Later On

I was never pet oriented, but kitties finally won me over. The Refined Feline has some very nice kitty furniture for others who live with cats. For example, The Wife’s kitty has this tower:

Molly likes it a lot—so much, in fact, that when visitors examine it, she runs over and gets on it and ostentatiously plays on it. Ostensibly, I believe, she is showing how much fun it is, but the real message is, “This is mine, see, so don’t get any ideas that you can take it.”

They also offer these, which I think look cool:

A movie movie is a movie about the motion picture business. Sometimes, as in Movie Movie, it’s not really a backstage movie, but just pointing out (affectionately) the foibles of the business. In Movie Movie, you get a double feature: a B&W boxing movie—the kid has to fight to get money for his sister’s eye operation—and a Technicolor backstage (theatrical) musical. Much to enjoy—for example, the night club in the boxing movie reappears with some furniture changes as the star’s dressing room in the musical.

A movie movie can be a comedy, as is Movie Movie; a drama, as in Sunset Boulevard; a musical, as in Singin’ in the Rain.

Last night I watch a great example of a movie movie, plus a terrific comedy: Bowfinger, written by and starring Steve Martin, directed by Frank Oz, with Eddie Murphy, Heather Graham, Christine Baranski, Terence Stamp, and a cameo by Robert Downey, Jr. It is insanely funny, but it’s also a very affectionate take on the movie business and in particular the struggles and improvisations necessary to make a low-budget (under $3000) film (the film the director/producer Bowfinger (played by Martin) is making). It includes the magic of Martin and some of his crew seeing a crowd enjoying and applauding their movie: magic.

It also has a very intriguing color palate with a lot of golden hues. Watch for it.

Wonderful comedy. I think this is the third time I’ve seen it, and I laugh my head off every time. You can tell that the people in the movie know in detail about making a movie, and they love it.

UPDATE: And there’s a lot in the movie, lots of little stories—the Mexican apprentices who become experts, the bed-hopping career woman, the insane cult that captivates a high-roller movie star and milks him for all he’s worth, and more.

I’ve decided to devote the next four weeks to shaving brushes:

Week 1: Synthetics
Week 2: Boar
Week 3: Horsehair
Week 4: Badger

Other themes as they occur to me.

I also play requests.

I just got my new super-thin keyboard cover. (I forgot to remove my old one when the Mac went in to have its motherboard replaced, and when the Mac returned, keyboard cover was gone. But they’re less than $3—except for this one: 1/5th the thickness of the silicone keyboard covers. Imperceptible.) Very nice, though it doesn’t seize the keys quite as much as the other cover: this one more just lies on top of the keys. Still, perfectly serviceable.

Mac is pretty aggressive about pushing software. I get regular emails (from which I’m sure I can unsubscribe) for various apps. And it works because the apps are in general free or available at a cheap price, plus instant delivery. Cool model.

After getting the computer back, the touchpad seems much more hair-trigger. I frequently (every few minutes) will find that the cursor’s jumped somewhere else as I type, and the end of the word I’m typing can appear anyway or (if the cursor jumps outside the data-entry box) nowhere. I don’t much like that.

I think I figured out why the new “natural” scroll direction that OS X Lion favors is so unnatural. That scroll direction works fine on the iPad and the iPhone: your fingers on those devices work directly on the screen, so to move what you see on the screen (and what you’re in effect touching) in a downward direction, you (naturally) pull your fingers down.

But on the MacBook, your fingers are on the trackpad, not the screen, and the intermediary position of the trackpad—between your fingers and the screen—changes the mental model. Your fingers now are not on what you see on the screen, and when you move your fingers down, you are (naturally) trying to pull the screen down so you can see text below what appears on the screen: the fingers in this case are not pulling the “paper” but the “screen”, and when pulling your fingers down the trackpad, you anticipate that the screen will similarly go down (and the text that appears in the screen will go up). Lion’s default setting violates that expectation.

A spicy morning, as you see. The Vie-Long horsehair—I think this one is 65% tail, 35% mane—did a great job with Prairie Creations Spiced Rum, which (as you see) is a tallow+lanolin-based soap. Thick, dense lather with no problem.

I asked Juan at GiftsAndCare.com about the differences between mane and tail hairs. Bristles from tail hair are stiffer and more resilient, those from the mane are softer. Thus a particular brush can be blended as you want. Those brushes with a long loft tend to have more tail bristles to provide the strength required by the loft; shorter brushes can be 65/35 (tail/mane) for a scrubbier brush, or 50/50 for a softer brush. Interesting that it’s easy to tune them.

I think it would be interesting to have a set of 5 horsehair brushes with a moderate loft—say, like the brush shown—whose tail/mane ratios 100/0, 75/25, 50/50, 25/75, 0/100 just to see what the differences would be. It would be a test set, as it were.

The great lather led, inexorably, to a great shave. Enter the Toggle, carrying a Schick Platinum Plus blade. Very smooth and easy 3-pass shave, followed by the alum bar and then, after a final rinse and dry, a good splash of Royall Spyce.

My Brompton back wheel is still rubbing on a support, so The Wife will take it back to Channell Wasson for another adjustment this Tuesday. No biking in the meantime.

Who could have predicted that? Same person who now predicts that yields will worsen over the coming years, year by year and decade by decade. That’s perfectly obvious. What’s hard to predict is what/when will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Sorry to be gloomy, and I would love evidence to the contrary, but that seems to be the way that it’s going.

Quite interesting post:

“There’s going to be riots, there’ll be riots.” Less than a week before a police shooting in the North London neighbourhood of Tottenham triggered the worst social unrest to hit Britain in decades, these were the words of a young man predicting the effect of youth club closures on his community. While the wanton violence and destruction still occurring in London and other places within Britain has shocked the world, it has not been as much of a surprise to many UK residents who have been warning of growing anger and alienation within British society, especially among youth.

While the rioters have come from backgrounds which cut across lines of race and social status, in the broadest sense what most of them have in common is that they are young men from economically deprived parts of the country. While many individuals have rightly pointed out that much of the violence appears borne of opportunistic criminality, this does not address the observable correlation between lack of economic opportunity, cuts to social services and the attraction of engaging in these types of destructive behaviours. Not only does Britain have one of the highest violent crime rates in the European Union, its unemployment rate for those between the ages of 16-24 currently stands at 18%. As Matthew Goodwin, a politics professor at the University of Nottingham, explained to Forbes:

“There’s income inequality, extremely high levels of unemployment between 16 and 24-year-olds and huge parts of this population not in education or training…there’s a general malaise amongst a particular generation.”

The idea that we must not earnestly try to understand these actions is not only counterproductive but potentially suicidal in the long term. Far from being an isolated incident, these riots are but the largest and most recent incident of unrest to rock Britain in recent years. Most unrest has taken the form of protest, and has come in response to increasingly stringent government austerity measures and a perceived push to dismantle the social welfare state which has historically provided affordable healthcare and education to British society. In response to plans in 2010 to end government subsidies to UK universities, a move which would triple the cost of university education for the average student and largely destroy the meritocratic ideal of class mobility through education, tens of thousands of young Britons took to the streets in sometimes violent protests that in many ways appear to have been the harbinger of the riots we are witnessing today. Indeed, just a few months ago over 250,000 thousand people protested in London over further proposed cuts to social services, which nevertheless went ahead as planned. . .

Continue reading.

Petapixel discussed as a Cool Tool.

From the Transform blog:

‘Children of the Drug War‘ is a unique collection of original essays that investigates the impacts of the war on drugs on children, young people and their families. With contributions from around the world, providing different perspectives and utilizing a wide range of styles and approaches including ethnographic studies, personal accounts and interviews, the book asks fundamental questions of national and international drug control systems:

• What have been the costs to children and young people of the war on drugs?
• Is the protection of children from drugs a solid justification for current policies?
• What kinds of public fears and preconceptions exist in relation to drugs and the drug trade?
• How can children and young people be placed at the forefront of drug policies?

Four thematic sections address:

• Production and trade
• Race, class and law enforcement
• Families and drug policy
• Drug use and dependence

The book is published by the International Debate Education Association (iDebate Press). It is available for purchase in hard copy from amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and other outlets.

The book has a dedicated webpage here which includes a downloadable pdf of the full book, and pdfs of each of its four sections. It can also be read online.

Steve Rolles, Transform’s senior policy analyst, has written a chapter for the book titled ‘After the War on Drugs: How Legal Regulation of Production and Trade Would Better Protect Children’.

The book also forms part of the new Count the Costs initiative - the introductory chapter, by the book’s editor Damon Barrett, titled ’Counting the Costs of the Children’s Drug War’.

Please help  publicise this brilliant new resource by linking the site, publicising it on your social networks, and drawing attention of key policy makers, professionals and media to the book.

A superb lather with the Vie-Long horsehair brush—I’m really enjoying horsehair brushes once I finally woke up to the quality of lather they produce. Three passes with the Edwin Jagger DE87 holding a Feather bade, a nice finish with Coral Skin Food, and I’m ready to face a day that begins with installing Microsoft Office 2010 on the Windows machine. After breakfast.

Sounds like an interesting book:

It’s 1951, and a group of teenagers who call themselves the Kings of Rhythm are motoring up Highway 61 from the Mississippi Delta, their instruments tied to the top of the car. A 19-year-old named Ike Turner is driving, and he and the band are on their way to Memphis when they hit a bump that sends their equipment flying. Turner and the others hail from Clarksdale, where poor folks make instruments out of wire and broomsticks, so when they discover a fracture in their amplifier, they just patch it and shoulder on.

The story begins with a musician and entrepreneur named Walter Barnes, a mover and shaker who crossed racial lines to buddy up with Al Capone, who taught him how to organize. In the Jazz Age, so-called territory bands played out of hotel ballrooms and broadcast over low-watt radio stations but also traveled as far as their reputations (and broadcasts) carried them. Barnes contacted dance-hall operators, promoters, colored-friendly hotels and restaurants, and took the territory band to a whole new level; like Capone’s Italian ancestors, he fused a bunch of separate city-states into a cohesive whole.

Just before and during World War II, entertainers like Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five showed that a handful of musicians could make just as much noise as an entire orchestra. As men and resources went into the war effort, Jordan became the model for every black pop group from Little Richard and Fats Domino to B. B. King and James Brown. These entertainers roughed up Jordan’s svelte style as swing became rhythm ‘n’ blues and the word “rock” began to appear in one form or another in song lyrics, like Roy Brown’s 1947 “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” as well as newspaper write-ups that described audiences as “rockin’” to the new sound.

The key to the chitlin’ circuit was “the stroll,” the main . . .

Continue reading.

Obama’s administration continues to flee the law. Hamed Aleaziz reports for Mother Jones:

The state secrets privilege—perhaps the most powerful weapon in the government’s legal arsenal—has a complicated history. For years, Democrats, including then-Sen. Barack Obama, accused the Bush administration of overusing of the privilege, which allows the government to quash cases that involve national security before a court even hears evidence. Then, after Obama took office, his Justice Department used this get-out-of-court-free card repeatedly.

Last week, the DOJ invoked the state secrets privilege yet again. But this case, civil liberties groups say, is different.

Most of the post-9/11 cases that the government has killed with the state secrets privilege have either involved foreign-born terrorist suspects or the government’s actions abroad. The case the Obama administration tried to quash last week doesn’t explicitly involve either. The case in question, which was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), focuses squarely on domestic intelligence-gathering targeting Americans—namely the FBI’s allegedly widespread use of informants and surveillance against Muslim Americans.

The FBI’s involvement in the case—and the fact that it involves Americans—makes it stand out among the other state secrets cases, says Ameena Qazi, CAIR’s deputy executive director. “We’re surprised at the government’s shocking move in invoking the state secrets doctrine in this case of all cases,” Qazi says. Since this case “involves domestic intelligence-gathering on US soil against Americans,” she explains, “it’s an unprecedented move to our knowledge.”

The case, Fazaga v. FBI, stems from . . .

Continue reading. I’m no longer shocked, but it is revealing how strenuously the current and previous administration worked to keep their actions from review in a court of law. I’m sure they have reasons, but I’m not convinced the reasons are good. I suspect it’s more a matter of covering up bungling, incompetence, and outright breaking of the law. But I guess we’ll never know.

Via Ed Brayton, this report by R.J. Hillhouse:

Forget the cover story of waterboarding-leads-to-courier-leads-to bin Laden (not to deny the effectiveness of waterboarding, but it’s just not applicable in this case.)   Sources in the intelligence community tell me that after years of trying and one bureaucratically insane near-miss in Yemen, the US government killed OBL because a Pakistani intelligence officer came forward to collect the approximately $25 million reward from the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program.

The informant was a walk-in.

The ISI officer came forward to claim the substantial reward and to broker US citizenship for his family.   My sources tell me that the informant claimed that the Saudis were paying off the Pakistani military and intelligence (ISI) to essentially shelter and keep bin Laden under house arrest in Abbottabad, a city with such a high concentration of military that I’m told there’s no equivalent in the US.

The CIA and friends then set about proving that OBL was indeed there.  And they did.

Next they approached the chiefs of the Pakistani military and the ISI.  The US was going to come in with or without them.  The CIA offered them a deal they couldn’t refuse: . . .

Continue reading.

I decided to go with artificial badger (in this case, the Omega Lucretia Borgia model) and Mitchell’s Wool Fat, which some take to be, if not the Mount Everest of shaving soaps, at least the Mount Shasta. I worked up a plentiful, rich lather with no problem at all—not quite Creamy Lather, but close. (Creamy Lather seems to require bristles with more resilience than badger can muster: horsehair or boar work well. I’ll try horsehair tomorrow just to check.)

I’ve been missing the iKon OSS asymmetric razor so I decided to take it out for a spin this morning. With a much-used Swedish Gillette blade, it did a fine three-pass job. A glide of the alum bar, a final rinse, and a splash of Paul Sebastian. Very fine shave—and I continue to enjoy shaving and look forward each morning to the process (and the result).

I ordered a proof copy of the 5th edition. I’m excited.

I got my MacBook Pro back. They replaced the mother board. Hard-drive data unaffected. So I guess it wasn’t a switch. It’s a great relief to have it back, but having it gone forced me to the PC, so I made good progress on the 5th edition.

Yesterday I went to Pilates—it felt great to be back at it—and today I bicycled to downtown for a haircut. So gradually physical exercise is returning to the picture. I also got my Rebok wobble board, as advised by a commenter. It’s really quite cool—and just $16 (no shipping for Prime people). I have just stood on it (while clinging to a chair).

While I was out I looked for the stuff that Steve talked about, but I couldn’t find it, so I guess I’ll have to order some.

The government is supposed to protect its citizens—that’s almost job 1. Japan has failed miserably, as reported in this NY Times article by Norimitsu Noishi and Martin Fackler:

The day after a giant tsunami set off the continuing disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, thousands of residents at the nearby town of Namie gathered to evacuate.

Given no guidance from Tokyo, town officials led the residents north, believing that winter winds would be blowing south and carrying away any radioactive emissions. For three nights, while hydrogen explosions at four of the reactors spewed radiation into the air, they stayed in a district called Tsushima where the children played outside and some parents used water from a mountain stream to prepare rice.

The winds, in fact, had been blowing directly toward Tsushima — and town officials would learn two months later that a government computer system designed to predict the spread of radioactive releases had been showing just that.

But the forecasts were left unpublicized by bureaucrats in Tokyo, operating in a culture that sought to avoid responsibility and, above all, criticism. Japan’s political leaders at first did not know about the system and later played down the data, apparently fearful of having to significantly enlarge the evacuation zone — and acknowledge the accident’s severity.

“From the 12th to the 15th we were in a location with one of the highest levels of radiation,” said Tamotsu Baba, the mayor of Namie, which is about five miles from the nuclear plant. He and thousands from Namie now live in temporary housing in another town, Nihonmatsu. “We are extremely worried about internal exposure to radiation.”

The withholding of information, he said, was akin to “murder.”

In interviews and public statements, some current and former government officials have admitted that Japanese authorities engaged in a pattern of withholding damaging information and denying facts of the nuclear disaster — in order, some of them said, to limit the size of costly and disruptive evacuations in land-scarce Japan and to avoid public questioning of the politically powerful nuclear industry. As the nuclear plant continues to release radiation, some of which has slipped into the nation’s food supply, public anger is growing at what many here see as an official campaign to play down the scope of the accident and the potential health risks. . .

Continue reading.

Tomato pie. Ingredients:

• 1 9-inch pie shell (see pie crust recipe for homemade version)
• 1/2 yellow or red onion, chopped
• 3-4 tomatoes, cut in half horizontally, squeezed to remove excess juice, roughly chopped, to yield approximately 3 cups chopped tomatoes
• 1/4 cup sliced basil (about 8 leaves)*
• 2 cups grated cheese (combination of sharp cheddar and Monterey Jack, or Gruyere or Mozzarella)
• 3/4 cup mayonnaise
• 1 teaspoon (or more to taste) of Frank’s Hot Sauce (or Tabasco) [or homemade, for God's sake - LG]
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Cheese biscuits. Ingredients:

• 2 cups + 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• dash cayenne
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 7 tablespoons butter, cold
• 2 scallions, finely chopped
• 3 oz. grated Parmesan cheese
• 3/4 cup buttermilk
• Kosher, Maldon, or Black salt for topping (optional; not table/iodized salt)

So far as I can tell, Otoko does indeed deliver on its promise of being good for your skin: my freshly shaved face is amazing smooth and soft, though some credit must be given to the new Feather blade I slipped into the Feather razor this morning: the first stroke didn’t seem quite so smooth as one wants, so I discarded that blade (of several shaves—I don’t really keep count) and trotted out a new one.

Otoko lather has its own distinctive character, and the Mühle “artificial horsehair” shave brush did an excellent job of mixing up the Otoko style lather: thick, ample, and somewhat stiffer than regular lather. (Other Otoko users feel free to chime in.) I think this is one unusual shaving soap that’s worth adding to your soap arsenal. Trumper and Truefitt & Hill and Taylor and the like are really great soaps, but the differences among them are not that significiant. (Of the bunch, T&H is especially good, though it comes in but a single flavor: classic lavender.) But Otoko is different.

Three smooth passes, a final rinse and the alum bar, another rinse and Jade East (to complete the Far East theme: Feather and Otoko being the other representatives). Wonderful.

And, on a personal note, I finally broke the back of the Lather chapter revisions for the 5th edition. What a relief! The rest should come together fairly quickly now.

The DOW drop reminds us that, as I’m sure others have observed, with the level of algorithmic trading now going on—level not only in volume but also in computational/programmatic complexity (and I’m sure they must be using genetic algorithms and neural nets in this—it only makes sense)—no one really has any idea what the programs doing the trading are going to do, what directions the software will take them… and us. And we’re stuck with it: they can’t dismantle the machine at this point—too much already depends on it—but it’s now passed as much out of our control as that colored-lights-and-sound synthesizer did when the scientist/engineer flipped the switch and turned complete control over to the computer (in Close Encounters of the Third Kind). It’s out of our control, and we’re going to have to live with whatever those programs do.

UPDATE: What’s particularly interessting is that no one intended or planned or had as a goal that a bunch of complex (and thus buggy) software programs, making decisions beyond the ken of their creators or “controllers”, would have so much influence (and, let’s face it, control) over the well being of this country and its people. It was accomplished blindly, as if by instinct, much as termites construct those perfectly aligned and ventilated structures. And here it is. Because of the stresses the systems are getting, I suspect we’ll quickly find some odd outcomes from at least some of these programs. But what do I know? This is all speculation.

I went to Whole Foods to pick up a couple of things for lunch and was pleased to see lots of red Fresno peppers. I got about a quart, along with ten habaneros and when I got home immediately made a hot sauce, now bottled. The ingredients:

Red Fresno peppers, caps cut off and discarded
Habanero peppers, stems removed and discarded
10 large garlic cloves, peeled
1/3 c sea salt
1 Tbsp toasted sesame oil
1 small can whole chipotles in adobo sauce
White vinegar just to cover

Blended, brought to boil and simmered 20 minutes, cooled 20 minutes, and then bottled. I added the oil because it occurred to me that some of the spiciness might be oil-soluble and perhaps this would help—plus I like the taste of toasted sesame oil. The garlic also adds a nice note.