My family has no Middle Eastern heritage, but my father has always been a big fan of the region’s cuisine, and it was he that taught me the recipes that follow. I’m sure that leaves me open to criticism over the “authenticity” of my recipes. But since recipes vary from one town to the next even in the regions where they were first developed, with each town claiming to have the original and authentic recipe, and since I base my recipes on what tastes good, rather than adherence to canon, I couldn’t care less.

Basing recipes on what tastes good (and allowing for differences in the flavour and intensity of fresh produce) makes it impossible to talk in absolute proportions. To make them really well you really have to know what you want the final product to taste like and tweak the recipe as you go, rather than using strict proportions from a recipe. I’ll try my best to explain how to reach the flavour I strive for as we go.

Baba Ghanoush

Otherwise known, according to Wikipedia, as baba ganoush, baba ghannouj or baba ghannoug (Arabic: بابا غنوج).

Ingredients:

• Some eggplants (aubergines)
• Some tahini (sesame paste, one of the ingredients often omitted entirely from commercial recipes)
• Some lemons
• Some garlic
• Some salt
• Some olive oil

I’m being deliberately vague here, but for some wild ballpark figures, reckon on about one clove of garlic, one lemon and 50g of tahini for a medium-sized eggplant.

Method:

1. Roast eggplants in a 230°C oven. Remember to prick them with a fork first, or there is likely to be an almighty “POOMPH!” at some point, and you’ll find an empty eggplant shell in your oven, with the contents drooping down through the wire rack. Trust me on this.
2. Once the eggplants are sad, collapsed remnants of their former selves, take them out of the oven and allow them to cool a little. When they’re safe to handle, slit the withered skins open and scrape out the contents into a bowl, taking care to collect the large amount of liquid that will inevitably spill out.
3. Throw in all the other ingredients and purée with a stab-mixer. Okay, that’s not really fair – I’ll try to explain how I go about getting the proportions right:
   1. Blend garlic cloves into the eggplant guts in the bowl one at a time, tasting after each addition. You’re finished when you can taste a definite garlic hit, but still appreciate the smoky roasted-eggplant flavour.
   2. Blend in tahini, a dollop at a time. You’re done when you can taste the earthy, slightly bitter tahini but still appreciate the smoky eggplant and the garlic. The colour should lighten significantly.
   3. Gradually blend in the lemon juice. You should be starting to get the point by now: keep adding the juice until smoky eggplant, aromatic garlic, earthy and bitter tahini and lemon are all in balance.
   4. Add a little olive-oil, just a splash for each eggplant. This is entirely optional – the hint of olive flavour adds a little complexity, complimenting the eggplant and tahini, and it gives the dip a slightly richer texture.
   5. Add plenty of salt, a little at a time. Keep going until you think “this might be a tiny bit too salty” – it’ll settle down over time. Often, if I have this dip in the fridge overnight, I find it needs a little extra salt and lemon-juice the next day.

You might need to iterate through step 3 a few times to get everything in balance. Eggplant will be the major component by volume, but I don’t make this as an eggplant dip with tahini, garlic and lemon flavourings, instead I try to reach a point where none of the four main flavours dominates over the others. You can also crush the garlic and use a masher instead of a stab mixer to get a chunkier consistency, but I prefer the creamy, puréed style.

Hummus

Otherwise known, according to Wikipedia, as hamos, homos, houmous, hommos, hommus, hummos or hummous (Arabic: حمّص).

The recipe, or at-least my recipe, for hummus is fundamentally the same as the one for baba ghanoush, but with chickpeas in place of eggplant. If you use canned chickpeas you can start at step 3 above. I use dry chickpeas because I believe suffering makes food taste better. Here’s how I prepare them:

1. Place chickpeas in a pot (don’t fill the pot more than around half-way).
2. Add water to around twice the depth of the chickpeas.
3. Bring to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes. Add water if necessary to keep the chickpeas covered.
4. Leave for 12 hours or so. You can generally just turn off the heat and let them sit on the stove – no great harm will come to them.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4, if you’ve got the time, otherwise you’ll just need to cook them a little longer in step 6. You can even skip step 4 altogether, but it will take a lot of boiling to get the job done.
6. Bring to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes. Pick out a chickpea and slice it in half. If there’s a lighter, chalky section in the middle, keep on boiling, with extra water if necessary.
7. Once the chickpeas are cooked through to the middle, drain them, setting aside the liquid, and blend with a stab mixer. Add the liquid back a little at a time until you reach a dip-ish sort of consistency – you may need to add extra water.

I usually start cooking the chickpeas one evening, give them another boil the following morning, then a final blast on the second evening to finish them off. As with baba ghanoush, I like to create a smooth purée that isn’t dominated by any one of the constituent flavours. From that point you can also experiment with additional flavours – a handful of basil leaves blended in makes for a particularly nice basil hummus.

So there you are, two delicious, easy-to-make dips – no excuses for buying the commercial versions now. The key to both dips is tahini, which transforms the base ingredients into something far more complex and wonderful. As a bonus recipe, illustrating tahini’s transformative power, here is the dip with which my girlfriend recently wowed her colleagues at a work morning-tea: add a dollop of tahini to a small bowl of natural yoghurt and stir. That is all.

The loaf of bread I just made.

I hear a lot of people with the same story: “I had a bread-machine once…made bread for a month, now it’s sitting in the garage…or maybe I gave it away…” The reasons vary, sometimes people just grow weary of operating the thing, but mostly people seem to not be hugely impressed with the quality of the end product – it’s “too light and fluffy”, “too dense”, “too crumbly”, or “too rubbery”.

The thing is, like most other recipes, you’ve got to tweak bread quite a lot to get what you want out of it. It also pays to start with a good machine; I like Panasonic’s sturdy cast-aluminium baking tin, and the results the machine produces. Lastly, you need to work out the right size loaf for your machine. Most machines, though they claim to be able to produce a wide range of loaf sizes, seem to have an optimal size (generally towards the low end of the range, in my experience) that produces an even texture throughout and a good crust all over.

I recommend starting with a good bread-mix; save plain flour based recipes for when you’ve learned the ropes a little. Bread mixes tend to produce very light, elastic bread, which is a good starting point. From that point, I work with a few basic tweaks:

• Reduce the amount of water if the loaf seems to collapse as it cools
• Substitute plain flour for some of the bread-mix to produce a denser, less fluffy loaf
• Substitute rolled oats for some of the bread-mix to produce a less stringy, more crumbly loaf (if you add them at the start, the oats will be completely pulverised in the kneading process)

Using the above tweaks, I arrived at the following recipe for my every-day bread:

• 325g Lauke wholemeal bread mix
• 50g plain wholemeal flour
• 50g rolled oats
• 1 tsp dried yeast
• 325mL water (or 300mL if I want a firmer loaf that will be easier to cut while it’s hot)

Take two minutes to bung it in the machine before bed, set the timer for breakfast-time, and hit the sack: couldn’t be easier. I took some to work once and they’re hooked; now if I don’t bring it to Friday morning-tea, there’s trouble.

Okay, I feel bad about the misleading title, here’s Australia’s National Institute of Circus Arts in action (click through for the full set):

NICA - At First Sight

1. What plans, if any, do you have for collecting preserving the data left behind by your grandparents, or parents?
2. What plans, if any, do you have for curating your own data to present it in the most accessible way for your grandchildren. Will you be leaving behind an unsorted blob of information, or picking out the most interesting parts for easy access? Will you delete all the saucy bits, leave them stand, or lock them in some kind of data time-capsule, to be opened only after all your children have died, to save them the embarrassment?

In answer to the first, since I can produce passable scans of both film and prints, I think perhaps I should take it upon myself to collect the few photos that exist of my grandfather. The second is far more difficult – I expect the most I can hope to manage is to keep the record in a single, largely unsorted, uncatalogued blob. I can’t imagine wishing to censor anything. In-fact, I intend to be the kind of old man that drops the most inappropriate details of youthful follies into casual conversation. You have been warned.

It is difficult to sympathise with Connex, who when buying trains apparently didn’t bother to ask whether they can stop when it’s wet (rather than sailing majestically past the station), or go when it’s hot (above 35°C, as it is for more than a week each year). However some of the blame has to lie with Melbourne’s commuters, who seem to make long, hard work of the simple task of boarding even a relatively empty carriage. Here, then, is the poem promised in the title of this post:

Paused, indecision.
Should she turn left, or turn right?
“Get out’ the doorway!”

I wonder if Connex will publish it in their Moving Galleries.

The Problem

The screenshot below shows a detail from a photo with no adjustments applied:

Base image

There is unnatural banding of oranges and yellows around the highlights on the arms and hands, and on the top of the cake and the dessert in the foreground. This banding is caused by channel-clipping, skip to the next heading for the solution or read on for the in-depth explanation of the problem:

• In the white highlights, the red, green and blue channels are clipped at full intensity. In reality the candle-flames were orange-ish yellow, not white, but since we’re dealing with a much nore limited dynamic range it makes sense to render (comparatively) very bright objects as white.
• On surfaces a little further out from the candles, the intensity of the blue channel starts to drop away. The red and green are still more intense than we can display within our limited dynamic range, so they’re still clipped to full intensity. With the blue channel dropping away, everything starts to turn yellow.
• A little further out, the green channel starts to drop away but the red level is still brighter than we can handle. With the blue mostly gone and the green heading downhill we get a big slab of orange.
• Eventually we reach surfaces so far from the flame that the red channel starts dropping within our displayable range, and at that point the colour is back in balance.

The Solution

It turns out that digital camera sensors capture a much greater dynamic range than we usually see in the final image, the conversion software takes a slice of that range and maps it to the final pixel values. That means that even when the red channel is clipped for a particular pixel, the raw data from the sensor may not be clipped at all. So, how do we get to see all that unclipped data? Simple, just use negative exposure compensation (turn on the overexposure indicator then decrease exposure until there are no areas indicated):

Darkened image

We can see the missing detail now, but everything else has gone dark. The important thing is that only the very brightest subjects the sensor recorded are now mapped to the maximum channel values in the final image. We can’t push the exposure compensation back up to lighten the image, that only gets us back where we started, so we need to use the base curve:

Fixed, but with low contrast

This curve leaves the white-point alone (it still touches the top-right corner of the grid) so it’s still mapping only the sensor’s brightest values to the maximum channel values in the output (I’ve turned overexposure indication on, so you can see that only the centres of the flames are overexposed), but it lightens everything in-between, bringing it back up to around the level of the original image. Cramming in that extra bit of dynamic-range tends to reduce contrast a small amount in other areas of the image, I find that putting a slight concave in the first segment of the above curve helps to compensate:

Final image, with contrast restored

You’ll need to tweak the other control points to maintain the overall brightness and ensure the curve touches at the top-right corner as I have above, then you’re done. The banding is gone, instead there are smooth transitions from highlights to normal exposure. One side effect is an apparent lightening and desaturation of the highlight areas (in particular compare the dessert at the bottom of the frame) – it’s not a bad thing, in fact it usually looks vastly better, but it’s worth being aware of.

I’ve used UFRaw for this demonstration, but the same techniques should work for just about any RAW converter. In-fact I’m sure some converters are already offering built-in functionality similar to this, or will do before long.

This may be a flaw in my own psyche (there are many), but whenever I hear a colleague utter this phrase I am overcome with sympathetic embarrassment at the sheer childishness of it. As obvious as it seems, I feel compelled to assert that the words for which this phrase and its variants stand in are in-fact not bombs. They have no inherent power beyond the puff of breath used to utter them, and have never, in the history of language, rent a person limb from limb.

If you really are keeping such timid company that the utterance of vulgar language may injure them in some way, my primary advice is to seek more robust company. Otherwise simply avoid directly quoting anyone who uses such language, or, as an absolute last resort, use the time-honoured phrase “the f-word”. That phrase is marginally less childish than “the f-bomb”, but shares the same fundamental, self-defeating silliness: anyone hearing it will immediately think “oh, fuck”.

In lieu of addressing the concerns raised about the filter, Hamilton chooses to build a straw-man in the form of the Internet’s supposed “community of devotees”, a group of cowboys and extreme libertarians that “live in cyberland”. I suspect the group to which he is referring is more accurately described as “anyone who uses the Internet and disagrees with Clive Hamilton’s view of Internet censorship”, but either way, I feel sure Hamilton would regard me as a member of this group. The bad news is that I live in a flat, have never owned a ten gallon hat, and the most extreme liberty I’ve taken recently is having three coffees in one afternoon. I go to work like anyone else, I spend time with friends and family, including my young nephews and niece, and in and around these and other activities, I use the Internet. This is because unlike the people Hamilton is arguing against, I am real, and not a two dimensional caricature (though, having admitted to drinking coffee I can see that I’ve left myself wide open to the “latte-sipping socialist” tag). The one real person opposed to the filter mentioned in Hamilton’s article has someone else’s quote, taken grossly out of context, attributed to him in a weak attempt to discredit his views.

The net result of inventing an opponent rather than addressing the real opponents and the real issues that they raise, is that the majority of Hamilton’s article is spent on a point that has never been part of the debate: that young children shouldn’t be given unrestricted access to pornography. While there are real arguments to be had about the best way to prevent children from having such access, no-one is seriously arguing that we just shouldn’t bother. Requiring all ISPs to offer a clean-feed seems a poor spending-choice, and for that reason there will be a lot of opposition to it. That doesn’t mean the opponents think that restricting children’s access to the Internet is a bad thing, just that there are better ways to do it.

The real issue to which real people are opposed is mandatory filtering. Hamilton begins his article by asking “What’s so special about the internet?” How does it differ from film, television, radio, books and magazines? I will attempt to explain, though I am aware this carries with it an enormous risk of reducing me to a two-dimensional cyber-cowboy. There are two major differences that mark the Internet as “special” in this context, and they happen to address both the “why we shouldn’t” and “why we can’t” of Internet censorship.

Why we shouldn’t: it is easy to characterise the Internet as simply being another medium like film, television, radio, books and magazines, but it is also wrong. Even describing the Internet as the interactive digital version of all those other media put together fails to acknowledge a huge proportion of what people do online. For every instance where people exchange information ‘offline’, there is an online equivalent – none of the other media mentioned share that property. Even that falls short of describing the scope of the Internet, but it is sufficient for this point: mandatory censorship of the Internet is equivalent to mandatory censorship of every coffee-shop, boardroom, telephone, university classroom, post-office, pub and living-room.

Why we can’t: People don’t simply sit down and watch or read the Internet, everyone who can access it can contribute to it in real time, not only is censoring it a bad idea in the first place, there’s just no way to censor even a fraction of the interactions that occur even if you tried. Perhaps more importantly, “the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”. You may not agree with John Gilmore’s views on many issues, and that quote may be cliché at this point, but it’s still true. Proponents of mandatory Internet censorship would no-doubt like to believe that using anonymity networks requires a great deal of effort and/or technical knowledge, and will therefore remain a niche activity if a mandatory filter is implemented. The truth is that the first time the system stops you from visiting a site, you can download a single free application, and with no configuration whatsoever, simply run it and browse to whatever site you wish. At the moment, perhaps not many people know this, but you can count on it becoming common knowledge if a mandatory filter is implemented. Anyone remotely inconvenienced by the filter can bypass it, with no technical knowledge, in minutes, and the technology that allows anonymity networks to operate is the same technology that protects data in online banking and other electronic-commerce applications – block one and you block the other.

Illegal material is, well, illegal. We already have systems in place to find and prosecute people who produce or download it. Yes, it might be nice if there was a magic machine that could prevent them from ever downloading it, but there isn’t, all there is is the potential to waste a large amount of money. Child welfare groups like Save the Children have already declared that the money could be far better spent on programs that will have actual results, rather than this pointless filter.

Since your favourite podcast team are unlikely to rehearse the entire show then blurt it out at high speed just to cater to your whims, you’ll have to take matters into your own hands. You might have a nice audio editing suite with a friendly GUI, I’m sure free downloads of such programs are plentiful, but I have the Linux command-line and the tools SoX and LAME, so that’s what I’ll be using:

sox podcast.mp3 -t wav - tempo 1.5 30 treble -6 | lame -b 64 - podfast.mp3

There you go, a 75 minute podcast wedged into 50 minutes. The operation SoX is performing is “time stretching” (followed by a broad treble reduction, to help counter some of the processing artefacts), so if you’re not going to use SoX, that’s the feature you need to find in whatever software you’re using. SoX does the best job of any software I’ve tried. LAME is just there to recode back to MP3, because the version of SoX I’m using can’t.

DISCLAIMER: This is a terrible way to listen to podcasts, don’t do it. If nothing else, it takes every ounce of concentration just to understand what’s being said, so it’s tiring work.

Through the wonders of technology I can take bad photos of inane crap and post them along with boring text straight to the Internet for all to see.