What's on your Christmas list?

Or Hannukah, or Kwanzaa, or just because it is winter and you should have some presents...

I'm crossing my fingers for:

• Fuzzy socks - snow is falling even as I type. Maybe some alpaca mittens or gloves, too. :)
• Le Couvent des Minimes honey/shea repairing hand cream - Everybody has their favorite; this one is mine. This outfit has other flavors, too, so their three-piece sampler might be more fun.
  
• A fancy recipe box - I'm not choosy, but I would like one that is snazzier than the little plastic job I've got now.
• A new shuttle for weaving - Webs, for example, carries some pretty snazzy 11-inchers by Leclerc.
• A new oven & dishwasher - Oh my god, did I just write that? Yeah, I guess so.

I think that my inability to conjure stuff I'd like to add to my life dates to about a year or two after I graduated from college. I like nice/pretty/new/frivolous/useful things, but I have a hard time saying I really need things, so it is hard to come up with a list. My sister thinks I need gear from Chiquita and other somewhat related items.

So there you have it. I can do other lists with greater aplomb. Maybe I should inventory the spice rack for a subsequent post...

An example of cool design

I don't know if The Symposium for Professional Wine Writers at Meadowood Napa Valley is as good as this poster advertising it, but if it is, it is probably worth the $475, plus $250 a night for a nonsmoking, king-size bed. (You're a king you say? Well, you will not believe what I have in store for you. I did not know you guys were all the same size... Speaking of which, the Mitch Hedberg quote page at wikiquote is now severely cut down.)

Happy Thanksgiving

I am thankful for peace and love, especially when they prevail.

CSI: Miami

Maybe the CSI stands for Curiously Short of Interesting.

Assorted thoughts collected while watching an episode of the show last night:

• If you're going to have a show about a murder, have a show about a murder. If you want one about a terrorist plot to blow up a nuclear power plant, have a different show. If you insist on having both in one show, maybe an hour's not long enough to, say, develop anything.
• Nobody who really does a job has to define all the tools they use.
  "Quick, Officer Smith, get your shotgun!"
  "I have retrieved my shotgun, which I use to fire shells!"
• If a truck carrying 10,000 pounds of plastic explosives leaves the docks at noon, what will its location be at 3 p.m.? If you said just outside the nuclear power plant, but close enough to intercept before it does any harm, you are correct.

Watching the show would have been a huge waste of time if it hadn't led to a half-hour of hysterical laughing and fake dialogue at bedtime.

Wicked busy = wicked quiet blog

Not that I have anything super insightful to post...

so I'll leave you with the quote I have posted on my bulletin board at work. It isn't really a quote at all, but a note from a freelancer. I think it might be the beginning of a novel:

There was nothing
else going on at the
luncheon.
- Liz -

Assorted sights from the path to work

Today, I have seen three accipiters. I assume they were Cooper's hawks, but sharp-shinned hawks are damn near identical, so who knows. I don't think I've ever seen so many of these hawks in such short order: two on the way to work (a 10-minute walk) and one from the window while I got coffee.

Also, two church reader boards (the first is a direct quote; the second might be paraphrased):

"Seven days without prayer makes one weak"

"Blessed it is when brothers and sisters live in unity"

Now, for today's mix-and-match, try to figure out which of the above replaced which of the below:

"God loves variety in autumn leaves and people"

"Life has many choices. Death has only two"

Gee, hmm. Which church would you rather attend?

A tantalizing tidbit

While reading a story this morning about a projected energy surplus in the region this winter, I stumbled on this little detail:

"Since 1999, the region has lost about 10 percent of its demand - largely from the
decline of the aluminum industry."

No kidding? I didn't even know the region had an aluminum industry, let alone one in decline.

Hey, I know the story isn't about aluminum, but now I want to know!

Speaking of unholy baseball-related items (aluminum bats annoy me), I see the Mets plan to sell their stadium-naming rights to Citigroup for about $20 million a year (according to the Associated Press). The AP story suggests the new stadium will be named CitiField. The deal is said to be for 20 years, long enough that maybe people will realize how silly looking two words smushed together with a capital letter in the middle can be.

Especially when one of those words isn't even spelled correctly.

Of course, I think the Mets stink, so maybe the name is a perfect fit!

Oral history project

Saturday is Veterans Day, but our paper doesn't publish Saturdays, so we rolled out our project for this year's observation today.

Over the past few months, we've collected audio recollections from local veterans of their most memorable time from the service. Thirty veterans' memories are presented today, with more to come in what I hope will be a project that is never finished.

On a side note, this project is one of the reasons I work at a community (aka small) newspaper: The reporters and Web content editor have just two managers, myself and the editor, so their good ideas and work aren't spoiled by too many cooks. We have flexibility people at larger papers don't enjoy and a collegial workplace unpoisoned by excessive workplace politics. I wouldn't trade working here!

Anyway, take a listen, if you like...

A thought on elections

While reading the wire today, I came across this line in a Howard Kurtz/Washington Post story about the impending election (and its predicted result, Democratic control of the House and possibly Senate):

"Divided government may or may not be good for the country, but it's great for the Fourth Estate."

He's right, of course, but I think the first clause is a cop-out.

Of course divided government is good for the country! Are you kidding? I'd even go so far as to say we'd be better off with a Congress that meets every two years (like, say, the Oregon Legislature does) than what we've got now. Congress has already found a way to stuff one year's work into several, so why not cut down the time for meddling and mischief even more?

I'm pretty sure the only people who would really be screwed if that happened would be people who get paid to hang around inside the Beltway (and only some of them), not the people whose lives are supposed to be made better by the work they do.

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

But on the bright side, the Cardinals did win the World Series!

Emmylou Harris sings my favorite song

She said in a documentary that because she was the first non-Townes Van Zandt person to do "Pancho and Lefty" she thinks of it as her song.

Fare thee well, Clifford Geertz

When you're famous in your field, you're not necessarily famous anywhere else.

That's the deal for Clifford Geertz, anyway, who died Monday. I don't fall in with his school of thought (symbolic anthropology, a scientifically suspect point of view), but his book, "Islam Observed," influenced me anyway.

I mostly like his interest in observation and storytelling, which most people who know me would agree are things I enjoy, too. Especially storytelling!

An unusual attack ad

Visa's current ad campaign, Life Takes Visa, is visually interesting, sometimes silly and usually clever.

Its newest TV component, "Transactional Fluidity," takes a swipe at cash, which strikes me as an atypical target for an attack ad. The 60-second spot is a highly choreographed play in a deli, where everything works like clockwork, including the Visa-swiping customers. That is, until one person pays with cash, throwing the finely tuned dance into disarray.

Besides villifying cash, the ad suggests to me that if you really want to be just like everybody else, you should use a Visa card.

Only weirdos and iconoclasts use cash, eh? Well, I'm ever in the deli in the Visa ad, I'm paying with pennies.

Visa says that what its new campaign "is really about are the people who stand up to life’s challenges, laugh at its jokes, savor its sweetness and continue down its unpredictable path."

I'm not sure how that statement fits with making an enemy out of cash, which the ad protrays as severely uncool. But the ad does fit with somebody else's agenda.

Earlier this year, National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson claimed that the "cash economy" is the No. 3 problem facing the American taxpayer. As I wrote in January, Olson alleges that the failure of taxpayers to report income from the cash economy costs the nation $100 billion or more each year, which she says translates to about $2,000 per taxpayer.

I'm not saying Visa and the IRS are in cahoots, but I'm pretty sure that if using cash makes both of them mad, I'm happy to slap down the dollar bills.

A piece of animation

I put this together while living in the Granite State...

Our hyped-up dogs

Just a typical day around the house...

Performance art?

The massage lady's latest project:

Your shoes are tied!

My father sent me this excellent link to Ian's Shoelace site, which caused me to relace my shoes. My Dr. Martens only have three eyelets, so I chose riding-boot lacing because... Oh, I don't have any reason, I just thought it would be fun.

Now, I need some shoes with more eyelets!

How out of touch can you be?

While reading a recent issue of APME news (an industry insider magazine), I came across an article about what editors hope to see in journalism graduates in skills and accomplishments.

In 1990, the list was topped by writing skills, spelling and grammar, internships, ethics, blah blah blah. At that time, only 6 percent of the editors who were surveyed thought experience with computers was "very important" and only 31 percent rated that experience as "important."

So now you can see how behind the times those editors were during the grunge era.

Times have changed, but some of the backward attitudes haven't. To wit, the article's section on blogging contains these three comments, no others:

"Blogging requires no journalism skills per se. But everyone has a right to speak."
"Blogs are not necessarily any closer to journalism than typing."
"(Regarding) blogs - No one reads them."

And there you have it. But keep in mind, these comments come from the same group that is surprised to find out that even though newspapers often have profit margins of 10 to 20 percent:

"I continually get new grads expecting to be paid $30,000 or more."

Well, gosh and golly, that's just crazy talk! I mean, for that kind of pay, you could afford a car payment and an apartment in the city. Maybe some food, too! Unless you have student loans, of course...

Swedish meatballs

The butterfly lady's heritage means we have Swedish meatballs every now and then, and not just for holiday meals. I usually whip up some mashed potatoes and such, too.

I suspect that there are as many recipes for Swedish meatballs as there are cooks who make them. Here's mine:

For the meatballs

Ground beef (the market here sells ground beef, curiously, in an 18-ounce package)
Bread, torn into small bits (I save heels for just this purpose, and used the equivalent of six slices)
A half of a large yellow onion, finely minced
1/2 to 3/8 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
1/2 to 3/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 to 3/8 teaspoon garlic salt
2 large eggs

For the gravy

2 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup flour
2 to 3 cups milk (I use 1 percent)
About 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
About 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

Mix together the meatball ingredients. Your hands are probably the best tool for this job. Form into roughly 1.5-to 2-inch-diameter balls. When I made these over the weekend, I got 29 meatballs out of this recipe.

In a large saucepan on medium heat, melt a couple of tablespoons of butter or heat up some oil. Brown the meatballs in batches. You'll find that they need to be seared completely on a side before they'll move nicely in the pan. If they stick, you're probably trying to rotate them too soon. When each batch is done, set the meatballs aside.

In the same pan on medium heat, melt the 2 tablespoons butter and whisk in the flour. Whisk for about a minute, then whisk in the milk. Whisk until roughly homogenous, then whisk in the nutmeg and pepper. A pinch of salt won't kill anyone, either, especially if use unsalted butter.

Arrange the meatballs in the gravy and simmer for about 30 minutes. I like to let the dish sit off heat for about 5 minutes after the cooking has stopped, then serve!

Throwing good ideas after bad

On the heels of the demise of Washington state's unusually bad tourism-inducing slogan - SayWA - the people charged with drawing visitors to Seattle "unveiled a new Seattle destination brand position" today.

Metronatural

I can't do better than the flaks, so here's their spiel:

"the new trademarked tagline is the centerpiece of a powerful new brand platform that will define and promote the unique Seattle visitor experience and drive the city’s tourism marketing programs. The metronatural brand concept was designed to highlight Seattle’s rare and uniquely-marketable combination of urban and outdoor experiences."

Alas, the Seattle PR people plan to make metronatural "visible in Seattle and around the world."

The word is the result of a year's work and apparently involved input from a vast number of stakeholders. The gambling houses may now commence on setting odds that "metronatural" enjoys a longer life in the realm of spoken words than "metrosexual."

Speaking of medicine

I saw the latest Claritin-D ad the other night, in which actors say rubbish like, "Thank you, Claritin-D, for not changing your formula! I can still count on you to clear up my congestion!"

The commercial would only need minor tweaking to make a great Saturday Night Live sketch:

"Thank you, Claritin-D, for making sure I still have ingredients for my latest batch of meth!"

Anyway, here's Schering-Plough HealthCare Product's bullshit "explanation" for why Claritin-D is now a behind-the-counter product:

"Federal legislation takes effect on September 30, 2006 that imposes a deadline on moving allergy and cold products containing the active ingredient pseudoephedrine (PSE) off store shelves and placing them behind the pharmacy or customer service counter. This legislation will make it harder to find longer lasting allergy and cold decongestants. Interestingly, many allergy and cold sufferers surveyed were unaware of the changes both in the law and on the shelf product reformulations."

I know Claritin-D contains methamphetamine ingredients, and maybe everybody else knows, too. Would it really kill the drug maker to acknoweledge they're part of a problem?

More on strep & staph nose

If you are reading this post, it is probably because you have a staph or strep infection in your nose. Many people who come to this blog come here for this post, so you have a lot of company.

The first time I was infected, I had never even heard of such a thing as strep or staph nose. Here's what I know about this pesky problem:

My noses background includes one strep infection, in 2003 or 2004, and one staph infection (two species, I was told) that started in 2006. The infection has been back two more times since the initial infection. My risk factor apparently is that I am routinely congested because of an allergy to swimming pool chemicals (I swim a lot).

For me, the symptoms have been annoying, itchy and painful little cuts inside my nose that won't heal. Weirdly, I have only had the infections in one nostril.

Treatment is simple. You just spread antibiotic "cream" - really a petroleum jelly goop - around inside your nose twice a day for 10 days. The drugs can be expensive (I had insurance, and the prescription for the strep was still $40), or cheap (the staph infections were attacked with an 0ver-the-counter remedy, like Neosporin).

Simple, yes, but effective? The staph infection has been back a couple times (it started in September 2006 and I just finished a third antibiotic course today, Jan. 19, 2007). Some of the literature I found online suggests eradicating staph nose (typically staphylococcus aureus, for which an excellent article can be found here) can be a yearlong process: five days each month for a year!

Speaking generally, streptococcus and staphylococcus bacteria seem to be omnipresent, like coliform bacteria, and can cause much more havoc than stupid nose infections. Flesh-eating bacteria, for example, is a variety of strep.

That's about all I know so far. If you arrive here with a bummed out nose, take heart and if you haven't already, pay a visit to your health-care provider.

Here are three more reasonably good links:

Dr. Gabe Mirkin on treatment of staph nose
MedicineNet.com article about antibiotic resistant staph nose
A longer but better netdoctor article on resistant staph

If this post did not answer a question you have, please leave a comment and I will hunt down the answer.

The bead game

While watching television late one night in the Granite State, the butterfly lady and I stumbled on "The Bead Game/Histoire de perles," showing on public television. The film, which can be viewed here, has this synopsis, provided by Canada's National Film Board:

"In this fascinating, innovative exercise in animation, thousands of beads are arranged and manipulated, assuming shapes of creatures both mythical and real. They continually devour, merge, and absorb one another in explosions of color. The theme is one of aggression and inevitability, but any conclusion is left to the viewer."

This is well worth watching.

And the jobs I shouldn't have bothered taking

• The second time working as a box clerk at a grocery store (the first time worked out so well!)
• The second time working at a cannery (The first time, I was a Cherry Pitting Machine Quality Control Technician, among many other delightful tasks. The second go-around, I left after one day. Ugh.)
• Guy Who Hands Out Free Five-Minute Phone Cards, at a local college
• Saw operator and wood sorter at a dysfunctional mill

That last gig could have been at the inspiration for Lemony Snicket's Miserable Mill, except I think that would be unfair to the Baudelaire's former workplace. The mill where I worked once produced Lincoln Logs, but had moved on to slats for cribs, Jenga blocks and other wastes of perfectly good trees. What a dump.

The best/worst part was working on the green chain (sorting wood as it came out of a saw and landed on a weird sort of conveyor system). Every day, the equipment broke down at some point and prevented us from reaching our production goal. And every day, our supervisor said something like:

"OK, we need to do 20,000 board feet today. Yesterday, we didn't even get to 15,000. So today, we need to haul ass!"

Wow, great pep talk! Especially on the seventh consecutive day of the same spiel!

Did I mention the place was a wretched dump? But it is also an out-of-business wretched dump. :)

What's the worst job you didn't get?

I've applied for many jobs that I didn't get but wanted, and I've turned down a few offers of good jobs, too. Rejection has had its kind side, too. Here're the worst (or most ridiculous) jobs I was rejected for:

• Assistant manager at Arby's. I think the owner's wife liked me a little too much for the owner's taste.
• Part-time party planner at McDonald's. To think, I could have been hanging out with Ronald McDonald and making $5 an hour, too!
• Gas station attendant. At a self-serve station, for Christ's sake.
• Warehouse worker for Schwann's. I guess I didn't look like I could handle frozen fish and ice cream. This was the same place that the manager asked, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" I should have said, "Celebrating the fifth year anniversary of you asking me this question."

Faintly Belizean dinner dish

So, I didn't have any beans ready to roll the other night, but I wanted something simple. Here's something simple:

Eight chicken thighs, skin removed
Three or four tablespoons oil
Two and half cups water
Three stalks celery
Three dried red chilies
Salt and pepper
Three cups cooked rice (I had leftovers)
Two tablespoons chickpea flour

I seared the chicken thighs in the oil over medium heat, then added the water, celery and chilies to make a sort of stew. After about 45 minutes, when the chicken was most assuredly done, I dumped in the rice and stirred in the chickpea flour.

Presto: The national dish of Belize, sans beans.

Playing tag by myself

1. Music That Has Changed Your Life
The White Stripes. My friend Stephanie gave me a bootleg copy of some of their stuff, including covers of Jolene and One More Cup of Coffee. I had no clue anyone was making that kind of music. Jack White is Cisco Houston and Jimmy Page put together.

2A. An Album That Has Stayed With You For More Than 10 Years (In a Good Way)
Joan Baez - Blessed Are
Bad Religion - Suffer
Joan Osborne - Relish

2B. Music You're Supposed To Like, But Are Embarassed To Say You Never Really Did
Pearl Jam. Hey, I liked Nirvana, but Pearl Jam? I just don't care.

3. Music That Makes You Laugh
Wesley Willis (ESSSSS TEEEEEE PEEEEEE, ESSSSS TEEEEEE PEEEEEE, ESSSSS TEEEEEE PEEEEEE, ESSSSS TEEEEEE PEEEEEE, ESSSSS TEEEEEE PEEEEEE, conked out my engine), Jamie Brockett (The Legend of the U.S.S. Titanic).

4. Music That Makes You Cry
Tough one. Music that has made me cry: City of Ruins, as re-recorded post-9/11; Philadelphia, by Neil Young.

5. Music You Wish You Had Written
I like to write and I like to sing, but I'm no songwriter.

6. Music You Wish Had Never Been Written
OK, I'm still a First Amendment fanatic. I can't say I wish X or Y had never been written, but I'm sure as hell not going to listen to most contemporary R&B or fake-o rock-'n'-roll "country" garbage.

7. Current Music You Like
Joe Purdy, White Stripes, Raconteurs, Strokes, Black Keys, Tori Amos.

8. Music You've Been Meaning To Hear
The next undiscovered outfit I am unaware of. I'm always on the prowl for below-the-radar gems.

An endangered page

No, I'm not talking about the ongoing flap inside the Beltway.

On a recent, routine jaunt over to the Mitch Hedberg quote page at Wikiquote, I found this unsettling tag:

"This page has been flagged for a review of its copyright status, as it may contain too many quotes from a copyrighted source. See Wikiquote:Copyrights for more information on Wikiquote copyright policy. Please do not remove this tag from the talk page of the article until it has been checked by a user familiar with the fair use provisions of U.S. copyright law and edited down if necessary."

As far as I know, this is the best place to go for Hedberg jokes, but maybe not for long. I wouldn't want to encourage people to violate copyrights or anything, but I'm pretty sure now is the time to copy the jokes for yourself ... And you could put them in the file under J, for jokes.

Oh! While in Portland over the weekend, my father, the butterfly lady and I passed a store that carried a "Fresher," a storage system designed to keep food fresh. I thought "man, I guess there really is a Kitchen Appliance Naming Institute." Fantastic!

And by the way, the above anecdote has been pre-approved as funny by me.

If you don't get anything I just wrote, you should have gone to the seminar I attended in Virginia, where you could find a whole bunch of people who also didn't get a lot of those jokes.

Happy Invader's Day!

I'm not sure of the best way to mark Columbus Day, which after several years in the Northeast I still expect to be a big deal when it rolls around each year. Here, in sunny Walla Walla, Columbus Day is met with a shrug.

Maybe I should make a lasagna.

Ethical dilemmas

Amid all the hullaballoo of ex-U.S. Rep Mark Foley's naughty e-mails, Oregon legislators accepting freebies from lobbyists and god knows what other usual business, here's a simple piece of advice, which is of course easier to offer than to follow:

If you wouldn't want to see it on the front page of your local paper, don't do it.

Luckily for newspapers, nobody listens.

Wishing for better spam

Gmail kindly dumps all the junk mail I get into a folder that I occasionally surf for story/blog entry ideas. Mostly it is all crap, but because I have an unusual handle, it is bilingual crap.

So I can get plastic cards and credentials - or - tarjetas y credenciales plastica? Hooray.

My current favorite junk mail is the crowd flogging Rolex replicas. Here's one of the sites the spam hopes you'll visit. The replicas don't look like anything special to me, and they're not exactly free ($250 for a knockoff?)

As you might expect, the best part of the site is the "customer testimonials." Here's a for-instance:

"FANTASTIC WATCH. 100% AS DESCRIBED. MY JEWELER COULD NOT TELL IT WAS NOT A REAL ROLEX. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND DOING BUSINESS WITH THIS SELLER. A+++++"

Awww yeah. That person even has a jeweler on retainer! Wow, I've got to get a couple of watches. (I would have to get two, because I want my arms to weigh the same.)

Gardens of good and evil

You're running a country, and you don't want the people living in it to shoot heroin or smoke opium. Reasonable, right?

But you also want to make medicines out of the same materials that produce those illicit drugs.

Do you grow your own? If you are running India, Turkey, France, Hungary, Poland or Australia, the answer appears to be yes. If you are running the United States (which in July alone had an international deficit in goods and services of $68 billion, according to the U.S. Census Bureau), the answer is no.

Federal law allows the United States to import the raw materials for narcotics (opium and poppy plant material) from the above six countries (and maybe Spain, if a federal rule change is approved).

The rule-making documents suggest that the overall cost of buying these drug materials from overseas tops out at $117 million per year, not a lot in the grand scheme, I suppose.

Still, I wonder how many family farms could that money keep afloat?

Poachers

Last night's Anderson Cooper segment on mountain gorillas (broadcast on CNN) and today's local story about a horse shot to death in a nearby town remind me, yet again, that I abhor poachers.

Legal hunting of non-threatened species? Not a big deal to me, although I am not sure I'll ever understand the impulse to shoot certain species (bears, coyotes and moose come to mind).

But poaching? I would reserve a special neighborhood in hell for poachers, complete with novel tortures to keep the demons amused. I'm pretty sure summary execution is too kind a punishment, too.

I'll return to sunnier topics soon.

Desk nonsense, part II

That last post was popular!

So, here's what's in my top drawer:

• Four Sharpie ultra fine point markers - Columbia blue, fuschia, tangerine and lime (these are for my color-coded calendar)
• One Sharpie fine point marker - black (for graffiti!)
• One Pilot ultra fine point permanent type pen - red (and NO XYLENE, thank god)
• Seven paperclips (three red and one each of blue, yellow, green and white)
• Two little binder clips (the cute teeny ones good for "binding" about two pieces of paper
• Two blaze orange earplugs (let's go hunting!)
• One uncanceled stamp
• One latex-free generic Band-Aid
• An unused letter opener from the USA Dry Pea & Lentil Council
• One notepad with nine remaining sheets of paper
• An A section from the Aug. 1 paper (to give to a freelancer who wrote the main story)
• An accuracy survey letter (which I need to pass on to another employee)

When I was in college, my friend Tom and I had a radio show, which we were kicked off of by the station manager in our second semester of senior year for "playing repetitious music and rambling." As you can see, old habits die hard.

What's on your desk?

Because our company's board of directors plans to visit soon, we've been encouraged to neaten our work areas. This does not usually take me very long because I don't keep much on my desk.

Besides my phone, CPU, monitor, monitor stand, keyboard, mouse and mousepad, I have:

• two empty soda cans (diet A&W root beer and diet Pepsi - OK, I'm still working on the Pepsi, but it is almost empty).
• my cell phone
• a piece of paper with notes for a brief for Monday's paper
• a red Bic "round stic fine USA" ballpoint pen
• a promotional toy from Quizno's, one of those little cars you pull back and let go of and it zooms away. This one looks like a rocket.
• a promotional card from the Popcorn Board. When opened, a little speaker plays the sound of popcorn popping. "Give your ears a little treat," the card urges.
• a promotional toy from Dairy Queen to flog their Moolatte frozen blended coffee. It is one of those old-fashioned canisters that you turn upside-down, then right-side up and it moos. Cute.
• an impressively feisty purple and green vinelike plant, which is in a yellow pot on top of my CPU (which is protected by folded-up newspaper under the pot). Besides the vine, which I love, the pot contains a small, white ceramic insulator and a pica pole (a type of ruler for unusual people).

And that is it, although near my desk is a filing cabinet that I use only as a place to put my planning calendar, which has color-coded information about stories that will appear in coming editions of the paper.

I don't know what my desk says about me, but there you have it.

A quick Indian meal

Oh, that's right, there's no such thing.

But because we have guests in town for a few days and home-cooked meals run counter to current events (10th college reunion for the butterfly lady and her homies), I whipped up:

• A North Indian Muslim dish of beef with dark almond sauce
• A vegetarian takeoff on that dish using acorn squash instead of Bessie
  
• Sookhe aloo (I think that's Hindi for "yummy potatoes")
• Rice with saffron, cardamom and cinnamon

I hurried, so the whole production took less than three hours. I should have enlisted help, I guess, but it was fun and the crowd liked the food.

I think the squash dish worked better than the beef version, though I think that next time, I'd use some tofu as well. And I would not make both dishes simultaneously, which although interesting was also hectic.

Making weight loss last

Until last year, my weight made steady progress in an upward direction since I graduated from high school, which is to say for many years.

I went through the customary denial (The dryer made my pants smaller! It's all muscle!) process until the point that the doctor showed me her chart, with my weight, in black and white, over the years I had seen her before leaving the area temporarily. So, I could see where I'd been, and I could certainly tell where I was. Plus, she showed me some other depressing numbers (cholesterol, blood pressure, blah blah blah).

I promptly lost 28 pounds (how? swim, don't drink much, swim, swim, don't drink much and swim), and although a few pounds have come back, I'm where she wants me to be (and wearing the pant size I had when I was in my best cross country running shape around 1989-91). The best part, I have to say, has been getting new clothes.

My motivation is a combination of wanting to live a long time, liking how I look (and how others look at me) now, that sort of thing. I don't ordinarily write about this sort of thing, but I thought I ought to put pen to paper (OK, fingertips to keys) to remind myself, if I ever look back through my blog, that life is better now than it was then.

Hey, how'd you find me?

Inspired by Lulu, I checked to see what my recent keyword activity looked like:

• the mysterious davy jones (oh, shocking)
• raven standard progression matrices (another thrill-seeker like me)
• easy notes on ghana (Here is a much better place to go)
• strep nose (it was staph - two varieties - not strep)
• mbna rejection instructions for apr increase
• evil mythical birds (I'd love to know a few!)

The staph, by the way, is in rout. But what a dumb thing to have: Staph Nose.

Changing times, changing fortunes

When I moved to Walla Walla the first time, in August 1990, some local folks worried the newly finished Blue Mountain Mall - the place to be for shopping and socializing - would drive the final nails into the coffin of the city's downtown.

In the old days, downtown had a Bon Marche department store (sort of old-fashioned in that you could buy frying pans, sheets and microwaves, not just clothes), a run-down drugstore, a couple of nicer drugstores, several sketchy restaurants (I've heard that two failed because of health complaints) and a few nicer eateries and stores.

Over the subsequent 16 years (yegods, time flies), downtown businesses rallied to revitalize the city center, and the mall was the salient. Many an imprecation uttered in those days included "the mall."

As it stands now, downtown shoppers may visit restaurants, boutiques, salons, a Macy's department store (sort of old-fashioned in that you can buy frying pans, sheets and microwaves, not just clothes), a wide variety of winery tasting rooms, art galleries, a toy store and the older businesses that stood the test of time, including a popular deli, an auto dealership, a candy store where they actually make many of the goodies, a music store and many other nice places.

Many storefronts remain boarded up or vacant and the second stories of many buildings are in disrepair or tenant-less. So there's still a long way to go, but times are most certainly changing for the better.

And how about that mall?

A recent visit by the butterfly lady and I (we have weird ways to pass the time here) found a sad scene.

Sears, Gottschalk's and Shopko are the mall's anchors - an Emporium closed and wasn't replaced. Besides those stores, the mall has the following businesses:

1. Claire's (hair clips, etc.)
2. GNC (I always think of Hans and Franz from SNL when I see a GNC - mmm, gainer fuel!)
3. Big Twist Pretzels
4. A nail shop
5. A Unicel dealership
6. Antonio's (a genuine local barbershop)
7. Fashion Bug (clothing)
8. Maurice's (clothing)
9. Foot Locker
10. Bath & Body Works
11. Teddy Bear Factory (open Friday-Sunday only)
12. Dim Sum Inn (a pretty good Asian restaurant)

And these quasi-businesses:

1. Cruisers Driving School (not open regularly)
   
2. Army recruiter
3. Air Force recruiter
4. Marine Corps recruiter
5. Navy recruiter
6. Walla Walla Police Department's crime prevention office
7. Two "community" rooms - vacant stores with some chairs inside.

Counting the community rooms, there are 32 vacancies, some ill-disguised by facades, some just left blank. Even the food court has only one occupant, having lost Sbarro, Orange Julius and Bob's Pizza.

I think it would be generous to say that the driving school, recruiters' offices, police office and even the Teddy Bear Factory are, strictly speaking, stores, so that would put the occupancy at less than 25 percent... not exactly the best of times.

Who says the TSA is unreasonable??

Having just bought and left behind some non-explosive toothpaste and similar items in Virginia (I don't check bags, regardless of how long I'll be on the road), I am happy to see that the Transportation Security Administration has eased its restrictions on what you are allowed to pack in your carry-on bag. The press release is here.

What it all boils down to is that you may now carry travel-size toiletries (three ounces or less each) in a quart-size Ziploc bag. You may also now take the soda you bought in the secure area onto the airplane, so you won't be at the mercy of the airline to keep you hydrated (or caffeinated, or liquored up)...

The fabulous photograph above is courtesy of TSA and shows the agency's idea of what you might carry. This rule change would be much funnier if the TSA would only allow you to carry those specific items. New slogan: "Unless you carry Scope, the terrorists truly win."

Choosy moms choose Jif?

Of all the slogans I could think of in the past couple of minutes, Jif's bothers me most. Choosy moms choose Jif. How exactly is that choosy?

When I whip up PB&J, I want to make sure the kids eat a few wholesome extras. Partially and fully hydrogenated oil, sugar, mono- and diglycerides are some of my favorite little downhome goodies, and I'm especially proud if I can get those into the each of the ingredients, too!

Now, I can see how the old-school Jif might still have all that crap, but the comparatively new brand, Simply Jif Creamy has this ingredient list:

Roasted peanuts, contains 2 percent or less of: partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (soybean), fully hydrogenated vegetable oils (rapeseed and soybean), mono- and diglycerides, molasses, sugar and salt.

How's that simply? Of course, you can always get Adams peanut butter (made by the same people who make Jif) without the unwanted extras.

This reminds me of another conundrum: When a company makes good and bad products, should you buy nothing from them at all or just the good ones? I'm pretty sure it doesn't really matter, but I still feel reluctant to buy canola oil from Crisco...

Returned from traveling abroad

OK, so northern Virginia ins't exactly "abroad," but it is a far cry from Walla Walla. I spent the last week in Reston - mostly - at a seminar for city editors at the American Press Institute (self-subtitled The Leadership Place).

Besides bringing home ideas, I also found:

• The Reston Community Center has a decent pool. 85 degrees, but it was a good deal.
• Gas was 30 cents a gallon cheaper there than here.
• Jammin' Java, in Vienna, Va., is the best venue I've ever been to a show at.
• Charlotte Martin was better than I expected, but still just pretty good (In my notebook, I wrote "This is what Tori Amos would have sounded like if she'd started with a drummer and a fancy piano thing" but I also wrote "All these piano licks are familiar" and "Joe Purdy rocked. Charlotte Martin should have opened for him").
• Joe Purdy rocked. Plus, he's very funny.
  
• If you need a cab in the Reston/Dulles area, call Mohisin Choudhry - (571) 232-6801 anytime. He's on call and a good guy to ride around with.

I found out a lot of other stuff, too, including that easy access to a computer where I could post was not to be had (as the six of you now know...).

Oh, and it is good to be back :)

Too skinny for the runway??

The second headline on this morning's Guardian feed reads "Jowell condemns thin models."

The British culture secretary (fuckin' A, you want to talk about big government? A culture secretary?) is chiming in on a recent controversy in Spain, where models with a BMI below 18 have been prevented from strolling the catwalk.

In a stand that runs counter to my parenthetical above, the Guardian quotes Jowell as saying, "It's categorically not an issue for government regulation. It is, however, an issue of major concern for young girls who feel themselves inferior when compared to the stick-thin young women on the catwalk. They all want to look as beautiful as that and see beauty in those terms. And I think it's fair to say that when they wake up in the morning, the first thing most 15- and 16-year-old girls do is feel their tummies."

Of course, being a nuisance, I had to check to find out what Tessa Jowell looks like. I found her picture here.

The war, the future, etc.

James Fallows was (and may still be, for all I know) in town last night to talk about Iraq, Iran, the U.S. attempt to deal with global terrorism and the way forward for the United States and the Islamic world. The talk lasted less than 90 minutes and was therefore overly broad for my taste.

I would have preferred he spend the hour-plus just talking about Iran, but I guess that wouldn't have been far-reaching enough for the fairly partisan crowd (I'll let you surmise which side of the fence the crowd that came to Whitman College on a school night fell on).

If you read The Atlantic regularly, you already know the bulk of the talk, which did include some pretty funny lines from Fallows.

The only real revelation of the evening came in the Q&A period, when a guy tried to draw an analogy between the war in Iraq and the grieving process. The analogy failed, but the guy said something interesting: that at the outset of the war, everyone supported the idea because of the prewar intelligence.

Until Thursday night, I don't think I'd heard any non-politician actually say that aloud. Politicians, sure: How else can they flipflop on the war without looking like they're only following public opinion? But regular people?

Hey, I've been fooled before, but never in hell did I believe for one moment that Iraq: a) had weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed in a meaningful manner; b) that Saddam Hussein was actively involved in nuclear weapons research and production (I'd easily believe, however, that his masturbatory dreamland included an A-bomb or two); or c) that any of the above posed a threat to anybody outside of Iraq.

On the flip side, Saddam Hussein is an asshole, but I'm not sure that's in the Reasons To Go To War playbook.

Look: The Intelligence Community couldn't predict the fall of communism (most of it, anyway) or whack Castro. Why should anyone take their word - handed down by the president - about anything else?

Villainous scented things

While reading Lulu's post on her department's new "meeting room" and its Renuzit Caribbean Cooler room freshener," I was reminded of the headaches I used to get from the smell of artificially augmented potpourri, as well as the horrifying stench that emanated from our neighbor's apartment in the Granite State.

Mighty Mouse, you see, had a small dog that whizzed indoors - nonstop as near as I could tell, and for every whiz, Mighty Mouse and her husband had a plug-in air "freshener." The smell was only noticeable if you were within a couple blocks of the apartment building, but even so...

So I was amused to read this quote from a local third-grader, on hand sanitizer her school has the kids use when they come in from recess, just before chow:

"It smells weird."

Damn right.

Luck of the draw

I'm soon to flee for Virginia, for a work thing, so I thought I'd troll for possible shows in the area while I'm there, to fill in a free evening or two. Lo and behold, Joe Purdy is opening for someone I've never heard of, on a night I have free, 10 miles from where I'm staying. What luck!

The aforementioned someone, Charlotte Martin, is also (so is Purdy) an L.A.-based artist. I've intentionally not listened to her since buying the ticket, so as to be surprised. I'm not optimistic. According to her Web site:

"Two years of virtually nonstop touring had effects. While on the road, Charlotte experienced the spectrum of human emotion: heartbreak, loss, guilt, and triumph. These years of intense transition and infinite potential found themselves in the words, notes, and production of Stromata."

My spider sense - which hasn't let me down on any musical outfit I've covered in the past - tingles when I read this kind of rubbishy solipsism. Here's to hoping I'm wrong!

So close and yet so far away

At this moment, five years ago, I was swimming at the University of New Hampshire pool, the last day I went swimming until I took it up again in September 2005. I recall thinking I'd better get in a swim before descending into news world for a few months. I was right.

Sept. 11, broadly defined, continues to depress me in the where's-our-country-going sense, though there are bright spots. My melancholy is summed up in part by the war-cost meter at Land-o-Lulu. Of course, there are the non-monetary costs, too...

But from a professional standpoint, Sept. 11 and the days and weeks after remain the zenith of my journalism life. Many good things came before, and many after, but nothing compares to Sept. 11, a time of focus, teamwork and relentless effort.

We who inhabit the Fourth Estate aren't government, but there are similarities, especially in this realm. We, too, can point to mistakes made before and after the attacks, triumphs and abyssmal failures that run parallel to those of the government.

I suppose the saving grace - for me, anyway - is that I have cultivated loneliness. My version doesn't take me to far-off lands to gather my own firsthand reports, but it does help to keep a distance between my professional and personal lives, and for that I am thankful.

Slice of life

Running delightfully counter to the hoity-toity stereotype you might have of "wine country," Walla Walla has a basketful of special events throughout the year that are decidedly non-pretentious.

In the spring, the Walla Walla Balloon Stampede brings about three dozen balloons to the area - not a big festival, but very popular. Morning launches, lots of tourists - pretty laid-back.

Of course, there's also spring barrel tasting weekend, a much newer way to ring in the season around here.

In late August, there's also the county fair - demolition derby, rodeo, carnies, cows, the usual.

Today was the splasho day for Wheelin' Walla Walla Weekend, which was expected to draw about 300-350 cars (Corvettes, Mustangs, street rods, El Caminos, lots of vintage models) and a few thousand people to the area.

Right around the corner from the fancy-schmancy wine tasting room, the butterfly lady and I passed a clot of vintage auto owners (hyphen oh so appropriately omitted) talking cars, at just enough above the volume of everybody else to raise suspicion. Sure enough, clutched in their mitts, obscured by insulating can holders, were a few cans on Natural Light (maybe it was Milwaukee's Best?).

I know a lot of people in my city worry about what the place will look like in a few years (good ol' Wally World with more money, or Upscaley Resortville filled with wealthy, New York Times-believing outsiders?), but I guess I mark the changing of the times by subtler cues.

Maybe someday our city, and our downtown, will change to the point that people who don't mind fracturing the open-container laws won't feel comfortable. That would be incremental change for the worse, a mark of just a little too much civilization for me.

Strep nose

I'm not yet diagnosed, but I am highly suspicious that the dreaded strep nose has returned.

I came down with it in 2003 or 2004 and had fun teasing the medical establishment by calling the snout trouble "strep nose." They seemed more partial to a mumble-y nonsense name, like intranasal streptococcal inflammation incident.

But strep nose is what it was, and the physician's assistant threw the kitchen sink at it with some high-powered, high-cost antibiotics. I'm pretty sure it's back, and I'm pretty sure it still sucks.

So off I go to have another round of nonsense with the doctor. What a treat!

Postscript: I have a more useful post on this subject, here.

MTV sucks

So, the geniuses at (Sometimes We Play) Music Television got the Raconteurs to play at their award show, but the producers went to commercial in the middle of a ZZ Top cover and came back with about 10 seconds remaining in "Broken Boy Soldier," which if I'm not mistaken is the title cut of a kickass album...

Maybe they didn't have time to spare because of needing to put Jack Black on stage for his little fuckfuck comedy routine.

Or maybe MTV figured that with Al Gore due up, they couldn't get too far off the beaten path of mind candy for the viewing audience and headed off Jack White's crew at the pass.

blogger comment nonsense

Having switched to blogger's beta a while back, I had merrily continued to post comments elsewhere (on the now-dreaded non-beta blogs) using my old password. Alas, this morning blogger breaks the news to me that "that feature is coming soon" or some similar rubbish.

Drat. I don't like being isolated, even in silly ways.

Wild-cow milking

The fair is on here, so the butterfly lady, her father and I went to the rodeo last night, to watch the usual roping, wrestling and riding. Besides standard fare was some silliness - too much rodeo clown, lots of victory laps in the back of a pickup, choreographed horseback riding - and the hinted-at wild-cow milking.

I strongly suspect the cows were not in fact wild, but they also weren't wild about the event:

Teams of two, initially on horseback, attempt to rope, subdue, cajole and milk one of a small group of cows. I thought for sure that the announcement of "wild-cow milking time" was a joke or maybe a code for something else, but it wasn't. As it turned out, only one of the teams was able to pull off the feat.

The other cowbows spent a lot of time being dragged around the ring by the miffed cows. Pretty silly.

Incredibly, this event is widespread (google can back me up here - I guess I've been going to the wrong rodeos or skipping out at the wrong time) and wild-cow milking is taken seriously, but mostly I thought it was just weird.

Be your own personal chef

So, you're busy all week, with no time to cook a brand spankin' new dinner each night. Unlike some people, you don't have the cash to pay somebody to fill your fridge and freezer with a week's worth of meals.

What you do have is a few hours free one day a week, some empty casserole dishes and ingredients. What do I have? A plan that will give you five tasty, healthy and interesting dinners, all fixable in a few hours on one day.

Here are my caveats:

• I assume that you, a busy person, have already figured out how to keep breakfast easy but interesting (granola, plain yogurt and English muffins are my staples, and all three can take a surprising variety of condiments).
• I assume you have either thrown in the towel and eat lunch at a local shop or simply pack a sandwich and some carrot sticks.
• I also assume that you can fend for yourself on Saturday night and will probably nibble and snack your way through a dinner's equivalent while you whip up your five forthcoming meals...
  

And here are my tricks:

• If you like to play grownup and have meals that consist of more than one food item, buy a bag of salad and a baguette every two or three days, one on cooking day, the other during the week - say on Wednesday - on your way home from work. Then you'll have fresh-enough bread and greens to go with your main courses.
• If you hate that kind of salad, buy bell peppers, carrots, celery, cauliflower, cut them into bite-size pieces (crudite, I suppose) and keep them in a bowl of water in the fridge. Then you can pull a handful out and dress them to go with dinner.
• If you can swing it, indulge in some nice cheese and olives. You can cut up some of the cheese and have it with the O's as an appetizer.
• Some condiments, such as hummus and black-bean dip, can be made with ease while you are making other food. As long as you have a free burner to simmer the beans, you won't have to worry about dips needing your undivided attention on cooking day.
• As you probably guessed from the above, I like to make my multi-course meals the easy way, by having other little goodies to go with them, not by going through the rigamarole of cooking three different dishes on any given night.

Coming soon, the first installment of recipes...

Allahu akbar

Although my job (newspapers) and avocation (handwoven scarves) are both visual arts of sorts, and I love! to cook, three of the deepest impressions I carry with me from travels are aural:

• Calls to prayer in Tunisia.
• Howler monkeys roaring in the forests around Tikal, Guatemala.
• The sounds of singers rehearsing for a performance of "Tristan and Isolde," heard from the window of a hotel in Chur, Switzerland.

I suppose this means I'll have to find my way back to all these places!

More on XFTA receivers

A post I made earlier on "XFTA enabled receivers" to allegedly help you get satellite programming - apparently for free - has turned out to be a very popular route to this blog. I'm guessing a lot of other people receive the same piece of spam I did, but I wouldn't think anybody would take that crap seriously.

Or maybe I'm missing out on fabulous free TV!!!!!!!

I guess that's why they call it beta

So, I thought I'd be all clever, switching to the beta version of blogger. But all I've done is ensure that I can embarass myself by leaving comments more than once hither and yon.

Drat.

Squash

I like squash: the word, the food item and probably the beverage. I'm not so sure about the game, which seems hoity-toity but is probably fun. It never looks fun in the movies when the rich guys are playing it, but lots of stuff rich people do looks un-fun.

Having had surplus zucchini and summer squash on hand over the past week or two, I fixed a couple of gratins, zucchini pancakes and pan-fried zucchini spears. The latter two worked fine but really aren't dishes I'd make again. I'd rather have latkes than z-cakes, and the spears were pretty boring. The gratins, of course, were very tasty!

Gratin A

• 1 medium yellow onion, halved and sliced into thin rings (you don't have to halve it, but it is a lot easier to slice thinly that way. I'll have to get around to shooting a time-saving onion-slicing technique)
• zucchini or summer squash, sliced into 3/8-inch-thick slices (enough to do one layer of whatever casserole you're using)
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup cream (depends on the size of the casserole. I used about a half-cup in a 12-by-12 dish)
  
• 1/4 cup Parmigiano Reggiano, finely grated

In a bit of oil, saute the onion until noodle-y but not carmelized. Dump the onions into the casserole and spread them out to cover the bottom of the dish.
Sear the squash slices on both sides, seasoning with salt and pepper. Here again, just to cook them, not to seriously brown or blacken.
Arrange the slices on top of the onions, then pour the cream over the lot.
Sprinkle with the cheese (you can get a good P-R at Safeway - they sell the real, imported McCoy under their Primo Taglio label in the cheese island at the deli, even at Ghetto Safeway, as one of our stores is so fondly called).
Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes, maybe a half-hour, until everything is bubbly and the cheese starts to brown.

Gratin B

• Four slices good-quality bacon
• 4 ounces grated Gruyere (hey, any hard cheese will probably do - it's just what I had on hand)
• zucchini or summer squash, sliced into 3/8-inch-thick slices (enough to do one layer of whatever casserole you're using)
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup milk (depends on the size of the casserole. I used about a half-cup in a 12-by-12 dish)

Cook the bacon over medium heat until near-crisp, then remove. Cut into pieces and set aside.
In some of the bacon grease, saute the onion until noodle-y but not carmelized. Dump the onions into the casserole and spread them out to cover the bottom of the dish.
In a bit more of the bacon grease, sear the squash slices on both sides, seasoning with salt and pepper (you won't need as much salt in this dish on account of the bacon). Here again, sear just to cook the squash, not to seriously brown or blacken it.
Sprinkle half the cheese on top of the onions, then arrange the squash slices on top.
Pour the milk over the lot, then sprinkle with the rest of the cheese.
Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes, maybe a half-hour, until everything is bubbly and the cheese starts to brown.

bee stings and blackberries

The butterfly lady and I took Bigg Dogg (her elder, the curmudgeonly spaniel, kicked back at the dog spa for the weekend) down to the Willamette Valley for a visit with my mother, sister (pregnant and due in October), her boyfriend (who passed inspection with flying colors, a definite keeper) and assorted others.

Katy behaved nicely, and has all the earmarks of a country dog - plays in the dust, eats plums off the ground, stays nearby on expeditions (OK, she still can't go too far, so expedition just means 20-minute walk).

Plums, grapes, blackberries and pears were all pretty much ripe, some on the vine, some on the ground and all delicious. Barefoot and munching blackberries, I stepped on a honeybee. Damn! My irrational fear of bees seems to have some rational roots. But that's what ice and antihistamines are for, I suppose.

The biggest cash-in of the weekend was a trip to Crabtree & Evelyn, where we used a substantial Discover Card rebate to stock up on all sorts of frivolity. Discover lets you double your rebate if you choose gift cards from certain companies, but most of the choices are rubbish - too many conditions, crappy companies, whatever. Crabtree & Eveyln offers a double with the only condition being that you have to shop in one of their stores, not online or at a licensed retailer. But no big deal.

We rolled back into the valley where we live Sunday evening, greeted by the smoke from a 100-square-mile wildfire. Ahh, summer.

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?