Day two: take the bones and vegetables from yesterday's stock out of the refrigerator, fill the pot with cold water, and do it all over again.

I've never tried remouillage like this before; it sounded like cheese paring. But the ten hours of simmering on Saturday left me just 32oz of stock — very strong, rich, gelatinous stock to be sure, but it's still just four cups. So, once more into the breach.

And it worked nicely; nothing more added, and it still came out rich and flavorful. I took 3 or 4c for dinner and still had a quart and a half to freeze

• watercress soup, with toasts and gentleman's relish
• red snapper, poached with onions, mushrooms, and garlic
• leftover chocolate bread pudding with southern whiskey sauce

This was also my first encounter with the Super 88 fish counter, which looks very promising. Many tanks of live fish, and lots of fresh fish I've never tried.

With everyone talking about the glories of veal stock, I realized my reserves of stock were just about exhausted. And so, with 7 pounds of really nice veal bones from Savenor's, I embarked on a stock weekend.

You don't have to make a big tsimmes, as Ruhlman recently reminded us. Grab 3 lb of bones, roast them if feel inclined, toss them in a pot, fill it with water, and leave it uncovered in a 180° oven for a few hours, Easy as pie. You can add mirepoix, you can add a sachet, you can do all sorts of stuff. You don't have to. Nobody will take off points.

Innovations this time: the pot was uncovered throughout, and I let it simmer a little more aggressively than usual. I also let it go for five hours before adding the mirepoix (roasted onion, carrot, and celery) and tomato, where previously these went in from the start.

I borrowed two ladles of veal stock for dinner, to make a nice mushroom sauce for the roast chicken. Hot pan, olive oil, shallots. Mushrooms. Deglaze the roasting pane with the veal stock; add to the mushrooms, reduce. Serve.

• Roast chicken with mushroom sauce
• Oven-roasted asparagus
• Chocolate bread pudding with bourbon sauce

The entree made a really nice plate.

The bread pudding, incidentally, was a big win, and easier than pie. Whole wheat supermarket bread, 6 oz. of really good bittersweet chocolate, some cream and sugar, a couple of eggs and an egg yolk. The dessert sauce is butter, sugar, whiskey, and nutmeg; simmer until dissolved, then whisk in a beaten egg and simmer 'til thick.)

The only bad news is that, after the sauce tonight, I only managed 32oz of stock. Ouch. But there's still the remouillage tommorrow.

We know almost nothing about Shakespeare's biography, but we do have one record of something he actually said, not wrote.

On Monday 11 May 1612, William Shakespeare gave evidence in a lawsuit at the Court of Requests in Westminster.

This deposition involves a dispute over an unpaid dowry; back in 1604, when he was lodging in Silver Street with in the Montjoy household, Christopher Montjoy has asked Shakespeare to convince Montjoy's former apprentice to marry Montjoy's daughter and to officiate at the betrothal. Shakespeare obliged. The family has now fallen out, the son-in-law is suing for his dowry, and Shakespeare testifies that some dowry was agreed, but he can't remember the exact amount.

From this small shred, Nichols pursues a fascinating, rigorous, and readable pursuit of Shakespeare's London environment. The house on Silver Street is gone, burnt in The Great Fire. Silver Street itself is gone, erased in postwar development. We can know that Shakespeare's room was upstairs, as was the privy. We can know he had a window. He finds out who else lived on the street, how they lived, whom they married. And though we have no idea in which direction Shakespeare's window faced, Nichols reconstructs that he might have looked out on the busy shopping street, or overlooked the parish churchyard, or perhaps had a nice view into a neighboring apothecary garden. And he finds out what they grew in that garden, and why.

Nichols' tireless search through record rolls, tax ledgers, physician’s case books, property archives, and the entire body of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature yields remarkable detail. When the newly-married couple moved out of the house, they moved in with George Wilkins, a nearby victualler who longed to be a poet, who was indeed writing a play (Pericles) with Shakespeare, and who — Nichols pieces together the evidence very neatly — seems to have at the same time been launching a career as a pimp.

Nichols is careful not to dash beyond the evidence, but his point is wonderful. As Shakespeare was writing Lear, we know — we have contemporary testimony from multiple sources — that in the house where he was living, a young bride and her father were bitterly falling out. They moved into a friend's house, a shady friend — shadier, perhaps, than they realized — at about the time Shakespeare is writing about a virtuous woman living in a brothel.

Tim Bray observes that there's a lot of change going on right now in the software world right now, an unusual ferment in which established ideas about programming languages, databases, networks, processors, business models, and kitchen sinks are very much up for grabs.

Cathy Marshall on arts and crafts.

Diane Greco on Paris.

French Laundry At Home on veal stock. Ruhlman on veal stock, too. (Useful point: you don't need to make tons of stock at once. You can, but you don't have to. When I visited the truffle farmer, he was making about a quart of chicken stock!) I've really got to replenish the stock supply!

Linda has been arguing for some time that we should have handled Iraq differently. I think she has the key. Michael Gordon's recent report on the garbage-strewn, sewage-choked streets of Sadr City crystalizes the issue. We've been there for years: we haven't we cleaned this up?

We’re not saying we’re going to disperse supplies today, but once it’s stabilized we will work on these projects," said Tahseen al-Sheikhly, the security plan spokesman. “Because of security, there will not be any projects for a while.”

What happened to Can Do? Instead, the Iraqis send twenty people to pick up the garbage, and then the Americans send some soldiers to check.

The trash collectors are outfitted with yellow vests. On Monday morning, a soldier asked for an “eyes on” report over the tactical radio on how many workers were picking up trash along a major thoroughfare.

The reply over the radio was not encouraging: “They started at 20, but are down to 4.”

This isn't working. Here's one way it could work: let's send a LOT of people to help clean up Sadr City. Me, you, everyone we know. Start with 5,000, and build from there.

photo: Russel Lee Klikka

And what you do is simple: pick up the garbage. You'll have some soldiers along, to organize and to provide some security. Maybe someone will start shooting: we'll try to keep everyone safe. Someone might get hurt: it happens in a war. Thousand of Americans have gotten hurt already.

So, you start somewhere; you pick up the garbage. You dry up the puddles. You take pictures. You try to be polite. If there's stuff that seems to need fixing, you try to fix it. Lots of hands, lots of people.

Some of the people are famous. Ted Williams flew fighter planes, James Roosevelt won a silver star. Let's send some athletes and some singers; it'll be fun. Lots of folks — plumbers, electricians, builders, bakers, cops. All together — there's safety in numbers, it's a party. Spring cleaning.

We'll need to bring along some food trucks, because all these folk are going to want snacks and lunch. We'll do what we can. We can bring lots of cold Coke, and share it. We'll have lots of freshly-baked bread — which we can buy from Iraqi bakers. We'll have lots of fresh vegetables. We'll have lots of portable toilets and first aid stations.

So America's Fighting Garbage Persons go out and they do a really good job, cleaning the street, maybe fixing what needs to be fixed. Maybe, just maybe, someone says, "But the plumbing in my house is broken.” Well, maybe we can find a plumber in the crowd. Maybe, just maybe, someone says, “My kid is sick.” We find a doctor in the crowd. And eventually the doctor might ask if she could perhaps stay and keep an eye on the baby here, and perhaps look at some other kids on the block? And before you know it, you've got a little clinic, or the start of a Hull House.

And every night on the news, you see pictures of Chelsea and Jenna picking up the trash with a bunch of Stanford students, and Manny Ramirez helping to paint a wall, and the plumber from Oshkosh fixing the sewers while Joni and Bruce and Keren Ann get set up.

And yes, some of the residents are going to say, “I hate this noise! The crowds! The music! And couldn't they have sent Madonna?” We'll sort it out.

Sure, someone is gonna get shot, someone is gonna try to blow stuff up. We'll do our best. War is hell. We've got thousands of casualties of sunk cost; they won't get everyone. And what's the point of blowing up garbage persons?

And maybe we can make some friends. Maybe, we can fix the plumbing and get the lights working again.

And even if we don't, we'll at the very least have cleaned up some of the mess.

Steven Poole offers a cogent discussion of the incoherent (but widespread) view that writers should give away their work on the internet, and live off university salaries or t-shirt sales. Thirty thousand people downloaded a copy of his eight-year-old book; seventeen or eighteen elected to pay something — and several of those chose to pay one cent.

I've added hcard microformat markup to this page, so your semantic web applications can (with luck) discover contact information and such automatically.

To my surprise, though, I haven't found a validator, or even much software that seems to use hcard. So, I really have no idea whether this markup will work with the stuff people have in mind. If it doesn't, let me know.

(You might need to reload the stylesheet if the page layout goes awry)

There's a new flickr pool for Tinderbox maps and other Tinderbox-related images.

I think it would be fascinating to collect a bunch of Tinderbox map views; this could be a nice resource for designers and researchers, and would also supply inspiration.

Stewart Mader offers five good reasons to write for WikiSym:

1. It’s the conference for discussing & sharing wiki research & practice.
2. Share your wiki adoption strategies at the first-ever WikiFest.
3. Get valuable feedback and ideas from fellow wiki experts.
4. It’s in Porto, a wonderful and historical city!
5. It’s fun! You’ll build great relationships with the people you meet!

.... to justify god's ways to man. But Milton does pretty well. I've never attempted Paradise Lost, but you've got to hand it to a guy who could do such a nice job of imagining what Satan's army would be inclined to say to each other after they'd lost the big one. Good punch!

But an apology in advance might best be made right now.

Among all my bad habits, one stands out,
Which is: I tend to soak up style and voice
Of any book I chance upon to read,
A harmless penchant mostly, but in this
Strange case it might some inconvenience hold
Because, like me, John Milton seldom met
A semicolon he did not admire.
Two colons — three! — in one short span amuse
But don't perplex the reader of his work.
In mine they would, and do, and I will try
To keep things within bounds 'til this wears off
And also ten-foot lines I will avoid
Real soon now. Thanks.