Orion's Eyes

Okonomiyaki

Okonomiyaki is a Japanese dish that is basically a vegetable filled pancake and is sometimes called Japanese Pizza. The name means "Cook as you please" or "As you like it." In Japan it is pretty popular but  hasn't seemed to have made much of an impact in the US. I have been making them for a long time from a recipe in The Tassajara Bread Book by Edward Espe Brown. It was published in 1970 so you have an idea how long. I loved it but never gave it much thought because I thought Mr. Brown made up the recipe to feed the visitors to the Tassajara Zen Center.

Here is the recipe that I have been using.



O-Kinomi-Yaki
Japanese pancakes made with vegetables (and meat), can be served as midnight meal with warm reults. Americans put butter on everything; Japanese prefer soy sauce, but syrup no.
(For 5 people)

1/2 cabbage: Chinese, green or red
1 large carrot
1/2 onion: yellow or purple
3 celery stalks
(1/2 c meat or fish pieces, if desired, or whatever you have around)
2 c (or more) flour: whole wheat and unbleached white
1 egg, beaten
2 T brown sugar
1 t salt
1 tall can evaporated milk
Enough water to make batter

Chop, shred, dice or thinly slice vegetables and meat. Mix together remaining ingredients to form batter. Fold vegetables into batter and grill. May be eaten cold on the beach.
(c) 1970 Chief Priest, Zen Center, San Francisco


I now find that Okonomiyaki has an illustrious history and two distinct regional variations - Osaka and Hiroshima. The recipe above is a simplified version of the Osaka tradition. 

Senno Rikyu started serving Ishi-yaki, the ancestor of the modern Okonomiyaki at tea ceremonies in 16th century Japan. It was a batter of flour and water spread on a grill, cooked through, brushed with sweetened miso and rolled up like a crepe. Ishi-yaki was followed by Monji-yaki and Dondon-yaki. Cooking Dondon-yaki was so much fun that it became a very popular form of entertainment and gets its name from the fact that the cook would bang a drum outside the shop to attract young customers. As people kept adding more and more ingredients Dondon-yaki became our modern day Okonomiyaki.

The Osaka version starts out like my recipe with shredded raw veggies in a pancake batter. Then another layer of veggies or meat is fried in a pan as a patty and the batter is poured over it. Pieces of other things like seaweed flakes or tempura crumbles are then imbedded in the batter and the whole thing is flipped over.

Hiroshima Okinomiyaki is even more complex. It starts with a crepe-like pancake. Cover this with a thin layer of flaked fish and a thick layer of shredded cabbage, chopped leeks and bean sprouts. Then spread three slices of bacon over the top of this and flip it over onto the bacon side.  Fry an egg and put the whole thing, bacon side down, on top of the egg. This sounds way too complex and uninteresting to me.

I will stick with my simplified Osaka recipe. I like to make up a batch on the weekend and keep them in the refrigerator for lunch all week. A couple of CD sized pancakes and a soy sauce packet and I am good to go. I do vary the veggies seasonally. The recipe from the Tassajara Bread Book I consider my winter recipe since it uses veggies that are readilly available then. I just made a batch where I substituted zucchini, yellow squash, eggplant, and a green pepper for the cabbage to make a summer Okinomiyaki. Also, because of my recent studies, I put clusters of sliced mushrooms or corn kernels in the frypan and poured the veggie batter over them. Yummie!

My thanks to the following web pages for their help in learning the background of my simple veggie pancakes.

About.com's Japanese Cuisine
Tsujicho.com's Okonomi-yaki
JapanGuide.Com
WIKIPEDIA's Okonomiyaki
Darke Child's Okinomi-yaki
Greggman.com's Okonomiyaki
NIPPONIA's Okonomi-yaki
Joyful Hiroshima





Posted by orion Jul 08 2006, 05:08:34 PM EDT Permalink Comments [1]

Billie Jean King - #97 of The 100 Most Influential Women of Alll Time

Deborah Felder's The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time is not the only ranking that has honored Billie Jean King. In 1990 Life listed her in their list of "The 100 Most Important Americans of the 20th Century." In 1972 she was the first woman and the first tennis player to be named Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year, and in 1994 Sports Illustrated ranked her #5 on their list of "Top 40 Athletes." ESPN lists her as #59 out of 100 "Top N. American Athletes of the Century."

The International Tennis Hall of Fame has a great biography that outlines her achievements in that field. Yet she is probably most widely known for beating Bobby Riggs in the 1973 "Battle of the Sexes" match in the Houston Astrodome. Larry Schwartz tells the story very well in his ESPN article entitled "Billie Jean Won for All Women." This article also reflects the real reason she is so highly honored; that is that she was such a leading figure in the advancement of women's rights. Schwartz quotes Frank Deford as saying: "She has prominently affected the way 50 percent of society thinks and feels about itself in the vast area of physical exercise."

Next: #96 - Katherine Hepburn


Posted by orion Jun 15 2006, 08:45:13 AM EDT Permalink Comments [0]

Edith Head - #98 of The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time

Here's a trivia question. Which woman has won the most Academy Awards?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------


Edith Head with eight Academy Awards:

1. 1949 - Costume Design (Black and White) - The Heiress
2. 1950 - Costume Design (Black and White) - All About Eve
3. 1950 - Costume Design (Color) - Samson and Delilah
4. 1951 - Costume Design (Black and White) - A Place in the Sun
5. 1953 - Costume Design (Black and White) - Roman Holiday
6. 1954 - Costume Design (Black and White) - Sabrina
7. 1960 - Costume Design (Black and White) -The Facts of Life
8. 1973 - Costume Design - The Sting

She was nominated for 35 Oscars between 1948 and 1977. She worked on over 1000 films and ran the design department at Paramount. The Internet Movie Database has a list of movies she worked on ranging from 1927 to 1982. Her designs were widely copied by retailers and became a part of the American scene. No wonder Deborah Felder chose her for inclusion in her book The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time.

Next: #97 - Billie Jean King (1943-    )
Posted by orion Jun 13 2006, 03:54:38 PM EDT Permalink Comments [0]

#99 - Elsie de Wolfe: Countdown of the 100 Most Influential Women of All Time

Deborah Felder says her inclusion of Elsie de Wolfe (aka Lady Mendl) in The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time may seem somewhat frivolous since she is known primarily as an interior decorator who lived in an openly lesbian relationship and ran a salon where the rich and talented mingled. Yet it is for all of these reasons that de Wolfe is so influential.  Born in the Victorian Era, de Wolfe in her memoirs recalls: "I was an ugly child and I lived in an ugly age. From the moment I was conscious of ugliness and it's relation to myself and my surroundings, my one preoccupation was to find my way out of it. In my escape, I came to the meaning of beauty." Her revolt agains the heavy, dark, and cluttered Victorian styles defined much of 20th century design principles.

Canadian Interior Design outlines her design accomplishments in their online profiles of 12 Legendary Women Who Defined the Art of Style.  Her design principles are outlined in her most famous book The House in Good Taste which is available online from the University of Wisconsin's Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture.

De Wolfe's relationship with literary agent Elisabeth Marbury and her contributions to the Gay Community are best summed up in an online article in glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender & Queer Culture. 

Sadly the art of interior design is a fleeting one done in the most ephemeral of mediums, and what was so innovative about de Wolfe's styles in the first half of the 20th century now seem old-fashioned today. A good example of this is Sarah E. Mitchell's review of The House in Good Taste and her article "Did Elsie de Wolfe influence my grandmother's style of interior design?"on her website VintageDesigns.

Yet de Wolfe's work and lifestyle helped take the 20th century out of the Victorian Era and has defined much of what was 20th century style.  In 1926 the New York Times said de Wolfe was "one of the most widely known women in New York social life." She was immortalized in the lyrics of two of the era's leading composers. Irving Berlin's Harlem On My Mind mentions a "high-falutin' flat that Lady Mendl designed." In Anything Goes, Cole Porter, writing about how times have changed, says:

"When you hear that Lady Mendl, standing up
Now turns a handspring landing up-
On her toes
Anything goes!"


Next: #98 - Edith Head (1897-1981)


Posted by orion Jun 11 2006, 11:07:16 PM EDT Permalink Comments [0]

#100, Lucille Ball - Countdown of the 100 Most Influential Women of All Time

In ranking Lucille Ball as #100 in The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time, Deborah Felder calls Lucille Ball the most infuential woman in the most influential medium of all time, television. Ms. Ball also made the Time 100 list of the Most Important People of the 20th Century.

The Museum of Broadcast Communications calls her "The preeminent woman in the history of television."  A museum called The Lucille Ball, Desi Arnez Center in Jamestown, NY has a website with lots of information. Wikipedia calls her one of, if not the most popular television star and provides a filmography. If you want to see her in action, YouTube currently has a 6 minute tribute online called Lucy!

Next - #99 Elsie de Wolfe (1865-1950).

Posted by orion Jun 10 2006, 08:04:37 AM EDT Permalink Comments [0]

Countdown of the 100 Most Influential Women of All Time - Introduction

The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time (Polish Cover)
by Deborah G. Felder.

I came across this book (the English version doesn't have as dramatic a cover) which used a very simple method to derive a list of the most influential women of all time. The author "sent out questionnaires containing a list of 150 influential women to women's studies chairs" and other university and college professors. How many? 10 are listed in the Acknowledgments and she says 3 could not supply the information requested.

They were asked "to choose from the list their top ten most influential and to add any women they felt had been left out." In making the initial list the author chose women from a variety of fields. The book includes a list of 50 additional Honorable Mentions One may question the method and/or the results. However, to me, the existence of such a list is compelling.

I can't reprint Felder's essays (which average 3.5 pages); you will have to find a copy of the book to read them. However, if these women are truly what she claims, they must have a significant Web presence. So I have decided to see how well they are represented on the Web. I will take one a day and, in a sense, annotate her essays with links to online information. Will this become an endorsement of WIKIPEDIA? I hope not.

Tomorrow I will start with #100 - Lucille Ball.
Posted by orion Jun 09 2006, 09:54:55 PM EDT Permalink Comments [0]

Seeing the 20th Century Through Magazine First Issues


Covering America, Our 20th Century in Magazine First Issues is a delightful online  historic presentation of the past century as revealed by just over 100 magazine first issue covers. Each year is represented by the first issue cover of a magazine that started that year. The covers and the year it appeared stay on the screen for 4-5 seconds so don't start this unless you have a high speed connection and about seven minutes of spare time. If you are like me, you might want to wait until you have 15 minutes because I wanted to see it again when I was done.

Most of the big titles are here: RedBook, Time, Better Homes & Gardens, The New Yorker, Esquire, Mademoiselle, Life, Seventeen, Ebony, Modern Bride, Mad, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, New York, Mother Earth News, Ms., People Weekly, Byte, Omni, Marth Stewart Living, Vibe, Wired, Maxim, and the century ends with O.

TV Guide and Playboy share 1953. 1930's The Unemployed is followed by Repeal in 1931. Topical titles like Cry for Justice, Suffragist, and Flapper are also here. For a graphic overview of the century, this is well done.

Although the web site has very little information about its source, the article that pointed me to it says it is by David Leishman and is a promotion for his forthcoming book, Covering America: A History of the American Century in Magazine First Issues. His premise is that printed magazines were an unique phenomenon of the 20th century which technology will make obsolete very soon.  Posted by orion May 23 2006, 12:21:08 PM EDT Permalink Comments [0]

Triangle Jewish Film Festival,Sunday, May 21, Galaxy Cinema in Cary


The Triangle Jewish Film Festival is coming this Sunday, May 21, 2006 to the Galaxy Cinema in Cary. This is a full day of films from 10 am to 10 pm, with an all-day pass to five movies costing $25. If you don't want to make a day of it, you can see any single movie for $7. "I'd love to go, but money is tight" you say? Well, volunteering for 2 hours gets you into a movie.

The films are:

1. A Cantor's Tale;
2. Live and Become (Va, Vis et Deviens);
3. Go For Zucker;
4. Le Grand Role; and,
5. Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi.

A Cantor's Tale is  a feature-length documentary about Brooklyn-born Cantor Jacob "Jackie" Mendelson. It is a wonderful blend of cultural history and beautiful music that has won the Best Documentary Award at the Tel Aviv WorldEye Film Festival and the Audience Awards at the Miami Jewish Film Festival, the Washington DC Jewish Film Festival, and the San Diego Jewish Film Festival. Also, Cantor Jacob Mendelson will be at the festival so you might get a chance to meet him.

Live and Become is a film about a non-Jewish boy who leaves desparate conditions in Ethiopia disguised as a Jewish orphan during Operation Moses, a 1984 effort to move thousands of Jews from Ethiopia to Israel. Gloria Wong in Schema Magazine says: "It?s a beautifully acted, seamlessly executed and genuinely touching piece about courage, resilience and love ? things we festival-goers seem to eat up. Luckily in this case, those qualities are just the beginning."

Go for Zucker is a popular German comedy about a dysfunctional Jewish family that won 6 "German Oscars" and the Ernst Lubitsch Award for Best German Comedy.

Le Grand Role is a Peter Coyote film that was a 2004 Grand Prix Prize nominee at the Paris Film Festival. A Variety review said it was: ?A crowd-pleasing dramatic comedy about love, friendship, role-playing and Jewish pride?sprightly pace, sunny thesping, fine comic timing.?  

Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi is a film about a boy who takes care of all the people in his life. Elizabeth Weitzman of the New York Daily News said: "Though the film deals with some heavy issues, director Shemi Zarhin uses a generally light touch, rightly believing that a family drama does not have to be loud to make an impact."

At 11:15 there is a special free showing of Lasting Impressions, a 2004 documentary by Drew Levinson about Jewish life and influences in Robeson County NC, followed by Q&A with NC State Senator David F. Weinstein.

There will be a Kosher Deli and Children's art on display. Also the soothing musical sounds of Mishpacha, and the more invigorating Freylach Time, a Klezmer dance band. Music, food, movies, art, and even a North Carolina Senator! What else could you ask for?
Posted by orion May 18 2006, 07:43:49 AM EDT Permalink Comments [0]

Journal Evaluation Tools Online

Comparative evaluation of journals got a lot easier with two databases that are freely available on the Web.

The first is called Journal Cost-Effectiveness and was put together by two economists from California, Ted Bergstrom and Preston McAfee. It allows you to look up a journal or a group of journals in seventeen different subject areas. A subject group can then be sorted by price per article or citation. They put together two different single value ratios of this data called Composite Price Index (the geometric mean of the Price Per Article and the Price Per Citation) and Relative Cost Index (the CPI divided by the median CPI of non-profit journals in the same subject category).

The second is called Journal Value Project and is from the University of Wisconsin Madison Library. The data is limited to titles in their collection. It provides data on Cost per Page Cost per 1000 Words, and Cost per Article, and a single cost ratio they call the Barschall Factor after Prof. Heinz Barschall who pioneered this kind of analysis.

There may be other projects like this being done. If you know of one, why not leave a comment below.

What value are journal value studies like this? They can help researchers be good consumers when selecting journals for submission of research papers. Also they can help libraries that deal with hundreds or thousands of subscriptions to identify the good values from the truly expensive titles in their collections. Publishers can see when their titles are overpriced in relation to other titles in the field.
Posted by orion May 10 2006, 02:43:44 PM EDT Permalink Comments [0]

Watch WorldCat Grow

Started to allow users to watch WorldCat reach its one billionth record, Watch WorldCat Grow is a great place to see random book titles. Updated every eight seconds, this site provides the latest entry into the WorldCat database, the OCLC Online Union Catalog of over 50,000 libraries worldwide. A great place for serendipity or inspiration. It has grown by almost 60 million titles since the one billionth record was added August 11, 2005. At the site you can also see a picture of that one billionth item and the librarian who cataloged it.

The record display changes every 8 seconds allowing you time to read each item. They appear to be batch loads because each time I go to this site I see records that have been contributed by predominantly one library. This morning a bunch of German titles, yesterday the titles were on nuclear engineering. In the 8 second interval anywhere from 10 to 50 records are added to WorldCat (average = 20). So what you see are samples from the full stream of added content.
Posted by orion May 10 2006, 07:41:11 AM EDT Permalink Comments [0]

Why Orion's Eyes?



The name for this blog comes from ancient Greek legend. Orion was a suitor for the love of honey-faced Merope, who lived on the island Chios where she was either the consort or daughter of Oinopion, a son of Dionysius. Oinopion gave Orion a task of rifdding the island of wild beasts to keep him from Merope. When he couldn't stall anymore, Oinopion got Orion drunk on honey wine, blinded him, and cast him off the island. Following the sound of the ringing of an anvil, he made his way to Hephaistos, the smithy of the gods, who told him he must seek out the first light of Helios, the Sun god, just when his chariot rises from the eastern sea. There the sun's first rays would restore his sight. Orion borrowed one of the apprentices, Cedalion, as a guide and regained his sight.

This story appealed to me 30 years ago when I first heard it because I was doing some amateur research on the ancient traditions of sun worship and sun-staring. So much did I like this story that I started calling myself Orion, first as a nickname, and later when I had my name legally changed. Orion loses his normal sight of the illusiary world, only to get back true vision. Such is the myth of sun-staring.

One of the books that I was reading at the time was  Project X: The Search for the Secrets of Immortality by Gene Savoy (Bobbs-Merrill, 1977).  Savoy was an Indiana Jones type character and his book is listed in catalog records as Occult Fiction, but classed under Occult not under Fiction. If it is fiction it is in the same vein as Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan books are. In it, he claims that pre-Inca and Inca civilizations originally occupied the tropical rain forests, and built their pyramids to gain altitude for staring into the rising sun. Studying geodesic maps, he used this theory to predict the location of Incan sites, and was very successful in finding them.

I have given up my research on sun-staring, but not my attempts to gain true vision. Books and libraries have always been helpful in this. I hope to use this blog to point out some insightful things to be found in any good university library.
Posted by orion May 04 2006, 09:06:28 PM EDT Permalink Comments [0]

ISBN-13 For Dummies




ISBN-13 For Dummies. Zoe Wykes

ISBN-13 For Dummies is a great introduction to a sweeping change in the numbering system for books. Starting in January 2007 all books will be issued a 13 character ISBN rather than the traditional 10 character number that has been in use for over 30 years. This short 16 page guide also talks about how the ISBN relates to EANs (International Article Numbers) that are used on non-book items for sale and the 14 digit Global Trade Identification Numbers (GTIN). It also shows you how to compute the last digit of the new 13-digit ISBNs so you can convert your existing 10-digit ISBNs to the new 13-digit ones.

Admittedly, this is primarily for the book publishing and selling crowd and their programming staff. So most of us buyers don't need to think about it. However, with desk-top publishing, more and more of us are becoming small independent publishers, and then all this will be extremely helpful. This publication even tells you where to get ISBNs for your books (no, you can't just make them up!).

Even the casual book buyer may want to know a little about the secret inner workings of the book industry and this is the answer. Best of all it is a free PDF on the Internet. Posted by orion May 04 2006, 02:53:08 PM EDT Permalink Comments [0]

Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present

Leonardo to the Internet : Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology) by Thomas J. Misa. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

LEONARDO TO THE INTERNET takes a broad historic look at the defining technologies of eight different eras between the 15th century and today. The author, Thomas Misa, is a professor in the Department of Humanities at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He looks at the relationship between technology and the various cultures of these periods and shows that "technology is not only a force for but also a product of social and cultural change."

In the first chapter, "Technologies of the Court," he looks at the court engineers, including Leonardo da Vinci, the invention of perspective in painting, and the Gutenberg printing press to show how these technologies were used, not for economic gain, but to support the royal courts and city-states of the Renaissance era.

The second chapter is entitled "Techniques of Commerce" and looks at the period from 1588 to 1740 when Dutch merchants amassed fortunes using technologies like herring fishing boat factories, windmills, and fine textiles manufacture and developed an international trade second to none. They used their wealth to support fine artists and to speculate in tulip bulbs.

"Geographies of Industry" is the third chapter and it covers the period from 1740 to 1851, the time of the Industrial Revolution in England. Rather than the cities normally considered the homes of industry in this period, Misa takes a close look at industry in London, using beer brewing as his focus. He then compares London to Manchester's textiles industry and Sheffield steel manufacture. He does this to create a much more complex image of the Industrial Revolution, and to show that there were many paths to industrialization in the period.

1840 to 1914 is the subject of "Instruments of Empire," the fourth chapter. Here Misa looks at how British Imperialism and the technologies of railroads, steamships, and telegraphy interacted to create a world-spanning empire.

Chapter five, Science and Systems, covers a second industrial revolution that took place between 1870 and 1930. Here the German science-based chemical industry developed a synthetic-chemical empire based originally on fabric dyes. Also science and technological research became an integral part of industry, driving out the independent inventors of earlier times. The author also looks to America's electric lighting struggle between direct and alternating current systems. Out of these developments came modern German companies like IG Farben, BASF, Bayer, and AGFA, as well as the American firms of Westinghouse and General Electric. Misa also looks at the beginning of university industrial partnerships with the development of the MIT labs.

The first half of the 20th century is the focus of chapter six, "Materials of Modernism." Here the Italian Futurists, the German Bauhaus, and the Dutch Modernists take the modern materials of steel and glass to redefine architecture and aesthetic theories.

"The Means of Destruction," chapter seven, looks at the relationship between the military and technological innovation in the 20th century. Misa calls World War II a "war of innovation" and looks closely at the atomic programs on both sides of the war as an example of how this relationship developed. The author shows that after the war this military-technology relationship still held sway. He uses the examples of the development of solid-state electronics and digital computers to illustrate this.

In chapter 8, "Toward a Global Culture," the author shows how Globalization was the major trend in last 30 years of the 20th century. He uses the development of the international standards that made the fax machine an everyday commodity as a case study of how this happened. Then he turns his attention to the world-wide food chain McDonald's to show how culture and technology give and take together in globalization. He then ends up with a discussion of the global Internet culture, but with a nod back to the previous chapter as he shows the military influences that developed the Internet.

He ends up with a summary chapter called "The Question of Technology" where he discusses the dynamics between Science, Economics, Culture, and Change. It is here that Misa points out that the relationship between Technology and Society is a constant give and take. There is a sad note to this summation as he states that he feels the attacks of September 11, 2001 signalled an end to this era. He states that the reactions to these attacks do not fit a pattern of globalization, and goes on to say that the "vision of a peaceful world, economically integrated and culturally harmonious, knitted together by information technology, is dead." He looks forward to a new era where reformers, social movements and groups of citizens embrace technological solutions to shape a new future.

Posted by orion May 04 2006, 12:38:00 PM EDT Permalink Comments [0]

Osamu Tezuka's Buddha Graphic Novel Series

Osama Tezuka was a highly renowned Japanese Manga author who died in 1989. Although he has produced much work, my contact with him is through a series depicting the life of the Buddha in a graphic novel series that has now reached 8 volumes in its US edition

Tasha Robinson, in her review for The A.V. Club on February 28, said: "If not for its staggering length and breadth, Osamu Tezuka's manga series Buddha would read like a child's history of Buddhism. The cute, wide-eyed, Disney-influenced animals, diversions into goofy humor, and bouncy, propulsive pacing are all indicative of a story for younger readers. But Tezuka's expansive generational approach gives his narrative an ambitiously adult heft -- it stretches out over eight chunky volumes, created from 1974 to 1984, and released by Vertical over the last two years -- and Tezuka's approach to Buddha's teachings are as reverential and thoughtful as his sight gags and comic anachronisms are irreverent."

At $25 a volume this can become an expensive thing to read. Indeed, there are many one-volume lives and even videos that capture the life of the Buddha wonderfully. Yet Tezuka brings a lightness and modernity to the topic that can't be beat. Check your local library to see if they have them. If not, talk to them about buying them. They will be a wonderful addition to any collection. Here are the titles in case you need help.

1. Kapilavastu
2. The Four Encounters
3. Devadatta
4. The Forest of Uruvela
5. Deer Park
6. Ananda
7. Prince Ajatasattu
8. Jetavana

Posted by orion May 03 2006, 02:21:07 PM EDT Permalink Comments [1]