Facebook Lexicon: party tonight, hangover.

Standard touristy stuff: Visit the Vasamuseet and the Arkitekturmuseet.

Ring up Clavia and beg for a factory tour.

Go to Chef John Bull’s restaurant Back A Yard.

See a Kirstein Ketsjer show — whoops, never mind, that’s Copenhagen.

(In truth I’ll see Kirstein Ketsjer in New York next month. This post is a thinly veiled excuse to link to Chef John Bull.)

I am terrible at getting predictions on record. This means that I don’t have to eat crow when I’m wrong, which is most of the time. But it also means I don’t get to rub my genius in everyone’s faces when I’m lucky right.

Let’s remedy that. First, let me clear out the backlog of expired predictions:

1. The Sopranos.
Last summer, with only a few episodes left in the final season of The Sopranos, some website I can’t recall ran a contest: What song would roll over the closing credits on the last episode? The Sopranos was of course known for its creative and esoteric musical selections, so the field was wide open for speculation. The early entrants made clever guesses, picking out forgotten treasures, callbacks to songs or artists used earlier in the series, etc. High-minded stuff. I thought about it, and said to myself, c’mon, David Chase isn’t going to end the series like that; he’ll switch it up. It’ll be something cheesy, something Everyman. Something like Journey. “More than a Feeling,” or maybe “Don’t Stop Believing.” But then I didn’t enter the contest!

So you’ll have to take my word on this one. Sigh.

2. The Super Bowl.
In January, while the 18-and-0 Patriots were being penciled in for an undefeated season — once they’d run through the formalities: you know, show up, put uniforms on, throw a few balls to Randy Moss, make Eli cry — I was saying that all outcomes were possible.

Don’t get me wrong, I thought the Patriots were going to win handily, but: all outcomes were possible. Except a Giants blowout. The Patriots could roll, they could squeak out a win, or the Giants could play solid and catch the Patriots on a bad day. I told anyone who would listen that Chuck Klosterman had written the only insightful article about the Pats dynasty.

Still, still! — I thought the Patriots would win. I don’t think any predictions for that game count, really. If someone says they called it for the Giants, then that means they foresaw Eli-in-the-grasp to Tyree’s helmet. That doesn’t happen, the Giants don’t win. And there’s no way anyone would have or could have predicted a play like that. No way.

3. The 2008 Presidential Race.
Here’s the lay of the land in the week before Super Tuesday. Before the polls opened on February 5, this was the story I was telling people (not verbatim):

McCain locks up the Republican nomination, probably quickly. Hillary wins over Obama eventually, but it will drag out a bit, and Clinton needs the Michigan/Florida delegates, the superdelegates, or dirty campaign ads to get over the hump. The prevailing impression is that Obama got screwed. Clinton, with all her baggage, goes on to lose to McCain, despite a commanding lead for the Dems in the Generic Democrat vs. Generic Republican polls.

After the election, Obama is feted, partly out of regret for not nominating him and partly for the class and grace he shows in the loss, and the Democrats give him a leadership role in the Senate. He becomes the public face for Congress as it fights with President McCain, and Obama becomes the runaway favorite for the 2012 nominee.

Free from the need to pander to the left during a Democratic primary, Obama is able to move to the center and capture more independent voters, libertarians, social-liberals/fiscal-conservatives, etc. (People like me.) McCain is not a terrible president; he gets the cleanup process started on the messes that the Bush administration created (or identified, if you prefer.) The next president won’t inherit so much and will have a freer hand. But McCain is old. Maybe he doesn’t even run for a second term.

Obama wins handily in ‘12, ascends bodily to the highest office in the land, and governs at the head of a previously unimaginable coalition of hardworking civil servants, smart pro-market economists, young folks awakening to politics, and vision-thing business leaders. New age of peace and prosperity, yadda yadda yadda.

Well, that vision has been shot full of so many holes that I don’t know where to start. The whole thing was probably more wish fulfillment than sober analysis. I was right about McCain knocking off Romney, though.

UPDATE: Marc Andreessen still likes what he sees in Obama.

This is way too late — a whole week, an eternity in Internet time — but I have to link to my friend Kara’s first-ever blog post.

I’m not exactly going out on a limb here, but I think she’ll get a lot more hits than I do.

Chef’s recap of the party on Saturday:

Carolina-style pulled pork

This turned out okay. I smoked two pork shoulders (deboned, Boston butt, skin on, ~7 lbs each) overnight, but with temperatures in the teens and twenties, the smoker only hovered around 200°F. The plan was to finish the butts in the oven for a few hours, then shred and let sit in sauce on a warmer for a while before the party started. But I wasn’t really happy with how much fat rendering I had after they came out of the oven, so I put them in for three more hours, and I ended up having to shred it during the party. In the end I was still a little disappointed with the flavor, but people seemed to like it. Folks scooped it out of the serving dish faster than I could fill it up.

Ass-Kickin’ cole slaw

This is an old family recipe (meaning we saw it in a magazine a few years ago, and have since been making it every chance we get.) Unfortunately I couldn’t find my copy so I had to reconstruct it from memory and a phone call to my dad. I didn’t have any sour cream so it was a little on the dry side, but it still tasted pretty good. Extra horseradish.

Collard greens with bok choy and tofu

This is the first time I’ve ever made something up completely, no recipe or memory to guide. I needed another vegetable dish, and when I saw the collard greens at Whole Foods I grabbed two bundles along with one giant bundle of mustard greens and some bok choy, with the idea that I’d just figure something out. The bok choy was labeled “Shanghai” bok choy, because it was half the size of the other bok choy on display, but it was still about five times as large as Shanghai minis are supposed to be (in my mind, at least.)

I’ve never made greens before, but I read a half-dozen recipes on the Food Network site to get a sense for how people prepare it. There’s a lot of variety — people cook collard greens from anywhere from 5 to 50 minutes. Mustard greens are considerably more tender. I started the collards steaming with some oil and onions, water, and apple cider vinegar, added the mustard greens about 15 minutes later, then chopped up the bok choy and tossed it in towards the end. I let it sit overnight (with a few scored Thai peppers) but it still didn’t feel finished. The next day I grabbed some spicy tofu at the Chinese supermarket, chopped it up to look like bacon bits, and added it to the greens when I re-heated them.

It was very, very hard not to use bacon fat in this, but we had vegetarians coming and I had to have some pork-free dishes. The carnivores were surprised to hear it was meat-free. Mustard greens taste awesome, by the way.

Pork bao dumplings
Chicken and vegetable jiaozi dumplings

These were just out of the freezer from the Chinese supermarket. On Friday when I’d gone into the hardware store to get a new cutting board, they had a display of bamboo steamers right up front, probably because of the new year holiday. Fortuitous. These were a great space-filler in the serving schedule, though I should have bought more of the bao. They weren’t the barbecue-pork variety, instead having more of a wonton-style wad of boiled pork in the center. Still tasty. $2.50 for four 3″ buns.

Hickory-Pecan-smoked pork ribs

The ribs were something of an afterthought after all the headaches that the pulled pork gave me. I ended up leaving them in the smoker until 8pm(!) or so and then pulled them into the oven for an hour to finish. They had maybe 3-4mm of pullback from the bone and not much of a smoke ring. But, mmmm. Every time I make ribs, I’m always disappointed, and I don’t believe people (or question their taste in barbecue) when they rave about them. But I liked these. So did the crowd. I think I got a couple of marriage proposals after these went out.

I changed a few things in my process, but wasn’t methodical about it, so I hope I can reproduce the improvement. But despite the slapdash prep I have a pretty good idea of what did it. It’s a secret, of course. (Heh.) One big change was that I ran out of hickory and had to use pecan wood. I’m still getting the vacuum-sealed St. Louis-cut racks from Shaw’s (about $14) so I still have room to improve by sourcing some fresher, higher-quality meat.

Twice-cooked pork with peppers, leeks, and bamboo fungus

While I was in Shanghai last year I had a killer bacon-and-fungus dish at the corner restaurant on our office block on Fuzhou Lu. I ordered off the menu by picture, so I have no idea what the dish was called. In my old Szechuan cookbook I found something that looked almost right, minus the fungus: Twice-cooked pork, so named because you boil the bacon for a few minutes to cook it halfway before frying it in the wok.

I had a rough time finding bamboo fungus in Cambridge. My usual go-to Chinese grocery didn’t carry it, but with the help of this awesome guide to Chinese groceries in Boston, I targeted Ming’s Supermarket on Washington as the most likely place to have them, and sure enough they did. The fungus is dried and packaged with the biggest packet of dessicant I’ve ever seen — the size of an apple, no lie. I soaked the fungus for about 20 minutes, blanched it, then trimmed off the messy net portions and sliced the gauzy stems into 2-inch strips. It went into the wok with the bacon, after the peppers and leeks were already soft.

This dish didn’t go out until 10pm-ish. People were getting full and only the most die-hard bacon addicts had more than a couple spoonfuls. But I was happy with how it turned out. The fungus was a hit, as it absorbed flavor and tasted more bacony than the bacon. This is the only item that had leftovers, and I’m fine with that — looking forward to eating it for lunch tomorrow.

Drinks: Beer; whiskey and green tea cocktail

I told people they didn’t need to bring anything, but it’s good they did. We built a mountain of six-packs on the back porch. By 7pm I couldn’t believe how much beer we had, and at midnight I couldn’t believe it was all gone. I was too busy to drink much but I did have a chocolate stout that Leslie brought (good, but tasted more like cold hot chocolate than beer) and a Sam Adams Double Bock from Bob (Not a fan of Sam in general, but this was good: “Ah, that’s what ‘bocky’ tastes like!”)

Trying to recreate another Shanghai experience, I brewed some green tea and iced it, then mixed it with a little well whiskey (Jack and Jim, which are wells in my book) and orange juice. People were not keen on the concept (as I wasn’t, when first confronted with it) but were pleasantly surprised with how it tasted. That might be the proverbial faint praise, but I liked it.

Dessert: Two kinds of lemon cake; Pumpkin pie

Susan has some sort of cake competition coming up; apparently she and a friend got into an argument over who could make a better lemon cake, and they decided to settle it with a Wild West-style showdown. I approve of this. Anyway, she brought two different cakes to compare and get opinions on. One was a very tasty pound cake with a nice lemon accent; the other was more like LEMON! More people seemed to prefer the intense recipe, but there was a vocal minority in favor of the subtler one. I tried to convince Susan to make both and layer the batter, or to bake separate layers and alternate them with icing, or something. But I don’t really have any cake credibility yet. I’m just a barbecue, pie, and wok man.

Kara also brought a raspberry-cream cake from Rosie’s, but we forgot to set it out. Doh!

Finally, pumpkin pie. It’s the Year of the Rat, but I didn’t want to serve actual rat. Pumpkin pie was the stand-in. Why? See below (at 0:15):

Two items you probably won’t see in the next alumni newsletter:

For his make-believe corruption trial in Episode 57 of The Wire, Senator Clay Davis taps real-life defense attorney William “Billy” Murphy, Jr. Selected pull-quotes from Murphy’s biography:

“As for his theatrics, Billy Murphy makes no apologies. ‘I look at it this way,’ he explains. ‘A trial lawyer who isn’t able to use the full spectrum of techniques has arbitrarily limited himself. If a trial judge pushes you, you’ve got to push back. I used to say that my client is a child of God and everybody else is a son of a bitch.’”

“The defense attorney also knows every trick in the book… But it’s Murphy’s mental agility that makes him the master defender.”

“‘You’re formulating your defense and reformulating it, even as the trial takes place… You’ve got to be nimble enough not to be wedded to one point of attack.’ An M.I.T. engineering grad, Murphy wired his practice years ago so that he could check precedents, draft motions, and send e-mail while in court.”

Murphy is a natural on camera and fits right in with the rest of The Wire’s excellent cast. Meanwhile, Jonathan Gruber is not getting raves for his recent appearance in a Paul Krugman column, quoted here:

So the Obama plan would leave more people uninsured than the Clinton plan. How big is the difference?
To answer this question you need to make a detailed analysis of health care decisions. That’s what Jonathan Gruber of M.I.T., one of America’s leading health care economists, does in a new paper.

Donald Luskin cries foul on Krugman:

What Krugman doesn’t tell you is that Jonathan Gruber is no objective academic. He’s an adviser to the Clinton campaign. What — couldn’t Krugman find an appropriate quote from Hillary herself?

Sent out this invitation earlier in the week:

The Gregorian calendar turned over thirty-six days ago, and I’m sure we all have fond memories of fireworks, malt liquor, and inappropriate behavior.

But January 1 has never felt like the real start of a new year. It’s too wrapped up in the Thanksgiving-Christmas whirlwind: you need the rest of January just to get back into a normal routine. The holiday juggernaut continues through Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Groundhog’s Day. Many businesses don’t conclude their fiscal year until January 31. MIT undergrads have January off; classes start the first week of February. That same week, election-year theatrics begin in earnest with the Super Tuesday primaries. Mardi Gras concludes the Carnival season and Ash Wednesday marks the start of Lent. And tragically, at the start of February the NFL season finally draws to a close, the footballs and pom-poms and cheese-shaped helmets going back into storage until the fall. It is a barren time; with the slate wiped clean, it’s the true start to new plans and resolutions.

You know who’s got it right: the Chinese. The Year of Ding Hai, the Fire Pig, ends tomorrow, February 6.

Come celebrate the new year, Western-style, with barbecue. We’ll smoke as many parts of the pig as are practical and send the Year of the Pig out in style. Non-pig items will also be barbecued for those who think pigs are just too darn cute to eat. The Year of the Rat is beginning, but no rat will be served.

Saturday February 9th, 5pm til whenever
XX ——- —-, Somerville.
617-XXX-XXXX

Come around 5 for food or show up later in the evening if you just want to party.
Barbecue will be smoked and served rain or shine; we have indoor seating.
Friends welcome.

If you would like to eat please RSVP via email, phone, Facebook, engraved note, carrier pigeon, or smoke signal, so we know how many pigs to butcher.

UPDATE: That was a great party. Thanks to everyone who came — we had a pretty big crowd, and I’m glad I planned to have lots of leftovers, because we ate and drank it all.

Today I briefly contemplated selling my Roland MKS-70 rackmount synthesizer. But I reconsidered when I realized how many albums in my current rotation evoke the 1980s Roland sound: Talk Talk, Prefab Sprout, the new Twin Peaks Season Two soundtrack… I can’t sell my only 80s synth; I need to fire up the MKS-70 again, geek out and get comfortable with it.

Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti is a known user of the Roland JX/MKS-series, but I wasn’t sure about Talk Talk and Prefab Sprout. Googling around, I saw a couple of references to “Roland strings” in articles about Sprout, but nothing definite. Hang on, Thomas Dolby produced their recently-reissued classic ‘Steve McQueen’? Didn’t know that. Here’s a post on his blog about remastering the reissue. Hang on, Thomas Dolby has a blog?

Yes he does. And it’s got some great stuff, too, especially about his love of boats and the ongoing tale of his efforts to buy a boat, park it in his garden, and build a studio in it. Awesome.

Thomas Dolby - About Boats
Thomas Dolby - Offer accepted!
Thomas Dolby - Hurdles
Thomas Dolby - Great day for a lifeboat delivery
Thomas Dolby - Convoi Exceptionnel

The pig-blogging is just getting started; stay tuned.

These bits of gossip (or important information, depending on how you look at it) popped up in my Facebook news feed today:

Guess it was an eventful weekend.

Today’s xkcd was, serendipitously, on the same topic:

Further silly, breathless explication of the “it’s complicated” issue can be had from the Baltimore Sun and Reuters Video.

UPDATE: It’s not all bad news. Tonight, there’s this: