News You Can Bruise for 2004 July 22

My customary pre-recipe Googling turned up no actual recipes for this dish; only intimations that it was used in various fancy restaurants, often as a garnish for steak. Well, what's good enough for steak is good enough for pasta, says I. Last night I made pesto with Parrano (one of the all-time great cheeses--it tastes like Parmesan but has a semi-soft texture like Gouda) and blue cheese. I wouldn't make it with only blue cheese, but making it with 1 part blue cheese to 3 or 4 parts other cheese gives the pesto the fighting spirit for which blue cheese is renowned. Obviously walnuts are better in this pesto than pine nuts.

Side note: why is this obvious? I don't know! I can't describe this pairing without resorting to terminology like "meaty" and "woody" that seems very unscientific. But at the same time I think that the statement "walnuts go better with blue cheese than pine nuts" is closer to objective fact than to totally arbitrary opinion or taste. If I knew more about food I could find out what compounds give those two foods their flavor and say that they complement each other, but that doesn't explain why and it can't be made into a useful general rule. This drives me crazy.

Sumana told me that Jerry Goldsmith, who composed a lot of themes for Star Trek series and movies, has died. I went to look at his IMDB page and found that that barely scratches the surface of what he accomplished. Even apart from his Trek work, he wrote the scores for many of the best-known sci-fi movies of the past 30 years: Alien (and its sequels), Planet of the Apes (and its sequels), Alien Nation, Gremlins (and its greatly underrated sequel), Total Recall, Logan's Run... Before that he did TV themes. Like the Twilight Zone theme and the Perry Mason theme.

He won an Oscar for The Omen in 1997, and for six years he wrote the yearly Oscar theme song itself, which should qualify him for a meta-Oscar. He's gone now, but he'll be stuck in people's heads for as long as we watch movies.

Making a favicon.ico file for your website used to be a grueling experience, due to Microsoft's weird mutant-BMP ICO format. But now there's Favicon From Pics (logically equivalent to the pics2favicon metaphor I would use). Just upload a picture and you get back a scaled-down, ICO version of that picture. Save the gruel for dinner.

After way too much nightly drudgework on NewsBruiser at the expense of all the work I wanted to do, basically all its text is now I18Ned or I18Nable. I managed to do this without sacrificing ease of installation, ease of use, or the decentralized nature of the plugin architecture. Jean-Pierre is still working on actually doing the I18N and the French translations, but he's done with everything except the themes (which were the last piece of the puzzle) and most of the plugins. If you've been wanting to translate NewsBruiser into another language, now's a good time to start.