the naming of chicken parts

Some people profess to be puzzled as to why other people eat chicken wings. "They're just little bags of bones," I've heard it said. Yes! I reply. That is why I like them! Wings have a higher-ratio of skin to meat than other chicken pieces, and it's the skin - and the seasoning and coating on it - that make chicken more than just good.

Whole chicken wings are less commonly served these days than before. What's become trendy in the last few decades is single joints of wings. The wing is cut into three pieces, the tips are discarded (season and cook them, and I'd eat them), and the rest makes two pieces.

One of those pieces, the one directly connected to the breast before it's cut off, is called the drumette, due to its resemblance to a miniature of the leg piece known as the drumstick from its resemblance to a etc. But what is the other piece called? For a long time I didn't know, which was frustrating because it was my preferred piece. But then I began to accumulate names:

Flats are what I found them called at the original Buffalo wing bar in Buffalo, and which I subsequently confirmed is a generally recognized term among others who serve wing pieces as snacks. Wingstop, for instance, uses the term.

Mid-joints is how they're labeled when you buy them uncooked at an Asian grocery. Many Chinese restaurants that serve chicken wing pieces only use the mid-joints.

Wingettes is how they're referred to on bags of cooked and frozen wing pieces in supermarkets. Isn't that a more general term for all the pieces? No, because the bag reads "wingettes and drumettes."

By any of those names ...

it's spring

If you feel like finding something, however nominal, to celebrate, today's the vernal equinox - and it's this, not Daylight Saving Time, which is primarily responsible for the greater light we're getting in the evening - so here's something to celebrate with:

"Here Comes the Sun," by George Harrison and the Beatles, performed as it would have been done by a ragtime band of circa 1910:



Enjoy!

books

Source Code: My Beginnings, Bill Gates (Knopf, 2025)
Covers the mogul's life up until Microsoft packed up in Albuquerque and moved to Seattle. It's a remarkably self-reflective memoir for someone on the autism spectrum. Gates attributes the secret of his success as his ability to concentrate ceaselessly on any task that interests him, an inclination not shared, to his irritation, by his business partners, except for one friend who died in a mountain-climbing accident while they were still in high school. Gates' intellectual passion was for anything that could be defined exactly, without gray areas or ambiguity. At school he thought of himself as a mathematician, and he was the best one at his school. But when he got to Harvard, he found - as have many others who've gone there - that everybody at Harvard had been the best at their school, and others now outshone him. His turning point came when a friend suggested that he concentrate on what he was the best at, computer programming. This had been a neglected field because software was then thought of as the free supplement to hardware. Gates credits himself with changing that attitude. But when he started a real company, he found himself concerned with covering the practical necessities of running a business, which - again - his business partners had no interest in. He had a real love/hate relationship with Paul Allen in particular: they were friends, appreciated each other's talents, but got on each other's nerves and argued fiercely.

The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians, 1962-1993, Anthony Burgess (Carcanet, 2024)
I picked this up at the concert with Burgess's music I attended a few weeks ago. It's a UK publication not in print in the US. It's a large (75 items) collection of Burgess's music journalism - reviews and feature articles. It does not include his monograph This Man and Music, though there is some overlap in content. It's mostly classical, of course, and when he dips into popular music you wish he hadn't. The title article is on whether music can be dangerous, and he dismisses pop music as too puerile (his word) to be of any concern: that's why the Devil prefers Mozart. Burgess claims to be writing for a general audience, but often delves rather bewilderingly into technical talk: I've had a modest technical training in harmonic theory, but I couldn't always follow him. Because these are separate pieces, there's a lot of repetition, including of Burgess's weird theory that Lady Macbeth's "Screw your courage to the sticking place" refers to tuning a lute. The editor, Paul Phillips, provides footnotes correcting numerous factual errors.

three concerts

I had a busy weekend.

Friday: Pavel Haas Quartet, San Francisco
Average-quality performances of two average-quality quartets by Dvořák (Op. 61) and Tchaikovsky (No. 3).

Saturday: Santa Cruz Chamber Players, Aptos
I had to attend this, because when I won their bassoon theme competition last year, the prize was a free ticket to one of this year's concerts. The season is almost over and this was the first one I could get to.
But I was interested anyway. Light and reedy tenor Andrew Carter sang 1) songs with piano by Harry T. Burleigh, Dvořák's Black pupil whose work I'd never heard before (very plush late Romantic), 2) songs without piano but with viola (!) by RVW (violist, Polly Malan), 3) a song with both piano and viola by the impresario of this concert, Chris Pratorius Gomez. Pianist Kiko Torres Velasco also unloaded Beethoven's Op. 109 sonata, a bit clumsily at first but with increasing effectiveness as it went on.

Sunday: Esmé Quartet, Willow Glen
For review at SFCV, but I'd want to get to this anyway. The Esmé are supreme at conveying the sprawling masterworks of the SQ repertoire. When they played Dvořák's Op 106, I wrote, "This was awesome, a performance for the ages." When they played Schubert's G Major, I wrote, "one felt floating along in a timeless state of bliss." This time it was Beethoven's Op. 131, a particular challenge to make comprehensible, and I wrote, "This lucid presentation came off as warm, even friendly" and that in all such works, they combine "grace and drive with ideal balance and expression." Most satisfactory.

Sofia Gubaidulina

I just came across the news that Sofia Gubaidulina died on Thursday, at the age of 93.

Here's the most extensive and explanatory piece about her music I've written, in a review of a San Francisco Symphony concert back in 2009:

Sofia Gubaidulina, 77 years old and the most senior of distinguished living women composers, her round face reflecting her Tatar ancestry, leaned forward in her chair and stared in an intense birdlike way at the interviewer posing wordy, vapid questions in a language the listener knows little of, then waited as the self-effacing translator (Laurel Fay, actually one of the most formidable American scholars of modern Russian music) rendered them into Russian, then replied in the same language for Fay to make English of it.

They were talking about Gubaidulina's The Light of the End, a recent orchestral composition that the SFS then performed under Kurt Masur. This is, the composer explained, a work about the conflict between the pure tones of just intonation, represented by the French horns, and the modern compromised system of equal temperament, represented by, I guess, the rest of the orchestra. The moments when the horns went on their way against other instruments produced an intense sub-intervalic dissonance very different from the boring old chromatic dissonances of your average modern composer. It had an almost spiritually cleansing effect, especially as it was used as punctuation, not a steady diet, and the whole thing was resolved into pure consonance at the conclusion, the "light of the end" of her title.

But that's Gubaidulina for you. Much of her music has a hushed, expectant quality. This piece was louder and more forceful than others of her works I know, but it played on that expectancy. And her mastery of the orchestra and capability for creating a distinctive voice were strongly evident. I "get" Gubaidulina in a sense that I don't get Carter, Dutilleux, or Kirchner (three living male composers older than she, all of whom I've suffered through in concert).

Gubaidulina expressed satisfaction that the light of her hard-won conclusion would be followed by Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, which she described as what comes afterwards when you get there.

words to live by

B. is reading a book by Mariann Edgar Budde. She's the Episcopal bishop who offended DT by asking him to be merciful. In the book, she quotes these lines:

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

world according to cat

It's beginning to look rather spring-like out there. Tiny birds are settling down on the top of the fence around our front patio. I can't hear if they're saying anything, because the sliding glass door is closed, but Tybalt is looking at them and is making enough chirping noises for the bunch of them. He wants them, but he's not going to get them.

John Wain

Today is the centenary of the birth of John Wain, a British writer - mostly novelist and poet, though also dramatist, critic, and professor - who was well-known to followers of contemporary English literature in his heyday in the 1950s, but is almost forgotten today.

Except for one thing. As a student at Oxford in the 1940s, he'd had C.S. Lewis as his tutor, and after his graduation Lewis invited him to attend the Inklings, so now he's on the unofficial roster of that famous society.

But he wasn't too happy about being known for that, when he was still around to express an opinion (he died in 1994), because the Inklings are most famous for fostering Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and Wain disliked that book. He found it meaningless and detached from reality. Wain's own fiction is conservative modern realism, so you can see the difference and perhaps understand why he couldn't grasp fantasy as reflective of reality.

But perhaps he shouldn't have been too upset, at least with me as an example, for after learning about Wain through reading about the Inklings, curiosity drove me to try his writings. I liked enough of them to carry on. Eventually I read all 14 of his published novels and 3 short story collections, as well as much of his nonfiction. Most of his novels aren't really very good, though they were clearly readable and not murky or dull, but a few I enjoyed, one of them - Lizzie's Floating Shop, his only juvenile - enough to re-read it. Some of his short stories are extremely biting. And I liked a lot of his nonfiction, particularly his two books of memoirs (Sprightly Running and Dear Shadows) and his biography of Dr. Johnson.

Last year I finally completed a long-mooted project of writing a paper about Wain - his biography, his literary views and their formation, and a survey of his novels - and gave it at Mythcon and a Signum University conference. It's not formal in nature so I have no plans to publish it academically, but maybe I can get it out somewhere else.

In the meantime, a centenary is a moment to think about its celebrant. Wain was born in Stoke-on-Trent, son of a dentist, on March 14, 1925, and by his own account wasn't much formed literarily or in personality until he got to Oxford at 18 and became a disciple of Lewis, the Oxford drama teacher Nevill Coghill, and, less formally, the independent scholar E.H.W. Meyerstein. Then Wain met fellow students and budding writers Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, both much better remembered today than himself, and his literary affiliations were set.

weird almost-coincidence

The New Yorker this week (Mar. 17 issue) had an article on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Leaving aside the politics, it discussed something about Abbott I hadn't known, though apparently everybody else did. He's permanently in a wheelchair.

It told the story of how he got there. One day, some 40 years ago, he was out jogging, and a large oak tree collapsed and fell on him.

That's weird, I thought, because at approximately the same date - and I'm just about Abbott's age, too - almost the same thing almost happened to me.

I was walking on the Stanford campus where I was working at the time (work was over and I was heading to the parking lot), and going past Encina Hall, when a full branch from a large spreading oak tree suddenly detached itself and slammed to the ground, right in front of me.

A couple steps away and I would have been hit, with unknown consequences.

But I'm confident that, whatever damage it would have done to my head, it would not have transformed me into a right-wing Texas politician.

The most amusing part of the article is an interview with Abbott's principal political advisor, who explains why he lives in New Hampshire and has been commuting to Texas fortnightly for getting on 30 years. “I never thought of moving,” he said. “Texas is hot as hell, and they have snakes.”

wickeder

B. and I just endured some three hours of watching the Wicked movie. The charge for streaming it online having been more than we wanted to pay (and far more, it turns out, than it was worth), B. put a hold on a library DVD and it came in.

Mind, I haven't seen the stage musical, and I never finished reading the Maguire novel. But seeing the movie fresh, I found:

The plot was forced (as in, "we're gonna cram in Wizard of Oz references whether they fit or not"). The dialogue was broken and discontinuous. The special effects were garish. The songs were dull and, even worse, sometimes gratuitously irritating. The problem is that they stood in the place of better songs. For instance, the movie begins with a song about how the Wicked Witch is dead. I could hardly avoid wishing I was hearing the infinitely more catchy song on the same topic from 1939 instead. And the song about visiting the wonders of the Emerald City was a pale, anemic little thing that made me think longingly of the similarly-themed but much more vivid and colorful "New York, New York" by Bernstein/Comden & Green from On the Town.

Thumb down on this one.