Thomas Hicks, the Washington Post’s military reporter, is most recently in the news for his book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, a history of how the situation in Iraq degenerated to the current state. (At the link, you’ll find a very good interview with Hicks.) But I’m mentioning him here because of his earlier book, Making the Corps.

He decided to write Making the Corps when he was with a Marine Corps unit facing action in one of our wars. He didn’t quite understand what was going on, and a corporal explained to him the unit’s objectives and how that fit in with the overall strategy. He was so impressed by the corporal’s demeanor and knowledge that he decided to look into the process by which the US Marine Corps trains its men.

Making the Corps is the result, and it’s a fascinating read. Among other things, he discovered that Marines routinely write and publish articles in their magazines that critique (i.e., criticize) specific actions and decisions that were made by current officers—a practice that, when Hicks mentioned it to an Army officer, made him blanch and say that, in the Army, this would be a career-ending move. Read the rest of this entry »

And it’s still going strong. Amazing. Article begins:

Five years after his retirement, ex-firefighter Tom Bramell still likes to visit Station No. 6 for old times’ sake, whistling in amazement at all the changes — the strange faces and slick high-tech engines.

But one thing remains exactly the same, and it’s what Bramell misses the most about his firefighting days. The sturdy little object hangs from the ceiling in the firehouse’s engine bay, emitting its familiar faint orange glow.

He calls it the long-lived lightbulb of Livermore.

That’s actually something of an understatement.

At 107 years and counting, the low-watt wonder with the curlicue carbon filament has been named the planet’s longest continuously burning bulb by both Guinness World Records and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

As objet d’art and enduring symbol of American reliability and ingenuity, it’s been lauded by senators and presidents.

It boasts a website — www.centennialbulb.org, drawing a million hits a year — a historical society and even a webcam that allows curious fans to check on it 24 hours a day.

… In 1901, when the tiny bulb was first screwed into place inside a so-called hose cart house, it cast its light on a simpler era.

Back then, horse-pulled carts carried water to fires. The bulb burned day and night, hanging at eye level from a 20-foot cord. Its job: to break the darkness so firefighters responding to calls wouldn’t have to fumble to light the wicks of their kerosene lanterns. Manufactured by the Shelby Electric Co. of Shelby, Ohio, the bulb soon outlived its maker, which closed in 1914.

Later, in the main firehouse, it illuminated more modern rigs as horses were replaced by gas-fed engines.

It didn’t always receive kid-glove treatment.

Climbing atop their engines, firefighters returning from World War II and Korea often would give the bulb a playful swat for good luck. The next generation — the Vietnam veterans and the younger kids — used it as a target for Nerf basketball practice. …

More at the link.

A recipe by David Latt:

“Fancy” Egg Salad
Yield 4 servings
Time 35 minutes

• 4 hard-cooked eggs, peeled
• 1 tablespoon Italian parsley, finely chopped
• 1 tablespoon capers, dried, finely chopped
• 1 large shallot, peeled, finely chopped
• 1 slice of bacon, crisp, finely chopped
• 1 1/2 tablespoons mayonnaise
• Salt and pepper

Put the eggs into a gently boiling pot of water and cook for 30 minutes. [!!?? I would cook a boiled egg for at most 10-11 minutes. - LG] Cool with water [and if you add ice cubes to the water, it makes the eggs easier to peel - LG], peel, and chop. (A food processor can be used although I prefer the therapy of hand chopping.)

Toss the eggs in a bowl with the parsley, capers, shallots, and bacon. Season with salt and pepper to taste, then add the mayo and mix well. Serve with fresh bread, crackers, on hearts of romaine, or in a salad.

Variations

Other spices can be added: mustard, ground mustard seed, cumin, or rosemary. The parsley can be replaced with cilantro. The mayonnaise can be flavored.

From Mark Bitten:

The other day I was talking to Nick Fox, the deputy editor of the Dining section, about avocados. … And I said, “The odd thing is, whenever I buy semi-ripe or ripe avocados, they’re awful — banged up and overripe, and often mealy.” His response, which jived with my experience but I have never been quite savvy enough to verbalize, was simply “You should buy them rock hard.”

He’s right: Ripe avocados can barely survive a trip home in the shopping bag; hard ones ripen perfectly and evenly on the counter. The one I ate this morning, bought rock-hard four days ago, was like butter.

Eating it has a reasonable probability of causing serious illness or death. More info here.

Nicholas Kristof has a good column today:

My Times colleague Barry Bearak was imprisoned by the brutal regime in Zimbabwe last month. Barry was not beaten, but he was infected with scabies while in a bug-infested jail. He was finally brought before a court after four nights in jail and then released.

Alas, we don’t treat our own inmates in Guantánamo with even that much respect for law. On Thursday, America released Sami al-Hajj, a cameraman for Al Jazeera who had been held without charges for more than six years. Mr. Hajj has credibly alleged that he was beaten, and that he was punished for a hunger strike by having feeding tubes forcibly inserted in his nose and throat without lubricant, so as to rub tissue raw.

“Conditions in Guantánamo are very, very bad,” Mr. Hajj said in a televised interview from his hospital bed in Sudan, adding, “In Guantánamo, you have animals that are called iguanas … that are treated with more humanity.”

Al Jazeera’s director general, Wadah Khanfar, said by telephone from the hospital that Mr. Hajj was so frail when he arrived that he had to be carried off the plane and into an ambulance. Guantánamo inmates are not allowed to see their families, so that evening Mr. Hajj met his 7-year-old son, whom he had last seen as a baby.

Reliable information is still scarce about Guantánamo, but increasingly we’re gaining glimpses of life there — and they are painful to read.

Murat Kurnaz, a German citizen of Turkish descent, has just published a memoir of his nearly five years in Guantánamo. He describes prolonged torture that included interruptions by a doctor to ensure that he was well enough for the torture to continue.

Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, an American woman of Afghan descent who worked as an interpreter, has written a book to be published next month, “My Guantánamo Diary,” that is wrenching to read. She describes a pediatrician who returned to Afghanistan in 2003 to help rebuild his country — and was then arrested by Americans, beaten, doused with icy water and paraded around naked. Finally, after three years, officials apparently decided he was innocent and sent him home.

A third powerful new book about Guantánamo, by an American lawyer named Steven Wax, is summed up by its title: “Kafka Comes to America.”

The new material suggests two essential truths about Guantánamo:

Read the rest of this entry »

Good things to know. For example:

The Word “Fanny”

In the USA, elderly women often use the term “fanny” to refer to their large backsides. It is also commonly used in the phrase “fanny pack” when referring to the small waste-band satchel frequently worn by tourists.

In Australia, however, the word “fanny” should NOT be used in polite conversation. It refers to a woman’s private part, more commonly known as a “you know what” or a “what-sa-mi-whozit”.

The tourist satchel is always called a “bum bag” in Australia.

To Root

Rooting in the USA simply means “supporting through good cheer”. One “roots for” their local sports team or for their friend’s big job interview.

Rooting in Australia simply means “having sex”. It is a colloquial term that is only slightly more socially acceptable than the “F” word.

How Rooting and Fannies can get you in trouble

As a 13 year-old Australian girl visiting the USA on a cultural exchange back in 1990, I was told by my host mother, a 50-year-old housewife that her “fanny is sore because we were sitting in the stands rooting for our team all day.”

My response to this statement was a wide-eyed “your WHAT is WHAT because you did WHAT?”

Take a look at the video.

Looks like Bernie Kerik did a heckuva job in Iraq. (Bernie is the guy whom Bush nominated to head the Department of Homeland Security.)  TPMmuckraker:

More score settling. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez opens fire on Bernie Kerik’s time training the Iraqi police in Iraq:

“He is a very energetic guy. He is very confident - overconfident to an extent - and he is very superficial in his understanding of the requirements of his job,” Sanchez said. “His whole contribution was a waste of time and effort.”…Sanchez said Kerik focused more on “conducting raids and liberating prostitutes” than training the Iraqis.

“They’d get tips and they’d go and actually raid a whorehouse,” Sanchez told The News. “Their focus becomes trying to do tactical police operations in the city of Baghdad, when in fact there is a much greater mission that they should be doing, which is training the police.”…

Kerik denied arresting any prostitutes in Iraq and said the Army always knew about his operations.

Oh, my. This is pretty bad—and he’s a Democrat, too:

Just 16 months into his four-year-term, Ohio’s attorney general admitted he was in over his head as he acknowledged an affair with a subordinate and his failure to stop problems that led to a sexual harassment investigation that brought down three of his aides.

Marc Dann apologized to his wife and supporters but insisted he would not step down. He took responsibility for the scandal, saying he was not prepared for the office or to run such a large agency.

“I did not create an atmosphere in my public and personal life that is consistent with the important mission of the Office of Attorney General,” the Democrat said Friday after the three aides were fired or forced out in the harassment investigation. “I am heartbroken by my failure to recognize the problems being created and by my failure to stop them.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Good post by James Fallows on air-taxi services—originally aimed at replacing 2-5 hour car trips, but now taking care of people frustrated by today’s airlines. Fallows quotes a press release from DayJet:

Traditionally, the use of the air cab service has been a remedy for driving trips of 2-5 hours, not a replacement for other forms of air travel. However, 2007 saw a shift with a significant number of new SATSair customers using the point-to-point air cab operation as a solution to their hub-and-spoke airline frustrations and woes, in fact decreasing the door to door travel times.

Read his whole post. I think an air taxi would make a lot of sense if you’re going on vacation to a city 5 or so hours away and it’s the kind of city where you would walk or take a cab (e.g., NYC) and not use your car.

Take a look at this Lifehacker post—lots of productivity tips specifically for Windows.

Via Very Short List, a TV Classic.

No cue cards, no teleprompters, and no second takes–legendary funnyman Sid Caesar pioneered live television sketch comedy with his 1950s sitcoms Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour. This classic sketch is “Argument to Beethoven’s 5th,” Sid Caesar and Nanette Fabray play a married couple in a argument with pantomimed action and the dialogue is classic music.

I regularly watched this program in high school.

Xobni is a very nice little program if you use Outlook. It’s free, and it offers lots of information and easy access to message threads. (Xobni is, of course, “inboX” spelled backwards.) Now it’s out of beta and available for free download. Read the NY Times article about it.

Modern programs mostly will automatically check for updates on start-up, but many programs are not that modern. So the little (free) utility UpdateStar may be useful for you. I downloaded and installed it, and it found quite a few updates available—many for programs that I either never use or didn’t even know I had. But some programs were definitely helped by installing updates. (UpdateStar provides a “download” bar for some, but not all programs. Skype, for example, I had to start up and click Help, Check for updates.)

And after the installations were complete, I ran Registry Booster 2 (not free, but I use it frequently and it has helped) and found 31 errors had been introduced to the registry. It was child’s play to correct them. Note that when you defrag the registry using that program, it will seem as though your computer has crashed. Just be patient. Eventually the defrag is complete—but it does take a few minutes. I do notice that any installation or uninstallation will introduce registry errors.

Neat little program to convert digital photos into sketches (pencil, pen-and-ink, or two types of painting). And it’s free. Here’s Megs as a pencil sketch:

Megs wishes you a happy holiday. (And yes, it’s photoshopped—you think she would stand for having a hat on her head?!)

This sounds quite tasty. She suggests it as a spread for scones:

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has an article about how to make yogurt (or as they spell it in the UK, yoghurt) in the Guardian. I did not want to go to the trouble of making yogurt from scratch, but I had a big pot of plain yogurt that needed to be used up so I made a sort of variation on the yogurt cheese balls further down on the page.

Yogurt cheese, in case you are unfamiliar with it, is just plain yogurt that has been drained of much of its liquid. To make it, just line a sieve with some porous cloth like cheesecloth, muslin, a coffee filter or even a couple of paper towels, spoon the yogurt in, and put the sieve with a bowl underneath in the refrigerator for at least a few hours. The more you let it sit, the drier it will become.

I strained about 2 1/2 cups of yogurt mixed with 1 teaspoon of sea salt from Friday evening to Sunday morning, by which time it had become the consistency of whipped cream cheese. I put this into a bowl, grated one garlic clove over it and drizzled on some extra virgin olive oil and mixed it up. It was the perfect spread for freshly baked hot savory scones.

I use this little gem to make my yogurt cheese. Works like a dream.

UPDATE: Also good with chopped ripe olives, tiny drop of Worcestershire. May a grating of hot pepper?

We have a mess:

Word spread quickly inside the windowless walls of the Elizabeth Detention Center, an immigration jail in New Jersey: A detainee had fallen, injured his head and become incoherent. Guards had put him in solitary confinement, and late that night, an ambulance had taken him away more dead than alive.

But outside, for five days, no official notified the family of the detainee, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. When frantic relatives located him at University Hospital in Newark on Feb. 5, 2007, he was in a coma after emergency surgery for a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages. He died there four months later without ever waking up, leaving family members on two continents trying to find out why.

Mr. Bah’s name is one of 66 on a government list of deaths that occurred in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007, when nearly a million people passed through.

The list, compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Congress demanded the information, and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, is the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of federal centers, county jails and privately run prisons that has become the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration.

The list has few details, and they are often unreliable, but it serves as a rough road map to previously unreported cases like Mr. Bah’s. And it reflects a reality that haunts grieving families like his: the difficulty of getting information about the fate of people taken into immigration custody, even when they die.

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting. From the Washington Post, an article that begins:

Reversing decades of tough-on-crime policies, including mandatory minimum prison sentences for some drug offenders, many cash-strapped states are embracing a view once dismissed as dangerously naive: It costs far less to let some felons go free than to keep them locked up.

It is a theory that has long been pushed by criminal justice advocates and liberal politicians — that some felons, particularly those convicted of minor drug offenses, would be better served by treatment, parole or early release for good behavior. But the states’ conversion to that view has less to do with a change of heart on crime than with stark fiscal realities. At a time of shrinking resources, prisons are eating up an increasing share of many state budgets.

“It’s the fiscal stuff that’s driving it,” said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group that advocates for more lenient sentencing. “Do you want to build prisons or do you want to build colleges? If you’re a governor, it’s kind of come to that choice right now.”

Read the rest of this entry »