Later On

Lean closer to the screen, please. If possible, place your forehead on the screen so I can get a clear reading…  it’s coming through… Here it is:

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Nice walk again today. I think I’ve discovered that what Dianne M. told me is correct: listening to music or recorded books is a distraction that ends up making the walk harder, not easier. In fact, cognitive dissonance reduction ensures that listening to music while you walk will make you view walking as more difficult—else why would I be trying to distract myself when I do it?

OTOH, carrying a camera makes the walk entertaining in itself—and I do note that walking is seeming easier this time: the distances don’t seem so long, and the time flies by. And, of course, I’m looking around more and enjoying the break.

It’s certainly not the MBT shoes, though I do like walking in them. As they point out, your calves will work harder with MBT shoes than regular shoes—which is all to the good, since I walk for exercise.

One thing I saw today is a couple of deer from the Pacific Grove herd:

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Via Glenn Greenwald, this very interesting article by Johann Hari in The Independent:

Ever since I started meeting jihadis, I have been struck by one thing – their Britishness. I am from the East End of London, and at some point in the past decade I became used to hearing a hoarse and angry whisper of jihadism on the streets where I live. Bearded young men stand outside the library calling for "The Rule of God" and "Death to Democracy".

In the mosques across the city, I hear a fringe of young men talk dreamily of flocking to Afghanistan to "resist". Yet this whisper never has an immigrant accent. It shares my pronunciations, my cultural references, and my national anthem. Beneath the beards and the burqas, there is an English voice.

The East End is a cramped grey maze of council estates, squashed between the glistening palaces of the City to one side and the glass towers of Docklands to the other. You can feel the financial elites staring across at each other, indifferent to this concrete lump of poverty dumped in-between by the forgotten tides of history. This place has always been the swirling first stop for immigrants to this country like my father – a place where new arrivals can huddle together as they adjust to the cold rain and lukewarm liberalism of Britain.

The Muslims who arrive here every day from Bangladesh, or India, or Somalia say they find the presence of British Islamists bizarre. They have come here to work and raise their children in stability and escape people like them. No: these Islamists are British-born. They make up 7 per cent of the British Muslim population, according to a Populous poll (with the other 93 percent of Muslims disagreeing). Ever since the 7/7 suicide bombings, carried out by young Englishmen against London, the British have been squinting at this minority of the minority and trying to figure out how we incubated a very English jihadism.

But every attempt I have made up to now to get into their heads – including talking to Islamists for weeks at their most notorious London hub, Finsbury Park mosque, immediately after 9/11 – left me feeling like a journalistic failure. These young men speak to outsiders in a dense and impenetrable code of Koranic quotes and surly jibes at both the foreign policy crimes of our Government and the freedom of women and gays. Any attempt to dig into their psychology – to ask honestly how this swirl of thoughts led them to believe suicide bombing their own city is right – is always met with a resistant sneer, and yet more opaque recitations from the Koran. Their message is simple: we don’t do psychology or sociology. We do Allah, and Allah alone. Why do you have this particular reading of the Koran, when most Muslims don’t? Because we are right, and they are infidel. Full stop. It was an investigatory dead end.

But then, a year ago, I began to hear about a fragile new movement that could just hold the answers we journalists have failed to find up to now. A wave of young British Islamists who trained to fight – who cheered as their friends bombed this country – have recanted. Now they are using everything they learned on the inside, to stop the jihad.

Seventeen former radical Islamists have "come out" in the past 12 months and have begun to fight back. Would they be able to tell me the reasons that pulled them into jihadism, and out again? Could they be the key to understanding – and defusing – Western jihadism? I have spent three months exploring their world and befriending their leading figures. Their story sprawls from forgotten English seaside towns to the jails of Egypt’s dictatorship and the icy mountains of Afghanistan – and back again.

I. The Imam

My journey began when, sitting in one of the grotty greasy spoon cafés that fill the East End, I heard a young woman in hijab mention that the imam of one of the local mosques was a jihadi who had fought in Afghanistan, but is now facing death threats from the very men he once fought alongside. His "crime"? To renounce his past and call for "a secular Islam".

After a series of phone calls, Usama Hassan cautiously agrees to talk. I meet him outside his little mosque in Leyton. It sits in the middle of a run-down sprawl of pound stores ("Everything only £1!!!"), halal kebab shops, and boarded-up windows at the edge of the East End.

Usama is a big, broad bear of a man in a black blazer and wire-rimmed glasses. He greets me with a hefty handshake; he has a rolled-up newspaper under his arm. He takes me upstairs to a pale-green prayer room…

Continue reading.

Very interesting post at Skeptical Science. From the post:

Figure 1: Surface Mass Balance – Discharge (red) compared with GRACE data (blue). GRACE data is offset vertically. Short horizontal lines indicate GRACE uncertainty. Dashed lines indicate linear trends. The scatter plot in the inset shows a direct linear regression between monthly GRACE values as a function of the cumulative SMB – D anomaly (van den Broeke et al 2009).

Read the entire post. Note that the graph is zero-based.

Greenland’s ice cap, unlike the Arctic ice in the ocean, will raise sea levels considerably when it all melts.

This is so very, very wrong. Michael Shear in the Washington Post:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and an assortment of national business groups opposed to President Obama’s health-care reform effort are collecting money to finance an economic study that could be used to portray the legislation as a job killer and threat to the nation’s economy, according to an e-mail solicitation from a top Chamber official.

The e-mail, written by the Chamber’s senior health policy manager and obtained by The Washington Post, proposes spending $50,000 to hire a "respected economist" to study the impact of health-care legislation, which is expected to come to the Senate floor this week, would have on jobs and the economy.

Step two, according to the e-mail, appears to assume the outcome of the economic review: "The economist will then circulate a sign-on letter to hundreds of other economists saying that the bill will kill jobs and hurt the economy. We will then be able to use this open letter to produce advertisements, and as a powerful lobbying and grass-roots document."

James P. Gelfand, the e-mail’s author, confirmed its authenticity in a brief telephone conversation Sunday evening. He said the campaign against Democratic health legislation would only be launched "if that’s what it found," but declined further comment and referred questions to a Chamber spokesman.

The behind-the-scenes effort by the business groups to influence the legislative debate is part of an intensifying series of attacks by the opponents of Democratic health-care plans. President Obama has said he wants a final bill on his desk by the end of the year, leaving opponents little time to raise new objections as the legislation marches forward…

Continue reading. Interesting approach. Not very open-minded, but perhaps they’ll run the ads if it turns out that the expert finds that the bill will not hurt jobs or the economy but instead is helpful.

This is incredible. Mark Benjamin in Salon:

Last April, two Marines at Camp Lejeune predicted to a psychiatrist that some Marine back from war was going to "lose it." Concerned, the psychiatrist asked what that meant. One of the Marines responded, "One of these guys is liable to come back with a loaded weapon and open fire."

They weren’t talking about Marines suffering from a tangle of mental and religious angst, like news reports suggest haunted the alleged Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. The risk they reported at Camp Lejeune was broader and systemic. Upon returning home, troops suffering mental health problems were getting dumped into an overwhelmed healthcare system that responded ineptly to their crises, the men reported, and they also faced harassment from Marine Corps superiors ignorant of the severity of their problems and disdainful of those who sought psychiatric help.

As Dr. Kernan Manion investigated the two Marines’ claims about conditions at the North Carolina military base, the largest Marine base on the East Coast, he found they were true. Manion, a psychiatrist hired last January to treat Marines coming home from war with acute mental problems, warned his superiors of looming trouble at Camp Lejeune in a series of increasingly urgent memos.

But instead of being praised for preventing what might have been another Fort Hood massacre, Manion was fired by the contractor that hired him, NiteLines Kuhana LLC. A spokeswoman for the firm says it let Manion go at the Navy’s behest. The Navy declined to comment on this story.

While military officials and the media examine whether the Army missed warning signs that might have indicated an unhinged Nidal Hasan was capable of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Manion’s Camp Lejeune story is a cautionary tale of what happens to those who blow the whistle on conditions for military personnel with mental problems.

Manion says the April incident with the two Marines was just one of a series of disturbing events and serious problems with mental healthcare he saw at Camp Lejeune, a base that may be best known for a water contamination scandal that led to high rates of cancer and birth defects among Marines and their families who lived there. He was particularly concerned to see that troubled Marines were stricken with the overwhelming impulse to commit suicide or murder, telltale signs of severe combat stress.

In a telephone interview from his Surf City, N.C., home, Manion talked of overburdened staff and inadequate resources at the Naval hospital at Camp Lejeune. The psychiatrist charged that medical officials failed to study and discuss violent events among returning Marines in an effort to prevent further, similar events, and did little planning to improve handling distraught Marines who were killing themselves and others in shocking numbers. In 2008, for example, 42 Marines committed suicide and 146 attempted to do so, according to the Marine Corps.

Continue reading.

John Hoeffel in the LA Times:

A few miles from Los Angeles City Hall, a small experiment in marijuana regulation has been underway for years. While the state’s largest city passed a flawed moratorium, failed to enforce it, debated proposed rules endlessly and watched flummoxed as dispensaries multiplied, West Hollywood pressed ahead.

Confronted with its own dispensary explosion in 2005, the city surrounded by L.A. imposed a moratorium on dispensaries, clamped interim rules on the ones that were open, passed a strict ordinance and capped the number allowed at four, all within two years.

When the West Hollywood City Council updated its ordinance earlier this month, the vote was unanimous, no residents spoke in opposition and the city’s dispensary operators lined up in support.

Today, in contrast, two Los Angeles council committees will hold what is sure to be a boisterously contentious hearing as they try to finish an ordinance now in its fifth draft.

In West Hollywood, city officials say, it’s been more than two years since a resident has complained about a dispensary. Neighborhood watch leaders say their streets are safer because the dispensary guards are required to walk nearby blocks. School officials welcome dispensaries as neighbors. And the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, which patrols the city, says there have been no recent crimes at dispensaries and no calls from agitated neighbors.

"We’ve been on top of this from Day 1," said Lisa Belsanti, a senior management analyst with the city who helped draw up its rules. "There’s a problem, but it’s in Los Angeles, it’s not in West Hollywood."

Cities with no medical marijuana regulations, including Los Angeles, San Diego and Long Beach, have seen an outcry from neighborhoods upset that dispensaries open wherever they want, often in close proximity, and attract nuisances, such as traffic, and real dangers, such as robberies.

But some cities, notably San Francisco and Oakland, have tightly regulated their dispensaries, and officials there say they have had little or no trouble with them…

Continue reading.

One problem with boar brushes is their lather-holding capacity: much less than badger brushes, though it improves as the brush is broken in. My Omega Pro 48 is getting well broken in, so I wondered whether it would work with a shave stick.

With the Irisch Moos shave stick, I did get an excellent lathers, which I worked as vigorously as I could into the brush. First pass was great, second pass was sparse, and I had to go to a tub of soap to work up lather for the final pass.

It looks like shave sticks require badger, and boar doesn’t work that well. But I’ll try again as the boar brushes become better broken in.

The Hoffritz slant bar with a newish Astra Keramik blade did a fine job, very smooth. And Alt Innsbruck was a nice aftershave to use.

I just made the recipe, and they are very tasty indeed. For myself, I might cook the onion and garlic in habanero oil, but nothing wrong with the recipe as is. Well, with small changes:

I did use 1 c. dried cranberries.

I did not use Worcestershire sauce (because it has high-fructose corn syrup), but rather about 1.5 Tbs minced anchovies, which I sautéed with the onion and garlic, and a small dash of soy sauce. (The idea is to give a umami boost.)

The recipe called for 1/4 tsp thyme for 2 lbs of ground turkey. That is to laugh. I used about 1 Tbsp.

Although the recipe suggests doing fewer (and thus larger) meatloaves, I used all 12 muffin cups and made 12 of the cute tasty little guys.

Very interesting post:

Alice is one of the coolest programs that teach computer programming to kids. What is Alice? It’s an important tool schools and families can use to turn computer programming into a game-like experience to teach basic object-oriented programming to kids.

One of the coolest memories I have as a kid is when my brother and I would copy BASIC programs from the computer magazines of the day (1980’s) into the old Franklin 64 desktop computer with one floppy drive and a whopping 64k of RAM. I’ll never forget when we finished typing the last line of that first program and then entered the command to RUN – how the screen started flashing characters and the miniature speaker beeped through a pathetic rendition of “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy.”  Pure magic.  I was only 9 years old, but at that moment I was hooked on computers for life.

For anyone who has never created an application, it’s hard to describe the feeling of creating something from nothing. Programming is a lot like any other form of art in that way, except instead of the canvas we’ve got the computer screen, and instead of the paint brushes we have the various programming platforms.

Here at MakeUseOf, we believe in the importance of simple learning tools that can teach complex skills, such as computer programming. For example, Guy covered how you can learn to write a program with SmallBasic, and he also covered a cool application called Scratch that can teach kids how to program. Today, I’d like to cover another innovative software application called Alice that can teach kids how to program in object oriented languages.

Alice 3D Programming – What It Is & What It Isn’t

Alice 3D is a programming environment offered by Carnegie Mellon University. It’s provided for free as a public service, through the funding of various programming  and computer giants, such as Electronic Arts, Sun Microsystems, the National Science Foundation and other major organizations.

Alice is not a scripting tutorial where students will learn about the correct syntax used in various programming languages. It isn’t about developing the best structured For Loop. Instead, Alice provides students with a virtual world – a 3D modeling environment where students can learn how putting together various components, which each individually have their own properties, can create a larger, working project. The 3D environment is meant to show students, in a simple way, how the concept of object-oriented programming works…

Continue reading.

Steve Benen at Political Animal:

There’s a near-empty prison in rural Illinois, in a town called Thomson. The federal government is reportedly eyeing the facility as "a leading option" to house suspected terrorists from Guantanamo Bay

Locals seem to think it’s a good idea…

News that the federal government seems interested in transferring detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the Thomson Correctional Center was greeted warmly in this small, rural farm town along the Iowa border.

After holding out hope that the sprawling $145 million prison might improve the economic conditions in this remote area of the state, residents say any prisoners would be a welcomed sight.

…but a couple of Illinois Republican congressman have embraced the usual nonsense.

[Rep. Donald Manzullo (R-Ill.)] acknowledged "extraordinary unemployment" in northwestern Illinois–he put the rate at 17 percent — but added: "The issue is: ‘Are you going to exchange the promise of jobs for national security?’ National security trumps everything. That’s the safety of the people.

The lawmaker, who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he was concerned that "al-Qaida would follow al-Qaida" to northwestern Illinois if Thomson became the prison to replace Guantanamo Bay, which he believes is perfectly adequate. [...]

House Republican Mark Kirk of Northbrook, a candidate for the U.S. Senate, is circulating a sharply worded letter among the state’s congressional delegation and state officials, urging the White House not to transfer suspected terrorists to the prison.

"If your administration brings al-Qaida terrorists to Illinois, our state and the Chicago metropolitan area will become ground zero for Jihadist terrorist plots, recruitment and radicalization," Kirk, a five-term congressman, wrote in the letter to President Barack Obama.

This is sheer idiocy. Maybe Manzullo and Kirk know better and want to create a panic for political reasons; or maybe they’re just cluelessly popping off. Either way, there’s really no excuse for federal lawmakers to be this wrong.

It’s hard not to wonder if these guys are even listening to themselves. Locking up terrorists is bad for security? Federal prisons are "ground zero for Jihadist terrorist plots"? It’s like listening to children.

Let’s try to put this in a way that even Reps. Manzullo and Kirk could understand: the United States has already tried and convicted literally hundreds of terrorists. They’re held in federal detention on American soil. The prisons have not become magnets for terrorism; there have been no escapes; there have been no attempted escapes; and there have been no efforts at breaking anyone out of any of the facilities. It’s not an academic exercise — it’s reality.

[T]he apocalyptic rhetoric rarely addresses this: Thirty-three international terrorists, many with ties to al-Qaeda, reside in a single federal prison in Florence, Colo., with little public notice.

According to data provided by Traci L. Billingsley, spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, "federal facilities on American soil currently house 216 international terrorists and 139 domestic terrorists. Some of these miscreants have been locked up here since the early 1990s. None of them has escaped."

A certain amount of political cowardice is to expected, but Manzullo and Kirk are just embarrassing themselves.

Does anyone understand why the GOP is so terrified of terrorists in prisons? And what is so special about "American soil" that, if terrorists step on it, they are suddenly able to destroy our national security?

Read the entire post, which begins:

Where to watch free movies online? Let’s get you started. First, we have listed dozens of free, high quality films that you can watch online. Then, below, you can find movie sites that feature free movie collections. Classics, international, film noir, documentaries, indies — they’re all here, waiting to be watched…

• A Farwell to Arms (1932) With Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes.
• A Fistful of Dollars (1964) Italian spaghetti western film directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood. (US viewers only)
• A Woman (1915) With Charlie Chaplin.
• Adaptation (2002) Directed by Spike Jonze. Nicolas Cage. (US viewers only)
• A Story of Healing (1997) Academy Award for best documentary short subject.
• Alexander Nevsky (1938) A historical drama film directed by the great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.
• Angel on My Shoulder (1946) A gangster comedy starring Claude Rains and Paul Muni.
• Battleship Potemkin (1925) Directed by the great Russian director, Sergei Eisenstein.
• Behind the Screen (1916) With Charlie Chaplin.
• Birth a Nation (1915) Directed by DW Griffith. A landmark work in film history (1915) with racist undertones. Also see his later movie, Abraham Lincoln.
• Beat the Devil (1953) Directed by John Huston, with Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre.
• Blackmail (1929) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
• Bon Voyage (1944) A French language WWII propaganda film by Alfred Hitchcock. Also see Aventure Malgache.
• …

Continue reading.

Donny Shaw at Open Congress:

Most of the coverage of Congress’ health care reform process has been focused on the public option. From it’s arrival as a compromise for single-payer to its slow and painful neutering in each successive iteration of health care legislation in Congress, the public option has been the health care politics story to watch. But all of Congress’ health care bills have been more than 1500 pages long— there’s a lot more to them than just the public option.

For months, Bruce Webb has been tracking a provision in the House’s health care bills that has flown mostly under the radar. He calls it the “most important and most overlooked” aspect of the bills, and he may be right.

The provision in question is entitled “Ensuring Value and Lower Premiums.” In all of Congress’s health care bills it reads more or less like this:

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Forget trials—declare them guilty and mete out punishment. I guess she thinks that will save time. Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress:

Yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the five individuals accused of conspiring to commit the 9/11 attacks — including alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — will be prosecuted in U.S. federal court. “I am confident in the ability of our courts to provide these defendants a fair trial, just as they have for over 200 years,” said Holder. “The alleged 9/11 conspirators will stand trial in our justice system before an impartial jury under long-established rules and procedures.”

But the U.S. justice system apparently isn’t good enough for former Alaska governor Sarah Palin (who believes that the White House has a “Department of Law“). Last night she went on Facebook and posted a message calling the Obama administration’s decision “atrocious”:

Horrible decision, absolutely horrible. It is devastating for so many of us to hear that the Obama Administration decided that the 9/11 terrorist mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, will be given a criminal trial in New York. This is an atrocious decision. [...]

Criminal defense attorneys will now enter into delaying tactics and other methods in the hope of securing some kind of win for their “clients.” The trial will afford Mohammed the opportunity to grandstand and make use of his time in front of the world media to rally his disgusting terrorist cohorts. It will also be an insult to the victims of 9/11, as Mohammed will no doubt use the opportunity to spew his hateful rhetoric in the same neighborhood in which he ruthlessly cut down the lives of so many Americans. [...]

If we are stuck with this terrible Obama Administration decision, I, like most Americans, hope that Mohammed and his co-conspirators are convicted. Hang ‘em high.

Palin further insulted the U.S. legal system by lamenting that a “hung jury” or “court room technicalities” may allow the defendants to walk away from this trial without receiving just punishment.” But the decision to make terrorists face the U.S. court system isn’t just an idea dreamed up by the Obama administration; there’s a strong precedent for it in this country. The U.S. has already successfully prosecuted 145 terrorism cases in federal court,including shoe bomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui.

In fact, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani praised the prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers:

-– “‘It should show that our legal system is the most mature legal system in the history of the world,’ he [Giuliani] said, ‘that it works well, that that is the place to seek vindication if you feel your rights have been violated.’” [The New York Times, 3/5/94]

-– “[M]any who were bruised by the traumatic event were certain that no verdict by a jury or punishment by a judge will exorcise the pain and terror that remain. … Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani declared that the verdict ‘demonstrates that New Yorkers won’t meet violence with violence, but with a far greater weapon — the law.’” [The New York Times, 3/5/94]

-– “I think it shows you put terrorism on one side, you put our legal system on the other, and our legal system comes out ahead,” said Giuliani. [CBS Evening News, 3/5/94]

Even in the weeks after Sept. 11, Giuliani “framed the attacks in the language of crime, describing the hijackers as ‘insane murderers’ and calling for restoration of the ‘rule of law.’” As CAP’s Ken Gude explains, Holder’s decision is a “victory for the rule of law and the American system of justice.”

No wonder the GOP gets so little respect these days.

Nicholas Kristof in the NY Times:

Any time anyone tells you that a dream is impossible, any time you’re discouraged by impossible challenges, just mutter this mantra:Tererai Trent.

Of all the people earning university degrees this year, perhaps the most remarkable story belongs to Tererai (pronounced TEH-reh-rye), a middle-aged woman who is one of my heroes. She is celebrating a personal triumph, but she’s also a monument to the aid organizations and individuals who helped her. When you hear that foreign-aid groups just squander money or build dependency, remember that by all odds Tererai should be an illiterate, battered cattle-herd in Zimbabwe and instead — ah, but I’m getting ahead of my story.

Tererai was born in a village in rural Zimbabwe, probably sometime in 1965, and attended elementary school for less than one year. Her father married her off when she was about 11 to a man who beat her regularly. She seemed destined to be one more squandered African asset.

A dozen years passed. Jo Luck, the head of an aid group called Heifer International, passed through the village and told the women there that they should stand up, nurture dreams, change their lives.

Inspired, Tererai scribbled down four absurd goals based on accomplishments she had vaguely heard of among famous Africans. She wrote that she wanted to study abroad, and to earn a B.A., a master’s and a doctorate.

Tererai began to work for Heifer and several Christian organizations as a community organizer. She used the income to take correspondence courses, while saving every penny she could.

In 1998 she was accepted to Oklahoma State University, but she insisted on taking all five of her children with her rather than leave them with her husband. “I couldn’t abandon my kids,” she recalled. “I knew that they might end up getting married off.” …

Continue reading.

You can read more about it in this Lifehacker post.

He’s a Democrat, he did wrong, and he’s going to serve time. I think this is an excellent step—just as it was an excellent step for the Republican "Duke" Cunningham (who actually had a price list of his services), who got 8 years. Here’s the story by Dave Cook in the Christian Science Monitor:

A federal judge sentenced former Rep. William Jefferson, (D) of Louisiana, to 13 years in prison for his conviction on corruption charges that famously included hiding cash in his home freezer.

Prosecutors had asked for a term of 27 to 33 years under federal sentencing guidelines. The request was significantly longer than for other congressmen in recent scandals. Defense lawyers had sought a term of less than 10 years. The 13 year sentence, which Jefferson’s lawyers have 10 days to appeal, is believed to be the longest ever given to a former member of Congress.

Jefferson, who represented part of New Orleans, was convicted in August on 11 of 16 federal charges of bribery, fraud, money laundering, and racketeering. He was also the first sitting member of Congress to be charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Jefferson tried to bribe the then-vice president of Nigeria. Some $90,000 of that bribe was found in Jefferson’s freezer when federal agents raided his home.

In imposing the sentence Friday afternoon in a courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia, Judge T.S. Ellis III said Jefferson’s conduct was “a cancer on the body politic.”

On the advice of his attorney, Jefferson declined the opportunity to make a statement at his sentencing, and he remained silent because he plans to appeal his conviction.

In sentencing documents, federal prosecutors accused Jefferson of a “stunning betrayal of public trust” and sought a sentence that could amount to life for the 62 year-old former member of Congress.

“The defendant betrayed the public’s trust time after time by using his congressional office as a criminal enterprise to further a pattern of racketeering acts of corruption and self-enrichment,” prosecutors wrote. They noted that Jefferson had participated in “no fewer than eleven distinct bribe schemes.” …

Continue reading.

Yesterday I cooked greens for The Wife: 3 pieces of thick bacon cut into little squares, browned in the large sauté pan, then half a large onion chopped added to that. As the onion cooked to transparency, I added one bunch of collards, washed and chopped. The collards didn’t look like all that much in the pan, so I quickly washed and chopped a bunch of rainbow chard (red chard, green chard, Swiss chard, etc.). After cooking that a little, I added about half a cup of chicken stock, covered it, and let it simmer for 30 minutes. At the end of that time, I put the cooked greens in a container, with a little juice left in the sauté pan.

So last night after cutting a few strips from the chicken thigh, I figured I should cook the rest of thigh for me. The juice left in the sauté pan looked good, so I figured I’d "sauté" it in that. I put the heat on medium-high and added the thigh. It was cooking well, but the juice was boiling off and was clearly going to be gone before the thigh was done. I didn’t want a burned taste, so I added a small splash of habanero oil, thinking that would calm things down in the pan, but it continued to cook too fast.

I keep a 1.5-liter bottle of red wine on the counter, pressurized with nitrogen so the wine doesn’t go off, so I quickly hit the spigot for about half a cup of red wine and pour that  in the pan, where it boiled up immediately—oh, the heat was still on medium high. I turned the heat off, stirred what liquid remained, turned the thigh, and put the lid on, thinking it would cook with the residual heat. (The thigh, being boneless, was fairly thin.) I went back and watched my movie (Up, an excellent movie and a new direction for Disney, thanks to Pixar.)

When I went back, the thigh was done and what remained was a very dark—almost black—thick liquid. I tasted it. OMG! It was delicious! Intense-tasting, rich (not from fat, but from taste), perfect amount of salt, complex, and altogether wonderful.

It was like a miracle: an accident that I probably could not duplicate on purpose (though of course a professional chef would now experiment and replicate until s/he perfected the sauce). So here I was with this fantastic creation that no one else would ever truly know—if only there were a way to blog tastes.

That’s what I like about cooking: the occasional miraculous accident.

Megs seems quite happy now with her Evo 95% Duck canned food: 1/2 a 5.5-oz can in the morning, the other half for dinner. She seems to start each meal by eating about somewhere between a third and half the food, then wandering away for a nap or other activity and returning later for more.

So I thought it was time to start the transition to homemade food. I bought a single skinless, boneless chicken thigh at Whole Foods (the guy was surprised that I was buying just one), and last night I cut from it three or four very thin strips, then cut those cross-ways into little tiny chunks.

Then I buried two of the chunks in the dinner duck and squeeze her dinner treat of one capsule of wild-salmon oil over the top. I put it down, and she dug in.

I was working on other stuff in the kitchen, but I heard her start chewing and chewing: clearly she hit one of the chunks. When I finally left the kitchen, she was gone, and most of her dinner was left. Uh-oh. I figured that one chunk might have been okay, but when she hit the second chunk, she figured the whole batch was bad. Oh, well. Back to plain duck for a few days.

But this morning I discovered her food bowl was completely empty—almost as if she had licked it after finishing the food. I guess a little bit of chunked chicken will be okay. I’m keeping it as a dinner treat, though, at least for now.

I like Booster aftershaves a lot, and at one time there was a sampler: nine small (airline-legal) bottles of the nine Booster fragrances. These were a fantastic gift item for a shaver, and of course a nice purchase for an airline traveler. The whole set was only US$9.98—a great bargain and, it appears, too much of a bargain: the sampler doesn’t seem to be around any more. I checked the primary Booster dealers (ShavingEssentials.biz in the US, Fendrihan.com in Canada) and neither has it.

My thought is that the sampler is sufficiently valuable in itself that it should be a permanent offering—perhaps at double the price to make it profitable for maker and dealer: US$19.98. At that price it’s not such a bargain, but it is still a great gift at a reasonable price—and a good way for any shave to sample the Booster delights.

If you think this is a good idea, please let the two dealers know.

UPDATE: As pointed out in the comments, the Booster sampler is still available—and at a very good price. At Shaving Essentials, look under the menu item “Samplers.” I was looking under “Aftershaves” (and, truthfully, I think it should be listed there as well).

UPDATE 2: Shoebox Shaveshop sells a LOT of Boosters, but they currently do not offer a sampler. Check back later.