Later On

This one’s in the zoo in Seattle:

Via James Fallows, who has some comments on it:

Josh Tyler at CinemaBlend.com:

When people look back on the early years of the new millennium they’ll remember it for movies like The Dark Knight and Lord of the Rings. Or they’ll geek out with their friends about the cult classics they discovered together, rewatching copies of the original version of Donnie Darko or spreading around copies of Idiocracy and laughing at its accuracy. Or we’ll remember the prestige movies, the big Oscar winners like No Country For Old Men and Chicago.

But in a better world, maybe we’d remember these movies. These are the other guys, the great films you missed through circumstance or stupidity, through studio stumbling or simply bad timing. The best movies don’t always get seen, the best movies don’t always win the awards. This isn’t a list of critically acclaimed indies which didn’t do well at the box office, or films with huge fan followings which couldn’t get anyone else to turn out (sorry Serenity). Nor is this a list of movies which flopped at the box office but later found cult success. These movies fell between the cracks and never really found the audience they deserved. When you’re thinking back on the aughts, you won’t think of these films, but maybe you should. Consider giving these movies a second chance. Unique and strange, funny and weird, challenging and sexy; they’re the most unfairly overlooked movies of the past decade.

Continue reading. Some superb movies in the list. I particularly liked Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang.

Just back from the doctor. The trouble with my knee is, he thinks, bursitis: the insertion of the tendons becomes inflamed and tender. Cause: too much walking too soon. He said I should have walked 5 minutes daily for a week, 10 minutes daily for a week, etc. Stick with 20 minutes for a month. Basically: slow down.

He gave me an injection into the most painful part of the knee, and instantly I felt better. What a relief!

The Nordic Track is good, but again: go slow. I do want to get to 12 minutes (at which point Dr. Kenneth Cooper said that the training effect starts to occur. So maybe once I hit 15 minutes, I’ll just stick there for a month.

He had a very good suggestion: do both the Nordic and the walk. Just don’t push it.

Quadriceps exercises are fine, and I’ll start today.

I also told him I wanted to try tapering off my antidepressant (Effexor XR 75 mg QD). He suggested that we wait until after the holidays, and he did give me a prescription for Effexor XR 37.5 mg. Then if all goes well, we move to the not-timed-release (i.e., not XR). And then quit.

I decided to take a break on the antidepressant after reading of the studies that found that placebos were almost as effective, plus my life situation has totally changed: now that I’m retired, all workplace stress is gone (and I have to say I had a fair amount).

Not all drinking water is unsafe, to be sure. But how do you know that your own drinking water is safe? And if you travel, how do you know the drinking water at your destination is safe? Safe fresh water seems to me a basic government obligation, and when the government no longer can provide safe water, it’s a bad sign. Charles Duhigg in the NY Times:

More than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data.

That law requires communities to deliver safe tap water to local residents. But since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.

Regulators were informed of each of those violations as they occurred. But regulatory records show that fewer than 6 percent of the water systems that broke the law were ever fined or punished by state or federal officials, including those at the Environmental Protection Agency, which has ultimate responsibility for enforcing standards.

Studies indicate that drinking water contaminants are linked to millions of instances of illness within the United States each year.

In some instances, drinking water violations were one-time events, and probably posed little risk. But for hundreds of other systems, illegal contamination persisted for years, records show.

On Tuesday, the Senate Environment and Public Works committee will question a high-ranking E.P.A. official about the agency’s enforcement of drinking-water safety laws. The E.P.A. is expected to announce a new policy for how it polices the nation’s 54,700 water systems…

Continue reading. You’ll perhaps recall the discovery that the drinking water in Washington DC had lead levels far, far beyond what is safe from 2001 to 2004. I blogged about it in April. And, of course, the repeated contamination of food, with subsequent recalls. And the refusal to test thoroughly for mad-cow disease (blocked by the beef industry for fear that such tests would find the disease). And, of course, the billions and billions wasted in the War on Drugs, including enforcement, investigation, court cases, prisons, prison staff, and so on and on—with the illegality of drugs preventing many addicts from getting treatment (because they don’t want to go to prison).

The government is gradually becoming unable to fulfill its responsibilities. The drinking water is one sign, the blockage in the Senate is another.

BTW, you just won’t know whether the local water is safe or not:

… An analysis of E.P.A. data shows that Safe Drinking Water Act violations have occurred in parts of every state. In the prosperous town of Ramsey, N.J., for instance, drinking water tests since 2004 have detected illegal concentrations of arsenic, a carcinogen, and the dry cleaning solvent tetrachloroethylene, which has also been linked to cancer.

In New York state, 205 water systems have broken the law by delivering tap water that contained illegal amounts of bacteria since 2004.

However, almost none of those systems were ever punished. Ramsey was not fined for its water violations, for example, though a Ramsey official said that filtration systems have been installed since then. In New York, only three water systems were penalized for bacteria violations, according to federal data.

The government is failing—though of course in this particular case (the drinking water contamination), the Bush Administration quite deliberately backed away from environmental protection and did not fund or support activities of that sort, which Bush and his cohorts viewed as “anti-business” and not so good an idea as, saying, invading Iraq and starting a war there.

Apparently this sub was the one that capsized the USS Oklahoma. Thomas H. Maugh II writes in the LA Times:

The remains of a Japanese mini-submarine that participated in the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor have been discovered, researchers are to report today, offering strong evidence that the sub fired its torpedoes at Battleship Row.

That could settle a long-standing argument among historians.

Five mini-subs were to participate in the strike, but four were scuttled, destroyed or run aground without being a factor in the attack. The fate of the fifth has remained a mystery. But a variety of new evidence suggests that the fifth fired its two 800-pound torpedoes, most likely at the battleships West Virginia and Oklahoma, capsizing the latter. A day later, researchers think, the mini-sub’s crew scuttled it in nearby West Loch.

The loch was also the site of a 1944 disaster in which six tank landing ships preparing for the secret invasion of Saipan were destroyed in an ammunition explosion that killed 200 sailors and wounded hundreds more.

When the Navy scooped up the remains of the so-called LSTs and dumped them outside the harbor to protect the secrecy of the invasion, it apparently also dumped the mini-sub’s remains, which were mingled with the damaged U.S. ships.

"It’s not often that a historian gets a chance to rewrite history," said marine historian and former Navy submariner Parks Stephenson, who pieced together the evidence for the television program "Nova." "The capsizing of the Oklahoma is the second most iconic event of the attack. If one submarine could get in in 1941 and hit a battleship, who knows what a midget sub could do today. Iran and North Korea are both building them. It’s very worrying." …

Continue reading.

Bryan Walsh in TIME magazine:

The controversy over e-mails stolen from global-warming researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s University of East Anglia has become so divisive that there is even disagreement over what to call it.

Skeptics of global warming, who have long considered climate change a fraud, refer to the incident as "Climategate," with obvious intimations of scandal and cover-up. Advocates of action on warming call it "Swifthack," a reference to the 2004 character attacks on presidential candidate Senator John Kerry by the group then known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — in other words, an invented scandal propagated by conservatives and the media that does nothing to change the scientific case for climate change.

The truth is that the e-mails, while unseemly, do little to change the overwhelming scientific consensus on the reality of man-made climate change. But they do hand a powerful political card to skeptics at the start of perhaps the most important environmental summit in history. Still don’t know what to make of it? If you’re struggling to untangle the details of the e-mail controversy, here are five key things you need to know: …

Continue reading. Note in particular this passage:

4. Do the e-mails weaken the scientific case for global warming? Put it this way: when it comes to climate-science analysis from the representative of the world’s biggest oil-producing state, it’s wise to be suspicious. In the weeks since the e-mails first became public, many climate scientists and policy experts have looked through them, and they report that the correspondence does not contradict the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming, which has been decades in the making. "The content of the stolen e-mails has no impact whatsoever on our overall understanding that human activity is driving dangerous levels of global warming," wrote 25 leading U.S. scientists in a letter to Congress on Dec. 4. "The body of evidence that underlies our understanding of human-caused global warming remains robust." …

Cool app lets you easily notify AT&T when your cellphone reception is lousy. Read about it here.

I spotted this recipe and will try it today, I think, with half going to The Wife. The ingredients in the original:

1 cup walnuts
1 cup cooked brown rice
1 cup canned garbanzo beans, rinsed and drained
1 cup oat bran
1/2 teaspoon marjoram
1/4 teaspoon thyme
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons Dijon-style mustard
18 to 20 large cabbage leaves
1 cup tomato-vegetable juice blend
2 tablespoons freshly-squeezed lemon juice
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

The changes I’ll make:

Add 2 Tbsp miso (I’m surprised that vegans and vegetarian recipes don’t make more use of this food)

Skip the “onion powder” and use instead 1/2 cup minced onion.

I’ll probably also add a beaten egg to the mixture.

UPDATE: It didn’t need the egg. I used a whole can of garbanzos (drained and rinsed) rather than just a cup. Next time I would add 3 cloves garlic, crushed. I used a Dandelion-Leek Miso that added a lot, I thought.

The big problem was peeling the cabbage leaves in one piece, then in cooking them enough. I say the hell with it: next time I’m using lettuce leaves—same idea: peel off the leaves, blanch them in boiling salted water, and wrap the filling. And the filling is excellent (as I fixed it, and probably pretty good following the recipe).

UPDATE 2: The Wife suggested cooking an entire head of cabbage in a pressure cooker, and then taking the leaves from that. And, since the filling is what’s tasty, she thought the filling would work as a filling for roasted mushrooms, for example.

Today I see the doctor to get a referral to a physical therapist for the knee. In the meantime, the Nordic Track provides quite a workout. I did 6 minutes yesterday, 7 minutes today. It doesn’t sound like much—and, candidly, it isn’t—but I am so out of shape that I am huffing and puffing by the end.

I believe I’ve found a solid approach on the intake side: I focus solely on today, and besides my exercise for today, I think about how to have a small lunch and a small dinner, taking good nutrition into account.

This is a little different. Always before, I focused on tomorrow, planning how I would cut back (which allowed me to eat what I wanted today). Always “tomorrow.” Now I think about tomorrow (in general) as a time when I can indulge myself in a nice dinner—but for today, just a small lunch and a small dinner. (In fact, I’m looking forward to the Christmas roast.)

It helps, of course, that I know the essentials of good nutrition and that I enjoy cooking. And that the house has been stripped of any indulgent foods—last night, when I was still peckish after my mushroom burger, I put together a treat from what I have on hand: nonfat yogurt, slivered almonds, and some raisins from Trader’s Joe’s Jumbo Raisin Medley. Yummy, nutritious, and no empty calories.

So, today like every day, I think: “What small lunch and small dinner can I fix?” Noshing is limited to Clementines.

My Chinese Grey Plisson made a fine lather from Vintage Blades Herbal Citrus shaving cream—and I do like the fragrance. My Big Grip with its Astra Keramik blade did a fine and efficient job, and TOBS Shaving Shop aftershave remains a favorite.