Later On

This sounds delicious. I think I’ll make it tomorrow.

It’s really tasty. I also added:

2 oz rice noodles (for the starch)
3 oz firm tofu, cubed (for the protein: now it’s a meal)
dash cayenne

At the end, I stirred in 1-2 Tbsp dry sherry before serving.

An idea I had but did not do this time: 1/4 cup miso in lieu of 1/4 cup soy sauce. Also, thinly sliced scallions would be a nice garnish.

I hadn’t used celery in a while. It’s totally delicious in this soup.

I do love Bee House Teapots. I broke one and went to Whole Foods to get another, but their stock was very low, so ordered directly from Bee House. Good that I did: they have a much greater selection of sizes, colors, glazes, designs, and so on than Whole Foods could possible carry.

James Fallows collects more interesting responses to Lofgren’s valedictory, many from Republicans. These are worth reading because they reflect a growing mood in the country.

My brand-new New Forest brush (Finest Silvertip 2213) did a terrific job with the Klar Kabinett. I took my time loading the brush because it was new and I wanted to play with it, with the result that I did get a good Creamy Lather. It really does look different on the beard, and lies flat and close.

Three smooth passes with the Feather, including a small nick on the upper lip (thank you, My Nik Is Sealed), and a splash of Woods readied me to ready the apartment for the cleaning ladies. I did have to return to the soap in the third pass, but this is the very first use of this brush: out of the box and into the shave. I suspect its capacity will improve with use, and I expect to find out quickly because I do like the little guy.

Just in time for the next time you have steak.

While it may be true that you can’t go home again, it turns out that you can return to happy girl kitchen co (certified organic).

I picked up 6 jars of the dry-farmed tomatoes (they’re out on their Web site, but when they get more: order). I also got two jars of crushed heirloom tomatoes, a small jar of their horseradish, tempted by the olives, did buy a jar of the pickled garlic (spectacular!), more Chai Cola Light and pu-erh with Earl Grey. And I tasted their raspberry-lemon jam: to die for. And I got two jars of bread-and-butter pickles, one of cucumber and one of zucchini, a superb spicy tomato salsa, two jars of garden vegetables (useful when eating leftovers and I need a bit more volume).

I see that they have much more in the physical store than they show on-line, so if you ever come to Monterey, you should make it a point to stop by their store.

James Fallows has a powerful post at the Atlantic:

Two days ago I mentioned the “Goodbye to All That” essay by Mike Lofgren, a respected (including by me) veteran Congressional staffer who had worked for Republican legislators on defense and budget issues for nearly 30 years.

If you have not read his essay yet, please read it now.  And then, please return!

Among the important aspects of his essay is that it goes beyond one now-conventional point of “the worse, the better” analysis: that the GOP’s main legislative goal is to thwart Obama, and if that includes blocking proposals that might revive the economy, so much the better for the Republicans next year.

More fundamentally, Lofgren argues that today’s Republicans believe they are better off if government as a whole is shown to fail, not just this Democratic Administration. Republican hard-liners might seem to have “lost” the debt-ceiling showdown, in that they wound up even less popular than the Democrats are. But in the long view, Lofgren says, unpopularity for anyone in Congress, including their party’s leaders, helps the Republicans: “Undermining Americans’ belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy,” because it buildings a nihilistic suspicion of any public effort, from road-building to Medicare to schools. (Except defense.) As I say, read it for yourself.

When you’re done, consider this message I received today, from another former Congressional staffer whose tenure overlapped almost exactly with Lofgren’s. This too is worth reading carefully, for it advances an important complementary point:

>>Like Mike Lofgren, I am a retired Congressional staffer who worked for a House Member from 1985 until January of this year. Unlike Lofgren, I did not retire voluntarily; my boss, a moderate Democrat, lost his race for re-election last November. I found myself agreeing with virtually everything in Mike’s article and immediately forwarded it to a bunch of my friends, some of whom remain working on the Hill.

Privately, many of us who have worked in Congress since before the Clinton Administration have been complaining about the loss of the respect for the institution by the Members who were elected to serve their constituents through the institution. I don’t think people realize how fragile democracy really is. The 2012 campaign is currently looking to be the final nail in the coffin unless people start to understand what is going on.

One thing that especially resonated with me about Mike’s piece is the importance of “low information” voters. The mainstream media absolutely fails to understand how little attention average Americans really pay to what goes on in all forms of government. During our 2008 race, our pollster taught me (hard to believe it took me 24 years to learn this) that the average voter spends only 5 minutes thinking about for whom to vote for Congress. All the millions of dollars of TV ads, all the thousands of robo-calls and door-knocks, and it all comes down to having a message that will stick in the voters’ minds during the 5 minutes before they walk into the voting booth.

The media likes to call this group “independents,” which implies that they think so long and deeply about issues that they refuse to be constrained by the philosophy of either party. There may be a couple of people out there who fit that definition, but those are not the persuadable voters campaigns are trying to capture. Every campaign is trying to develop its candidate into an easy-to-remember slogan that makes him or her more appealing than the other guy. Actually, because negative campaigning is so effective, they are more often trying to portray the opponent as more objectionable (“I guess I’ll vote for the crook because at least he won’t slash my Medicare”).

I’m writing because now that I have been out of the Beltway Bubble, I have gained a little more perspective on how real people see the work of Washington, and I am scared that they are close to revolt. The debt ceiling debate in particular had me screaming at the TV on more than one occasion because both sides botched it so badly. I would like to hope that news outlets like yours could play a positive role in helping to educate people. But I’m feeling pretty pessimistic at the moment.<<

Further on the implications of this soon.

It baffles me that the media are all over non-events like snarky remarks in the hacked emails from climate researchers, but give a complete pass to errors, outright dishonesty, and conflicts of interest on the part of denialists, but it may be a by-product of corporate takeover of media and corporations that own the media working much more consistently to shape and select the content to support corporate agendas.

At any rate, in The Scientist Jef Akst reports:

An editorial published Friday (September 2) in the journal Remote Sensing points to “fundamental methodological errors” and “false claims” in a paper that challenged current estimates of climate change, published in the same journal just 6 weeks ago.

When the paper was first published, it was touted in the media as evidence that the global warming threat may be overblown. The authors used NASA satellite data to suggest that climate models overestimate the amount of heat the atmosphere retains, and thus misjudge the warming greenhouse effect. Climate researchers weren’t convinced, however.

The paper “essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents,” Wolfgang Wagner of Vienna University of Technology, the journal’s editor-in-chief, wrote in the editorial. “This…was missed in the review process, explaining why I perceive this paper to be fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal.”

“I don’t blame anybody in the publication,” Wagner told Science Insider, but he has decided to resign all the same. “Someone has to take responsibility. As editor-in-chief, I should be the one.”

The journal has not stated whether or not it plans to retract the paper, but Wagner hopes his resignation will signal that “Remote Sensing takes the review process very seriously.”

It occurs to me that the diet described in this post is very like what I’ve gradually settled on for myself. Differences:

Still eat grain as a starch, but only 1/3 cup (cooked) per meal, usually black rice. Not sure how to count oat bran, but that’s a grain product. And chia seed? It’s a seed, not a grain…

The only dairy I normally eat now is half a pat of butter with my egg, but once I reach goal, I’ll probably reintroduce yogurt and the occasional hit of Parmesan. But dairy is not a big part of my diet.

Legumes enter as tofu and tempeh. So sue me.

At any rate, the bulk of my diet seems to follow the Paleo guidelines.

It’s quite clear to those paying attention that the GOP has fallen into the hands of extremists. Their tactics and goals are clearly specified in this excellent piece by a retired GOP staffer.

The goal of the modern GOP really seems to be the destruction of the Federal government, which they view as an evil. Their negotiating strategy—with specific instances discussed in the column at the link—is to threaten grave harm to the nation unless their demands are met. We saw that clearly in the debt-ceiling negotiations, and we see it daily in their refusal to confirm appointments or allow Senate business to proceed unless they get everything they want. This is not negotiation: this is extortion.

What’s interesting to me is that we’ve seen this previously, and from the same region of the country (for the most part). The South was prepared to destroy the nation if they could not keep slavery, and by God, they did their best. The South initiated the Civil War, as we all know, by firing on Fort Sumpter. They insisted on war. If they could not get their way and continue to own slaves, they would destroy the union.

That same attitude, from that same region, is clearly visible today. The GOP does not care how much it damages the Federal government or the nation. As the guy quoted in the column at the link says, it’s a win for the GOP in any case: they don’t like the Federal government. So far as I can tell, the GOP favors direct corporate control of our society, and by God they are doing everything they can to see that it happens—no surprise, since they are funded by corporations and in effect work for corporations.

Still, it’s interesting to see the same attitude emerge from the same region. Very powerful thing, cultural continuity.

The US has not done a good job here, thanks in part of politicians and public figures who work hard to pump up the fear. James Fallows has an excellent post on the topic:

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg has written recently to criticize attempts by John Mueller and others to put terrorist attacks “into perspective.” Mueller has compared the number of people killed in bombings, hijackings, and similar deliberate terrorist assaults with, say, the number who drown in bathtubs each year. His point is to ask whether terrorism should be considered an “existential threat,” as many people argued after 9/11, and whether the “global war on terror” has justified the financial costs and the strains on Constitutional liberties we have seen in the past decade.

Jeff Goldberg points out, correctly, that not all risks or deaths are the same, and that there is a big difference between an accidental tragedy and a purposeful assault. Roughly as many Americans die from cancer every two days (~3000) as died from terrorism on September 11, 2001, but we rightly regard these tolls in very different ways. He then makes another point I agree with, but from which I draw a different conclusion from his own. He says:

>>Deaths caused by terrorism, on the other hand, can have a profound effect on society and the economy. The deaths of ten people in bathtub accidents won’t cause people to fear leaving their homes; but imagine the impact of 10 deaths in a terrorist bombing of a shopping mall, or a movie theater. And imagine if it happens more than once. The economic impact could be devastating; the impact on the emotional health of parents and children would be profound….

And consider the impact of terrorism on the Constitution, and on our collective self-conception as an open and free society. Just look at the stress placed on our constitutional freedoms by 9/11. …Terrorism’s capacity to affect the functioning of our society, and to fray the bonds that tie citizens together, and to cause mass-casualty events that would dwarf 9/11, makes it a unique and dangerous challenge.<<

It is precisely because people and societies can panic about terrorist threats — and often did ten years ago — that both the threats and the panic are worth doing everything possible to minimize. Anyone who has ever thought about the long-term effort against terrorism realizes that the threat of attacks will never completely go away. If a society is large, open, and diverse, that is simply impossible. It’s like “eliminating” crime, or evil. Or like eliminating the chance of another Columbine-style schoolyard shooting, which is “terrorism” in every way except the conventional name. All of these deserve the best possible preventive efforts, but “best possible” will never mean perfect.

Therefore the next step is to avoid magnifying the terrorizing effects of a murderous attack, and instead to do what we can to keep it in perspective. Parents send their children to school every day, even though we know that some day there will be “another Columbine” (or “another Virginia Tech” or, away from the schoolyard, “another Tucson”). School shootings are absolute evil, which we should take far more urgently than we do. But when they occur, the usual response is to try to dampen rather than intensify a reaction of generalized fearfulness and panic. That is how we should react to something called “terrorism” as well. Which is what Mueller was trying to do.

I think Jeffrey Goldberg agrees with this; but I wanted to spell out that what he presents as something terrorism “can” create is something worth doing our utmost to resist. It’s bad enough when people are hurt or killed for any reason — in car crashes, in random crime, or by someone who says he is waging a holy war. It’s worse in all of these cases if we needlessly compound the physical damage with panic and terror.

As an example of an attitude not to emulate, consider this report just now (with emphasis added):   . . .

Continue reading.

This is indeed cool. And more sleep tips (and some nice kitty photos) in this Lifehacker post.

Guess we can add mass extinctions to the list of potential outcomes of willful ignorance about global warming. Alexandre Witze writes for Science News:

The question of what killed most life on Earth 250 million years ago is a veritable Murder on the Orient Express, with multiple characters all dealing part of the deathblow. Now, scientists have learned how one of the assassins — acid — could have performed its part of the deed.

High levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide would have turned the oceans more than acidic enough to kill off marine critters, a computer simulation indicates.

“This would have been another stressor in the system that might have pushed things toward extinction,” says Alvaro Montenegro, a climate modeler at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. He and his colleagues describe the finding in a paper published online August 2 in Paleoceanography.

At the end of the Permian period of geologic time, more than 90 percent of marine species and three-quarters of terrestrial species vanished. Leading suspects in the die-off include . . .

Continue reading. Whom do you believe: the climate scientists of the world? or James Inhofe?

For years and years the focus of my meals has been the meat: meat and sides; meat with two veg; and so on.

Now that I’ve gradually settled on a standard template for my meals, the focus shifts somewhat. The protein and the starch are givens, and not all that interesting now: they’re essential and basic; like the ground under our feet, we totally depend on them as the fundamental foundation, but they’re not notable. The protein now is generally tofu or tempeh, as the simplest and easiest, and the starch is generally black rice or whole wheat couscous or pasta. Those are sort of basic requirements of a meal, the constants that drop from my attention because they are constants, present in every meal. What’s interesting is what’s different.

The accents come with the garlic, ginger, and hot peppers. The context is provided by the fundamental veggies: onions, leeks, mushrooms, squash, zucchini, eggplant, dried tomatoes—whatever I select and add, along with cooking liquid. But the center of the stage belongs to the star of the show, the greens. The greens seem to have moved into the spotlight once occupied by meat, and now they are generally what I think of first when I start thinking about what to cook. I pick out the greens, add some veg that strike my fancy and seem a good combination, and then—oh, yes, of course: protein and starch. (Today, for example, I got some lovely fresh dandelion greens, which I’ll beef up with a little kale (much more nutrition clout than dandelion greens). That, along with a very nice leek, is the focus. The rest follows automatically, more or less, particularly protein and starch.

This seems a rather large change of view. So far as I can tell, this is now simply the way I view my meals: it feels permanent and very much a part of my outlook. But it was not a conscious decision. It seems rather the logical inevitable resultant of things I’ve learned through (a) reading (on foods and their nutritional values) and (b) experience (when and in what amounts to eat the foods, with direct personal knowledge and experience of the consequences of unwise eating choices, resulting in effective self-monitoring along with a strong aversion to choices that have produced bad results; all that from experience, plus a lot of practice: extremely valuable and delivered only through experience).

And it’s become such a habit. I now demand my morning and afternoon fruit snack. It’s a way to provide myself a real treat twice a day, and I enjoy those snacks immensely. I always scan the fresh fruit to find those most appealing as a snack. A plum, a plumcot, some berries… all terrific.

Strange to find myself in this vegetarian place, not knowing quite how I got here. I just drifted in, but I do enjoy my meals immensely, and they are extraordinarily easy to plan and prepare.

I mentioned already how Joseph Pilates recommended the use of a no-handle body brush in the shower: brush every bit of your skin, which results in twisting, bending, stretching, stooping—a good little flexibility/balance workout every morning, and we know from shaving that daily practice produces rapid improvement. The skin serves as the mnemonic to ensure you’ve done the job: it’s easy to notice unbrushed skin when you’re inside the skin.

So yesterday I got this brush at Whole Foods. The handle is easy to remove: it is held in the slot only by friction. The bristles are made of tampico fiber: the unbleached skin of the agave plant. The instructions at the first link, like those attached to the brush, have you brush your entire body (face excluded) with the brush before you step into the shower. They claim that dry brushing works better. I liked it because I didn’t like the idea of squirming around in the (slippery) shower (though I do have non-slip stickers on the floor of the tub). Brushing in the bedroom seems safer.

I found a couple of things: you do indeed do a fair amount of twisting and bending; it doesn’t take long; and it feels great. I immediately called The Wife to let her in on this new information, and it turns out that she’s been doing this for years and thought everyone knew about it (thus never once telling me). Indeed, perhaps she’s right, and telling you about this is carrying coals to Newcastle, but it was new to me and I can’t be the only naïf on the planet.

This is commemorative in honor of the book, though it’s not quite the shave shown on the cover. Still a G.B. Kent brush (satisfying the badger-week requirement), but a BK4 instead of the BK8 in the cover shot. And the lather in the cover shot is from Castle Forbes shaving cream, not a tallow soap. But it’s definitely the same razor.

As indicated, I went for minimal water again. This time I started with 1 cup, and I ended up using slightly less than 1/2 cup in total. Cheats: I rinsed my hands (when needed) under the tap, and at the end, after the shave, I rinsed out the brush under the tap. But the entire shave—washing my beard with MR GLO (and rinsing), wetting the brush and making the lather, rinsing after each pass (really, just a tablespoon of water to wet my face), and the final rinse at the end—all that takes only 1/2 cup of water.

This ends the minimal-water experiment. I’m satisfied. And with good water disciple, a gallon of distilled water, unmixed with any tap water, will last for a month (32 shaves). That’s good enough for me.

As to the shave itself: a good lather from the Prairie Creations soap. (As of this morning, the Prairie-Creations Web store continues to be closed. It’s been closed at least two months, probably longer.) This, as you see, is one of her tallow+lanolin soaps.

Three passes with the Gillette 1940s Aristocrat holding a Swedish Gillette blade, a final rinse with loads of water (about 1/4 cup), dry, and a good splash of Lustry Spice. I’m feeling good, looking great.

I have blogged a few times before about using the kid’s plate: first post, then this. My plate:

But now TYD sends me a link to a grown-up version:

Jeannine Stein has the story in the LA Times.

Now let’s add Joe Pass and Barney Kessel. Too bad Django can’t make it..

I haven’t done a Pilates post for a while, and I had a thought this morning as I initiated mat exercises at home. (More on them below.)

I don’t know how people view Pilates. I think some see it as a physical fitness thing, which I guess it is, but it is more physical fitness for daily life, with the exercises translating rather directly into daily activities: Pilates teaches you how to hold yourself (posture), how to stand, squat, sit, twist, etc. Certainly there’s muscle strengthening, but they’re strengthened in the course of natural (though systematized) movements: the kinds of movements you make daily. And the strengthening is focused at much at the small muscles as at the large.

In other words, the exercise programs that include things like jumping jacks, push-ups, burpees, and the like are a different kettle of fish altogether. For some of those, fitness is required already.

I think Pilates is much closer to physical therapy than traditional fitness training. The Wife and I were talking to someone recently about Pilates, and they said, “Oh, I have a bad back, so I probably can’t do it.” It was an interesting remark because The Wife herself has a bad back, and Pilates has helped remarkably. The month she was in Paris she was walking constantly, and for the first time in years her back did not bother her. Vacuumiing is something that really hits her back, and this weekend she vacuumed her entire apartment without a break and with no tinge of back problems.

So it’s therapeutic (with the usual caveats: if properly done with a good instructor, yada yada yada). And, as I mentioned, the controlled finish to each exercise helps in the segue from exercise to daily life. But—interestingly—it goes the other direction as well: daily life activities construed as Pilates-like fitness exercises.

For, as I mentioned earlier, one can move and stand in a Pilates manner, and thus that becomes an exercise—as in “you’re exercising what you’ve learned” but also in the sense that doing them right is a good exercise in improving your form.

And it’s even more than than. Pilates in his introduction to A Pilates Primer: Millennium Edition discusses how one should shower. I sort of rolled my eyes as I read. He talks about exfoliation of the skin, using a natural bristle brush, brushing the skin vigorously—I can’t believe I’m reading it, at that point—and then specifies that the brush have no handle. It must be a brush that you grip in your hand. (My eyes are rolling so much that probably only the whites are visible.) But then he explains, and I stand in awe of the economy of his idea: “…[T]his type of brush [no handle - LG] forces us to twist, squirm, and contort ourselves in every conceivable way in our attempts to reach every portion or our body which is otherwise comparatively easy to reach with a handle brush.”

I suddenly get it: Brushing every part of your skin is (in a way) just a mnemonic, like dropping pebbles from your hand as a way of counting laps: drop one pebble as you complete each lap, and when your hand is empty, you’re done. Much easier than trying to count.

And as you twist, stretch, bend, and stoop, using the brush, your skin serves the role of the pebble: did you miss any skin? Well, then, twist, squirm, and stretch to reach the spot you skipped.

It’s so simple: a daily flexibility exercise, easily incorporated into one’s routine, self-checking (did I miss any skin?), and progressive: I can readily see how spots impossible to reach at the outset become easier and easier over time, until we can knock off a complete body brush in no time at all. Moreover, since one is doing that in the tub or shower, it also calls on balance, and I would expect over time that balance will also improve, being exercised as it is.

Very cool. The scrubbing clean and exfoliation can almost be seen as secondary to the flexibility exercise.

I settled down to do the mat exercises after the shower, and I quickly confused myself. So I’ve decided to do only the first mat exercise (the hundreds) initially, and I’ll ask for my instructor to check my form. Once I get it solid, I’ll add the second exercise, similarly getting coaching. And so on.

You may think I’m rather late starting the at-home exercises, and you’re doubtless correct. But I did want to be sure that I was doing things in good form (I wrecked a shoulder doing a kettlebell with bad form). Now that I am actually starting to feel my posture and skeletal structure in movement—or at least to become aware of those feelings—I think I can start exercising at home and rely somewhat on my awareness to correct mistakes—along with specific coaching from my instructor, exercise by exercise, over the next few weeks.

I’m also using The Complete Book of Pilates for Men, which has the same exercises as the book listed above, but with slightly different explanations, sometimes quite helpful. Moreover, in this book exercises are specified for beginning, intermediate, and advanced exercisers. So right now I’m doing only the beginning, and only the first one of those. So far as I can tell, nothing about the book is specific to men: women could use it equally well. It’s just the Pilates exercises.

Quite a good shave today, despite it’s having occupy the intersection of several shaving projects: this week is badger brush week, you’ll recall, and it seems that it will be tallow-based soap week as well, since Lea is (I believe) tallow-based. And over on Wicked_Edge, I proposed people try a minimal water shave, as if on a camping trip or when trying to subsist, shaving-wise, on purchased distilled water when living in a hard-water area: I observed that a gallon has 8 pints, so with a 1-pint shave a gallon (~US$1) will last a week plus a spare.

So: the badger brush first. Since I’m going for minimal water, I (sensibly) picked a smallish brush. Well, more than smallish. I picked a micro-brush that has macro capacity.

Here’s the shave, with water usage commentary: First I drew 1.75 cups of hot water from the tap into a measuring cup. I wanted no doubt that a pint was possible, so I start with less than a pint. Moreover, I accept the handicap of using a US pint (16 fl oz) rather than an Imperial pint (20 fl oz).

I start with a dry face, though after the shower. I pour about 1 Tbsp of water into my cupped hand, and use my hands to rub my bar of MR GLO for the preshave wash. The 1 Tbsp works fine, and I wash my beard thoroughly. Another 1 Tbsp is enough to rinse roughly—and with MR GLO as a pre-shave, you do not want a thorough rinse in any case.

I rubbed the Lea shave stick against the grain all over my wet beard, then dipped the Wee Scot into the water in the measuring cup, swished it, gave it a little shake (into the cup, naturally), and began brushing briskly. I soon had a fine lather, and I took my time, brushing it in and loading the brush.

To rinse my razor, I pour a little water—about 3 Tbsp—into a coffee cup. When my razor head—the OSS, as you note—filled with lather, I smply immersed it in this water, and the lather floated off.

No problems at all in the first pass: it is just a regular shave at this point. After the first pass, I pour about 1 Tbsp of water into my palm and rinse/wet my beard area with that, then apply the next layer of lather. (The Wee Scot has amazing capacity: loads of lather for 6-7 passes, if you want.)

Another pass, another minimal rinse/wet using about 1 Tbsp, and the final pass.

At this point I have loads of water left. I pour a cupped palm full, and rinse. A good rinse. And I have more than 1 cup of water left, so I used less than 3/4 cup.

When my hands got soapy, I did rinse them under the tap: in a hard-water town, that would be acceptable. On a camping trip? I think probably better to wipe your soapy hands off on a towel (to minimize water usage).

A splash of TOBS St James, and I’m done. The Lea lather is excellent, the Wee Scot is superb, I love the OSS, and all in all it’s being a fine morning. And I don’t have to go to work today. That always makes me feel good.