food & drink

Lulu's recent musings on gin and bacon got me to thinking, happily, on those and a few other necessities:

Food

• Bacon - I like to buy local, so I prefer Hill Meat Co. bacon, from Pendleton, Ore. Added bonus: delicious! I'm pretty fond of sausage, too.
  
• Chocolate - the darker, the better. I like many (mostly premium) brands, and prefer bars that are 72 percent chocolate or higher.
• Olives - fancy green ones suit me just fine. I like the ones that are unpitted, just to have something to do. They're tasty in Tunisian sandwiches, too.
• Cheese - I'm picky here, too. I am a big fan of Parmigiano Reggiano and Grafton Village cheddar, among many others.
• Peanut butter - Make mine Adams Natural Peanut Butter. I like the crunchy variety, and I see Smuckers (the parent company) has a devlishly clever mixer to reincorporate the oil with.
• Cashews - It is hard to believe that something that takes so much damn work to get from farm to market can wind up costing $5.22 a pound at the local grocery. Oh, and they're yummy, too.
• Tomatoes - In a perfect world, heirloom tomatoes, right off the vine on a hot day. Indeed, I ate one of mine just the other day: perfect.

Drink

• Gin - Tanqueray and Bombay Sapphire are hard to beat, but I prefer Hendrick's. I prefer martinis, as opposed to having my gin neat or with tonic, mostly because of my fondness for olives. Give me five in a big glass of icy gin and color me happy.
• Scotch - I'll drink other whisky if I must, but if you're with me, you're drinking Laphroaig.
• Bourbon - I think "bourbon" is just American for "Scotch" and if you think about who populates Appalachia, I think you might agree. Lately, Maker's Mark, Booker's, Elijah Craig, Evan Williams and the like have taken center stage, but my favorite bourbon memory was glasses of Jim Beam at dinner just down the trail from South Twin Mountain in New Hampshire.
• Coffee - Black, brewed in a stovetop espresso pot. Or a hot can of Georgia-Old from Family Mart.

That's a start, anyway.

Mythical birds

Setting aside Fawkes, the bird with the roll-your-eyes name in the Harry Potter books, I think phoenixes are pretty neat. An apparent analog in Japan is the ho-oo or hojo (the name differs from source to source). Here's one:

Albert Pujols-Babe Ruth connection

Hey, besides the paycheck and interesting job, Albert Pujols also gets access to fun diversions, including a battery of tests once used on George Herman Ruth.

Among the tests Prince Albert is reported as taking are hand-eye coordination and cognitive assessments. No big surprise: Pujols scored out of sight on hand-eye coordination and showed an unusual (anecdotally, anyway) and apparently baseball-useful way of processing visual information.

Details offered in the wire stories are sparse, but it sounds like he got to have some fun. Naturally, one version of the story had to quote a researcher as saying that the individual skills weren't as impressive as the total package, which is no doubt true but also echoes what another test taker - with whom I am intimately familiar - was told after scoring well on some assessments.

"The scores aren't what's important. It's what you do with those abilities."

No kidding. But if the scores aren't important, why did you ask me to take the tests?

A dream job other than my own

I love my job. When people ask what a city editor does, I just say "read, write and talk." That pretty much sums it up, but like the recipe for Sprite, there's more to it than that. *

Supposing I had to do something else, something that isn't journalism or journalism-related, I'd like to try being a noxious-weed killer (that's a much funnier title if you leave out the hyphen).

I'm sure there's bullshit involved, inevitably. But what job doesn't have some measure of silliness and nonsense? Around here, as is true pretty much anywhere these days, noxious weeds and invasive species are Problem No. 1, or a damn close second. I like to work in the yard and garden, but I have to admit my preference is for demo work ("kid, tear the ivy out of the oak grove" is much more music to my ears than "kid, grow some potatoes").

I suppose the most fruitful work would be done out on the prairies, but this town has more than its share of villainous plants. The problem is so severe that local beekeepers even flog their yellow star thistle honey at the farmers' market.

In a truly absurd twist, one honey tout claimed that pollination of yellow star thistles "really doesn't help them spread." That seemed like rubbish. To wit:

It reproduces exclusively by seed, estimated to be as high as 29,000 seeds per square meter with about 95 percent viability. - U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Environmental Laboratory.

Anyway, there's plenty of star thistle to be stamped out, along with a host of other invasive species. I'm sure the work wouldn't always be pleasant, but it would be fun!

* They say the recipe for Sprite is lemon and lime. I tried to make it at home. ... There's more to it than that.
"Want some more homemade Sprite?"
"Not 'til you figure out what the fuck else is in it!"
- Mitch Hedberg

On yet another damn difficult book hunt

After my fairly easy success in finding "The Promotion" by James Tate, I was hoping to have similar success tracking down a book (really, any one of a series of books). The lead character is female, and the books seem to be oceangoing adventures involving her. I think she is based, or grew up, or whatever, on the Northeast coast. And she's got an unusual name, something like Twyla.

I've only read part of one book, but it had promise.

Damn. Last time this happened, figuring out the answer took years of on-and-off searching and a very sharp employee at Powell's to produce The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet.

Well, here's to hoping for a lucky strike.

comment-free zone

Having recently switched to blogger.com's beta upgrade, I'm wondering what the deal is with comments. I have to use an old login to comment elsewhere, and I see that leaving comments here isn't necessarily possible. Grrrr.

Hurry up, google people!

The risk of trying to do too much

Oftentimes, a story seems just too good to leave out any details in the lead:

DREXEL, Mo. (AP) - A Missouri man who police say confessed to killing, dismembering and burning the bodies of seven men in his bedroom fireplace was charged Sunday with one count of murder.

That's one spacious fireplace! And how do you kill the bodies of seven men?

Ah well. The man in question confessed to the killings when he was hauled in on an unrelated charge, so I think I would have recast the lead to either include that unusual detail or to just pare back what the writer was trying to pull off, which was to put the whole story in one sentence. But here's an easy fix that doesn't surrender much detail:

DREXEL, Mo. (AP) - A Missouri man who police say confessed to killing and dismembering seven men and burning their bodies in his bedroom fireplace was charged Sunday with murder.

or

DREXEL, Mo. (AP) - A man who police say confessed to killing seven men was charged Sunday with one count of murder.

The seven men being, you know, dead, seems to me to be of greater significance than what happened to their remains. Unless killing seven people is so run-of-the-mill in the Kansas City area that the added information is needed to differentiate between one set of deaths and the others.

One small step for recyclers

I owe it to an article in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, and I suppose I could have found another recycler, but one portion of my recycling quest is complete, and my employer has now donated about 15 nonfunctional and extremely dated cell phones, along with a junk pile of chargers, cigarette-lighter plug-ins and whatnot to recyclemycellphone.org.

Now, there's this matter of monitors...

Smokers' rights

After reading for the nth time about how smokers' rights are being trampled by Washington's anti-indoor smoking law, I have to say:

Smoking is many things: a pastime, a vile social ill, a social activity, a crutch, a tradition, whatever. But it isn't a right.

Voting, yes.
Free speech, sure.
Owning a gun, fine.

Smoking? Which part of the constitution covers smoking? The same part that covers drinking beer?

Bullshit. Complain if you like that smokers are discriminated against, or that the rules are unfair, but don't try to pretend smoking is the same as voting.

Campaign finance: A corollary manifesto

The buttefly lady sees the future of the National Recycling Act outlined below as hinging on a change in how political campaigns are financed.

I strongly suspect that she views the system as corrupt because it vests immense political power in the hands of the rich and ultra-rich. But the rich and ultra-rich are as entitled as you or I to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech, and judging from how the Constitution sets up our form of democracy, I suspect the founders would be pretty comfortable with the way things work now. But they're dead, so the question is moot.

Because of the inherent conflict in politicians changing the rules they benefit from, I suspect the question of campaign finance reform is also moot.

And yet:

Over the decades all kinds of superb (and awful) public policy has been carried out. Although the voters are frequently lambasted for their collective choices or apparent apathy, they do have a choice, and they do flex their muscles.

When Newt Gingrich sold people on the Contract with America, the voters responded. When Bill Clinton sold people on the Third Way, the voters responded. When Ralph Nader called Al Bush and George Gore clones, the voters responded.

Did they respond how everybody wanted them to? No. But like newspapers' readership, voters are a bad crowd to underestimate. I think the problem isn't "fixing" the voters - or the readers - but learning to listen to what they care about and speaking to those wants, needs and fears in a way that they connect with. If you can't connect with voters, all the money on Earth won't help you.

Likewise, I don't think the problem is "fixing" campaign finance rules, I think it is voting out the candidates who behave in a manner inconsistent with the principles of democracy (i.e. by selling themselves to the highest bidders). Voting out the bad eggs depends almost entirely on the previous point, learning to connect with voters. Maybe as a side benefit, the people who are voted in will come up with a constitutional answer to the campaign finance conundrum.

So my answer is sticky, glib and bound to produce frustration:

Power to the people.

which leads to my father's maxim:

In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.

The road ahead is a hard one, fraught with all sorts of perils. But good leaders can find a way to a more democratic future, if they can show people why they should care enough to follow them down that path.

In the words of Joshua "Lawrence" Chamberlain, "Let's fix bayonets."

Recycling: A supplier-side problem

Like just about any other person on the continent, I have a small stockpile of dead or obsolete electronics, including the dreaded computer monitor.

Like just about any other person who gives a shit about the planet, I'd like to get rid of the stockpile in a responsible manner, which here means "not in the landfill."

What's missing, of course, is this third sentence:

Like just about any other person in Sentences A and B, I sent the unwanted goods back to the manufacturer for ecologically friendly recycling and reuse.

So.

I have wished for a national bottle bill since the day I realized that not every state is like Oregon (and my home state's rules aren't even all that effective now that a nickel's not worth as much and so many containers are exempt).

Here's my manifesto, or mission statement, or whatever:

All recyclable goods shall be sold with a meaningful deposit that is refunded upon return of the used item to the retailer that sold it. All manufacturers of recyclable goods shall be ultimately responsible for their product's end-of-life care.

When I say "all recyclable goods," I mean empty beer cans, shampoo bottles, toaster ovens, retired monitors, old cell phones, junker cars, speedboats, refrigerators, the box the fridge came in, the packing materials, the whole nine yards. Every god damn thing under the sun that can be recycled, and that's pretty much everything but food, diapers, Kleenex and toothpaste.

Why pick on retailers instead of just leaving this to manufacturers? Here's my rationale:

As long as consumers are allowed to discard what they want, pretty much how they want, they won't do expensive or laborious procedures unless they really want to on a personal level. That is fine for some things, but not for managing our shared natural resources.

Consumers need to be on the hook (the meaningful deposit - maybe 10 percent of the item's sticker price?) and have an easy way to return the recyclable (to the retailer, not some godforesaken warehouse in Tiffin, Ohio).

Manufacturers, at the other end of the delivery chain, tend to be too far removed (physically) from consumers for easy returns of empty bottles, dead computers, etc.

Retailers, however, are mostly physically close to the consumer and have well-established supply lines from manufacturers (or distributors) that could be used in reverse.

Complications:

• Retailers would have to deal with higher prices from manufacturers, who would have to arrange to deal with their goods' denouement, and would also have higher costs of operation (to handle customer returns of used-up goods). Because this rule would be absolute, everybody would have to deal with the same problem. Everything would probably cost more. Oh well.
• What about onlines and other outfits that ship items? Well, I guess they'd just have to provide postage-paid returns of defunct and empty items then, wouldn't they? Again, everything would probably cost more. Oh well.
• What happens to orphaned goods? Inevitably, some of the things you buy, the maker will go broke before you're done with it. But usually, they'll get bought out, and as king of the realm, I decree that responsibility travels with ownership, so when Kmart buys Sears, it also buys all those potential returns. Hey, that's the cost of doing business. Truly orphaned goods could wind up in landfills, along with all the stuff people were willing to give up the deposit on. This system is never going to catch everything.
  

Right now, the system doesn't work. The world's trash is piling up in junkyards, ditches, rivers, oceans, beaches, forests, pretty much everywhere. A lot of that trash should never have been thrown out in the first place. If it isn't curbside or at a transfer station, recycling is too god damn complicated. Something needs to be done, and this is a start.

Fools and their money

Fortunately, gmail has a very good spam interdictor, but sometimes I like to cruise through the junk mail that accumulates to see what kinds of crap people are trying to pull.

One offer I received targets people who have illicit connections to "Dishnetwork." The offer claims some sort of DISH Network electronic countermeasure will blow away "receivers that are using cards with blockers" and of course offers to fix you up with an "XFTA enabled receiver" for the bargain price of $299.98 or $149.99 (the offer is ambiguous).

It is going to be hard times for consumers who call the attorney general (or dish, that would be fantastic!) to complain that the devices they bought to illegally swipe programming don't work...

Osama in College Place, Wash.?

The College Place City Council authorized city police to buy some fancy stuff - night vision goggles and a fingerprint imager - using a small portion of city funds and about $20,000 from the federal Law Enforcement Terrorism Prevention Program.

That's cool, because the city only had to ante up about 10 percent of the overall cost, but I'm thinking that only the fingerprint imager makes much sense.

Sure, terrorists would do well to hide out in Small Town America, but I don't think night vision goggles are going to be their undoing. Maybe the goggles will help during a drug bust, or a domestic, or to catch some 9-8s who are highly 9-2, but I really don't think Osama bin Laden and his friends are going to be nabbed by people who can see in the dark.

If the federals are underwriting these buys in every town the size of College Place, I think I can explain some of the budget problems we hear about now and then.

Speaking of Osama, my all-time favorite typographical error, caused by an auto-fix spell check by The Associated Press in Concord, N.H.:

Osaka bin Ladder

sweet!

too busy to blog!

or so it seems. This weekend, I managed to:

• not sleep in - Puppy and Pig were too busy for that.
• with the butterfly lady:

1. visited two heretofore unvisited galleries
2. buzzed through the farmers' market, where we gained nothing but ideas
3. shopped for paint and found many more home ideas, for within and without
4. bought paint (wowzahs)
5. drank coffee
6. watched 1.75 movies ("Whale Rider" and "Red Dawn")
7. walked, fed & entertained aforementioned canines (yegods, busy monsters!)
8. painted - she a project I started earlier for the kitchen, I the plant stand (which is now white and awaiting decorative trim she plans for it)
9. ate clam chowder
10. lots of other stuff!

• wove 3.5 scarves
• offloaded a truckful of recycling (where it all comes from, the gods only know)
• drink more coffee
• install a new ceiling fan in the dining/sewing/open/who-really-knows-what-it-is-for room. The old one wobbled, was noisy and had the worst possible lighting kit imaginable. The lights were designed to provide the maximum glare on any reading material below.
• read half a book and half a magazine.

Aside from that, however, not much happened :)

Plant stand progress

So, it took a while (really, only two days of carpentry/priming, etc., but spread out over a few weeks), but the plant stand is taking shape. All that's left is some crack sealing and a paint job. I had a more complex scheme in mind, but scrapped it in favor of simplicity. The stand, after all, will soon be covered in plants.

Medical Care Can Kill You, too

Or so claims Louise Lane in her cheaply produced but spendy book of similar title ("Appointment with Danger: Medical Care Can Kill You), a copy of which landed near my desk.

The review copy came with a complimentary "bookmark" (a thin slip of paper, really) that reads:

Medical care is the third leading cause of death in the United States.

Riiiiight. Evidence this book is maybe not the best ever written?

"This book will focus on 'Just the facts'..." - page 16.

"In Stony Brook, Long Island, a baby just six days old died as a result of being given ten times the amount of potassium chloride. ... One can wonder if the indificual who made the mistake got his position through affirmative action." - page 82.

Sweet.

Reading can kill you!

How can you get those darn kids to read? Well, it isn't hard. Open a library, launch a reading program and bribe the kiddies with little bendable toy dogs and cats.

Alas, even this best-laid plan has gone awry.

The Oregon Department of Human Services reports today that certain of these "program incentives" contain lead in concentrations deemed unacceptable by the authorities (um, I think lead doesn't belong in toys in any concentration. There's already too much of it in the god damn air - thank you very much, O Kings Of Industry).

The villains? Pictured below, in this image provided by Oregon DHS.

nine and counting

The buttefly lady and I, walking toward a life of love...

Chipmunk!

I heard a frantic rustling this morning in one of the tree of heaven saplings in the alley I walk down on my way to work, so I stopped to see who was making the commotion. A chipmunk!

We used to see them in our parking lot in Newmarket, but that was in the woods. I certainly didn't expect to see one in the rundown alley by the armory.

It was hyper and cute and gave me the hairy eyeball before dashing off to some unknown adventure. Maybe it is headed out on maneuvers...

Lunch in space

After all these years of laboring under the impression that astronauts were still stuck in the bad old days of Tang, powdered applesauce and squeezable, room-temperature meat food, imagine my relief when I learned that the folks on the International Space Station got a shipment from Emeril Lagasse, as well as a chat with the chef himself.

I'm not sure which notch they've been kicked up to, but there you have it.

Other oddball food-in-space facts gleaned from NASA:

• Tortillas are an "easy and acceptable solution to the bread-crumb and microgravity-handling problem." Fuckin' A. I hate that microgravity crumb thing.
• Skylab had a refrigerator.
• Meals for astronauts are calculated to offer "100 percent of the daily value of vitamins and minerals necessary for the environment of space." OK, but whose calculations? The nine-grains a day people? Yuck.
• Meal planning begins with menu selections about five months before a flight and includes tests, revisions, production and storage that leads up to the launch. So, you're stuck with what you liked back then, as long as NASA says it is OK.
  
• Water generated by the space shuttle's fuel cells is used to rehydrate food. Cool!
• NASA makes no mention of dehydrated whisky. Drat.
• Moist towlettes are used for cleaning up.

You can read more about eating in space here.

After last night, when the butterfly lady and I gobbled up homemade whole-wheat samosas stuffed with kheema and sookhe aloo, I'd have to say that after a few months in space, eating a bunch of predetermined, precooked chow would make me very sad.

But the view would be impressive!

A book project

Holly didn't tag me with her responses to the book meme, but I'm tagging myself.

1. One book that changed your life?
Well, there are plenty. I'll stick with "The Killer Angels," a relentlessly researched historical novel by Michael Shaara about the battle of Gettysburg that attempts to set the record of the battle straight. I didn't even know there was a record to set straight, and after reading the book a few times (and listening to it on tape about 10 times more), I concluded that the history classes I took in high school and college were nothing but a digest version intended to spur students to dig deeper. I also concluded that the history classes I took in high school and college were mostly bunk.

2. One book that you have read more than once?
One? Well, the Associated Press Stylebook is probably the book I've read the most bits of the most often! In a way, it is just a book of rules and a glossary, but like a dictionary, it is easy to get lost in.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?
Like Holly, I would choose "Wind, Sand and Stars," by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Of airplanes, he says that progress is measured in how much can be taken away, how simple the machine can become for the pilot, that sort of thing. His writing, too, strips away all the chaff.

4. One book that made you laugh?
"The Bad Beginning," the first in the Series of Unfortunate Events. Holy cow, they're all funny.

5. One book that made you cry?
"Parsifal Rides the Time Wave." The kid's dog dies, 'nough said.

6. One book you wish had been written?
"How to Build Anything From Stone" Secretive stonemason motherfuckers, they never publish anything good.

7. One book you wish had never been written?
Look, many ideas suck, but keeping them out of print won't keep them out of circulation. I oppose the idea of unwritten books, even awful ones.

8. One book you are currently reading?
"Words and Rules: The ingredients of language" by Steven Pinker. A loaner from my father thta I've finally got to the top of the to-read stack. Pinker says the book is entirely about regular and irregular verbs (and of course, that means it is about a universe more), which suits me perfectly!

9. One book you have been meaning to read?
"Crypotgraphy: A Primer," which is in the books section of my profile. Reading that book will mean reading a few others first, so it is in the seriously long-term stack...

10. Tag 5 people to do the meme!
As people who know me often find to their annoyance, chagrin or relief, I rarely pass along projects. Self-tagging is so much easier.

curling, yes!

In retrospect, and considering the comment I got today, I'd say that yes, curling's a sport. In the early 1990s, a friend and I considered forming the Jamaican curling team, figuring that it would not be impossible to beat out the other Jamaican teams and grab the slot.

The idea never bore fruit, although we did drink some Red Stripe, I believe. Or maybe it was Lucky Lager and we just pretended it was from farther south.

That said, curling is quite a bit different from its relatives, not the least reason being the need to skitter around on the ice while coaxing the missile to its target. And it is fun to watch on television, unlike some more widely regarded sports, such as track and field (which TV strips utterly of drama, speed and power. The usual camera from above can't beat the view from trackside.)

Come to think of it, not many sports are as good on TV as they are in person. Maybe billiards, because of the advantage of the Telestrator. Maybe tennis, because then you don't have to have the bouncy-head syndrome.

Anyway, I'll buy curling.

A trend of which I was unaware

until I read a particular blog this morning: A list of five significant songs. I dunno if these are significant like "Masters of War" or "Battle Hymn of the Republic" but they count to me:

Pancho and Lefty (Townes Van Zandt)
Telling Stories (Tracy Chapman)
Tom Joad (Woody Guthrie)
32 Flavors (Ani DiFranco)
If I Needed You (Townes Van Zandt)

Death's choices

The sign outside one of the churches between home and work reads like this:

LIFE HAS MANY CHOICES BUT DEATH HAS ONLY TWO

Uh, OK. So what are they?

Wield scythe, or switch to an H&K G36.
Continue to ride outdated white horse, or maybe a Ducati 999R.
Wear flowing black robes (so timeless), or perhaps a ghillie suit.

Aside from those, I don't think Death has a lot of choices to worry about.

My $0.02 on packing light

The butterfly lady, with whom I travel, is a truly brilliant packer. She can fit everything for a trip of any duration and variety into her backpack, no sweat.

I'm not one to be one-upped, so of course I carry everything in my pack, which is a less-adorned, yellow twin to hers.

All travelers aren't equal, though: She fits a much greater diversity of goods into her pack, and I think she winds up with more clothing options, too. On the other hand, I usually carry some oddball stuff (i.e. a spotting scope, or a field guide or two and binoculars in addition to a camera, etc.). Sometimes I volunteer for something heavy or bulky that we'll need & can share.

I do most of the same things she does, packing-wise: one pair of shoes, no full bottles, certain clothes as a cushion at the bottom of the bag. The biggest difference is I've taken a more radical stand on clothes.

For our most recent off-Homeland vacation, a three-week road trip in North Africa, I had two shirts, two pairs of pants, two pairs of boxers and two pairs of socks. I also brought a T-shirt and pajama bottoms. The trick was that I got all but the PJs in quick-dry specialty models (pretty easy on the wallet, which was nice) from a travel outfitter, and we were headed for a pretty dry place. Much easier on the laundry than Central America, I daresay.

As it turned out, I didn't like one of the shirts at all, so I only wore it twice in three weeks. The other shirt I kept clean by washing it nights and wearing it the next day even if it was still a little damp. In retrospect, I think I could easily have gotten away with one of each item instead of two, given the climate.

I couldn't speak for the butterfly lady, but as for me, packing lightly has gotten a lot easier since I:

a) bought those packpacks!
b) decided I'd carry only that pack while outbound (hey, some souvenirs are worth picking up an extra bag for) and then started a competition with myself to eliminate every non-essential item.
c) realized that you can almost always buy stuff on the road that is cooler than what you would have brought with you if you'd remembered it in the first place.

Of course, b) and c) have been the most fun, because I don't buy a new pack for every trip. But b) and c) really are fun, and because I value my portability, I don't mind buying new stuff every now and then to lighten that bag.

My moral for this story:
Unpack your mind before you pack your bag.

Will God slay Fidel?

President Bush was quoted in an AP story today as believing that when Fidel Castro, apparently ill with an intestinal malady, will "move on" is the "work of the Almighty."

Well, I guess ol' Fidel's not a bad guy then, because the Almighty's had 47 years to do something about him and he hasn't done jack shit. In fact, you could even say the Almighty has protected Castro, if you believed in that sort of thing.

I also guess that the Almighty doesn't think too much of Fidel's neighbors to the north, nor the displaced fascists in Miami who have called for Castro's head since '59. Or maybe the Almighty is only at work when she's doing something Bush likes.

Also in the news, people who see the world only in black and white apparently do something different - brainwise - than the rest of us to keep themselves in the dark.

Coincidence?

Burger King's evil new sandwich

This morning's junk e-mail brought a press release denouncing Burger King's new offering, the BK Stacker.

Here's what Burger King says of the burger:

"Get meat and cheese your way with BK STACKERS. Choose from double, triple or quadruple layers of beef and cheese - topped with bacon and sauce. It's the flame-broiled meat lover's burger and it's here to stay - no veggies allowed."

And (predicatably, but still funnily) here's the best part of what Jeff Novick, director of nutrition at the Pritikin Longevity Center & Spa, has to say:

"Fast food like this is great if you're in a hurry - to die!"

In search of a sport for which steroids won't help

OK, baseball, football, basketball, hockey, tennis, swimming, sledding, skiing, track and field, bicycling, rugby, lacrosse, soccer, boxing, skating, rowing, fencing, gymnastics, weightlifting (duh), wrestling, volleyball - all these are out. Even table tennis and badminton are probably on the list of steroids-could-help-you sports, if you are one of the serious, non-back yard types.

And I can't say I think golf, darts, curling, shuffleboard, bowling, shooting, sailing, polo, riding and other such games and pastimes really count as sports, even if your conditioning is superb (and maybe steroids would help you after all). I guess the latter sorts fall in with racing cars, which certainly requires mind-boggling conditioning but isn't really a "sport" either, at least in the Platonic sense I have in mind.

So what's that leave?

Archery? No, alas, even bows and arrows have their troubles: Mark Hainline was busted (for refusing a test) in 2005. Jai alai? I don't think so.

I must be missing something good.

They're misappropriating my favorite words!

While speaking over with a colleague, I found myself saying "misrepresentation" instead of "lie" in a situation that most assuredly merited the latter, more black-and-white term. Yegods, thought I.

So I started mulling over other casualties, and I found some good words that don't really belong on the no-say list: graveyard, undertaker, rapist (I shit you not, my former employer - because Granite State laws call it aggravated felonious sexual assault, not rape - wouldn't call a rapist by that term in news stories.): The list goes on and on.

Some words fall out of favor for good reasons (colored, Oriental - offensive but also aspecific). Others, however, are pooh-poohed by people who don't want to be called prison guards (correctional officers), trash collectors (sanitation engineers), strippers (exotic dancers) or whatnot.

Maybe I'm too sentimental, but I think we all lose something when good words, and more to the point, good, descriptive words, fall out of common usage.

Of course, I can already hear the tinny screech of a certain Seattle-area editor: "It's a living language! Supercede is a perfectly acceptable spelling!" and all that nonsense.

To that, I say, "Bovine solid waste, you vitamin C-deficient canine!"

young and full of beans

Who knows why people say the young are full of beans? The mad bomber reminds me of that peculiar expression every so often, when she dashes headlong through the house in the crazed full tilt of a puppy. Like her elder, mutt bro, she usually follows up the bombing run with a kerflomp onto the cool "wood" floor. Pretty cute :)

The Mysterious East

The Far East rightly gets a lot of credit for being interesting. It also gets saddled with a lot of hocus-pocus nonsense from people who invest the region with mystical and supernatural powers.

Let me give you three for-instances from an otherwise Seriously Smart Guy, Geoffrey Miller:

For-Instance 1: In comments that forecast the future of evolutionary psychology lying to the East, Miller says (quoted from Human Nature Review in a forwarded e-mail), among other things, "We realize that the U.S. is morphing into a fascist-fundamentalist plutocracy that will never seriously support Darwinian research."

I can see that. But he also says that "Asians" have:

"sophisticated views of sex: in contrast to sex-negative European monotheism, many Asian cultures are more sex-positive, more urbane, and more sophisticated (consider the Kama Sutra, Tantric Buddhism, Hindu temple carvings, Thai sex tourism, geisha culture, etc.)"

Oh? OK, Mr. Anecdote, if they're so positive and sophisticated, why did the Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors (fittingly enough, carried out by Pfizer) find that people in the West - mostly - find their sex lives more satisfying than people in the East?

For-Instance 2: Miller assumes aggressive growth for India and China and forecasts both will surpass the gross domestic products of the United States and Europe by 2050, a prediction he uses to state that China will become the world's most prosperous country.

Maybe Miller thinks GDP is a better measure of a country's prosperity than per-capita, or median, or mean (for Christ's sake), income, but I do not.

I'd certainly rather live in Bermuda than Sierra Leone, for example, even though Bermuda checks in at No. 167 on the CIA World Factbook's GDP list and Sierra Leone stands at No. 159. Hell, Afghanistan, North Korea and Russia all have Bermuda beat, and its per-capita GDP is the highest on Earth!

The latter measure is misleading, too. Would you prefer the United Arab Emirates or Japan? Well, UAE soars above Japan, so by Miller's reckoning, it must have an edge.

For-Instance 3: Miller says China will soon be the world's most "progressive" country. He doesn't back that up, except to say that "China is an officially atheistic state; most other
advanced Asian countries are fairly secular, with very low rates of creationist monotheism. ... Daoism and Buddhism embrace perpetual change as the cosmic norm."

If by "progressive" Miller means to say "amenable to evolutionary science" then maybe. But I take progressive as having implications that reach far beyond the realm of the privileged. China may be headed toward Miller's vision of a "prosperous and progressive" future, but for whom?

Miller's predictions above and at the recent Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference could sound reasonable at first blush, but I fear this otherwise worthy member of the resistance has given up far too early on the rest of us.

need your hog washed?

Just ask AAA, whose flack is linking "record-high" gas prices with "news" that AAA wants to get out about travelers going online (specifically to AAA resources) to make plans that among other things conserve fuel.

Give me a break. Those "records" aren't adjusted for inflation, and a quarter-century has passed since gas was $3.07 a gallon in 1981 (somewhere in the United States, as reported by the ever-reliable Internet yaps).

As I have said, many times now, the extended spell of high gas prices seems to me a good thing, maybe even a very good thing, although my wallet isn't so happy from time to time.

Coming next summer to a city (kinda) nearby

IKEA plans to announce Tuesday it will build a new store in Portland, near the international airport. That won't bring IKEA closer to here than it already is (there's one down the road from Sea-Tac), but it will put the store in striking distance of family.

The company's PR people note the store will be accessible by light rail (two stations) and employ 350 people. Of course, from a more selfish perspective, it will also put my impulsive and indulgent mother just a short drive from the place :)

off the streets and out of trouble

that's what my mother always says about projects that keep you busy. I've undertaken a little carpentry escapade (maybe a fiasco, but not yet): to build a three-tiered plants stand.

After about a million hours of poorly drawn sketches, I put together a draft scenario by stacking up CD cases, then semi-poorly drew some more sketches, then made a 3-D paper model, then not-poorly-at-all drew some more sketches, with measurements, then went to the store, then toiled for a while. Although there's not much to see yet, the project is coming along.

Whether or not I post a picture would be, I suppose, connected with how well all this works out. :)

Fantastic! Easy Street, here I come

I always like to get e-mail, but who knew I'd hear from the guy whose letter I've pasted below?

Two reasons why this letter's better than the run-of-the-mill crap from the "descendants" of - ironically - Sani Abacha:

Ol' Michel is pretty cheap. You can't have ANY money unless I help you and the best you can do is a quarter-mill in dough and chunks o' gold?

That last part, gold, makes me think Michel's been watching too much CNN in the morning (the only place I know of that you can run afoul of the Monex slobs)



iykedon07@yahoo.com MICHEL NGUESSAN
ABIDJAN COTE D' IVOIRE
WEST AFRICA
Dear One,
It is my pleasure to introduce myself to your good self. My name is Michel Nguessan I am an orphan, My late father was the Managing
Director in a minning company in accra ghana,before he later join the cocoa export company here in Abidjan,Cote d'Ivoire until his
untimely death on the 2nd of June 2005 He was poisioned by his business associates while my mother died of cardiac arrest. Soon as my father died, I later found out that he deposited a consignment in a security company here in Abidjan before he died and it is only me that have the knowledge of this. He also made me the next of kin when he deposited the consignment in the security company . This is the reason why I am contacting you. I am an orphan. . I just finished my high school and I would like to go into business with this heritage. I am contacting you so that you can become my business partner by helping me to retrive this consignment . After the successful retrivement of the consignment, I will then move together with you to your country, where we shall invest the money in a lucrative business . The sum in question is four million, five hundred thousand USdollar(US$4,500,000). and also he deposited (500KG of raw GOLD ASSAY) which
he got when he was working in accra minning company in ghana as executive cheif officer,to be sincere the gold its self was kept in the security company here in abidjan and all the clerification document is with me right now, I also hope to continue my education in your country from this amount as soon as the money and myself gets to your country. Immediately upon the successful retrivement of this consighnment I will then relocate to your country,
I will compensate you with 5% of the total sum that would be retrived for your kind assistance. You will also serve as a guardian of the joint investment we are going to operate together. Please reply me with this my private email iykedon07@yahoo.com .com
YOURS REGARD
MICHEL NGUESSAN

incremental progress

I think some newbies are running the show at the pool: The past few days have been inconsistent, at best, when it comes to the start time.

Yesterday the lap swim began three or four minutes late. This seems to have been no big deal to anybody but me, because everybody else has a workout that doesn't use the whole 60 minutes, but I haven't the luxury of standing around. When the lifeguard says, "go," I go.

So I pushed a little in the warmup but still only had 45 minutes left for a 2,000 and a cooldown. I don't know if the limited time frame was the reason, but I finished with a bit of room to spare, a first for me at that distance. I think I could have squeezed in another 200, but I think I'll save that for next week, because I'm still leery of invoking the wrath of my left arm. I find I only aggravate whatever the injury is at the end of a workout, probably because I don't stay as loose and smooth when I'm tired.

Whatever. I'm still pretty sure I'll be able to get to 3,000 meters per workout by Sept. 6, which is close enough to my goal of two miles for government work.

All of this beats running, anyway. Especially when you look at the projected 100- to 105-degree highs for the weekend...

observations on dominance

Katy the sizeable youngster edges little old Max out of the way pretty often, whether it is for pats or drinks of water. He's figured out ways to work around her (I think he would say that he has "chosen" to do things differently), but she is definitely playing the part of top dog around here.

Similarly, I've found myself swimming in a new lane, edged out by a youngster. Varsity (keep 'em straight, there's only three: Gary, Monkey and now Varsity) started swimming in "my" lane a couple of weeks ago - which I don't really mind - so now I use a portion of the fast lane.

Irony aside, it is interesting to see the difference in how I perceive the swimmers around me. Mostly, I think I need more than one thing to think about at a time, so I watch to see what others are doing. I find it useful to keep track of Gary, who appears to swim at a consistent rate and is therefore a good clock. He laps me several times each workout, but I can tell by when he does how fast or slow I am going, which is a big help near the end of my workouts, which typically end at the same time as the lap swim hour expires.

I can't see the real clock unless I pause, which I am loathe to do, so hurray for Gary. Varsity uses almost the whole hour, but I haven't got her measured yet, so I'm not sure if she'd make a good clock, too.

Neither would make a good wristwatch, of that I am sure...

ugh, too warm to make the rest!

well, that about says it. So, leftovers and other odds & ends is what we had instead of samosas, etc. This is probably a good thing, as I was more in the mood for fruit bowls (which is what we ate today) than for deep-fried snackies.

The squash remains on the counter, looking sullen.

eats

Well, the local (grown in the front yard) onions worked out just fine. Kheema, chana masala, moong dal and hummus (with tortilla chips, for that Mexicindian flavor) down, and naan, samosas and squash to go...

Weaving is the property of few these days

And weaving has company:

While sharking around at a local thrift shop, I found a very old book, "Selections from the Poems of Ovid." My book is longer than the unavailable listing at Amazon because it has a 91-page vocabulary section (so you, too, can translate a Saint Ex book title to "volatus nox").

The book is small but wonderfully heavy, and wears its 120-odd years of living well. Old books rock.

As does old-school education. The book is "intended as an introduction to the reading of Latin poetry," which presupposes a level of knowledge that I am sorry is no longer widespread.

I can appreciate the view of people opposed to teaching only the old, white and dead, but I can't say the same about those opposed to teaching anything old, white and dead.

Having had an education inflicted on me at South Salem High School, then a nationally recognized school of excellence, I can say with authority that there is more than enough time to teach the new and old, white and non-white, alive and dead - even if that meant double the workload - without pushing students much beyong a reasonable amount of work.

To put it mildly.

on the menu

The addition of our now-not-so-little bear cub reminds me that the old days of cooking for the week on the weekend should be the new days, too. I've been in a make-food-on-demand rut since the necessity of bulk of cooking on Saturday and Sunday lifted (aka when we got the hell out of the Granite State).

On the list for this weekend's cooking extravaganza:

• Baked tomatoes stuffed with kheema and fried onions (with locally raised lamb and Walla Walla Sweets grown in our yard)
  
• Samosas filled with sookhe aloo
• Improvised naan (We don't have a tandoor for the naan, man)
  
• Chana dal, and maybe dals built on black-eyed peas, split peas and/or yellow peas (I can't remember what all we have on hand)
• Hummus (if there're any chickpeas left over. I love chana dal.)
  
• Spaghetti skwash of some sort (if it was an acorn squash, I'd just stuff it with kheema and bake it. Maybe I'll pick one up - at the same time as I buy more storage containers!)

We'll see how many of these things come to pass. I'm also thinking of a chutney or two, if only because I (gasp!) oftentimes overlook making my own.

It is hard to beat quality time in the kitchen with the (quick, call 20/20!) culinarily inclined butterfly lady and the inevitable eight paws and two snouts.

The Decongestant Times, Vol. 4

Yeah, yeah, I know: Volume isn't the same as Issue, but I called it Vol. 3 last time, so here's Vol. 4.

I don't mind buying Claritin-D, but I'm not sold on long-term daily use. For the most part, I have only used it on days I swim, and I also make a point of thoroughly rinsing out my snoot and its related ductwork after each workout. Last night, at the butterfly lady's suggestion, I did another rinse 'round bedtime.

I did not take a pill because I want to see if I can get by with fewer doses than swims each week. The rinse helped: I didn't wake up 18 times to blow my nose (just the usual reasons - to take the puppy out and for no apparent reason a few other times) or rise in the morning with severe stuffiness. That said, it's been a sneezy, runny-nose morning, so the experiment continues...

A good project with a mildly depressing note

Since early May, I have sold books to benefit the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and the United Way of Walla Walla County.

The project is made possible by my employer, a daily newspaper based in the city. The company had until early May a rather substantial collection of books, which it made available for sale at a steep discount to employees.

In 2005, that technique raked in about $12. Plus, the books were a nuisance because they took up space. I volunteered to sell the books online on the condition that 50 percent of the proceeds go to DFGF (the default charity for the paper is United Way).

I believe the net benefit to be split between the charities now stands at about $350. Not as much as I thought when I hauled all the books home, but not too shabby. Besides, now all those books have homes.

But on a somewhat sad note, the titles include "Daddy, You're My Hero" and "Mommy, You're My Hero," both of which are written and illustrated for small children whose parents are about to deploy, presumably to war.

They're not the greatest books, but they are touching in their own way. The former sold early on, the latter yesterday.

Irksome noise

I don't really care if you want to play music in your car, or in your home, or in your ears, whether you're on the street or in the pool.

And I know that in some public areas, classical music is piped in to keep out the hooligans. Very clever.

That said, I can't abide by business owners who put ghetto blasters outside their shop, or worse yet have installed outdoor speakers, and play music loud enough to hear as you pass by.

Inside, fine. Outside, I will never buy anything from you, ever.

yardage

Aside from the pesky left-arm trouble, pool and loom times have sailed along nicely of late. On Saturday, I took advantage of the longer lap-swim session to add 200 meters to my regular distance.

What my "regular" distance is changes from day to day, but typically I have been able to go 2,400 meters (500 warmup, 1,800, 100 cooldown) or 2,600 meters (500, 2,000, 100) each day.

I could of course go much farther, but there's only an hour and I'm not particularly speedy. So I jacked up the middle of the workout to 2,200 meters, which put my time in the pool at about 65 minutes. My goal remains to get the middle to 2,600 meters so I can swim two miles in an hour, but that seems like a long, long way off.

Well, I guess that's how a good goal works.

At the loom, I've been tooling along through a couple of warps worth of contract work before returning to my sometimes-on-hold own work.

In a fit of pique, I reconfigured the basement, which in the fullness of time I plan to use as the weaving area. Weaving is exercise, so the cooler temperatures would be a benefit, and there is plenty of light - mostly because of the egress window.

Besides, the pup likes to be rambunctious, and the hard edges of the loom, bobbin-winding station and creel aren't too friendly. As it happens, the butterfly lady has the only shiner to show from the loom, and impressive multicolored job.

I was planning to make the move later in the year, when the loom returns from its annual vacation in southwestern Missouri. But I feel amibitious, so I might do the switch when I finish the warp I'm working on now.

Maybe the butterfly lady will veto the plan, but then I'll just wait until she's away for a few hours or asleep and do it sneaky like. :)

Sacred markers

These snazzy lightning bolts are made from paper, usually heavy, clothlike stock.

You'll find them hanging from ropes at shrines, or as the wikipedia article linked above suggests, in a stand-alone fashion.

Although my father and I capitulated and just unfolded one when we were trying to puzzle them out, they turn out to be simple - and intuitive - to make.

I sharked around for a diagram, but maybe it is more fun to figure it out on your own!

very funny post that isn't mine

10 Reasons Why Gay Marriage Will Ruin Society

My favorite psalm

My list of favored psalms is quite short, so choosing a favorite isn't the toughest call. But I'm quite fond of Psalm 23, so here - for lack of an original thought of my own - it is:

1. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
3. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
4. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
5. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
6. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

I suppose that it would by typical to appreciate most the imagery of green pastures and still waters (especially in a desert religion's book), but I am (usually) most taken with 23:5. I suspect that whatever it is about me that likes that verse is the same part that likes this bit of "32 Flavors," by Ani DiFranco:

"God help you if you are a phoenix and you dare to rise up from the ash. A thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy while you are simply flying past."

The rockets' glare

wasn't really all that bright this year. The barrage went on for a while, but didn't seem to be as fierce as in the past. Maybe that's because of the Fourth being a school night, so to speak. Or maybe it was just a function of which part of the neighborhood I live in, or inattention on my part...

Piggy didn't seem to enjoy the show. On his nightly walk, we passed several groups firing off artillery shells, and he watched some of the fireworks, then lowered his head and trucked on down the sidewalk. I think he was trying to act casual. When we made the turn to head home, he sped up more than usual. But he wasn't particularly clingy at home (maybe that's because I was vacuuming, another activity he has a dim view of).

In case you were curious

So, people make a lot of yap about cold, wet snoots on their pooches. I know that when I wake up in the middle of the night (which because I rarely sleep well is all the time) I sometimes check Piggy's snout and find it dry and warm. Why? Because he hasn't yet had a chance to do this:

lucky strike - not the cigarette, either.

I dropped by Joe Purdy's site tonight, hoping he might head this way on tour. No dice, so I decided to take another listen to his unavailable music (I only own eight songs from "Joe Purdy" and "Sessions from Motor Ave." - songs that were free to download at his site before it was redesigned).

After a little surfing, I realized those two older albums are finally for sale at iTunes, so I snapped up the remainder of each...

I don't know why he's not better known. If you are reading this post, go here, click on Music and take a free spin through his music.

toast

Toast is hard to beat. At the very least, it is warm and crispy and a perfect place for jelly to lay...

Being an enthusiastic toast consumer but also highly cognizant of bread's highly caloric nature, I've re-become a big fan of English muffins. I think I started gobbling them up again after moving to the city, so that's only the past year and change... anyway, a muffin (both halves) has the same number of calories as a typical slice of bread, so you could have two pieces of bread or four muffin halves. Yeah, I know, that's silly math but it works for me.

English muffins also seem to be heat resistant. My toaster has nine settings (unlike my fan, which is also a liar), and regular toast is a 5. English muffins are a 9, and that's only if you want your muffin just lightly browned.

Fewer calories and harder to toast. Just like that other delicious snack: tinfoil.

hurray for modern living

Something you will encounter if you hang around in Japan is modern architecture, a nice counterargument to the nonsensical rot that people who wish the old times would live forever try to push on everyone.

My usual practice with weirdos is to accept them on their own terms, but for me cultural preservationists fall into the same category as creationists: unfixable.

Why? Well, think about it for .02 seconds. Remember the good ol' days, when mom and dad looked after you and life was wholesome? Yeah, well, that was the same time that black people couldn't drink from the same fountain, so forgive me for calling bullshit on people who think the past is better. Oddly, "people" includes Hagakure, who thought everything gets crappier as time goes by.

Of course, he also wrote this:

If you cut a face lengthwise, urinate on it, and trample on it with straw sandals, it is said that the skin will come off. This was heard by the priest Gyojaku when he was in Kyoto. It is information to be treasured.

Yegods. Maybe he shouldn't be the authority figure.

Anyway, if you think the good old days really were better, talk to me about polio.

Swimming update

A nagging suspicion that I have been developing an arm problem has kept me out of the pool off and on over the past few months. Mostly, I've felt it prudent to limit swims to three or four a week instead of the five (or six!) I prefer.

But after a lot of experimentation, I think I've isolated the cause to a glitch in the breathing part of my stroke. I've apparently fallen into a habit of sort of looking up to the side to breathe in instead of looking over my shoulder, more or less. The over-the-shoulder way completely eliminates the twinge I've been feeling in my left arm, which although it hasn't been particularly painful has worried me.

Now all I have to do is get over-the-shoulder burned into my muscle memory and I'll be all set. I hope. Oh, an added plus: Washing out my sinuses more thoroughly pays off. I've had much less congestion, although I have had to take Claritin each evening. I plan to launch a multi-month experiment to try to cut back on how many doses I go through in a week. I'm not concerned about the long-term effect of the drugs, but they aren't cheap (about a buck a dose, even on sale) and I'm not keen on ingesting meth ingredients every day that I swim.

Anyway, this week has been very good in the pool, with no need at all to take a day off. Katy's puppyhood is tiring (and very worth it!), but I find that the swims help keep me in an easygoing frame of mind, even if I am a bit worn.

History in the making, but who cares?

I guess I've been beaten to the punch in using "schism" in a post or headline, but there's one going on right now anyway.

I wonder if the Great Schism went down like this. You'd think big moments in history would be obvious when they're happening, but maybe not. Who would have thought when it was first advertised that the Macintosh would have had such an effect?

Maybe this difficulty in seeing the forest when you're in it is why reputable halls of fame, such as baseball and sainthood, make would-be entrants wait a while to get in and why there are so many bullshit choices made for awards given the same year something happened ("Crash" - need I say more?)

First signs of the coming storm

A whistling Pete was set off in the neighborhood last night, no doubt a precursor of a nearly weeklong barrage. Piggy will not be pleased.

Last year's Independence Day celebrations started about this early and ended late, and he wasn't too happy, especially when walk time coincided with neighborhood fireworks time.

The spaniel finds pyrotechnics to be very much a bad thing and typically holes up wherever his mommy and daddy are, looking disconcerted. No sign yet of how Katy will handle them, but given their wildly divergent styles of interacting with each other (he wants her to go away, she wants to lick his face and nip him on the butt), she'll probably think it is just a really great party and possibly an excuse to take a nap.

Making ends meet on the installment plan

"Imagine the world of opportunities that awaits with an ability to spreadyour payments over several months!"

With those words, Mason Shoe Chairman Bill Scobie wraps up his pitch for potential customers of his company to sign up for Mason Direct Credit, which in the case of the person whose catalog arrived at my home allows for a credit line of $500 to buy shoes, boots, slippers and/or a few accessories.

The catalog has two front-page refers to the program, in addition to the open letter from Scobie on Page 2, a Web address at the bottom of every page and a pull-out sheet headed "Congratulations: You're PRE-APPROVED FOR Mason Direct Credit" that give some details of the program.

The pull-out sheet is in magenta and black and has a frilly border of the sort you saw on the Elks Club Hoop Shoot certificate you got after a middle-school free-throw contest.



I didn't see any hint of finance charges. Flipping through the catalog, I saw that all the shoes have little inset breakdowns of the price per month, but the fine print on each page says "the price per month reflects merchandise price only. Actual monthly payment may vary..."

Although No. 3 on the certificate pictured here says that all the terms are on the "back" of the form, when you flip it over you find only some terms, including overdraft and late charges, how payments need to be made, a definition of default, some other provisions and a paragraph on arbitration.

What gives? Where's the rest of the fine print?


Well, at the back of the catalog is the other half of the pull-out sheet (of which there was no mention at the front of the catalog), which - Surprise! - outlines the annual percentage rates and "privacy" policy.

The APR is predictably high (though not in Arkansas, where it is listed at 6 percent) and the "privacy" policy is a joke. Unless you opt out, Mason Shoe may share your "nonpublic personal information" with pretty much anybody they like.

Now, I'm not saying they're painting a target on people of limited means, but they are trying to attract people who need to pay for a pair of shoes in installments...

Katy's Bear Paw

After some experimentation, our growing ball of fuzz has a name. She also has the beginnings of several tricks (sit, get up - her favorite thing to do is lie down, so that's not really a trick - hurry home) as well as an improving track record with collars, leashes and house training.

Max still isn't too keen on the situation, but he is finding little ways to assert himself and he is always willing to growl. Ah, dog dynamics.

Is Garybob slacking?

If so, I hope he doesn't read my blog.

Having already established that Monkey doesn't take very long swims, I was attuned to other people's workouts in a way I wouldn't normally be, which led me to calculate Garybob's swim at 1,500 meters, somewhat short of the amount he credits himself with. Curious, that.

Of course, I'm one to talk, having launched into a multiple personality disorder style of swim distances (see, I know it's not schizophrenia!).

Oh, I guess it isn't called that anymore, damn it. Let's try that again:

Of course, I'm one to talk, having launched into a dissociative identity disorder style of swim distances (see, I know it's not multiple personality disorder!).

It's all about the fans, baby!

By popular demand, our baby (who got a clean bill of health and some shots at the vet today)...

Quadruped #2

Fortune may favor the foolish, but the butterfly lady and I - OK, the butterfly lady anyway - have a wisdom surplus, so I'm not sure what to make of our shocking luck...

News of a Newfy pup came in on Friday's breeze and today brought the above individual. Below is a somewhat ruffled other individual...

day of coding

One of the side benefits of being me is the chance to do entertaining odd jobs that are not strictly speaking a part of my job description.

Yesterday (and Wednesday afternoon), that meant revising some of the macros that our Byzantine and antiquated (come to think of it, Byzantine is probably becoming an antiquted term :) pagination system uses to make our jobs "easier."

The A1 index is an example of an item that can be macro-ed, but also one that a template works for in about a quarter the time (hey, these aren't rocket-fueled computers). Guess which one I use? But to learn more about macros, I revised the index, which has lots of little details and tricks.

I'm not sure how much I learned, but I got the hang of the macro thing, so hey, low-cost amusement. Especially because I can see HUGE opportunities for fun and devilment in designing some of the macros. One reason for this is that the programmer can work in little dialogue boxes that pop up when a macro user needs to make a decision. The text of those boxes, as you might have already guessed, is up to me!

Flying cowboy class

"Classy" airplane seating sets sail under many flags - business class, first class, executive class - but it all boils down to comfy. What isn't so hot, you would think, is having all the cattle-class schlubs parade by on their way to the back of the plane. Unless your goal in sitting up there is to feel superior, I suppose.

It seems to me that the airlines, hoping to lavish their higher-paying customers with goodies to ease the pain of flying, figure they've pulled off a clever twofer: Seat the first class folks first so they can have a treat, but also so they can act as a living, breathing advertisement for flying in the front of the plane.

Well, I don't want to spend big bucks to be a free ad, and if I'm about to sit for a few hours in a tin can, I'm not too keen on sitting down right now. So how about giving me a lounge where I can enjoy those drinks standing up and letting me get on last?

Of course, some airlines just buy planes that put the passengers on in the middle of the craft and segregate them at the door. That's a good solution, but not if you're stuck with a bunch of old planes...

I'm reminded of all these things by a recent flight, and also by the news that Southwest Airlines is edging away from its festival (dog-eat-dog) seating of aircraft. Although their news release pays lip service to efficiency and other rubbish, I think the real deal is in this poorly written sentence:

"Southwest also has said it would consider Customer Satisfaction enhancements, like assigned seating, if such a move would attract new Customers and maintain or improve overall operational efficiencies."

When you start capitalizing things like Satisfaction, it is a short trip to capitalizing on things like satisfaction.

The irony here is that Southwest highlights its "enviable" successes in the same statement. Those successes would be, obviously, in comparison to the performance of other, more class-conscious carriers that are always on the brink of bankruptcy.

Strange and mysterious.

The Decongestant Times, Vol. 3

Safeway, which previously foreswore selling such infamous products as Claritin-D, is now peddling it, but according to the lady at the pharm desk not for long. And in keeping with her prognostication, the price label under the little chits for the product reads "while supplies last." The discount expires July 1.

The pharm lady also suggested the drug might soon be by prescription only, by the above date in Oregon and "soon after" in Washington.

OK, but I don't think putting the drugs in Prescriptionland is really going to make a difference in the "war" on meth. In the long run, all this appears likely to do is put the meth labs in Mexico and add one more drug to the well-developed supply lines.

This doesn't seem like a very good plan, but maybe that's because it isn't part of a plan, just a piecemeal take-a-stand campaign by states that don't want meth labs in their back yards. That fits from a parochial standpoint, but is irresponsible and doomed from any other sensible point of view.

It seems to me that a more rational course of action would be to attack the demand side of methamphetamines, which some people - notably the Montana Meth Project - do.

Why do we call him Pig?

Mostly because he does a little vocal thing when he sniffs to see if your hand is holding a treat, but also because he has a tendency to do this!

Whaling

Icelandic, Japanese, Norwegian, Russian, Makah, who cares? You kill whales, you've got mental problems.

On that happy note, I see that the International Whaling Commission has made a symbolic step toward ending the ban on whaling (which of course is not universal). Hey, I get the whole its-my-culture-that's-why-I-want-to-kill-them bit, and I also get that dead whales are valuable, but give me a break, on both accounts.

The fiscal argument cuts no ice: It's been 20 years, find a new job.

And culture? Rubbish. Cultures change. To pretend that a culture will "die" if its carriers can't kill something is a charade carried on by the superstitious and provincial, enabled by the namby-pamby forces of political correctness. Absolute bullshit.

We're not talking about whole cultures here, but if your country has represented as pro-whaling for the past 20 years and you haven't done anything about it, you're partly to blame, too.

Butterfly lady at a joe shack

West Philadelphia doesn't seem to be a hotbed of good coffee shops, but this one was A-OK by me... This also happens to be my maternal grandfather's old neighborhood.

Juvenile delinquent or young punk?

Our living language provides plenty of chances for the politically correct to recast the world in their image. Here's yet another example, at a facility near the University of Pennsylvania.

amusing signage

From the University of Pennsylvania neighborhood, scraps of silliness.

underfoot

Sometimes the coolest little details are near your shoe. How many cities do you know of where such an item is manufactured?

cool but disorienting typeface

found in some odd corner of Philadelphia.

If I had a million dollars (seriously)

I would buy a Raven's Progressive Matrices kit and all the accessories from Harcourt Assessment. Alas, the kit's price tag is $749 and does not appear to include handy things like a fleepin' manual to tell you what the scores mean.

I am a little annoyed to find out that the fancy schmancy testing I underwent to get my job used standard matrices, not the advanced test, which one would hope is harder (and more fun).

So now all I need to do is find somebody who has time to spare and an advanced set they're willing to run me through!

Shariff Azim (and/or his friends) rocks!

After blathering ad nauseum (and judging by the overwhelming number of comments on my postings from the conference) about the goings on at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference in Philadelphia, I got the sneaking suspicion that I should have been a bit more self-promoting (Advice Goddess Amy Alkon had the good sense to put up little signs at the conference sign-up table indicating she'd been blogging on the proceedings).

But Shariff Azim and/or his friends and fans, saved the day with multiple visits, although I think I gave his research short shrift. So here's how Azim and his second author, Ara Norenzayan, laid out the meat of their study in an abstract:

"Using social psychological methodologies, we have examined how priming religious concepts affects moral and prosocial behavior. Our results indicate that even subtle unconscious exposure to religious ideas can dramatically encourage prosocial over selfish behavior. These effects hold for both theists and atheists. Current research is examining the relative effectiveness of secular moral concepts such as civil responsibility and social contractarianism."

I still say the most interesting piece of their research - to me, an outsider - is how stark the difference was between religion-primed and control-primed participants, and the implications for priming in other venues. Indeed, "can dramatically encourage..." may even be too soft a sell...

A sin of omission

On a quick online troll for information about an OTC allergy drug, I found a list of which states won't sell you decongestants without a trip to the pharmacy counter.

The list also indicates which stores Alavert's maker says won't leave the methamphetamine ingredients out in the aisles: Albertsons, Safeway, Longs Drugs, Rite Aid, Shopko, Safeway, Target and Wal-Mart.

Exactly half of states will let you buy Alavert Allergy & Sinus D-12 (and, presumably, all its competitors) without rigamarole.

Of course, Alavert (again, presumably, joined by its competitors) doesn't make any effort whatsoever to say why you have to go to the pharm desk...

not quite a triumph, but not too shabby

Tuesday's swim, the first in recent memory (vacation'll do that to me), went fine, but was a smidge slow. The reintroduction of chlorinated water did not make for happy sinuses, but oh well.

It was, as always, fantastic to be in the water.

perched

and waiting a triumphant (??) return to the pool. Yesterday was definitely out on account of the two hours of sleep that came between arriving at home and heading to work.

Work: Where you go to recover from vacation.

:)

If I had a million dollars...

I'd buy whatever I wanted.

But if I only had $20, what would I do?

That question is the basis for an interesting economic game that a healthy handful of researchers - most notably and most heavily referenced, Norm Li - presenting at HBES are playing with their participants.

The basic principle: You get a list of attributes for a short-term or long-term mate (or both) and a small amount of capital to spend on the attributes. What do you look for? When the researcher doles out another helping of capital, do your priorities change? What about another helping?

Typically, the answer when the budget is small is absolute necessities. In the case of women, that would be a man with resources. In the case of men, that would be a good-looking woman. After satisfying those obvious basic needs, the less-useful items get bought, such as sense of humor, kindness...)

The games are touted as being a way to get to the heart of what's important in mate-seeking in a way that is very difficult in the lands of plenty that all this research is done in.

For a fully laid-out version, read Li's paper, "The Necessities and Luxuries of Mate Preference: Testing the Tradeoffs."

Ironically, perhaps, a talk today by Elizabeth Pillsworth on the Shuar (hunter/horticulturalists of southeast Ecuador) found that kindness, reliability and faithfulness ruled for people seeking long-term mates. Being as the Shuar appear to be in a life situation much more closely related to all of humanity's forebears, you'd think that they, like the people Li's games test, would put greater stock in looks/resources...

Kanazawa postscript

When I caught up with Satoshi Kanazawa during an evening poster session Friday, I put the question to him: Can you have high mating intelligence without using it?

He said no, and equated mating intelligence with cheater detection. Could you truthfully say you're good at detecting cheaters but also acknowledge being routinely taken in?

Says I, "Does that mean that you have to have a wife and kids to have high mating intelligence?"

"No," says he, "but you would need to have a lot of partners."

OK, fine. But what about for women? Having many partners is not typically seen as a genius strategy for women, so his position would mean that the only women who have high mating intelligence are indeed the ones who have a husband - or other long-term mate - and kids.

I find this implausible, to say the least, but I also think Kanazawa is onto something when he posits that mating intelligence is not the be-all Intelligence - a position held by others.

That doesn't mean I'm sold on Kanazawa's proposition that general intelligence, mating intelligence and all the other intelligences are non-hierarchical, though.

a useful tool?

In a task designed to determine whether religion points people toward morality (defined here as prosocial behavior), researcher Azim Shariff used implicit priming (a word-jumble game that contains certain terms, in this case ones associated with religion) to see whether participants would be more likely to share money.

The upshot appears to be: Yeah, they will, regardless of whether they are theists or atheists. Of course, there's plenty of room to wonder what exactly was at work, but the religion-words-primed participants were much more share-y than the non-religion-words-primed participants.

In this particular experiment, the participants had to decide how to allocate $10 between themselves and an unsuspecting other (unsuspecting in the sense that if you took $9, they wouldn't know they were getting a worse deal than if you took $6).

This leads me to wonder whether other sorts of implicit priming could be used to point people in the direction of parting with their money. For example, the longer you play cards against the house in a casino, the more likely you are to lose. So maybe casinos already (or could choose to) employ some sort of priming to keep people at the tables for another hand.

Maybe that's what Jack and Cokes are for.

implications for newspaper folk

Off the side of a side road, I came across this little item:

A study by Miriam Law Smith of whether human face color counts when it comes to assessments of mating worthiness shed some light on an area I hadn't expected. Smith said that when the time came to manipulate the reds and yellows in people's faces (facial redness turns out to be widely viewed as desirable, so drink up!), using lab color was the best choice (most lifelike, evidently), as opposed to operating in RGB (or CMYK, for that matter).

Of course, the natural inclination for press types is to operate in CMYK, because for all its pitfalls, it is the color that's used on the press.

Lab color, unlike the sorta primary color scheme used on the multimillion-dollar machines, is a way to tinker with lightness as well as, if you by the Wikipedia account, redness and greenness.

Would this mean we'd be best off adjusting images in lab color, then converting? Who knows. Adjusting in RGB then converting sometimes results in a loss of fidelity, no doubt on account of the inherent limitations of CMYK (muddy waters ahead!).

But this is certainly information that begs experimentation!

more food for thought

Medical professionals sometimes suggest to women struggling with acne that they use oral contraceptives because they have a knock-on effect (besides preventing small people, I mean).

Acne is also represented as a bacterial ailment.

Today's lecture by Diana Santos Fleischman on the effect of ovulation on OCD symptoms - fascinating in its own right - brought to light something I missed previously: that the synthetic hormones used in contraceptives can suppress women's immune systems. What does that say about using it to fight a bacterial ailment?

If acne is indeed an infection, I'd say that suppressing your immune system on a monthly basis would be an outstanding way to give the germs the reprieve they'd need to dig in and fortify. In addition, Fleischman found a higher interest in non-contamination among women with natural cycles versus women on the pill. This seems to me a way to exacerbate the problem.

All of this would be especially bad if acne turns out to be sometimes an infection, sometimes an outcome from hyperactive immune systems. Some of the latter maladies manifest as Xerox copies of acne, after all.

So, que pasa?

Remember the bad old days, when cervical cancer was a dark and deadly mystery and ulcers were "caused" by stress? Perchance a new day could dawn here...

assorted addenda from Thursday's sessions

Food for a couple of thoughts:

So you already know that crazy-clean tendencies on mom's part can result in asthma (or worse) for the kids, but check this out: These days, it is country kids who are seen as having better preparation to fight such hyper-immune-system ailments in part because, as Marlene Zuk detailed Thursday, country kids have access to intestinal worms, which in small numbers prep your body for later assaults by activating a class of cells (T2) that help regulate another class of cells (T1, and are you still with me?) that when unchecked can account for awful afflictions such as Crohn's disease... The key element, it appears, is to have evidence of manure in the linens of the country kids (aerosolized pooh?).

On a lighter (or heavier) note, the standard deviation for brain size was, if Geoffrey Miller said what I think he did, is 8.2 percent. Bigger is better when it comes to your brain, so when some people get a baker's dozen, they really are much better off than the holders of a standard 12. OK, that was a stretch, but hey, 8.2 percent is quite the hill of beans.

What's your mating IQ?

PHILADELPHIA - What's it take to get laid?

Speakers at an annual evolutionary psychology conference here Thursday took a long, deep view at one of life's age-old questions during morning paper presentations. And a new player in the intelligence game reared its head, too.

Morning presentations at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting focused on creativity as a key element in getting mate seekers into the good graces of their intended, as well as tackling larger questions about how the intelligence needed to do so works.

Presenters discussed mating intelligence, a publicity-poor cousin of such popular concepts as emotional and Machiavellian intelligence, in a symposium aimed at building a case for the idea from an evolutionary perspective.

Whether mating intelligence - roughly defined as adapatations that will get you a mate, help you keep that mate and deal with rivals - should take its place as part of a pantheon of intelligences or as a subsidiary of general intelligence was a subject of debate. For that matter, the idea of "general intelligence" got its fair share of inspection.

Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science, put forward his view that mating intelligence is a separate portion of a whole that has no name - a sort of unnamed pie that includes a slice called "general intelligence" as well as numerous other slices.

Kanazawa cast his view in opposition to popularly held - and in the world of evolutionary psychology this is a supremely subjective term - views of general intelligence.

Other speakers at the morning session took a more pragmatic approach to their arguments.

Ilanit Tal of the University of New Mexico discussed an attempt to validate mating intelligence.

Her study called on college students to undertake a variety of creativity tasks - including representational and abstract drawings and short essays - as well as a battery of tests to ascertain their intelligence, attitudes, personality type and tendency toward mental illness.

Findings of her study included a bright spot for the verbally creative, which is that the skill is a positive for men looking to capitalize on a short-term mating strategy.

Other findings discussed in the symposium posed more questions than they answered. A talk on mating intelligence as seen through the lens of speed dating concluded that more needs to be learned. Peter Todd's research attempted to find more about the high-speed assessments, but perhaps his most amusing discovery was that men typically offered second encounters to about 40 percent of women,. Meanwhile, women acquiesced to only about 20 percent of second encounters with men.

Never a truer word spoken?

Indeed.

Researchers in the session repeatedly highlighted findings that suggest long-term bonds are forged primarily at the hands of women, who are typically seen by evolutionary psychologists as having a greater interest in the long haul.

A final and fascinating note in the symposium was offered by Maureen O'Sullivan, whose research suggests that while everybody lies in relationships, women have a particularly distinguished record in that they successfully lie not only to men but to themselves.

Alas, for the romantic little remained after the mid-morning session.

Except, perhaps, findings of Scott Barry Kaufman, who found that creativity - that attractor of mates - to be linked with mental illness.

First-day impressions at HBES 2006

Philadelphia is the place, the annual conference (www.psych.upenn.edu/~kurzban/HBES2006/) of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society is the reason, and here I am.

After the customary night of beer, wine and high-decibel chatting, the meat of the meet arrived this morning. As you might expect, talks leaned heavily toward mate attraction. Two pieces of the puzzle addressed today were displays of creativity and mating intelligence.

Is visual or verbal creativity another feather in the cap for men (or women, though most findings suggest men make more use of it) seeking mates? Uh, maybe.

Is mating intelligence its own animal (like the much-ballyhooed emotional intelligence) or is it a piece of general intelligence? For that matter, is general intelligence the foundation of all other modules of intelligence (i.e. emotional IQ) or vice versa, or are they completely separate (aka there is no overarching intelligence)? Uh, maybe!

Besides the intellectual fun, a few collected items:

David Buss, he of fame, fortune (?) and certainly above-average height and intelligence, arrived at a talk just as the question was posed: Are height and intelligence selected for together? (I think the real question is: Are taller people smarter, and do they get picked first in the mating game?).

Although it used to be that city kids could resist disease better than country kids, the roles are reversed or at least reversing in the developed world, especially when it comes to asthma. Of course, the whole room-is-too-god-damn-clean thing is a reasonable explanation for why urbanites' kids wind up sick; it just strikes me as funny that now the barefoot country kids have an edge because they are the only ones being exposed to parasites that keep them, in the long run, healthy.

More later...

good, but not as good as the last dish

In a mood to bump off some ingredients that lurked in the fridge, I assembled a country cousin of manicotti pomodori e gambero. Here were the major players:

cottage cheese
shrimp
a finely chopped onion, sauteed
finely chopped bacon, three strips

stuffed into jumbo shells and manicotti

topped with halved grape tomatoes, cream sauce (which, if I do say so myself, I make damn well) and finely grated Parmesan.

The previous dish was cleverer by half (at least), mostly because of the spaghetti squash, which is a much more interesting filling than cottage cheese.

But it was still tasty...

yardage increase (finally)

Consistency hasn't exactly been my middle name lately, but the past few swims have been 2,600 meters with time to spare (not much, but a few minutes). My tentative goal for the summer is to get to 3,000, which should be doable because I could probably hit 2,700 or 2,750 right now.

I've been going up in 200-meter increments for no apparent reason (kind of like wearing a glove on your left hand if you're Bill Buckner or Michael Jackson), and I think I like the pattern. Ideally, of course, I would get to 3,200 by Sept. 6, but I'm not sure that's a plausible goal. It would be cool, though!

By then, the new pool should be open at the alma mater, which will pose a dilemma or two. If I can weasel in, it would be free, in which case the butterfly lady says she'd go, too, and if the hours work, it would be hard to justify the cost of the current venue, which has the advantage of being a place I am comfortable (and know two or three people).

Ugh. Who knows. Free is a very good price.