Just came back from the 4th walk. Step count tomorrow, but no walk on Saturday or Sunday. Right now I’m thinking next week is another 4-walk week, and then maybe I’ll think about 5.

And on interesting shoes. I want to get a pair. The article, by Adam Sternbergh in New York magazine, begins:

Walking is easy. It’s so easy that no one ever has to teach you how to do it. It’s so easy, in fact, that we often pair it with other easy activities—talking, chewing gum—and suggest that if you can’t do both simultaneously, you’re some sort of insensate clod. So you probably think you’ve got this walking thing pretty much nailed. As you stroll around the city, worrying about the economy, or the environment, or your next month’s rent, you might assume that the one thing you don’t need to worry about is the way in which you’re strolling around the city.

Well, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you: You walk wrong.

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Cool idea, especially when making omelets for a large group—and each person wants something different. So each person makes his/her own, but they get served at the same time.

This is very useful when some love Tabasco and others don’t, for example, or some are vegetarian (lacto-ovo, of course) and others are not. Choice of grated cheeses, chopped veggies (tomato, scallions, mushrooms (I know, not veggies), red pepper, etc.), chopped meats (ham, crumbled crisp bacon, cooked chorizo, smoked salmon, etc.). I would throw in a pat of butter, myself.

Go look. Click any drawing for a closeup.

While the US fiddles, the oceans die. From the LA Times, an article by Kenneth Weiss:

Oxygen-starved waters are expanding in the Pacific and Atlantic as ocean temperatures increase with global warming, threatening fisheries and other marine life, a study published today concludes.

Most of these zones remain hundreds of feet below the surface, but they are beginning to spill onto the relatively shallow continental shelf off the coast of California and are nearing the surface off Peru, driving away fish from commercially important fishing grounds, researchers have found.

The low-oxygen, or hypoxic, zones may also be connected to the Pacific coast invasion of the Humboldt, or jumbo, squid. These voracious predators, which can grow 6 feet long, appear to be taking advantage of their tolerance for oxygen-poor waters to escape predators and devour local fish, another team of scientists theorizes.

Researchers believe these phenomena are linked to subsurface layers of hypoxic water in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans that have been thickening over the last 50 years, according to the analysis published today in the journal Science.

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Via Slashfood, 50 ways to get a bacon fix.

Megs this morning, sunbathing again. And she doesn’t use any sunblock. Click to enlarge.

Mark Kleiman at the Reality-Based Community lays out in detail how Sid Blumenthal has run the smear/slime machine for the Clinton campaign, with Obama as the target. Worth reading, though disgusting.

UPDATE: Correction: it’s a tempest in a teapot. Blumenthal regularly sends political trivia to his friends, including snippets for and against a variety of candidates, including Clinton. See this post.

Self-policing and self-regulation depend on the willingness of organizations to embarrass themselves by washing their dirty linen in public. Surprise: they won’t do it. That’s why independent oversight is required: Federal regulators for business, for example, and Congress for the Executive branch. For example:

Almost two weeks after the New York Times reported on the Penatgon’s military analyst program to sell controversial policies such as the invasion of Iraq, the broadcast television news outlets implicated in the program are hoping to tough out the scandal by refusing to report it. Media Matters of America (MMA) reports that, according to a search of the Nexis database, “the three major broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — have still not mentioned the report at all.” In contrast, they note, on April 28 all three reported on the controversy over a photo of scantily-clad Miley Cyrus, the star of Disney Channel’s Hannah Montana program. “ABC devoted about two and a half minutes to that story, while CBS and NBC each devoted about two minutes to it,” MMA reported. The Pew Excellence in Journalism project has a chart showing that ” there was virtually no mainstream media follow up to The Times’ expose” with the only national TV coverage being the introduction segment and live debate featuring CMD’s John Stauber on the PBS NewsHour.

Source: Media Matters of America, April 29, 2008

Arthur Allen has a saddening report in the Washington Independent:

The United States is suffering its worst measles outbreak in at least seven years, health officials announced Thursday, because parents who fear the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) shot aren’t vaccinating their kids–in Israel, Switzerland, and here in the U.S. So far this year at least 70 cases have been reported, more than any year since the 116 cases of 2001. That number will easily be topped by the end of the year, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, head of the CDC’s Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. There have been measles cases reported in 10 states this year. In the latest outbreak, eight unvaccinated children in a Washington state family fell ill after relatives attended an international church conference.

Nearly all the cases have been tracked by molecular fingerprinting to outbreaks of disease in Europe, Israel and Asia. An outbreak in Switzerland that has struck more than 2,000 people, and one in Israel affecting 1,000-plus patients, began in communities who don’t vaccinate for philosophical or religious reasons. These threads of belief have also fed the outbreaks here. At least a quarter and as many as half of the patients were not vaccinated because their parents had exempted them from vaccination.

Twenty of the patients were too young, or barely old enough to be vaccinated.  It is in these young children, under 15 months of age, in which the disease is most serious. Many of these babies and toddlers were hospitalized. Measles is extremely contagious–you can get it sitting in a room where a sick child sat two hours earlier–and potentially deadly. The vaccine, when given in two doses, is 99 percent effective. Only one of the 72 cases reported Thursday occurred in a fully vaccinated person.

The measles vaccine became available first in 1963. In the pre-vaccine era, 3-4 million American kids contracted measles each year; about 500 died, 48,000 were hospitalized and another 1,000 suffered permanent brain damage. In the last big outbreak, in 1989-1991, there were 122 deaths. Then, most of the measles struck inner-city kids too poor to afford vaccines. Now, vaccines are free to those who need them, and the patients tend to be well-to-do people who think vaccination is dangerous. A British doctor claimed in 1998 that the MMR shot caused autism, creating a scare that has diminished vaccination rates around the world, though he’s been conclusively proved wrong.

Simply Recipes has two very attractive recipes (with photos) today: lemon chicken (not the Chinese dish, but roasted chicken thighs with lemon) and roasted asparagus. Well worth clicking, highlighting, and adding to your Evernote collection. That’s what I did. (BTW, I never click my Firefox Evernote button for a whole Web page anymore—I always select the text for Evernote.)

Mary Kane has an excellent article in the Washington Independent detailing the fraud that drove the mortgage crisis. It begins:

The debate over what caused the mortgage mess and how best to fix it is now taking a sharp turn, as new problems surrounding liar’s loans and payment-option mortgages reveal the pervasive fraud, lying and deceit that permeated the market at its height.

As loans made to borrowers with decent credit begin to fail at a surprisingly rapid rate, it’s becoming clear that widespread fraud helped support the entire mortgage system — from borrowers who lied on their loans, to brokers who encouraged it, to lenders who misled some low income borrowers, to the many lenders, investors and ratings agencies that conveniently and deliberately looked the other way as profits rolled in.

Despite its widespread role, fraud hasn’t yet been at the forefront of proposed rescue plans, which center on refinancing people out of loans now resetting to higher rates. That may begin to change as the mortgage market continues a meltdown that seems to have no end. As fraud becomes a focus, the question of who did most of the lying and cheating will be crucial in deciding who deserves help in any housing rescue plan.

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Look at this upsetting development, reported by Glenn Greenwald:

Are House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and a small handful of “Blue Dog” Democrats working in secret to reverse one of the only worthwhile acts of Congressional Democrats since they were given control of Congress in 2006: namely, the refusal to vest the President with vast new warrantless eavesdropping powers and bequeath lawbreaking telecoms with amnesty? It certainly appears that way.

Numerous reports — both public and otherwise — suggest that Hoyer is negotiating with Jay Rockefeller to write a new FISA bill that would be agreeable to the White House and the Senate. Their strategy is to craft a bill that they can pretend is something short of amnesty for telecoms but which, in every meaningful respect, ensures an end to the telecom lawsuits. It goes without saying that no “compromise” will be acceptable to Rockefeller or the White House unless there is a guaranteed end to those lawsuits, i.e., unless the bill grants amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms.

Even Capitol Hill insiders are baffled at the impetus for this new drive to capitulate. For the first times in years, the House Democratic caucus unified to take an actual stand on an issue relating to Terrorism — all but five Blue Dogs voted for the House bill and rejected the Rockefeller/Cheney Senate bill. Even the GOP accepted that their fear-mongering campaign around the issue had failed, as there was no public outcry demanding that the President be allowed to spy on Americans without warrants or that telecoms be allowed to break the law with impunity. Key Blue Dogs have been making impressive public statements insisting that they will not reverse their position.

Hoyer’s motives, then, appear to be two-pronged: (1) he and the House Democratic leadership simply want to grant amnesty to telecoms — they favor it — because they do not want the lawsuits relating to illegal spying to proceed to resolution; and (2) they are deferring to the tiny number of Blue Dogs who favor amnesty and warrantless eavesdropping. This article from The Hill this week specifically identifies freshman Rep. Chris Carney as demanding that the House comply with the President’s demands:

Vulnerable freshman Democrats and Blue Dogs say the issue demands action.”Overall, it’s very important,” said Rep. Chris Carney (D-Pa.), a freshman member of the Blue Dog Coalition who often votes against his leadership.

Carney said that a compromise should protect national security and also respect civil liberties. “I’ve been in favor of the Senate bill. We’ll see what happens,” he said.

In early March, a new campaign was announced to begin running ads in the districts of vulnerable Democratic Congressmen like Carney whose presence in Washington is worse than worthless: it’s extremely counter-productive since they essentially eliminate the entire concept of “opposition party” by continuously pressuring Democrats to enable the most radical aspects of Republican rule for their own perceived narrow political gain.Within 24 hours, close to $50,000 was raised for that ad campaign. And the poll accompanying the fundraising campaign — which asked which of five proposed Blue Dogs should be the first target — resulted in a clear win (or, more accurately, a clear loss) for Chris Carney. The ad campaign aimed at Carney is in the process of being completed (and a professional ad coordinator to oversee and finalize that process is now needed — email me if you are one or can recommend one and I’ll pass it along).

For obvious reasons, this ad campaign is now more imperative than ever. The more funds that are available to fuel the ad campaign, the more potent the impact will be — both for Carney and in terms of the message being sent generally. Those who want to donate to the ad campaign can and are encouraged to do so here.

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James Fallows has a good post this morning:

I am a long-standing devotee of the David Allen “Getting Things Done” (GTD) approach to life, as I first described in this Atlantic article about him four years ago. We’ve become friends and stayed in touch since then too, which at least for me has been very enjoyable. Plus, since long before the Atlantic wrote about him he has been a loyal subscriber!

The GTD Way mainly involves habits of mind and action, but it also places a lot of emphasis on having the right tools, gizmos, and gimmicks to support those habits. Over the years I’ve used a variety of software to set up GTD-based systems on my computer. Ones I’ve liked include Results Manager and Chandler. The one I keep coming back to for my own purposes, more than a dozen years after I started using it, is the idiosyncratic but powerful Zoot. Zoot is PC-only, and for that matter text-only (no graphics etc), but it runs flawlessly on a Mac under VMWare Fusion.

Here are three more to bear in mind, with different strengths and idiosyncracies of their own: …

Continue reading.

The usual one-hour route and then a stop at Whole Foods added up to almost 10K. I now no longer feel wiped out after the walk, which is nice. Today I’m going to see Iron Man because I really, really like Robert Downey, Jr.

Kid’s plate last night held a piece of chicken, a little rice, and roasted veg (beets, onion, mushrooms, the last not a veg, but still).

This morning I used Yardley shaving soap—extremely nice, let me say. I chose the Rooney Style 2 Finest and the lather was superb. I loaded a new Treet Black Beauty into the Merkur Futur and had a wonderfully smooth shave. Rituals Skincare shaving oil for the oil pass, and then Geo. F. Trumper Spanish Leather aftershave. Really an extremely good shave today.