I awoke on Saturday to what could only have been a new Weezer song playing on Maya's laptop. I'd been quite unaware of any of their recent activities, and wasn't looking to get my hopes up about about a return to form. But I have to say that when the song ended I liked it more than I've liked a new Weezer song in a long time. It's classic Weezer in pretty much every easily measured way, but I think it has something that all the Hash Pipes, Dope Noses, and Beverly Hills never had. (I never heard more than a couple of songs off "Make Believe", and heard those only a couple of times.)

Rivers has swung wildly in many directions when it comes to his connection with fans. In the days of Pinkerton, and before mass internet availability, the band's catalog was so small that finding a copy of a CD single with a previously unheard B-side was a major life event for me and some of my friends. There were rumors of an entire aborted attempt at Pinkerton that was either sitting in Rivers' closet or had been destroyed in the archetypal fit of rage. Years later, the band started posting dozens of demos of new songs on its website, and I collected them dutifully, gradually realizing that there had been a seismic shift in Rivers' ways and that none of the songs had much meaning or significance. Where Weezer songs had once been rare and precious things, they had somehow become a commodity.

Now Rivers appears to have become some kind of Youtube addict, not only featuring many of its cult figures in their video, but participating in an interactive songwriting project with its masses, with videos of Rivers discussing songwriting methods with his voice pitched comically up or down. It's hard not to see the Pork and Beans video as pandering a bit, trying to become a meta-cult hit as it celebrates its audience. Then again, its message is certainly relevant, the video is entertaining, and the song's definitely got something.

Nice headline from Bloomberg: Airlines May Start Treating Passengers `Like Freight'. They're having to get very creative in dealing with fuel costs, and many ideas are mentioned in the article, although no one actually admits to considering charging passengers by their own weight.

Meanwhile, a great first sentence in a Times article: Opponents of teaching evolution, in a natural selection of sorts, have gradually shed those strategies that have not survived the courts.

Maya and I spent a week in Paris in March. It was my third time there and Maya's first. My first time, in junior year of college, was spent mostly shuttling between museums and churches in the cold of winter, and it was still pretty great. I didn't eat any French food, but we were there during the transition from the Franc to the Euro, causing us to accidentally order a 60 Euro bottle of champagne on new year's eve. The second time was with my friend Jordan (previously known as Mr. Extreme Sloth), who had no interest in museums or other tourist attractions. We ate a lot of French food and I did a lot of preparatory research for the first time. This trip was something of a mix of the previous two, activity-wise.

The travel itself was a trial; in both directions, our initial flight was delayed, while our connecting flight was not as delayed, forcing us to sprint through Heathrow and delaying our checked luggage. Then some things happened that we won't mention, like going to wrong airports and booking hotel rooms for wrong days. Moving on!

The Rodin museum was one of my favorite places. The Hôtel Biron, where Rodin lived for quite a while, is a great building, the grounds are pleasant and immaculately manicured, and the sculpture is just amazing. At first I had trouble understanding why he was such a controversial figure in his time, but a biography that Maya picked out from the gift shop has helped. More on that in a future post, I hope.

We hit up Pierre Hermé, one of the foremost patissiers in town, on Macaroon Day, which I had been lucky enough to hear about. They had a vast selection of flavors, many of them quite unusual, as well as the ones that have made them famous, such as the sublime Ispahan. The deal was 3 free macaroons of your choice, plus an extra one of a flavor specially made for the day, for a donation to a charity. I chose white truffle hazelnut, vanilla & olive oil, and Campari & grapefruit. The first and third were interesting but not perfect, while the vanilla and olive oil was revelatory. Maya chose Ispahan (rose, lychee and raspberry), Mogador (chocolate and passion fruit), and caramel and sea salt. We ate them on a bench in the adjacent Place St. Sulpice.

This was a stupendously inspiring experience for me. I felt lifted by the evident passion and perfectionism that had gone into crafting these cookies. Their colors and decorations were vibrant and unique, and the way such disparate ingredients had been incorporated and combined was masterful. I wanted nothing more than to return home and start baking and experimenting on my own, if nothing else to try to replicate what I had eaten so that I could have it more than once every several years. Of course I didn't do that, because I have seventeen other obsessions piling up in addition to my full-time job, but I will get to it when the time is right. We went back the next day and bought two dozen more macaroons which we painstakingly brought back for our friends (they are exceedingly fragile).

On our last day in town, we decided to make an attempt at visiting the boutique of Rick Owens, a fashion designer whom we had just read about in The New Yorker (abstract only). The store was located in the Palais Royale, a huge rectangular frame of buildings lined with stores, with a park in the middle. There was a map where we entered, but much of it was helpfully obscured by some paste-up. A fence made it all but impossible to identify the stores unless walking right alongside them, meaning that we might have had to take the whole circuit to find it. We did not have the energy to do this, and how sure could I be that I would recognize his clothes? After some amount of wandering, I found a security guard's office and he pointed us in the right direction.

The boutique's door was locked, but there were some clerks inside. It took about five minutes of ambivalently peering in and trying the door before someone finally let us in. I couldn't really blame them; I'm sure we didn't look like anyone about to drop twelve hundred Euros on a leather jacket. But I'm glad we braved a place of haute couture. We saw the anatomically correct wax statue that Owens had commissioned of himself, now wearing a black curtain for at least one type of modesty. We saw his "mega turbo boots"; I'm impressed that any independent designer can make his own sneakers, as they seem like a definitively mass-produced object. And we saw many amazing creations, in feathery and exotic fabrics, that showed the immense skill the New Yorker had described in sewing to manipulate shape. Some of the features reminded me of the minimal surfaces seen in the science of topology. We contemplated buying something, but in the end, the minimum expenditure of a hundred and sixty dollars for a distressed tank top that looked like it could fall to pieces at any moment was too hard to justify. Maybe when I'm a rockstar.

As I ate lunch in an office building's subterranean food court today, the house piano player, a distinguished man in a suit, riffed on the melody of Peter, Bjorn and John's Young Folks.

1. When I got an ice cream maker, I was excited to try out some of the recipes in "The Sweet Life" dessert cookbook. For a holiday meal I made two: Apple Cider and Caramel Ice Cream, and Quince Sorbet. The first came off well and offered my first opportunity to make caramel, and as the book said it would, the flavor was quite reminiscent of Tarte Tatin. But I have to admit I was a bit disappointed that the flavor of the two ingredients was so fused, rather than remaining independently recognizable.

The Quince Sorbet turned out very nicely, and was pretty fun to make. The book advised that leaving the seeds in during the preparation, then straining them out at the end, would allow the pectin in them to act as a natural gelatin and make the sorbet creamier. The texture was unique, quite different from that of other sorbet, perhaps halfway between sorbet and Jell-o. The results are below.

2. When I finally got a large Le Creuset Dutch/French oven, I tried out the No-Knead Bread recipe from the New York Times. The recipe's concept is that letting the dough sit at room temperature for an extended period does the same work that kneading would normally do. Supposedly this technique allows home cooks to produce bread of the same calibre as the best bakeries.

The recipe instructs us to "Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature." I let it rest for the full 18, but I found that at that point the dough had actually fallen some from the volume it had at 12 hours. This may have contributed to the compressed appearance the bread had after cooking. It was pretty tasty, but a small reward for the effort because it got stale very very quickly.

3. I spoke recently of my devotion to Pierre Hermé's macarons, or French macaroons. I took the chance to try making my own when the office held a cookie bake-off. I thought I might try to recreate the flavors in the Ispahan, but although I did find Rose water, I couldn't find any lychees in the time I had. So instead I went with chocolate and raspberry, and combined recipes from the web and The Sweet Life. The preparations were a lot of fun and a big mess. Maya offered some much-appreciated assistance in assembling the final product.

To my great surprise, I ended up winning the bake-off. The best part of this was that while everyone was tasting cookies, the bakers were anonymous, so I got to hear everyone's totally honest reactions. Some said that my macaroons tasted like Milanos, others compared them to peanut butter and jelly, and others just made interesting faces. After my trip to Pierre Hermé and the fun I had making them, I think I'll stick to my theme if there's ever another bake-off, and experiment with flavors some more.

4. I've also been pretty excited about Molecular Gastronomy, whatever its limitations, and wanting to see if I can do any of it at home without any anti-griddles or vacuum cookers. I perused the recipe collection at Khymos.org, and one struck me as requiring almost no effort or special ingredients at all. It wasn't really a recipe so much as the idea, from Hervé This, that if you made an emulsion of egg white and olive oil, and heated it in a microwave, it would set as a gel. This might not taste very good on its own, but it was suggested that one could add other flavors easily. There were no measures specified.

When I microwaved the mixture, bubbles expanded outward and upward in an impressive display. I let the microwave go for about ten seconds. When I turned it off, the mixture lost its volume abruptly. I took it out, and it had basically turned into a small puck of cooked egg white. In appearance and smell it was just about the nastiest thing I've ever made; I didn't bother tasting it.

The recipe collection has now been updated and much improved, and this idea has become a real recipe, with fruit syrup in the place of olive oil. It states that one egg white will yield two liters of foam, and that only a couple of seconds in the microwave are necessary.

With my building having been built in 1915, my apartment has a fair amount of 'character.' We can see where it was divided with the apartment next door. Our bedroom used to be the dining room and had large French doors. There's no proper grounding in the electrical outlets. Some of the doors have old-fashioned keyholes. The bathtub is actually a cast iron one with feet that have been covered up by tile; there is no flat part on which to stand, and the overflow drain goes nowhere that's helpful. Looking at more recent times, our door has three locks and a chain, and a vestigial part from an alarm system.

One of the more interesting items is a square bump in the kitchen wall. My former roommate's father, a man of encyclopedic knowledge in areas that you wouldn't even know how to look up, identified it as a potato bin. Apparently it was a box built into the wall such that the lack of insulation made it a natural refrigerator in the winter. It had been sealed shut by many layers of paint, and I didn't think about it much after that, until its paint started peeling and I wanted to scrape it all off and repaint, perhaps with an accent color. I didn't know if I'd be able to get it open in the process, but it was an intriguing possibility.

Sure enough, while chipping away around the edges, I saw it budge, and it wasn't much of a struggle from there. The bin contained cobwebs, a bottle of lemon cleanser, a sponge, a rag, a spring, and a bar of soap. It had been lined with linoleum. The sponge started to crumble when I touched it. Interesting to think about the lives of those who last saw these items, and how this bin went from one use to another and then was sealed and forgotten.