The great passport panic

Shall I tell you what panic is? Panic is when you have plane tickets
to attend your brother’s
wedding in a foreign land two weeks from now and you realize your
passport has expired.

Here’s what you do: You are a logical creature, so start by checking
the procedures for applying for a
passport. The mail-in system is both convenient and recommended.
Unfortunately, you don’t have time to wait the “up to ten business days”
it will take to get your new passport back. Decide to bite the
bureaucratic bullet and go and stand in line to renew the thing in
person.

Because you live in New York City, however,
the passport agency will offer you only a nightmare of an automated
phone system, which point-blank refuses to allow you to speak with a
human being without paying $1.05 a minute for the privilege. It also
requires you to have proof of travel and to enter a travel date within
fourteen days (fifteen means you’re relegated to the mail-in system) in
order to get a computer-assigned appointment. Loathe, despise, and hate
this process with a positively Old Testament hatred.

Prowl the Web some more and discover the Instant
Passport service, which promises a turnaround time of under 24
hours. Be very pleased with yourself and with the freedom and glory that
is e-commerce, until you note that it costs $100 per passport (and this
is over and above the government’s rush fee of $75 per renewal). Drop
this idea.

Have a brainwave: maybe you don’t NEED a valid passport to go to
Toronto. Look it up at the State Department’s incredibly useful Foreign Entry
Requirements page. It turns out that you can get into Canada, and,
more importantly, back into the United States afterward, with proof of
citizenship plus photo ID. Your expired passport plus driver’s license
meet those requirements. Now you can wait and do the regular mail-in
process after you get home — and it will only cost you $40.

Sing the “Hallelujah
Chorus,” loudly, astonishing and disturbing your co-workers.

The food of the gods

It’s the most eminently satisfying nosh I know. It’s what beef jerky
would be like if it actually tasted good, or what Italian sopressata
salami would be like without the visible fat chunks. It’s the South
African snacking treat known as biltong. And
all you need to make it is a London broil and a dream. Now that the
humidity is largely gone from the fall air, biltong-making is becoming a
feasible proposition, even without the fancy cardboard drying apparatus.
Just hang it up to dry in front of a fan in the basement and it’ll be
good to go in three or four days. (My father used to skewer the
marinated, spiced strips of meat and then suspend the skewer from a wire
coat-hanger using pipe cleaners or those little twist ties you get with
Baggies.) I do recommend leaving the meat in the apple cider vinegar for
an hour or two before you rub it with the pepper and coriander seed,
rather than just dipping it for a moment, as the linked recipe
recommends. It’s also perfectly kosher — very authentic, in fact — to
use deer meat rather than beef, should you just happen to have an
abundance of the former on hand this season. And, if all else fails, you
can always just have it delivered. Bon
appétit!

Lux et veritas

The Luminarium is devoted to
English writers from the late medieval, Renaissance, and 17th-century
periods. There are quotations, biographies, bibliographies, online texts
of the works or links to same, essays, and, if your computer is so
enabled, music. The selection is excellent; the Renaissance section, for
example, includes not just Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marlowe, but also
many less widely known lights such as Roger Ascham, Aemilia Lanyer,
Thomas Nashe, and the marvelous John Skelton. An impressive resource for
students and teachers, and a real pleasure for those of us who forgot to
stop being English majors when we graduated and who still occasionally
experience an urgent need to identify the source of a stray line of
Donne.

Tears on my pillow

I learned a new word this week: “lachrymatory” — a small vessel
built to hold tears. Yes, tears. You can, if you wish, save them. Glass
artist Bill Flenniken invites you to send him your tears. He will seal
them into a handmade glass lachrymatory that, judging by
the sample images on his Web page, will be quite beautiful (if
lachrymatories are your thing). It all seems fairly loony to me, but I
presume some people must be saving the tears cried at a funeral or
wedding as souvenirs. Or maybe people are collecting the tears of
still-living likely prospective saints, such as Mother Teresa was, and
creating relics out of them. Whatever floats your boat, kids. …