Later On

My morning shave is now a daily (save Sunday) search for the perfect Creamy Lather. I picked De Vergulde Hand because the container looked as if it would helpful in working the lather back into the brush. And I chose my Plisson Chinese Grey brush because it is somewhat coarser than the silvertip brushes, and I thought it might work the soap and lather more along the lines of boar and horsehair.

I did indeed get a very nice lather, though it didn’t quite hit the sweet spot. Still, it was better than my regular lathers. I want to try this with Klar Kabinette soon.

Three passes with the Pils. I tend to have Pils problems on my upper lip: the blade angle—the blade emerges almost flat from the head—combined with my slight familial tremor can readily inflict a small cut, and I got one this morning. Not bad—that’s what My Nik Is Sealed is for—but I think this is why I’ve sort of being unconsciously avoiding the use of this razor. But that makes it worse: lack of practice. I will be bringing it more frequently into the rotation. OTOH, I have yet to have a nick from, say, the Feather premium stainless razor, which is significantly less expensive than the Pils.

I had read something about the Weleda balm and wanted to give it a go. Not bad, for a balm. The manufacturer reports:

Organic jojoba seed oil absorbs quickly to protect your skin without leaving an oily film. Biodynamic^® aloe is rich in vitamins, minerals and enzymes that nourish and soothe razor burn. Myrrh has mild antiseptic and astringent properties that calm small shaving wounds. Your face feels soft, smooth and relaxed. Now that your close shave is no longer a close call for razor burn, you can go on being as smooth as your clean-cut face.

I actually buy it from Vitacost.com because of the discount. They also list the ingredients:

Ingredients: Water (aqua), alcohol, buxus chinensis (jojoba) seed oil, glycerin, aloe barbadensis leaf juice, butyrospermum parkii (shea butter), glyceryl linoleate, chamomilla recutita (matricaria) extract, commiphora myrrha extract, sodium beeswax, magnesium aluminum silicate, chondrus crispus (carrageenan), xanthan gum, fragrance (parfum), limonene, linalool, benzyl benzoate, geraniol, citral, farnesol and evernia prunastri extract.

Free of: Synthetic additives, fragrance, artificial color, preservatives, and raw materials derived from mineral oils and animal testing.

Oxfam has run some studies. Grim, at best.

Look what the GOP in Indiana is doing. I swear the entire party has gone batshit insane. And Rick Scott down in Florida is about the same. This willingness to do serious damage to the common weal simply to “prove” some ideological point is worrisome. I think many of the GOP are willing—as indeed they say that they are—to let the US default. They think it will somehow “teach us a lesson.”

I’m reading with great fascination and enjoyment Joshua Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein: The art and science of remembering everything. As he takes care to point out, this is not a self-help book. Rather, it is a book about human memory: the forms it takes, how it works, and techniques once commonly used to allow humans to remember vast amounts of information—quite solid techniques that were unceremoniously discarded and forgotten once the invention of writing began the rush to maximize external memory—to the point where (as he writes) we now value the skill of being able to find information more than the skill of remembering information. And when I say “forgotten”, I don’t mean that we knew we once had those techniques but we don’t know what they are, but rather that we even forgot that such techniques existed, so that we are now amazed at relatively trivial feats of memory—say, at a person who goes into a room, meets a dozen new people just before he gives a presentation, and when asked a question during the presentation, always addresses the questioner by name. We’re floored, since most of us have trouble recalling the name when we are introduced to one new person (exception: if you find person is sexually attractive, the name is remembered without effort). And yet that sort of skill is trivial and, as demonstrated to Joshua in his investigations, can be taught in ten minutes.

I’m blogging right now not so much because the book is extremely interesting and highly entertaining, though it is, but because of what just happened.

I’m learning a lot of new Spanish vocabulary this afternoon—about 30 new words, some of which are naturally hard to recall. Then I thought, what the hey? why not try the technique Foer describes in the book?

I am stunned. I know every one of those words, more or less indelibly, after just one pass. And it’s permanent: I’ll know them tomorrow and next week, just as described.

Highly recommended, with this caveat: the explanation for why the technique works recognizes human evolution as a fact.

I will reach goal this month: I have 5.6 lbs to go, and I have discovered (through trial, error, and pattern recognition) some of the problems that were slowing my loss. One thing is that it takes much less food to maintain my weight than what I had been eating. (Wonder whether that might not have something to do with putting on all that surplus weight… nah, probably not.)

I’m pretty tickled about cracking this final puzzle. I was at 184.7 lbs on 4 April and at 184.1 lbs on 29 May. In between I had gone up and down, just a few pounds each way: highs around 186.7 lbs, low at 179.5 lbs. But, essentially, no loss for two months.

The good news is that it shows that I can maintain—at least for a couple of months. And now I think I have a good meal approach that will lose the last of the weight—but not too rapidly.

Now that I think about it, it has been exactly one year since I started this effort. So overall weight loss for the year was 72.4 lbs: 1.4 lbs/week, on average—not a precipitous weight loss by any means. “Slow and steady wins the race.” – Grandmother Ham.

As we move closer to the day in August when the US will hit the debt ceiling, people are getting worried. Trent Hamm has some good common-sense advice at The Simple Dollar.

This article is well worth reading—unfortunately, the full thing is not on-line. From the abstract at the link:

ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY about whether Iran’s nuclear program is being exaggerated. Is Iran actively trying to develop nuclear weapons? Members of the Obama Administration often talk as if this were a foregone conclusion, as did their predecessors under George W. Bush. There’s a large body of evidence, however, including some of America’s most highly classified intelligence assessments, suggesting that the U.S. could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one made with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq eight years ago—allowing anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimates of the state’s military capacities and intentions. The two most recent National Intelligence Estimates (N.I.E.s) on Iranian nuclear progress have stated that there is no conclusive evidence that Iran has made any effort to build the bomb since 2003. Yet Iran is heavily invested in nuclear technology. In the past four years, it has tripled the number of centrifuges in operation at its main enrichment facility at Natanz, which is buried deep underground. International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) inspectors have expressed frustration with Iran’s level of coöperation, but have been unable to find any evidence suggesting that enriched uranium has been diverted to an illicit weapons program. In mid-February, Lieutenant General James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, provided the House and Senate intelligence committees with an updated N.I.E. on the Iranian nuclear-weapons program. A previous assessment, issued in 2007, created consternation and anger inside the Bush Administration and in Congress by concluding, “with high confidence,” that Iran had halted its nascent nuclear-weapons program in 2003…

Continue reading. Glenn Greenwald has a short comment on the article with some good quotations from the article.

From an Ed Brayton post (and I recommend you read the whole thing):

In other words, the government can arrest someone under the material witness statutes for any reason whatsoever, even if it has nothing to do with them being a material witness, and there is no legal recourse whatsoever for the person who was wrongfully arrested. And this was an 8-0 decision (Justice Kagan recused herself, presumably because her office had argued the case in the appeals court when she was Solicitor General).

I blogged this incident in Tucson: a vet shot to death in his home in the middle of the night by a SWAT team that had broken in. This seems very much like criminal activity to me: a bunch of armed men breaking into one’s house in the middle of the night and killing the head of the family. At least when the police in Atlanta shot to death the 92-year-old woman in a similar raid, they at least planted drugs to try to portray her as a major drug dealer. (The Wikipedia article on that incident is quite good and has numerous links to contemporary news reports.)

Here the best they could come up with was to say that the guy had shot at them first… but then it turns out that he didn’t. He died with the safety catch on. Philip Smith at StopTheDrugWar.org:

No drugs were found in the home of a Tucson man shot and killed May 5 by a Pima County Sheriff’s Office SWAT team, the Arizona Star reported Friday. Former Marine Jose Guerena, 26, was killed by SWAT team members after confronting them with a rifle in his hand as they broke into his home to serve a search warrant related to a complex drug investigation.

Jose Guerena survived two tours in Iraq, but not his encounter with a Pima County SWAT team.

Guerena’s was one of four homes searched by SWAT teams in the investigation that day. Police said they found about $95,000 in cash, an unspecified amount of marijuana, and firearms during the raids, but nothing especially incriminating was found at Guerena’s house.

Police said items seized at Guerena’s house included a pistol, paperwork, tax returns, insurance papers, bank statements, and a bank card. They also found body armor in a hallway closet and US Border Patrol hat in the garage. Owning weapons, body armor, and Border Patrol hats is not illegal.

No arrests were made at any of the homes searched. Guerena had no criminal record.

Guerena’s wife, Vanessa, and their four-year-old son were in the home when it was raided. Vanessa Guerena has said she saw armed men moving around her house and woke her husband, who was sleeping after working all night at his job in a mine. She and the child hid in a closet while Guerena went to confront the intruders.

Police originally said Guerena fired at officers before they returned fire. They had to revise that statement when it was revealed that the safety on Guerena’s gun had not been switched off.

I would expect that his widow and young son will get a substantial award for damages—but that will never replace the boy’s father.

How long must this continue? Can’t people tell that the current approach is NOT WORKING?

It looks as though the drug-law mess has gotten sufficiently bad that it’s attracted major-league attention. From Transform:

Former Presidents of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Switzerland, Prime Minister of Greece, Kofi Annan, Richard Branson, George Shultz, Paul Volcker and Other Leaders Call for Major Paradigm Shift in Global Drug Policy

Commission of World Leaders Urges End to Failed Drug War, Fundamental Reforms of Global Drug Prohibition Regime. Today the Global Commission on Drug Policy will release a groundbreaking report at a press conference and tele-conference at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. The report condemns the drug war as a failure and recommends major reforms of the global drug prohibition regime.

The Commission is the most distinguished group of high-level leaders to ever call for such far-reaching changes – including not just alternatives to incarceration and greater emphasis on public health approaches to drug use but also decriminalization and experiments in legal regulation… 

The Executive Director of the global advocacy organization AVAAZ, with its nine million members worldwide, will present a public petition in support of the Global Commission’s recommendations that will be given to the United Nations Secretary General.

“Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the US government’s global war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed.

“Let’s start by treating drug addiction as a health issue, reducing drug demand through proven educational initiatives and legally regulating rather than criminalizing cannabis.” said former president of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso

The Commission’s recommendations are summarized in the Executive Summary. They include: . . .

Continue reading.

Several things going on in today’s shave:

a. I had given the surface of the Yardley soap (a vintage soap from decades ago) a good spray of Guerlain’s Vol de Nuit to see if I can beef up the soap’s fragrance. Worth a try. Didn’t work. The soap smelled quite nice, but once the lathering started, the Vol de Nuit was pretty much indetectable.

b. Joe, prop of the Italian Barber, said that the Creamy Lather phenomenon is most easily achieved with coarser, low-end brushes: boar brushes, horsehair, and the like, and that the high-end silvertips don’t do so good a job. I’m still experimenting to see whether this works for me, but in fact I first got a Creamy Lather using this very brush: a Tres Claveles horsehair. And I got a Creamy Lather again today. So horsehair definitely works.

c. i decided to use the Red Ring Eclipse after seeing this set of photos of a NOS Red Ring Eclipse at the Pogonotomy forum. I’ve mentioned before that the Eclipse is an open-comb razor in which the teeth of the comb (a weak spot) are strengthened by attaching a crossbar reinforcement to the back of the tips of the teeth. The photos include an excellent shot that shows this:

The bottom line: extremely good shave, and tomorrow I’m trying for a Creamy Lather using a soft silvertip Omega brush. We’ll see whether I succeed.

Interesting. I’ve avoided some, though doubtless will have others.

I do like Lennie:

Razor Blades & More Co. Lots of goodies. Take a look.

The president in question is Hamid Karzai, president of Afghanistan, where several countries are busy fighting something of a war—a war that includes killing, with no warning or determination of guilt, hundreds of women and children noncombatants, which the US and its allies lump together as “collateral damage” and pay the surviving kin a few hundred dollars per head. There’s no accountability for the killers unless they simply go berserk—as some have.

The Afghanistan people, in their untutored simplicity, do not like strange nations bombing them to death along with some suspected terrorists, and they undoubtedly have communicated this displeasure to their president, who then ordered the armies in his country to cease dropping bombs and sending missiles to blow up dwellings, since it’s generally unclear who’s inside—and they’re running out of child-sized coffins, perhaps.

What he doesn’t realize is that he’s now just a figurehead and Afghanistan has lost its sovereignty. The US military and its allies will ignore this and continue their campaign.

But it’s not just Karzai: the Afghani people are also tired of being the target of bombs and missiles. If your children or your wife or your family were killed by a foreign army, even though they had done nothing wrong, would you be satisfied with a few hundred dollars? Or would you want revenge? Maybe we’re creating the terrorists we’re fighting.

More information here.

The lather I worked up with the Omega 49 Boar brush shown was quite good, and normally I would be delighted with it. But it wasn’t quite Creamy Lather™. I don’t know whether it’s the soap (cold-pour glycerine, rather than triple-milled tallow), the brush (still breaking in), or—most likely—my nascent technique. The nice thing is that I get another shot at it tomorrow. I’m trying the same brush, but with triple-milled tallow-based soap: specifically, the Yardley vintage soap that has been soaking up the spray of Guerlain’s Vol de Nuit EDT for several days.

As I said, the lather was perfectly fine. Three passes, with one additional trip to the soap to gin up more lather, and I was both recipient and deliverer of a fine shave. I used the Merkur 34C HD—I was surprised yesterday to discover that they now have a variety of razors with that nickname, but the 11C was the original and—to my mind—only HD. It does a fine job, this morning with the Swedish Gillette blade that was already in it. Fine little razor.

The window is narrow [UPDATE: If you don't order by Sunday, you'll miss the chance to own one of these], so if you want your own custom horsehair shaving brush from the Pogonotomy forum, this is the time to order. They are of particular interest for those interested in the Creamy Lather™ phenomenon: I first experienced it with a horsehair brush, and now I learn that this form of lather is most easily made with horsehair and boar brushes: it can be done with badger, but it’s easier with the other two—which is why Italian barbers favor boar brushes.

The brush is €26 for European orders, €29 for non-European. For US residents, that amounts to US$41.81. And it’s quite a handsome brush:

If you would like to order one of these, go here by (say) Friday and follow the instructions. I especially recommend the brush if you do not already have a horsehair brush. They’re quite good and the reasonable price is more a mark of the ready availability of horsehair compared to badger bristles than a sign of difference in quality of brush or lather.