instead what we want to do is keep the scoring systems, but just shift down across the board how much we spend on them.

To do this, Frank proposes a highly progressive consumption tax. This is absolutely not like FairTax, sales tax, VAT, etc. which are consumption taxes but which are regressive. The whole point of this tax is that as you spend more, your tax rate increases drastically. In Frank’s example, all money spent over $4 million in a year would be taxed at 200%, meaning you’d need $3 for every $1 of consumption above this amount. Rich people will still buy fancy stuff, but they’ll have an incentive to spend a little bit less. Frank argues that this will not cause them distress, since the money is being spent on positional goods. You can live with a 40 room house instead of a 50 room house, as long as all your peers are doing the same. And this wouldn’t just apply to rich people, everyone would cut down on conspicuous consumption.

Implementation of this tax system is surprisingly simple. All that would need to be done is to make savings exempt from income tax. We already do this for 401(k) accounts. Any money you put in the account is untaxed, and only when you take it out of the account is it taxed.

In other words, every year you report your income and you report your savings (as you would for a 401(k)). You pay tax on the difference (your consumption).

Such a tax was actually introduced into the Senate in 1995, and even had the obligatory cheesy acronym (Unlimited Savings Allowance tax), but never came to a vote due to Clinton vs. Republicans budget battles.

What would the effects of such a tax be on the current recession? Less money would be spent on consumer goods, but more money would be spent on capital goods (means of production) due to more money being saved/invested. Such a transition would certainly be delicate. The way to go would be to phase the system in gradually, by slowly increasing the maximum amount a family could put into their tax deferred savings account.

And once the system’s in place, the government would have a much more powerful fiscal tool to prevent future recessions than the current income tax. As it is now, government can temporarily reduce income tax (like last year’s “stimulus”) to try to incentivize consumer spending. But most of the money people get back goes into savings or paying off debt (which is just savings on a negative balance).

Contrast this with the consumption tax. In this scenario, when the government temporarily reduces the consumption tax, people can only benefit from this reduction by spending more now.

If you’re interested in this, I highly recommend Frank’s book Falling Behind. It’s very well-written, no economics background required, and also has lots of interesting data on American consumption trends, rising inequality, and some of the psychological/evolutionary causes of the positional vs. non-positional spectrum.

We all want to belong to stories.

Shopping is fun because it is the acquisition of story resources. With this new kitchen gadget I can make shoestring fries and cucumber noodles. With this new outfit/costume I can show how I don’t belong to the mainstream story.

Some stories we want to belong to and some we don’t. It depends on the stories we’ve belonged to so far and the stories we know about. This is why images that dig into our subconscious are so powerful.

Every bit of story opens up new story possibilities.