Rich Mintz  

In this incredible video clip, two women who don’t speak Hindi use Google Translate to order Indian food in Hindi over the phone, and it works:

I tweeted about this video earlier this week, but I just watched it again and it was so arresting I had to embed it here.

Gotta go now, I have to go play SimCity…

A new street sign design has hit some of the streets in downtown Los Angeles. Featuring the LA city seal, and a new typeface (which isn’t, however, Clearview), they look pretty classy.

It’s not clear whether these are going to be the new standard, but I hope they are — they look, as Curbed LA put it, “badass.”

The blogger Militant Angeleno has compiled a survey of the five types of street signs still in place in Los Angeles, from the “shotgun” and “black blade” that prevailed when I was a child to the ugly, poorly-copy-edited “trapezoid” that started taking over when I was in high school.

I’ve got one of the “blue blades” right here in my kitchen — I bought it from a junk shop on Abbot Kinney Boulevard just after the name changeover from West Washington Boulevard in the early 1990s:

I don’t have much hope for Marcel Vigneron’s new cooking reality show, but it’s worth a try, so I just set my DVR. Bonus: I set it using the Time Warner web-based DVR management app, which is more usable than I expected. More to come.

I’ve just finally gotten myself more or less ensconced in GQueues when something possibly better comes along: Flow. I can’t go switching every 3 weeks, but Flow does in fact seem pretty awesome, based on a bit of poking around. So if you’re looking for something more Mac-ish and/or more groupware-ish than GQueues, check it out.

No, I’m not talking about this ridiculous coffeemaker you can talk to… but apropos of this example of AT&T’s website giving you a gibberish (and inaccurately to boot) message about why logging in might take a while, I particularly liked the experience of signing up for the Rdio streaming music service. After you enter your email address, here’s what you see:

They tell you what they did, they tell you what to do next, and they tell you what to do first if you suspect that the thing they did didn’t work. All in plain English. Classy! Somebody is involved here who has some sense of how to make users comfortable. (I signed up for this specifically because someone I know praised the user interface of the Mac app — I’m looking for a suitable replacement for the Sirius XM Mac app, with its reliably programmed music but a user experience so aggressively awful that it makes me angry just to type a sentence about it — so I’m not entirely surprised about that.)

Clio is home, after 2 nights in the hospital. Still waiting for the test results, but she’s been rehydrated and is starting to get her appetite back, so it was worth the trip even if the ultimate news is not good. Here are a few photos to satisfy those who keep asking:

If you need a dose of comfort, try this. It’s nearly foolproof, and the recipe itself is virtually impossible to ruin; it stretches or bends in almost any direction and still hangs together. Adapted from Mark Bittman, but I stopped bothering with the cookbook a year ago.

Start by pouring yourself a glass of a rustic red wine — whatever you keep in the house. (My choice is a Long Island red, Schneider Cabernet Franc.) Have a sip.

Chop and/or grind (I use the grinder attachment that came with my cheap hand mixer) all the following, in any convenient order, and dump them in a big bowl:

• 1 large carrot
• 1 large shallot
• 3 cloves garlic
• About a cup of absorbent grain, using whatever’s within reach: bread crumbs; cooked rice or oatmeal; uncooked Minute Rice, tabouli, or couscous; or, in an emergency, half a cup of cornmeal
• A couple of spoonfuls of savory liquid, not too drippy — I used ajvar tonight because I had some, but anything from Worcestershire sauce to spaghetti sauce to barbecue sauce will do
• If it’s handy, a handful of parsley
• Somewhere between 1/4 cup and 1 cup of grated or ground cheese — the classic recipe calls for parmagiano reggiano, but any hard cheese is fine
• Salt, pepper, and seasonings as you see fit — sometimes I toss in dried chopped jalapenos
• Two raw eggs

Add to the bowl:

• About a pound of ground sirloin and half a pound of ground pork, torn apart into small chunks

Mash with your hands until ingredients are distributed. Form into meatballs. Heat a fairly thick layer of good olive oil in a saucepan (use a heavy, well-seasoned pan for best results). Drop half the meatballs in and cook, turning very frequently, until very dark on all sides. Remove to a plate as they finish and replace with new raw meatballs until all the meatballs are cooked. You’ll end up with 30-40 meatballs, depending on how big you make them.

When half the meatballs are done, turn on a pot of salted boiling water. When boiling, drop in good chewy pasta — I have a taste for Italian gemelli, but use whatever you like, as long as it’s not too cheap. Make twice as much pasta as you think you need; it’ll all get eaten. Cook until done and then drain.

When all the meatballs have been removed to the plate, pour off some of the oil (but not all), return the pan to the fire, and pour in about half a cup of your rustic red wine (or more, if you’re cooking for several people). Deglaze the pan, scraping all the cooked bits into the wine. Pour about two-fifths a jar of high-quality pasta sauce per person into the hot wine (I use Rao’s). Lower the flame, but not too much, and aggressively boil down the sauce-and-wine mixture. When it’s ready, which will be roughly when the pasta is done, it should be a chunky mass (not watery), and very dark due to the wine.

For each person, take a big bowl; dish out a hearty serving of cooked pasta; glop some of the thick sauce-wine mixture on top (leaving some of the pasta unsauced, to offset the strong flavor of the meatballs); drop half a dozen meatballs on top. (Some people think the meatballs should be reheated in the sauce, but I consider this to be bourgeois and unnecessary.) Pour yourself a big glass of red wine, and enjoy.

My cat Clio — my near-daily companion for well over a decade — is in the hospital tonight, for the first time in her life, and will probably be there through the weekend. The experience is a lot harder than I expected, so I’m spending the evening cooking and eating comfort food, watching engaging TV (mostly Leverage), and talking to you.

It appears that she has stomach cancer — I’m likely to know after tomorrow. She’s in no pain, probably isn’t even aware she’s seriously ill (although it’s clear that she feels woozy), and is in good spirits, spending most of her time in physical contact with me if I’m around and interacting as usual. But the prognosis isn’t good. Given her age, I’ve asked that she not be subjected to invasive diagnostic surgery or destabilizing therapy. They’re doing a non-invasive biopsy in the morning and we’ll provide palliative care, but I don’t plan to subject her to chemotherapy; if this proves to be her final illness, I’d rather have her end her life at home, in as much comfort as possible.

Clio is somewhere between 14 and 18 years old — most likely near toward the top of that range, although it’s hard to know for sure, as I don’t know exactly how old she was when I brought her home from the Atlanta Humane Society off Howell Mill Road in 1998. She’d been taken to the humane society after the death of her first owner, an old lady who had two cats — a kitten who got adopted right away, and Clio, who was left languishing for weeks. The AHS is very well run, but it’s still no place to make a home, and Clio didn’t like it. When I met her, she was angry after six weeks in a cage, and swiped and snarled; but I had a sense that she had a sweet nature underneath (she kept coming up to the front of the cage, then retreating to the back), and after less than an hour at home, this proved to be true.

Unlike your typical standoffish cat, Clio has been unusually social and vocal her whole life, perhaps due to her Abyssinian ancestry (they’re known as talkers). She’s as self-reliant as any cat, and is perfectly competent to be left alone in the apartment for three days; but she’s made clear over the years that she’d rather have people around than be by herself. She will walk into a crowd in the living room rather than hiding from it; she’ll plop down on the couch next to a stranger; she looks you right in the eye and licks you on the hand or the back of your head. As a result, when I lose her — which I realize will be soon in any case, as she’s already passed the average lifespan of a housecat — it will be hard to get used to not having her around. Tonight, I keep forgetting she isn’t here, and looking around for her; she’s rarely more than a few feet away from where I happen to be, and I’m acutely aware of her absence.

I have to acknowledge the competence and professionalism of the veterinary staff at my clinic and hospital, who have gone out of their way to keep me informed, to make me aware of all the care options, and to treat both me and Clio with respect and dignity. She’s had the good fortune not to need veterinary care more than once or twice in her long life, but now that she does, I’m comfortable with the dedicated hands she’s in. So now we wait, and eat meatballs.

Since (thanks to weather) I have 2 unexpected hours to kill in the United pier of LGA’s central terminal — one of the least pleasant places I can think of to spend 2 hours, but nothing to be done about that now — I’ll offer you a few brief notes about today’s airport experience:

I scared the TSA by accident

Apparently the Compass iPad stand, when folded and stowed in your bag, looks like a shiv on X-ray. My bag got stared at on the X-ray, then searched, then stared at on X-ray again, then searched again. It wasn’t until five minutes had gone by that I realized I had an idea what they were looking for.

Unfortunately, if you ask a TSA agent “what are you looking for?” he isn’t going to tell you, so I tried again with “there’s a steel iPad stand folded up in there that probably showed up as a long, thin metal object.” That enabled him to find it in the bag and I was sent on my way.

Skype is changing more than voice calling

I’ll have more to say soon about Skype 5 — which I downloaded over the weekend — as I start rolling it into my everyday life. I no longer have a landline, iPhone call quality is spotty, and even the voice quality over VoIP in my office leaves something to be desired, so given that Skype tends to deliver better-than-the-available-phone-options voice quality, I’ve been using it more. Now that it supports multi-way video calling, I have even more reasons to play with it.

But the aspect of Skype 5 I’m most surprised and pleased by is what they’re calling Skype Access, which is basically the ability to use your Skype credit balance, via Skype’s billing system, to pay by the minute to use public wi-fi networks (such as Boingo Wireless in the airport) that were previously available only by daily or monthly subscription. If you keep the Skype menu in your menu bar or your system tray, like I do, this means that whenever you’re within range of a commercial public network (which includes most of the time I find myself looking for a quick fix of Internet access, except when I’m actually in motion), instant-on pay-by-the-minute access is just a pulldown away.

The per-minute cost is high-ish, in the range of $10-12/hour (promoted at 14 cents, but I was actually just charged 19 cents, presumably including taxes). But on the other hand, if you keep your eye on the meter, and stay disconnected except during the minutes you actually need data, it can be convenient — and for short bursts of Internet, it’s certainly cheaper than paying by the hour.

I’ve never been much of a customer of pay-by-the-hour wireless providers, because I usually feel either ripped off (because I don’t use anywhere near an hour), or forced to make a commitment to a longer-term plan without knowing whether it’s justified. Using this kind of plan, even if I pay more, I feel better, because I’m controlling my own spend. Everyone wins here: Skype sees me spend down my balance faster, the ISP gets a premium rate from a customer who otherwise wouldn’t bother, and I get the few minutes of Internet I needed without having to spend a fortune.

In practice I’ll rarely use this (I carry a mobile hotspot), but it’s great to know it’s here, and I’ll certainly use it occasionally. And as free wireless becomes more ubiquitous, I may ditch the wireless hotspot entirely and just try to go with Skype. God knows I’m tired of paying separately for quadruply (now quintuply) redundant Internet access which I can’t possible eat all of at once — but that’s a topic for another post.