Author: The Grey Literature

This is the personal blog of Benjamin Gregory Carlisle PhD. Queer; Academic; Queer academic. "I'm the research fairy, here to make your academic problems disappear!"

Authentic Bajoran Hasperat

Authentic Bajoran Hasperat
Authentic Bajoran Hasperat

My little sister and I made some Authentic Bajoran Hasperat tonight. I was hungry while watching an episode of Star Trek once. It was an episode that featured a fictional (but delicious-looking) dish called “hasperat.” I wanted to eat some, even though I knew it didn’t exist. Then, I Googled it, and discovered that there was someone who had made a recipe for it. We made it tonight. It was good!

 

I think from now on, I will refer to all wraps as variations on hasperat. “Yes, I’ll have the turkey hasperat, please.”

The prop for Hasperat from "Preemptive Strike"
The prop for Hasperat from “Preemptive Strike”

For reference, I have included on this post a photograph of the prop used in Star Trek for hasperat.

Edit: 2016 May 27

The original recipe has been taken down, but I saved a copy, so here it is:

Hasperat

For Two

  • 2 10″ Wheat Tortillas
  • 1/2 Cup Hummus (Any flavor, plain or horseradish is nice)
  • 1 Small Cucumber, sliced very thin (about 1/2 cup)
  • 1 Carrot, shredded (about 1/3 cup)
  • 1 1/2 Tbs Tamari (or regular soy sauce)
  • 1 1/2 Tbs Rice Vinegar
  • Black Pepper
  • 2 Small Handfuls Baby Spinach
  • Hot Chili Sauce/Tabasco, optional

Using a mandoline, or your food processor, or a sharp knife, slice the cucumber very thinly and place in a large bowl. Add the carrot. Add tamari and rice vinegar and toss. Let marinate 5-10 minutes (or longer, if desired).

Warm your tortillas so they’re pliable. You can microwave them for a few seconds with a damp paper towel, heat them in a dry skillet, or (my favorite) hold them directly over the flame of your gas burning stove.

Spread the tortillas with hummus, 3-4 Tbs each, making sure you cover the entire surface. This will help the sandwich stick together. Arrange the cucumber slices in one layer, slightly overlapping. Add carrot, and sprinkle some fresh pepper over the top. Add a layer of baby spinach.

Roll up the wrap, tucking in the ends, and place on a hot grill pan to slightly warm and create pretty grill marks. You can do this in a regular pan if you don’t have a grill pan. Slice and eat immediately.

TA-ship for next semester

Recently, I found out that I have been offered a second TA-ship. This is great, because it means that I will have enough money to last me for the rest of the semester and a bit into the summer. Last year, I only had one TA-ship and I pretty much ran out of money at the end of the school year (which is why it was such a big deal for me to get a job right away, and why I was so panicked about it at the time).

I will be a TA for Contemporary Moral Issues. I’m not sure who the prof is, yet. I’m looking forward to TA-ing this course. I think it will be more like last year’s TA-ship than the one I’m just finishing, because the course isn’t really a “core” philosophy course—there will be many students taking the course who are not philosophy majors, just like the biomedical ethics course from last year.

Gingerbread Tardis

Tardis
"Hello, I'm the Doctor."

In light of some difficult family circumstances, I decided to take a night and do something silly. I had a friend over, one with whom I am in the habit of watching Doctor Who. While the result wasn’t quite as good as some other gingerbread Tardises on the internet, I am very happy to present photographs from last night’s project.

Usually, when I make something creative with gingerbread, I use a lot of red food colouring. You know, for the blood.

This time, however, the carnage was only an afterthought. I didn’t mean for there to be such a high death toll. Honest! And further, I think that the massacre was relatively tasteful for me.

The only cookie cutters I own
The only cookie cutters I own

The real reason why there was so many dead people is not because of the (very adorable) gingerbread Daleks. It’s mostly because I only own cookie cutters that have pieces missing from them. (Thanks for the present, Steph!)

You’ll note that even the gingerbread man who I assume is supposed to be the Doctor (the one who is halfway inside the Tardis) is missing his hand. My interpretation of this is that this is a scene from the few seconds during which the Doctor had his hand cut off by the Sycorax before it regenerated. This makes sense, because that happened during the “Christmas Invasion Special,” and it’s a gingerbread Tardis, so it should be on a Christmas theme, after all.

Tardis and bodies
"Exterminate!"

Free time in grad school

Let us define “free time (0)” to mean something like “time where a person has no particular appointments or where she has no duties that need to fulfilled within that time.” So, for example, an hour break between classes would be an example of free time (0).

There is another sense of free time that is not captured by free time (0). Let us define “free time (1)” to mean something like “time where a person doesn’t have anything that she even could be doing during that time.” For a person with free time (1), that person would be able to say, “I don’t have any assignments hanging over my head right now.” Of course, for such a concept to be useful, it may be necessary to specify a domain over which it applies—so one might meaningfully say, “I have free time (1) with respect to my job, but not with respect to my chores at home.” It would be rare indeed to have free time (1) without qualification.

So for example, a student between semesters, or at the beginning of the summer break has free time (1) as far as school is concerned. And if we consider the previous example, it’s easy to see how a person might have free time (0) in an hour break between classes, but how that person will not truly have free time (1) until after she writes her final exam and hands in all her assignments, because until then, there is always more preparation and work that she could do.

When I worked at my 9-5 job this summer, I was lucky because I had a lot of free time (1) with respect to my job, even though I didn’t really have as much free time (0) as I had when I was in school. That is to say, I didn’t have much free time (0) because my job dictated that I spend the hours between 9h in the morning to 17h in the afternoon at my desk, doing particular things. I had little free time (0) in that sense. Contrarily, I had plenty of free time (1), compared to being at school. At school, really, the only time you get free time (1) is when you are between semesters (and sometimes not even then). At work, I had free time (1) from my job every night. When I left my work, the responsibilities of the office stayed at the office. I never had homework. I never had exams. There was a clear line separating my work-life from the rest of my life. In fact, as far as work was concerned, the set of hours that made up my free time (0) was exactly co-extensive with the set of hours that made up my free time (1).

Now that I’m working on my thesis full-time, I have more free time (0) than I have ever had in my life, especially now that my office hours and conferences are over for the semester. The trade-off is that I don’t ever have any free time (1). There is always something else I could be reading, or something I should be writing or a revision to my thesis that I should be working on. There is no time that I couldn’t point to on my day-timer of which I couldn’t say, “maybe I should use this time for my thesis.”

Here’s where it gets interesting: I believe both that I’ve never truly had any free time (1) while in school, and that somehow this experience of writing my thesis means that I have even less free time (1) than I had before. This is obviously a contradiction (to think that I never had something before and that now I somehow have less), so it means that my conception of free time (1) is too simple.

So let’s now re-define free time (x) as being time with no particular appointments or tasks to do, when there is up to (1-x) times a full workload’s responsibility “hanging over your head.” And x can be any real number between 0 and 1, inclusive.

Awesome. The previous definitions still hold, pretty much, and it gives us the language for describing the difference between my experience in undergrad and my experience with my thesis.

My experience in undergrad was that while I never actually did experience free time (1), I often experienced free time (1/2) or free time (3/4). I would come to a point where I only had a very few things that I could reasonably do (after all, there’s a finite number of review questions for your chemistry test) and so I wouldn’t feel the weight of the full workload’s responsibility. At the beginning of each semester in my undergrad, I would have free time (x) with a higher value for x than at the end of the semester.

With my thesis, on the other hand, even though the whole thing is divided into chapters, it’s more like one long paper than a series of short and connected ones. For example, I have to make sure that any changes I make to one chapter will agree with the other chapters. My supervisor uses the analogy of building a railroad. I have to make sure that the tracks at one end (chapter one) line up with the tracks at the other end (the last chapter). My thesis is a whole, in some ways, and so I think that’s why my experience with regard to free time is different than it was during my undergrad. I sometimes do experience a little bit of free time (1/4), though, but that’s after I submit a draft of a chapter or something.

In conclusion, right now I have lots of free time (0), no free time (1), and only little bits of free time (1/4), every once in a while.

And for the record, I did write this while procrastinating on writing my thesis.

A bacon-related death

I used to have the phone number for my little sister’s landlord programmed into my phone. I forget why, exactly, but one day, a couple years ago, I accidentally sent the following text to the landlord’s number rather than my little sister’s:

“I am about to die a bacon-related death.”

My little sister’s landlord replied, “I don’t know who you are, but whoever you are, stop eating bacon!”

Great Expectations

I’ve been slowly working my way through Dickens’ Great Expectations as my most recent Metro reading. (The last thing I was reading on the Metro was The Deptford Trilogy, and before that, Nikolski, both of which I recommend.)

Right now, I’m at the point where the escaped convict reveals himself to be the mysterious benefactor of the protagonist. I’ve never read it before, so don’t spoil it for me if you know how it ends!

Here is a list of three fun words whose meanings I have learned while reading this book:

  • Fain
  • Prolix
  • Akimbo

If you legitimately know the meanings of all these words without looking them up, you get three points.