« Fly with specs; Radio Liberty towers removed; Paul Newman eats dog food | Main | Online egg toy; French protests succeed; John Lennon songwriting contest; Google Map Maker; Firefox memory leak hack »

April 9, 2006

Read the Gospel of Judas, backstory online; 1000-layer lasagne; Photorealism: bugs

A Gnostic edition: National Geographic has put some pages of The Lost Gospel, aka Gospel of Judas, online, along with translations. There's a TV special tonight at 8 p.m. (EDT) on the find, on their own National Geographic cable channel. (From the video preview here, it appears there are dramatizations of the events in this coptic alt-narrative. This could be historic, or hokey.)

This being the Web, there are others who've been all over this for a while. (These pages were discovered in the '70s, so there's been time for the story to develop.)

The Coptic Ps.Gospel of Judas (Iscariot) by Roger Pearse reproduces news accounts of the find's trek through the rarified end of the art world, details on carbon dating and gum adhesive. He credits Michel van Rijn's art-market site, DEVASTATING ART NEWS, which is a trip in itself. (Here's its index.) The lead item right now is Most of the Judas Gospel has 'disappeared.' (No permalinks.)

For the very patient: Thousand Layer Lasagne: (But the photo looks like about nine layers of superthin noodles...odd)

Thin out your pasta using a pasta machine. Start by cutting the big sheets into 2-inch(ish) wide ribbons. This means making 2 cuts along the sheets. This should yield you about 12 2-foot strips. Run them through the pasta machine. I go to the 8 setting, one shy of the very thinnest setting. The sheets should almost be translucent. Cut the strips into manageable rectangles roughly 4-inches in length.

Pre-cook the pasta: Fill a large bowl with cold water and a few glugs of olive oil. Place a large flour sack or cotton dish towel across one of your counters. Salt your pot of boiling water generously. Ok, now you are ready to boil off your pasta. Believe it or not, you are on the home stretch. Place a handful of the pasta rectangles into the boiling water to cook (I've found I can get away with about 20 at a time), fish them out (I use a pasta claw) after just 15-20 seconds, don't over cook. Transfer them immediately to the cold olive-oil water for a quick swim and cool-off. Remove from the cold water bath and place flat and neat on the cotton towel. It is ok for them to overlap, I don't have a problem with the sheets sticking typically. Repeat until all your pasta is boiled....

I'd love to try somebody else's..

Igor Siwanowicz: Amazingly sharp photos of mantises, butterflies, bugs and a frog, close up. Good thing these creatures aren't larger.

(I know I've had dreams of a giant brown mantis like this one.)

That's a raging hornet at right.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 3:13 AM | Permalink