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Abandoned theme parks, international edition.

Like the Six Flags in New Orleans that's been abandoned since Katrina hit, these abandoned theme parks in South Korea, Russia, Japan, and Germany are just fascinatingly creepy.

Tonight's cocktail: Remember the Maine.

Via this Serious Eats article about Heaven's Dog, the "Remember the Maine" cocktail: rye whiskey, cherry heering, sweet vermouth, absinthe.

I'm making one of these, tonight!

I made a scramble.

It has kale, kabocha squash, bacon, and eggs. I've made it twice, now. It's great when you have leftover kabocha squash, or maybe some kale, or both (and everyone has eggs and bacon, right?).

First, I chop some peeled kabocha squash into small cubes (1/2 inch cubes or so), toss them in olive oil, salt, pepper, and fresh thyme, and roast them until they're tender.

Then, I prepare a bunch of lacinato kale/cavolo nero like so (ala Lucques): half an onion, sliced, cooked in 4 tbsp olive oil until soft and just colored; a clove of garlic, minced, cooked with the onion for a minute; then the kale, stripped of ribs and roughly chopped, sauteed until done, alternating the heat between very low (most of the time) and very high (for brief periods), until it's dark green/black and kinda crispy. Season, of course.

And then: chop up some bacon into lardon-size pieces and saute them until crispy, then melt some butter, then add some eggs (I add 4, beaten) and scramble them. When they're done, mix in the kale and squash. We like it!

My concert luck is very bad.

I missed Marnie Stern's show this week in Oakland, which is so disappointing, because I'd love to see her play live. And last week, we missed the Of Montreal/Janelle Monae show that we actually had tickets for, because I just forgot. #firstworldproblem, I know! But I'm still sad about this.

Justin Timberlake: "Cry Me A River"

Probably my favorite song of the 2000s decade.

What's interesting (to me) is that this was released (as a single) only a year and a half after "Pop", and only two and a half years after "Bye Bye Bye" (one of the only videos I remember watching the making of).

And yet "Cry Me a River" feels way, way more recent (not to mention relevant, cf. "Abyss") than either of those.

A Refined Desktop Collection

via davidslog.com

I'm using the Dark one.

An Optimization Anecdote

The other day, a friend asked me a seemingly simple question: what's the best way to convert a list of integers into a string, presuming that the integers are ASCII values. For instance, the list [97, 98, 99] should be converted to the string 'abc'. Let's assume we want to write a function to do this.

via www.python.org

This exercise in optimization (in Python) is pretty fascinating (via fold).

Just for fun, I rewrote most of the functions in Perl (you can check my work in this gist); the results are actually somewhat interesting (f1() is very fast in Perl, for instance, while it's one of the slower implementations in Python). The results, using a 256-item list:

f3   6950/s    --  -21%  -50%  -74%  -98%
f6   8839/s   27%    --  -37%  -67%  -98%
f2  14023/s  102%   59%    --  -48%  -97%
f1  26920/s  287%  205%   92%    --  -94%
f7 421642/s 5967% 4670% 2907% 1466%    --

The fastest in both languages is probably the one you'd expect; in Perl, it's using pack, which is hugely faster than anything else.

The Throwdown Cocktail

via www.seriouseats.com

This sounds delicious (as does the Frisco cocktail)!

The Dream: "Yamaha, Nikki pt. 2, Abyss"

For me, less immediately immediate than the top and bottom of Love King ("Love King", "Florida University"), but! The middle Trilogy of "Yamaha", "Nikki pt. 2", and "Abyss" may now be my favorite 3-song sequence of 2010.

Pumpkin Pancakes

Ruth Reichl:

I made these today because I had some left-over pumpkin from the Swiss Pumpkin I made the other night. But I originally made them to use up that annoying bit of canned pumpkin puree that's always left over when you make pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving.

I didn't have any leftover pumpkin to start, but I bought some canned pumpkin puree just to make these pancakes this morning. Well worth it! They're delicious.