Month: January 2003

Have you noticed? Knitting is back in a big way—we find more and more of our Gen X friends picking up the needles and trying their hand at a sweater for the kids, a hat for mom. Here, a traveling exhibition finally arrives in the heartland of American Scandiphilia—literally hundreds of amazing samples from this noble art. Sweaters, hats, scarves, socks, and mittens are just the tip of the berg. (By the way, kids around the age of seven tend to pick up knitting the way they pick up languages—so much faster than their entrenched parents.) American Swedish Institute, 2600 Park Ave., (612) 871-4907, www.americanswedishinst.org

William Gibson may not exactly be the next Philip K. Dick, but who wants to be a Dick? Gibson has achieved significantly more commercial success than his sci-fi forebear, and may not have the same literary gravitas, but he still can spin a pretty great yarn. The coiner of the word “cyberspace” also created cyberpunk as a literary form. And although Dick beat him to the idea of the dystopian future (what a simple idea—that humans may actually be moving backward through time, morally speaking), Gibson has already explored galaxies of headspace from “Johnny Mnemonic” to Neuromancer to Idoru. Here he’ll be reading from Pattern Recognition, a brand new caper in the same style, though set in a present that Gibson has been envisioning for 20 years. Barnes & Noble Edina, Galleria mall, (952) 920-0633, bn.com

Funny Times, the monthly humor newspaper, may seem a little old-school compared to hip upstarts like The Onion and ModernHumorist.com, but it can still deliver a quality product. With essayists like Garrison Keillor and P.J. O’Rourke and comics by Lynda Barry and Matt Groening, their 60,000 subscribers always get their money’s worth of humor with a lefty slant. Funny Times has compiled some of their best pieces for Funny Times presents: The Best of the Best American Humor, featuring the talents of Spalding Gray, Ted Rall, Hunter S. Thompson, Dave Barry, and St. Paul cartoonist and Rake contributor Andy Singer. Big Brain Comics in downtown Minneapolis will host a signing by Singer and others from American Humor, as well as the recently released Attitude, which features 21 hipster cartoonists including Singer and P.S. Mueller and is edited by Rall. Humor, politics, and fun—now more than ever. Big Brain Comics, 81 S. 10th St., (612) 338-4390

Klinkenborg got our attention a decade ago when he was a visiting professor down in Northfield. Ever since then, he’s been writing thoughtful little meditations on the New York Times op-ed page under the rubric “A Rural Life.” We’re not sure how one ends up with a job like this—paid to say whatever crosses your mind, from the comfort of the family farm, in the Paper of Record. (We suspect it may have something to do with stringing together visiting professorships from coast to coast. That and sitting on the Times editorial board.) But it certainly helps if your prose is as effortless and clever as Klinkenborg’s. Perhaps he’ll reveal precisely how he does it at his February 29 reading at Ruminator Books from this, his third book.

The longstanding appeal of the Atlantis myth is a sort of historical rubbernecking. Everyone loves a good disaster story, especially when it’s real. But lurking underneath it is a more haunting thought—one day, like maybe next Tuesday, we could go the same way as the Pompeiians. That’s one argument for the practicality of archaeological research—if we can figure out why, say, the Anasazi died out, it’s less likely we’ll follow them into the grave of history. Atkinson, a British journalist and scriptwriter, tackled asteroid and meteor strikes in the critically well-received Impact Earth. In Lost Civilizations: Rediscovering Ancient Sites Through New Technology, he brings the scale down a notch, albeit still a world-spanning one, to catch us up on the state of the science. Taking 20 vanished societies from across the globe, Atkinson uses satellite photography and computer-aided design to recreate what their cities and cultures must have looked like in their prime—some likely familiar, like the monumental temples of Angkor Wat and the giant Mayan pyramids, and also more obscure locales like the Arabian Peninsula cities of Mahram Bilqis and the Ubar. Many of these sites are only accessible thanks to space-age technology, which allows the easy scan of a remote jungle site from 300 miles up and reduces complaints from locals who understandably don’t want sacred places disturbed—nicely ironic, that the past is more illuminated only as we move further into the future.

Every rogue state on the planet would love to get its hands on my grandmother’s recipe. I would not like to think what would happen if Saddam got the chocolate sauce. If I have anything to say about it, he’s not getting squat.

If that makes me seem arrogant, or like the chocolate-sauce-police of the globe, I’m sorry. But the fact is, I have the recipe and you don’t. Be reasonable. If you really think about it, none of us wants to live in a world where anybody with enough pluck can go ahead and make my grandmother’s chocolate sauce. That would be highly destabilizing, and additionally, would suck.

I’m not definitively saying there’s evaporated milk in it, but Iraq appears to be trying to get their hands on this unique ingredient. There is no other known use for canned, evaporated milk than my grandmother’s chocolate sauce. Can you name another use for it? No. Who else buys it except me? No one. Until now. Iraq’s apparent interest in evaporated milk is very troubling indeed.

A similar product, sweetened condensed milk, is innocuous. I’m not giving away any state secrets here when I say it has no application in the making of my grandmother’s chocolate sauce. Lots of delicious, though conventional, recipes call for it. A tablespoon mixed into a hot cup of tea is delightful, and no cause for alarm whatsoever.

It would be ridiculous to deny that sugar, cocoa, and butter are in my grandmother’s chocolate sauce. They are. And they are easily obtained everywhere, though not necessarily in the correct proportions or of the required quality. This is one of the tradeoffs of a free society. I would not like to eat dry toast just to make sure no one else got my grandmother’s chocolate sauce. For better or worse, our current laws allow just about anyone to buy these ingredients over the counter, as long as they look like credible shoppers.

Thanks to unscrupulous relationships in the past with Russia and the CIA, Saddam already has access to cheesecake and sherbet. We’d have to be pretty naive to believe that he doesn’t have a cupboard full of sauces, glazes, chutneys, and nut-toppings as well. Confetti sprinkles, for example, are distributed evenly throughout the globe, as they should be.

But this chocolate sauce stays in the family. It is not Iraq’s fault that it didn’t develop this chocolate sauce, and I don’t blame them for wanting it.  It is a terrible responsibility, and one that I do not take lightly at all. With a heavy heart, I reflect on the awesome fact that my grandmother’s chocolate sauce exists at all. It would be so much easier if we could turn back the clock, and pretend she never created it.

Don’t get any ideas about raiding my recipe box. I have committed it to memory, and destroyed the original. Also, I must urge you not to try to duplicate my grandmother’s chocolate sauce. It has evolved into a very exacting science which cannot be easily transferred. For example, if the sauce has just a dash of vanilla extract in it—and I’m not saying it does—well, what the hell kind of measurement is a “dash” anyway? Let’s just say that disaster has so far been averted. But when you get a hundred million Iraqis mucking around with double boilers (which, by the way, are NOT used in making the sauce), it would only be a matter of time. Is it worth the risk?

People of Iraq: Do not fear me or hate me because of my grandmother’s chocolate sauce. Be grateful that it’s in such good hands. If it’s any consolation to you, Turkey has been trying to duplicate my wife’s cranberry sauce for decades, and Chile—let’s not even go there.