Salon.com > Paulina Borsook

Not home for the holidays

Tue, 21 Nov 2000 20:24:00 +0000

In 1969, when I was 15 years old, I ran away to Canada. I know that in today's harsh climate of '60s bashing and family piety, I am supposed to say that this was a bad decision and an error of my youth. It wasn't and it wasn't.

What's rarely remembered or recounted about the '60s is that many of us, particularly during the last two years of that decade, were filled with paranoia, despair and a scary sense that the United States was blowing apart. Thomas Pynchon's "Vineland" is about the only thing I've ever read that gets that feeling of end times and desperation right: the military transports and Nixon's election and the body bags and questions about just who was an agent provocateur and whether there was strychnine in those tabs of acid.

Suffice it to say, I left home for motivations both personal and political. I did not like where this country was going and I had come to the end of the line in my own trajectory: Goodbye application to Radcliffe; goodbye to all I had loved. It was time to go and try something else, somewhere else, somewhere more benign.

Virgin stuffing

Tue, 21 Nov 2000 09:00:00 +0000

Make a stock, using:

1 turkey neck
1 cup water
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 peppercorns
1/2 bay leaf
1 sprig parsley

Simmer for one hour, covered.

Meanwhile, sauté half a pound of coarsely chopped mushrooms in butter over low heat for at least half an hour and up to 45 minutes. Stir from time to time. The point is to shrivel the mushrooms until they are black and gnarly and reminiscent of dried mushrooms. They will have an incredible concentration of flavor, and border on crispy.

While the mushrooms are sautéeing, sauté a quarter-pound of slivered almonds in butter until lightly toasted. Set aside.

In the same pan that the almonds were sautéed in, sauté diced turkey giblets, well seasoned with salt and pepper, until fully cooked. Set aside.

When everything is ready -- stock, mushrooms, almonds, giblets -- mix it with:

4 cups bread crumbs
1/2 cup finely diced dried apricots

Include the butter that's left over in both sauté pans. If there isn't enough butter, including the butter coating the mushrooms, almonds and giblets, to lightly moisten the bread crumb mixture, melt a bit more in one of the sauté pans and stir it in. (But it's hard to imagine you'd need more than a few additional tablespoons.)

Revenge of the chocolate zucchini bread

Tue, 10 Oct 2000 21:11:00 +0000

First, the Wesson Oil Ideal Housewife of the 1950s stats for the Famous Chocolate Zucchini Bread: Of all the recipes I've ever invented, this is the one I am asked for most often. The Famous Chocolate Zucchini Bread freezes well, slices thinly, lasts a long time unrefrigerated, is a sneaky way of getting vegetables into children and appeals to the dessert-shy. Production requires no golden hands. It is an excellent way to get rid of excess homegrown or neighbor-donated zucchini, after you have tired of caponata or batter-fried blossoms.

The bread got its start -- as most, though not all, things in my life have -- because of a guy. As part of my squalid (no, make that adventurous) adolescence, I used to slink around the dorms at Cal Tech. One year, one of my playmates from that esteemed institution took me home to meet his parents. I dumped him and kept them -- the surrogate parents I thought I had always deserved. For 25 years, if I needed to run home to mommy and daddy, it was to these folks I scampered. Anyway, one summer, they had the problem of too much zucchini -- so as a small gesture in compensation for their many kindnesses, I devised what came to be known as the Famous Chocolate Zucchini Bread.

The Famous Chocolate Zucchini Bread

Tue, 10 Oct 2000 16:18:00 +0000

The Famous Chocolate Zucchini Bread

2 medium-large zucchini
2 eggs
1/2 cup butter
2/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2/3 cup flour
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa
1/4 teaspoon salt
2/3 teaspoon baking soda
1/3 teaspoon nutmeg
1/3 teaspoon cinnamon
2/3 cup chocolate chips

Steam medium-large zucchini until mushy. Purie in blender (i.e. do not strain using Foley food mill.) Cool to at least room temperature (cooling can be speeded up by placing purie in freezer for about 20 minutes, covered.) Set aside.

Separate eggs: Beat whites until fluffy, yolks until lemony. Set aside.

Cream together butter with sugar. Beat in egg yolks and vanilla until very smooth. Set mixture aside.

Sift together flour, unsweetened cocoa, salt, baking soda, nutmeg and cinnamon.

Mix dry ingredients into butter mixture. Fold in cool zucchini purie. Stir in chocolate chips. Fold in egg whites.

Bake in greased, floured loaf pan at 350 degrees for one hour, until bread stands away slightly from edges of pan.

Paulina Borsook to Eric Raymond: Don’t you Kakutani me!

Fri, 30 Jun 2000 19:25:00 +0000

TO: Eric Raymond
FROM: Paulina Borsook
RE: ABENDS in The Program You Compiled on 6/28/00

Eric -- Thanks for the great work at such short notice. Alas, there were some bugs you obviously didn't have time to patch, so here's a quick and dirty list of the ones most apparent by inspection. Cheers!

1) There seems to have been a subject-object confusion going on. My name is not Michiko Kakutani, I do not work for the New York Times, I have never written for the New York Times and I was just as much subjected to her critical gaze as you were. I am sure she would be as puzzled as I am that you equate her ideas and writing with mine.

2) I only wish I had the power of punditocracy. The closest I have ever come to being part of the old-media elite was back in the 1980s when I was on staff at the now-defunct technical trade, "Data Communications," which routinely contained a level of technical detail about on a par with an IEEE publication and had about as much glamour as another McGraw-Hill publication, "Modern Plastics." You would have no way of knowing this, but I actually also ghostwrote the first chapter of a reference book on Apache last year. I am quite aware of the importance of open-source software in geek culture.

No sex please, we're geeks

Wed, 12 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Jan. 12, 2000

#if !defined(EROS)

It's been observed that the Victorian era's astounding progress in engineering, communications and global capitalism is a tribute to what harnessing sexuality to commerce can do. The same might be said about Silicon Valley, where no sleep, no life and the residue of the valley's founding Puritanism (military/aerospace and semiconductor fabrication were not party-hearty industries) drive the information economy.

The guys wearing polo shirts who make the cover of Business 2.0 may be enjoying the pop-star eroticization of their image -- but the fact is, the engineers who actually build technology are mostly not singing the body electric. At least not in the way Whitman intended. Ignore the high-profile sexual bad behavior of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison or former Starwave CTO/Infoseek exec Patrick "hotseattle" Naughton -- their antics could have showed up in any industry sector, at any time. The Internet gold rush is not creating a new Barbary Coast in its stampede to the Bay Area.

How the Internet ruined San Francisco

Thu, 28 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

I had the misfortune to live in Manhattan during the '80s, when all conversations turned ineluctably to real estate and the shops and people that made New York interesting were being wiped out by a boom economy. Then, you'd see a slightly faded kosher butcher shop replaced by an Italian fusion restaurant, what was the rehearsal space for a dance troupe become a lawyer loft.

Now in late-'90s San Francisco, you can have all the Manhattan greed-is-good bull-economy moments you like. Freed, Teller and Freed, the oldest coffee and tea seller in the city (established 1899, its handcrank cash register in use until the end) survived all -- earthquakes, the Depression, Starbucks -- but it couldn't survive the Internetting of San Francisco: It closed Oct. 15, its building to become condos. You can stand on Sixth Street smack in the middle of SOMA (where Wired got its start) and the flow of traffic now evokes Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Parking is bad all over the city, the gratuitous kindness from strangers and service personnel I always so pleasantly contrasted with New York is fading fast, and it's beginning to be all too clear that people have no slack in their lives.

What year is it, anyway?

Fri, 23 Apr 1999 16:00:00 +0000

After writing about technology for magazines since 1983, I took three years off to work on a book. As a consequence, I no longer know anything about anything: Whatever understandings I had built up in 15-plus years of writing about computers had to have become obsolete -- after all, in an era of Web-weeks and epoch-changing accelerating technological change, who can possibly keep up
with the shock of the new?

My friend Owen Thomas, who compiles the sly dissing-the-digerati Ditherati every day, often skewers people and issues I have never heard of. Ditherati is as topical as it can be, savaging choice bits that appeared that very day on the wire services or in places such as the Wall Street Journal. Owen is fond of telling me some benighted frame of reference I have is so 1995. It is? It was? How will I ever be able to catch up?

So I spent a day in the library reading computer trade magazines, to see how bad my predicament was. Just how much had things changed since I had last really looked at the whiz-bang, all-new all-the-time world of high tech?

I have turned the results of that day's research into a quiz for Salon Technology readers, who may also be wondering just how current their knowledge of computers and communications is. After all, your next investment decision may depend on it!

Instructions:

Beside the description of each news story, each of which appeared in one of several reputable computer-trade publications, choose the letter a, b or c to indicate the year in which the story was published.

1) The Internet, "the world of @ signs on business cards and home pages ... for Coors Brewing Company," gets called "the most overhyped topic" of the year.

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1994

2) Commercial uses of Internet technologies are growing fast, even outside the United States.

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1987

3) A front-page human-interest story describes how an author placed the first chapter of his book online for free, with interested readers having the option of downloading the rest for a fee.

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1985

4) A column on corporate computing outlines a day in the life of a consultant, which begins by his checking e-mail both for personal messages and news downloads, working with his calendaring and Rolodex programs, looking up relevant information in a database while talking to clients, using
groupware to work collaboratively on a presentation that will be replete with fancy graphics and desktop-publishing bells and whistles, booking travel arrangements online and communicating with a colleague who is working on a proposal at a remote site.

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1986

5) "Apple Attempts to Mend User Fences."

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1990

6) Macintoshes have "at last found a home in the corporate world as serious business machines."

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1987

7) "A year ago, it really looked as though the Mac was dead meat. But that has really turned around."

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1987

8) Lotus founder Mitch Kapor predicts that the Macintosh will sell well to small businesses.

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1984

9) Institute for the Future cyberpundit Paul Saffo writes that "portable computers will ... sell as primary computers for an entirely new class of users."

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1991

10) Portable computers are named as the fastest-growing segment of the personal computer industry, representing "qualitative advantages beyond those reflected in their obvious technical advantages.

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1987

11) One of the lessons learned for the year is "Do not bad-mouth lap-size computers."

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1984

12) "PC managers expect a certain percentage of machines to fail ... New models, especially, tend to have higher failure rates initially ... Inexpensive clones [are] not of the same quality."

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1989

13) "Taking hardware to the limit," computers become "faster, smaller, cheaper."

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1993

14) "Movie moguls once opposed to computers are now computer advocates ... Now, all of our cameramen have to know how to use the computer ... The computer's precision saves time when scenes must be reshot over and over from different angles."

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1983

15) Encrypting e-mail with PGP is suggested as one way of engendering a modicum of enterprise-wide security.

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1993

16) Year-end prognostications: "new technologies will continue to confound the market ... The market analogs are elusive ... maybe the entertainment industry is a better comparison ... Wall Street is as confounded by the industry as the rest of us ... Companies have to make it on single product hits. And one success doesn't mean another will follow."

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1986

17) More year-end prognostications: "Do not predict IBM's demise ... The fancier the press kit, the more spectacular the demise ... Never trust an earnings estimate ... Never underestimate the clout of personal computer users."

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1984

18) Still more year-end prognostications: "Lots of people expect computers, phone systems, and televisions to grow together."

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1990

19) Regarding the Y2K problem: "It will be fun to see what stops after midnight on 1999 --- and fun to see Bill Gates find a way to make billions from it all."

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1989

20) John Markoff, currently a technology reporter for the New York Times, writes about Unix as a desktop OS for the everyday user.

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1983

21) The switch to a flavor of Unix is made for a highly visible company with terrific media presence -- an enterprise that depends on real-time flows of insanely accurate information, yet must maintain an immaculate and seamless presentation to the consumer at all times.

a) 1999 b) 1995 c) 1993

Answers to the quiz:

1) C. Doug Van Kirk, Infoworld, Dec. 26, 1994/Jan. 2, 1995

2) C. Paulina Borsook, Data Communications, May 1987

3) C. Nancy Groth, Infoworld, Dec. 23, 1985

4) C. Michael Blum, Infoworld, Dec. 23, 1986

5) C. Kristi Coale, Infoworld, Dec. 24-31, 1990

6) C. Laurie Flynn, Infoworld, Dec. 28, 1987

7) C. Staff-written, Infoworld, Jan. 5, 1987

8) C. Jim Bartino, Infoworld, Dec. 31, 1984

9) C. Paul Saffo, Infoworld, Jan. 7, 1991

10) C. Paulina Borsook, Data Communications, July 1987

11) C. John Ganz, Infoworld, Dec. 31, 1984

12) C. Alice LaPlante, Infoworld, Dec. 18, 1989

13) C. No byline (apparently staff-written), Infoworld, Dec.
27, 1993/Jan. 3, 1994

14) C. Kathy Chin, Infoworld, Dec. 26, 1983

15) C. Paulina Borsook, Byte, May 1993

16) C. John Ganz, Infoworld, Jan. 6, 1986

17) C. John Ganz, Infoworld, Dec. 31, 1984

18) C. Michael J. Miller, Infoworld, Jan. 1, 1990

19) C. John Ganz, Infoworld, Dec. 18, 1989

20) C. John Markoff, Infoworld, Dec. 26, 1983

21) C. Paulina Borsook, "Interoperability" supplement to LAN magazine,
spring 1993