Later On

This is a recipe to try. Note the ingredients:

6 pork spare ribs

Marinade:

2 c freshly brewed coffee
3 chipotles & 3 teaspoons of the adobo sauce (or substitute with chilli), finely chopped
1/3 c cider vinegar
4 tbsp rich brown sugar like molasses sugar
4 cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped
generous pinch of sea salt

This is rich: A woman, bird-watching, is accosted by an officer who confiscates the sage she has in her fanny pack, searches her car, finds even more sage, and sends it all off for testing at the state crime lab.

Three months later, police return, arrest her in front of her boss, co-workers, and customers on felony charges of marijuana possession, take her away, do a strip search and a body-cavity search, and keep her in jail overnight. A month later, it is discovered that the Assistant State Attorney ordered her arrested without the “drugs” having been tested. When her attorney learned that, he demanded that the stuff be tested. Surprise! It was still sage.

She’s now brought a civil lawsuit against the Assistant State Attorney, but prosecutors have immunity—which is probably why these things happen: there’s no accountability, the prosecutor suffers no sanctions at all, so why not throw people in jail? Hell, some people have even been convicted because the prosecutor conceals evidence that would show their innocence, but even then the prosecutor gets immunity. Some prosecutors have had people jailed and mistreated when they were not even accused of any crime—the “material witness” mistreatment for which Ashcroft was sued: immunity. He gets to do that.

And soon they may come for you.

Here’s the full story (so far), which I found via Ed Brayton.

My shaves currently center on the lather, and trying to perfect the creation, at will, of Creamy Lather™. Today, I used Klar Kabinette shaving soap, cutting off a good chunk (the brick on which the razor rests is what remains of the 1.1 lb bar, half of my 1 kg supply) and pressing it sideways into the apothecary bowl from Edwin Jagger. (I should have picked the black version, the better to see the later, but live and learn.)

I used the Tres Claveles horsehair shaving brush, since I had my first, semi-accidental success with that brush. (Semi-accident: I was deliberately using the method Zach illustrated in his video, but when I got the result he described, I had no idea what had happened. Maybe I’m spending too much time with Megs.) If you want to try this, you can (for the next several hours) order a custom horsehair brush through the Pogonotomy Forum (see here and then browse); or, alternatively, you can just order a horsehair brush from this vendor (same vendor as providing the custom brushes). You can also get a mixed horsehair-badger brush, which I have yet to try but sounds intriguing.

I followed the method Zach described: get brush soaking wet, let it drain briefly, and then attack the soap with abandon, brushing vigorously and folding the lather back into the effort, suds flying about… It’s wonderful. I even added just a little water along the way, I was having so much fun.

When I finished, I had a lather like very thick whipped cream—heavier than whipped egg whites. I applied it to my beard, and with three passes of the Feathers (razor and blade) had a perfect smooth visiage which welcomed the splash of Alt Innsbruck.

Tomorrow I’ll be using a Mühle razor that I now know is a called the “Sophist,” and comparing it with the Jagger R89. And, if I can manage it, another Creamy Lather.

Unfortunately, the halls of Congress are filled with elected officials who possess both in ample quantities. Here is an example—and the cost to the nation is hard to calculate.

I haven’t bought a new pocket knife for a long time, but this one caught my eye and turns out to be very nice in the hand. Action was tight at first, but with a little oil and continued opening and closing, it is  much easier and smoother now.

I’ve over the years noticed the odd phenomenon of other people’s preferences occasionally diverging from mine, so some may not find the knife to their taste. I like it because it’s relatively small and lightweight, has nice lines, and is one-hand open-and-close. And the opening mechanism is new to me. The blade locks open, of course: that’s a requirement. This one uses a liner lock, which is fine. And I find that I like single-bladed knives.

It has a clip, which I don’t like, but that’s easily removed if you have a set of small Torx drivers, which I do. Clip and its two Torx screws are in a small plastic bag with my pocket knives now.

UPDATE: The Wife commented that, for all that I liked the knife, she was struck by the things “wrong” with it that I had to take action on (stiffness and pocket clip). Those, to me, are more or less irrelevant because those are easily fixed—it’s like buying a house: the key thing is location (of course) and overall design and construction. The color of a painted house is irrelevant: it’s easily changed.

So removing the clip is no biggie—nowadays it’s common for some models of pocketknives to have clips, but almost always they readily removed—and the knife’s overall design and its action are unaffected.

And a stiff action in a new folding knife is absolutely normal: that’s the way they come. But the wear-in is not a problem. It just shows that you got a really new knife.

I broke with my usual practice and today shaved despite its being a Sunday: I just had to practice making lather again. The Atkinson Mango Oil shaving soap shown has a great fragrance, but I’ve had indifferent success with its lather, so I was eager to give it a go, knowing what I now know.

I in fact did get a fair lather with the Omega Pro 49, but it did not persist—a problem I have with boar brushes, though other shavers are more successful with them. On the second pass, I broke out my Tres Claveles horsehair brush, and lo! once again succeeded in getting Creamy Lather. This is the very brush that marked my first success, so perhaps horsehair has some magic for me. The lather this time I thoroughly enjoyed, and the soap as well: my skin feels very nice.

Three passes with the Joris—a somewhat aggressive razor—holding a Swedish Gillette blade. Then a splash of the TOBS No. 79—a very traditional-smelling fragrance—and I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s shave.

With this Creamy Lather technique, I am once again interested in bowl lathering—in particular, using a deep soap bowl that allows easy working of the initial lather back into the developing mix. So I cut a nice chunk off the end of one of my 1.1 lbs (500-kg) bars of Klar Kabinett and jammed that into the bottom of my Edwin Jagger lathering/soap bowl. And tomorrow I’m going to use the Tres Claveles brush again…

In the meantime, a shipment of horsehair brushes is on its way to me from España. Plus the custom horsehair made for members of the Pogonotomy Forum.

A thoroughly enjoyable book, recommended.

In Classical times orators and learned men used “memory palaces”: structures that you know intimately so that in your mind you can walk through them and note as you go the mental images that you have placed along the route to remind you of what is to be remember. Memory palaces were important enough that their deliberate acquisition (in memory) is still a part of what memory experts must do in developing their technique.

I wondered whether a well-to-do Roman in Classical times might design a new home to include “memory palace” features (lots of nooks, shelves, alcoves at various heights, cubbies, etc.), much as a modern house might have optical cable installed from the git-go, knowing that it will come in handy. Such a Roman would certainly know the house well, living in it, and having the memory palace features could be a considerable boon for the techniques described in the book.

I encountered few errors in the book, though “factorized” for “factored” made me wince. And a rather bad mistake, in talking about an experiment William James did. He tried memorizing a passage from Victor Hugo before and after memorizing something else. Foer writes, “When he returned to Hugo, he found that his memorization time had actually declined to fifty-seven seconds a line [from fifty seconds a line].” This is a common solecism. It was his memorization performance that declined—the time actually increased (not decreased).

And what have we gained? An extremely wealthy criminal class, destabilization of multiple countries in Central and South America, by far the largest prison population (per capita) in the world, wealthy and powerful prison and prison-guards lobbies to increase the prison population (through things like mandatory sentences, three-strikes laws, and the like), and billions upon billions of dollars wasted.

The video is from a good post by Ed Brayton:

Although this is enormously gratifying, by far the vast majority of cases do not have such a good outcome. And our Congress stands firm in its resolution to protect the banks and the financial industry from any sort of meaningful accountability. Whether this is connected with the enormous amounts of cash that banks and the financial industry funnel to Representatives and Senators is not proven, and Congress and the financial industry aim to keep it that way.

The video is from this story.

Soon it will be evident to everyone: Climate change will decimate our food supply. It has already begun, and this summer will tell an interesting story. Justin Gilles writes in the NY Times of belated attempts to breed crops for future climate conditions. But between here and there are millions upon millions of deaths from famine.

Another vendor new to me. This one has some wonderful shaving brushes—horsehair, horsehair and boar, horsehair and badger, boar, and badger. Plus a really good selection of makeup brushes, which The Wife may covet. Here’s the essentials:

Gifts and Care - contacto@giftsandcare.com -  (+34) 96 3400 220 in Spain – Lots of horsehair brushes, including horsehair and boar mix, in a range of grades. Also, Castle Forbes, Floïd, La Toja, Lea, Merkur, Myrsol, Proraso, Taylor of Old Bond Street, Tres Claveles. They also carry an extensive collection of makeup brushes.

I discovered them via the Pogonotomy Forum, which is where I’ve started to hang.

A fascinating trip down memory lane, of how strenuously the Washington Post defends the right of members of the Elite to break the law, either with absolute immunity or with trivial sanctions. That all goes out the window, of course, if a person is NOT a member of the Elite. You can then treat the like garbage—like the guy detained as a “material witness” in three locations, though he was not even accused of a crime. And of course he must not be allowed any restitution and the members of the Elite who were in the wrong here must not be touched.

A little something to kick off the weekend:

Cute story, via Ed Brayton. I think it’s interesting how the cops gave him the brushoff until the story of his blog (and the photos thanks to Hidden) started to spread and the police got a phone call from Good Morning, America—at which point they suddenly decided to work on the case after all.

Final grades have been posted. Of the 1025 possible points for the semester’s work, I got 1002.93. So I figure I passed.

It didn’t take long to enter all the vocabulary from Lesson 1 of the second semester text, but when I went to Lesson 2 I discovered that pages 93-108 were missing from my textbook (ordered directly from the publisher). So now I have to await a new copy…

But it won’t take long, and in the meantime, I of course continue reviewing the vocabulary I already know and adding words from my reading.

It’s well known that one doesn’t have to decrypt enemy messages to get information from their communications—traffic analysis can also tell a lot. If lots of messages start to go from headquarters to a particular unit, then it’s obvious that one should keep an eye on that unit.

To finesse this loophole, modern military practices include a constant stream of communications traffic to all units, using some sort of filler material that will look like real messages as “packing” to keep the channel constantly busy. Filler is replaced with actual messages as needed, and the traffic is constant, so that sort of traffic analysis doesn’t help.

But now I’ve learned that the shape of the communications network also provides information. For example, the skullduggery at Enron resulted in a particular type of communications structure for the illegal activity, in contrast to another structure for legitimate work. Take a look.

I have to say that, since discovering how to make Creamy Lather (or, more accurately, being told explicitly, clearly, and repeatedly, and shown a video of the process, and then more or less accidentally stumbling into it, and then trying to figure out what I did), I can’t wait for the morning shave to experiment more.

Of course, I could go into the bathroom at any time and whip up lathers till the cows come home, but that seems very unsporting. I like to wait, impatiently, for the next day’s shave and then to maximize the opportunity.

Although I have many brushes and soaps I want to try, this morning I gave into my intense curiosity about how the big, puffy Omega silvertips would work. So I picked the puffiest, along with a bowl of Institut Karité shaving soap (25% shea butter) and went to work. I thought the bowl would help, since it’s deeper than the typical wooden soap bowl, and I was curious how the big brush would work. It certainly would hold a LOT of lather.

So: shower, wash beard with MR GLO, and then go to town, working up the lather, modeling my technique on my memories of Zach’s video, lather flying about the sink. And: it worked! Creamy lather. Maybe this is why the Italian silvertips that Omega made were so big and puffy: because they work well with the Italian lathering technique. Or, perhaps, I just am gradually getting better (as in, “I can even make Creamy Lather with an Omega silvertip”). But I think the Omega does work pretty well at this, though whether that was a conscious intention of the manufacturer, I don’t know.

Three passes with the iKon Bulldog, which Gregory says will eventually return, but in a die-cast, chrome-plated model, rather than machined from a solid block of stainless—but I do wish he’d offer the machined version as a top-of-the-line luxury model at some point: a limited edition of (say) two dozen a year….

Extremely nice shave, and just for the heck of it, I threw in an Oil Pass, using jojoba oil (readily available in the cosmetics section of, say, Whole Foods). Then a good splash of Pashana, and a rush to the computer to blog my success.

Take a look.

The Anki author is right: it makes sense to make your own deck. I have just completed entering the vocabulary from lesson 1 of ¡Adelante! Dos, and I picked up not only the end-of-the chapter vocabulary, but also most of the words defined in footnotes or marginal notes. So once this vocabulary is learned, Lesson 1 will be easy: the reading passages will be nothing, so I can focus on learning the grammar.

I figure I’ll do one lesson a day, so it will take six days. On the seventh day, I will rest. And start learning the vocabulary.

If you’re taking Spanish and using ¡Adelante! Dos, I’ll upload the complete deck to the Anki site next week, once I’ve completed it. (The deck for ¡Adelante! Uno is already on the Anki site, available for download.)

I find it difficult to understand how a free society can pass secret laws: the whole idea of a law is to provide explicit guidance to want can and cannot be done. Is ignorance of the law and excuse if the government has gone to great lengths to keep the law secret? (Ans: No. One of the ideas of secret laws, I believe, is so that the government can lock you up and tell you that you have violated a law, but you cannot be told the law you broke because it is classified and you are now just a common criminal.)

Ed Brayton points to this article, in which Julian Sanchez attempts to figure out what is in the secret provisions of the Patriot Act. He begins:

Barack Obama’s AutoPen has signed another four-year extension of three Patriot Act powers, but one silver lining of this week’s lopsided battle over the law is that mainstream papers like The New York Times have finally started to take note of the growing number of senators who have raised an alarm over a “secret interpretation” of Patriot’s “business records” authority (aka Section 215). It would appear to be linked to a “sensitive collection program” referenced by a Justice Department official at hearings during the previous reauthorization debate—one that would be disrupted if 215 orders were restricted to the records of suspected terrorists, their associates, or their “activities” (e.g., large purchases of chemicals used to make bombs). Naturally, lots of people are starting to wonder just what this program, and the secret interpretation of the law that may be associated with it, are all about.

All we can do is speculate, of course: only a handful of legislators and people with top-secret clearances know for sure. But a few of us who closely monitor national security and surveillance issues have come to the same conclusion: it probably involves some form of cellular phone geolocation tracking, potentially on a large scale. The evidence for this is necessarily circumstantial, but I think it’s fairly persuasive when you add it all up. . .

Continue reading.