The World Figure Skating Championships are in Boston next month. I have tickets. I know nothing about figure skating, beyond what one picks up from watching the Olympics on TV. So I’m reading tutorials, queuing up books, and I’m watching movies.

One thing I’ve learned is that it can be really helpful to go back a few decades. They used to be slower, and the jumps were doubles and triples. Got back a few decades more and the jumps are singles, which are far easier to see!

This movie is a fairly silly revision of Taming Of The Shrew, but it has moments. “Toe-pick!”

by Brian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman

Get the book.

A terrific book, through which I am cooking. I’m not religious about this, and I’m not planning a Julia, but this is a fun book, and since it seems I can withstand pie crusts as well as plain bread, pies are more fun.

So far I’ve tried short rib pie, chicken pot pie (biscuits), chorizo and goat cheese pie (twice), and smoked turkey pot pie (with extra leeks and no celery — oops). Really good.

Working on the next book, I was reading Lars Spuybroek on “The Aesthetics Of Variation.” Spuybroek said something interesting about Hogarth’s depiction of crowds, citing Walter Benjamin. I wondered exactly what Benjamin said, so I Googled it. The AI assistant told me that the discussion would be found in “The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction.” This was certainly plausible, as Hogarth’s memory is very much bound up with mechanical reproduction.

But Google was wrong. It’s not there; it is in The Arcades Project.

The Information City generates some interesting energy simply by placing building next to other buildings.

At the right, the house with the sign holds my notes on Ruskin’s aesthetics and, specifically, his list of the properties of the Gothic. Those notes were becoming long, so I split some of them into separate notes concerning specific Ruskinian qualities — savageness, changefulness, generosity. Those wander down a narrow street to the right; I can see them and select them, but they’re not the foreground right now.

In front, we have two related sets of reading notes. One holds reactions to Daniel E. Snyder’s interesting book on The Tender Detail: ornament and sentimentality in the architecture of Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, which I’m reading to learn more about how people feel about urban settings like the Information City. Next to it, I have a second set of reading notes on an essay that Snyder mentions, The Aesthetics Of Variation” by Lars Spuybroek. One thing that became evident very early in the development of the Information City is that, if every building looks alike, it’s hard to find the one you want. We address this, at least for now, by adding lots of variations and decorations to buildings. They can have different window treatments and different door shapes. They can have awnings, or not. They can have signposts, or not. Some can have outdoor tables, or just benches. So, without going overboard on models, combinatorics give us a ton of distinct buildings. Some axes of variation might have semantic meanings: I’m using green buildings for current topics such as ToDo lists and release notes. Some axes might reflect implicit meanings; I’d like the level of lights we see through the window to reflect how recently the note was edited.

Rachel Miller and Alex Caruso have taken a tiny space in Lynn and turned it into one of the most interesting and challenging restaurants in the US.

We went because we had an anniversary, and it was terrific. Nine courses, maybe ten? Caviar and potato chips with ethereal custard fluff was the first course. Fresh Portuguese barnacles — barnacles! — poached and chilled and served over crushed ice, with the delightful spicy dipping sauce that, I’m told, is simply ⅓ salt, ⅓ black pepper, and ⅓ lime juice. Beats mignonette by a country mile.

There was an amazing shrimp toast would not be out of place at Alinea. There was a tiny Vietnamese-inflected lobster roll in a tiny custom-baked Boston-style bun. There was a kabocha squash course with crispy confit duck tongues. All with some really daring wine pairings.

This goes beyond authenticity: it’s not your grandmother’s Vietnamese/French comfort food. (Neither Miller’s grandmother nor mine, I expect, was Vietnamese. My grandmother didn’t cook if she could help it.) This is really thinking through what terrific food we can make, in a world where we can get Nước Chấm and diver scallops. The only comparable I can come up with is Mandy Lee’s Escapism Cooking: Miller, like Lee, likes to have a lot going on, fireworks in the mouth and excitement on the plate. She’s very big on flavor and texture contrasts, and they pair nicely with some really complex wines (oh, that Lapeyre Jurançon had a lot to say!). But Lee’s book is, at least in part, performance art; Miller is doing stuff on the plate, four nights a week.