Mustard and Ketchup

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Neat article in the food section of today’s Contra Costa Times about homemade condiments — flavored mustards, mayonnaises, and ketchups. Mmm.

I don’t care much for mayonnaise, but I’ve been making homemade mustard every now and then for a long time now. It’s very easy, and you can even whip up a batch in about 90 seconds and use it on sandwiches at once; while it won’t be as yummy as if you let it sit for a while, it’ll still have a great, fresh, bright flavor. (Just grind some mustard seeds to a powder and add a few drops of liquid to make a paste. That’s it. Use yellow seeds or brown seeds — which are hotter — or a mix of the two, use whatever kind of vinegar or wine or sake sounds good at the moment, maybe add a pinch of salt and/or any other spice that sounds good with the sandwich you’re making. Improvise! Yum!)

I don’t like ketchup, at least not the commercial kind — it’s too sweet for my taste and if you look at the label you’ll find out why — but I’ve never tried making my own, and I suspect I might like ketchup a lot more if it were savory rather than sweet. Doesn’t sound that hard, though if you make it from fresh tomatoes instead of sauce it takes a long, long simmer. Maybe that’ll be a project for a weekend sometime soon.

Listener Statistics

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One of the things most amazing to me about the Listener puzzle is that, even though prizes go only to the first three entries drawn at random each week, every entry is checked, and a full record is kept of how each individual solver does through the year. Given that there must be a thousand or so people who submit at least one entry during the year, this seems both wonderful and awfully obsessive-compulsive to me. And a tribute to the cult-like following that the Listener crossword has acquired over the decades.

Around the end of each March, you can send in a self-addressed stamped envelope and receive a ten-page report about the previous year’s puzzles. This report lists:

  • all the year’s puzzles, identified by number, name, and constructor, along with statistics about how many correct and incorrect entries were received for each and how many of those entries were from new solvers
  • a list of the most common errors made in each puzzle
  • the top 200 or so solvers, along with the numbers of the puzzles (if any) they got wrong
  • a table summarizing how many of the people who sent in x errors during the year got y correct (for example, of the seven people who sent in exactly 27 entries during the year, one got 26 correct and two each got 25, 21, and 20 correct, and what possible interest there is in these data I cannot fathom)
  • a report of the annual dinner that is held for the constructors (in British terminology, setters) of that year’s Listener puzzles, which many solvers also attend

I made the list of top solvers this year (yay!), getting only three puzzles wrong out of the year’s 53. The first page of the list is taken up by those who made none, one, or two errors, so my three are enough that I only make it to the second page. And not even near the top of the second page! Those who miss the same number of puzzles are further ranked by when they made their errors (the longer your string of correct solutions from the beginning of the year, the better), and as I made my first error on the second puzzle of the year, I am near the bottom of those who made three errors. I haven’t yet counted exactly where I am in the rankings, but it looks like somewhere around 70th or 75th. Not a dazzling performance, but not too bad.

I knew about one of the errors already — while looking at the published solution to one of the puzzles, I spotted that I’d put in the wrong spelling of an archaic word that has several spellings given in Chambers Dictionary, apparently having never taken the time to go back and double-check that my chosen spelling fit the wordplay in the clue (it didn’t quite). As this puzzle was late in the year, my excuse is that I was preoccupied with finishing The Manga Flute. But the other two errors were a surprise, both of them looking like silly copying errors I must have made when preparing my entry.

Into the stapled packet of photocopied pages is folded a single, additional, loose piece of paper. It is a list of the exact errors that you personally made during the year — yes, it really tells you that you got 18 Across wrong on this puzzle and 25 Down wrong on that puzzle and so on. Do you not find it both wonderful and freaky that, in this day and age, there is somebody in England, who cannot possibly be getting more than a modest stipend at best for all this, who week in and week out is actually keeping track of these things for a thousand or so solvers, and will send you your individual stats for the year just for a self-addressed stamped envelope? Overseas solvers like me don’t even have to send stamps, just the self-addressed envelope.

But even this is not the part I find most wonderful and freakiest of all. It is that this list of your own personal errors is neatly written out — yes, I mean by hand — on a sheet of lined paper, the three-hole looseleaf notebook kind. Amazing. Just amazing.

“Ballad”

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I finished this Friday’s Listener crossword, “Ballad” by Elgin, late Saturday morning after a longer struggle than usual.

It’s a tough puzzle. The across clues aren’t given entry numbers for the grid, and they are listed not in order of their appearance but in the alphabetical order of their answers. Now, this actually helps a lot in solving them: You can figure that a clue, say, about a third of the way down in the list probably starts with a letter around F or G or H. Then as you find some of the answers, that helps narrow down the possibilities for the rest; if one answer is GENERAL and the answer two clues down is GOLDFISH, then you know that the answer to the clue between them starts with a G and the second letter is somewhere between E and O, which probably means GE, GH, GI, GL, GN, or GO. So even without any help from crossing letters, the possibilities for the across clues narrow pretty rapidly, and it wasn’t all that long before I had close to half of them solved.

However, you could solve all the across answers and still not know where to put any of them in the grid. For that, you need help from some down clues. Down clues are ordered normally, so once you solve one you know exactly where in the grid to place it. But you don’t get any help from crossing letters till you’ve placed a few of the across answers, and you can’t place any of the across answers till you’ve solved some of the down answers, so you have to solve at least a handful of the down clues without any help from crossing letters before you can start filling in any of the grid.

But on top of that, the across answers may be entered either left to right or right to left, and there are no vertical bars to show where across entries begin and end, so that has to be deduced as you go along, and there are additional strange things in the instructions about a missing column in the grid and two across answers that have to be entered overlapping and some unknown number of across answers that aren’t entered in the grid at all, and these things also have to be figured out as you go along.

And on top of that, the clues are a lot harder than usual, though inventive and fair, I’d say. So all in all I found filling the grid to be a slo-o-o-o-ow, gradual process.

I didn’t figure out what the theme of the puzzle was until I’d just about finished filling the grid. But it’s a delightful surprise to discover the theme and see how it is worked into the puzzle in several amusing ways, justifying all the odd things about the puzzle. Everything comes together very satisfyingly. All in all, a tough puzzle, but worth the struggle.

There are a few clues where I know from the completed grid that I must have the right answer but I still don’t understand the wordplay. For another clue, I think I understand the wordplay but the clue seems to involve an alternative spelling that, while perfectly familiar to me, is nevertheless not given in Chambers Dictionary, or at least in the iPhone version (the only version that I have the latest edition in). That seems like it shouldn’t be kosher according to the rules of the Listener puzzle, but I’m not really sure.

Showing My Age

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I just caught myself saying “Looks like we’re on the same wavelength” to a man who is easily young enough to be my son. My god, am I establishing myself as an old fart or what? Hey Grampa, that’s a ham radio metaphor! That is ancient technology!

Obviously I should have said “Looks like we’re on the same page”.

Anatol

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Over the last few days I’ve reread Schnitzler’s play Anatol, to get ready for the Aurora Theater production which we’re planning to see.

I don’t think I’ve looked at the play since my twenties. If I remember correctly, I was actually looking for a copy of Reigen (meaning Round Dance, but best known in English as La Ronde after the movie version), which I’d seen a production of, and while I was browsing through some used-book store or other, I came across the Modern Library edition of some of Schnitzler’s plays, including Anatol. Some time later I came across a wonderful little book of the published letters between an experienced actress and a young man just starting out, in which she writes about the art of acting in comedy, and she uses the last scene of Anatol as the basis for many of her examples, so I was glad to have a copy of the play handy.

Still, I don’t remember thinking much of the play when I was younger. My recollection is that I thought it was arch and facile, going after paradoxes and contradictions for easy laughs at the expense of believable characterization.

Oh my. Well, what can I say, I was in my twenties and didn’t understand much about human nature yet. On rereading it, I find that the paradoxes and contradictions in the play seem very true to me of how people actually are. Just not true of the way we think we are when we’re in our twenties. The way Schnitzler pokes fun at Anatol’s self-imposed delusions — with affection and understanding, perhaps, but unsparingly all the same — reminds me a lot now of Chekhov and Ibsen. (I know, I know, Ibsen??? But in my middle age I have come to think of both of them as two of the greatest comic playwrights ever.) The director of Anatol, Barbara Oliver, directed the sharpest and at the same time the funniest Uncle Vanya I think I’ve ever seen a few years ago, so I’m expecting that she’ll do right by Schnitzler, too, and I’m greatly looking forward to the play. (Later: Whoops. Ms. Oliver was in that production but did not direct it. I’m getting forgetful in my advancing age, I fear. That doesn’t change the fact that Barbara Oliver is a longtime favorite director of mine and Dave’s.)

I was struck by how similar Anatol is in structure and theme to the musical Company. Anatol has no story; it’s just a series of seven vignettes, each showing Anatol’s relationship with a different woman. Taken all together, they’re a shrewd and funny and rather sad portrait of a man who is completely deluded about love, who wallows in his illusions about it and refuses to give them up even when it should be obvious that they are not serving him well. As a result, even though he thinks of himself as an expert on love and the human heart, he’s completely barricaded himself off from any genuine love in his life.

One considerable difference is that in Company Bobby eventually comes to see through the lies he tells himself and makes a psychological breakthrough — and it’s by far the least convincing part of the story. Anatol gets to the end of his play having not learned a thing; the only real difference between the first scene of the play and the last is that at the end Anatol has gotten himself into a much bigger mess than he ever has before. Yet I find the ending of Anatol very satisfying, at least in the reading of it, and after seeing the show several times I still find the ending of Company a real letdown.

But I’ve never seen Anatol staged before, so I’ll have to see how I think it works once I’ve seen it in performance.

Curiously, Anatol has much more in common with Company than it does with The Gay Life, AKA The High Life, the 1950s musical that was ostensibly based on it. I’ve never seen the show and I don’t have a copy of its book, so everything I know about the story is from a couple of synopses I’ve read. But it looks like they basically threw out the play, threw out most of the characters, threw out everything the play is about, and replaced it all with a rather trite, sentimental story about a playboy who is in the end reformed by an innocent young woman who loves him. Blech. Why bother with the pretense of adapting a play if you’re going to throw out everything but your central character? And not even really keeping him, just keeping his name and changing the essence of his personality. I’ve got the original cast album, too, but I haven’t listened to it much. There’s one song I like a lot, “Something You Never Had Before,” but the rest of the score has always seemed rather lame and false to me.

Weekend Update

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I’ve had headaches on and off for a week now, probably due to all the damn pressure fronts coming in and going out, and I haven’t had the energy or desire to blog. But I really gotta say at least quickly that:

First, The Tempest at Butterfield 8 in Concord is a very enjoyable production. Very small and very low budget but fun and warm and imaginative. Don Hardy, an old friend of Dave’s and mine, is Prospero, and he’s very good. Honest, I’m not just saying that. There are several other very good performances in the show, too, but I don’t have my program at hand so I’ll have to try to remember to come back later and put in some names. (Later: I thought Becky Potter as Miranda was the other standout performance, and I also particularly enjoyed Edwin Peabody as Caliban and David Hardie and Molly Kate Taylor as Stephano and Trincula. Ms. Potter was also terrific as Elizabeth Bennet in the company’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which they’re repeating this summer.)

The play has been adapted so that several of the men’s roles — most of those stranded by the shipwreck, in fact — are now women’s roles. Worked well, I thought. The adaptation is nicely managed and the actors all handle the verse adroitly, so it’s a very clear telling of the story. The play is substantially trimmed, but it seemed like a good job of trimming to me, losing some richness and power but gaining clarity and directness in exchange.

After saying all that good stuff, though, I still gotta confess: I’ve seen quite a few productions of The Tempest by now and it’s still not one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. But this is a clearly told, imaginative, and enjoyable production.

Second, last Friday’s Listener crossword, “Breach of Contract”, is terrific. Maybe my favorite so far this year. I found it slow going at first, but as the pieces came together I picked up speed and finished the last few clues in a satisfying rush. And there are several nifty surprises along the way.

“Sinecure”

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This morning I finally finished this week’s Listener puzzle, “Sinecure” by Franc. Not a very hard puzzle at all, really, but I got a late start on Friday and then was busy with other things much of Saturday. Still, by bedtime on Saturday I’d solved everything except for unscrambling the ten-letter theme word. Turned out I didn’t have quite the right combination of letters. This morning I spotted where I’d made an unjustified assumption and got the right combination and found the word. I’d never heard of it, but it was a nice surprise to discover that it meant exactly what I’d suspected it had to mean, given the rest of the puzzle. (Turned out that it was a familiar word to Dave, though.)

Weekend Update

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What a weekend! It’s Wednesday and I’m still tired.

Thursday, Dave and I went to the American Mavericks opening concert at Davies — works by Copland and Harrison and Ives, the last being the wonderful Brant orchestration of the Concord Sonata.

Friday night was the second performance of The Manga Flute. A very full house and a great performance. Dave and I watched it from the back row of the balcony, where the visuals are less effective but the sound is better. The supertitles are party obstructed from there, but I thought you hardly needed them — the sound of orchestra and singers is better blended up there and it was easy to make out the words. Of course, I can usually remember what people are singing on any given line, so I’m not necessarily the most accurate judge of that.

The performance was very polished — the whole show zipped along happily, acting was sharper, everybody’s characters seemed a notch or two more focused and intense than they were on opening, the music (both singing and orchestra) was confident and full of detail and nuance, and set changes and other cues were crisp. Lovely.

Saturday night, Dave and I headed to the Castro Theater to see a beautifully restored print of Children of Paradise. It’s a favorite of Dave’s. Me, I like parts of it enormously but other parts seem kind of silly to me, and the whole movie strikes me as being at least a half hour too long for the story it’s telling. But the story is rich and many-layered, and I’m never bored by it, even in the places where the story and characters feel a bit too dry and mechanical for my taste.

Sunday afternoon was the final performance of Manga Flute, and it was even better than Friday’s. Tempi were more energetic, transitions between scenes were tighter and smoother, the dialogue scenes were brisker and more focused, and the whole show felt like its energy level had been cranked up a notch or two.

Monday, the SF Chronicle‘s review came out — overall a rave, though with a few qualifications. The prize paragraph for my résumé is this:

Chief among the pleasures of the piece is the sleek virtuosity of Marley’s English libretto, which — like his many previous efforts for the company – turns the foreign-language original into a faithful, witty and effortlessly naturalistic translation. The rhymes all fall where they should and the sense of the text remains intact — and all without any impression of strain.

I’m a bit startled, though, that he calls the libretto “faithful”, says in the above quote that “the sense of the text remains intact”, and writes elsewhere that “the plot remains largely intact”. It seems to me that — after you get past the first musical number, at least — my plot is just about entirely different from Schikaneder’s and only gets more obviously so as it progresses, and that the few places where the English words are more or less faithful to the German original — the Queen of the Night’s second-act aria, for example, and some individual lines and couplets here and there in Papageno’s second-act solo scene (the one leading to the entrance of the Raccoons and then Papagena) — are very much the exceptions.

But I shall choose to interpret this as meaning that Mr. Kosman found that the story and the words fit the music so well that they create the illusion in the theater of being exactly right for the score, and thank him for the compliment.

Chambers 12th Edition

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Woo hoo! My Chambers Dictionary iPhone app is updating free to the new 12th edition! I wasn’t expecting that — if you buy a print dictionary, you don’t get a free update to a new edition, so I was just figuring they’d bring out a separate app for the new edition.

As I cannot even remotely afford to buy the new edition at the moment, and as I don’t seem destined ever to have any of my entries drawn in the weekly competition for the Listener crossword, this is very welcome. Thank you, Chambers people!