I use Gmail Notifier. It absolves people of the need to constantly go to mail.google.com in a browser to see if they have new mail. If I have new mail, the mail icon in the menu bar will turn red, so I can forget about it.

The thing is, sometimes you get new mail that’s just not worth the effort of opening a browser tab. (Gmail Notifier gives you a summary of your new mail.) Yet if you don’t actually go into Gmail, those messages will still be considered new, and the Gmail Notifier icon in the menu bar will stay red.

It does not have a command that lets you tell it to ignore the recent new messages and change its icon back to gray. The red active notifier is surprisingly hard to ignore. So much so that I usually end up going to Gmail and clicking on each new message just so it won’t be counted as new, and the red icon will go away.
 

Well, not anymore. I put together a simple Python script that uses IMAP to log in and mark the new messages as read. If you want to use it and have Python installed, all you need to do is enable IMAP in your Gmail settings, edit the script to use your username and password, and then execute it whenever you want Gmail Notifier’s red icon to stop glaring at you.
 

markasread.py (Right-click to download.)
 
 

Assuming all pork chops are breaded, because I haven’t had them in a while and that’s how I remember them, I started cooking a chop using Mark Bittman’s recipe from How to Cook Everything. Once I had the oil heated, I noticed, hey, no breading!

Then, I did recall that I have had tasty pork chops without breading. Still, I wanted breading, so I looked up some breaded pork chop recipes. All the first page results involved baking, which is a sign that that’s the correct way. Still, I had all this olive oil poured and heating.

Knowing full well it could end in disaster, I decided to improvise. About 19 out of 20 times, my cooking improvisation results in something barely edible or worse. Here, I lucked out. The chop ended up just juicy enough, with a surprisingly complex flavor. And of course, it had some tasty breading.

Ingredients

• 5 oz. pork chop
• 1-2 slices of bread (even better if you have bread crusts equal to the volume of 1-2 slices of bread)
• ~1.5 tablespoons sherry
• 1/2 teaspoon of minced garlic
• 1 egg
• ~2 tablespoons of milk
• ~2 tablespoons of olive oil

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There’s this one dude at judo that does only one thing when it comes to newaza: He pulls you into his closed guard, then squeezes you while he tries to break your posture and collar choke you. He’s done this every time I’ve sparred with him and whenever I happen to see him rolling with someone else.

My first thought about this always is, besides not getting better at the rest of the game, isn’t that super boring? It could be that he’s just not all that interested in newaza. But it could also be that it’s actually effective, at least with the lower ranks, who are the only people I see him sparring with.

Every time I’ve gone up against him, he’s trapped me and neutralized me for five minutes. The guy has some strong-ass legs. I know I should just tap and move on, but his insistence on always going for that means I’ll probably just end up there anyway. It also compels me in the way that a video game that stopped being fun hours ago somehow forces you to try to beat it.

I was up for taking a shot last night. I’ve made some progress in the past by at least avoiding full closed guard. In half guard, though, he uses the same strategy. He pulls you in, and he also squeezes your one trapped leg as hard as humanly possible. There are a few guys at the dojo that can make you tap out doing that, but this guy’s leg placement was slightly off. So, it was unpleasant, but not out and out painful. After a while, though, my hip did start feeling weirdly numb.
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