Later On

Interesting article on the roots of kids’ comic strips like Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, and others. It’s a lengthy article with many reproductions of early comic strips.

More on the corrupting effects of money on our politicians and how eagerly that cooperate in the corruption—we’re gradually selecting for the most venal of people in politics: corporate money flowing to politicians allow them to spend lavishly and buy elections, so their opponents find themselves also courting money to spend. As the amounts spiral, so does the corporate ownership of politicians. Those who will not sell out to corporations and do their bidding get no funding—just small individual contributions—and almost always fade from politics: they simply cannot command the financial resources to compete successfully, since to get those resources requires commitments they will not make.

Over a few decades, you pretty much have filtered out of politics any integrity or purpose of mission. Instead it becomes a matter of corporations deciding what they want the government to do to help their profits, and then order the politicians they now own to get to work. This is after, of course, siphoning off all the money from the public treasuring to give to their executives as bonuses—and to pay off more politicians. It’s a Ponzi scheme whose end is the collapse of representative government.

Here’s a fairly detailed example reported in Salon by Mark Hertsgaard:

“Follow the money” is an elementary rule for understanding American politics, and in the case of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the money trail leads to a case of apparent money laundering that involves his Republican presidential rival Mitt Romney and a $1 million contribution from the same Texas tycoon who bankrolled the “Swift Boat” attacks against the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry.

Bobby Jack “Bob” Perry, a residential construction magnate in Houston, is not related to Rick Perry by blood, only money. But there has been lots of that. As with the Swift Boaters to whom he donated $4.45 million, Bob Perry ranks as the single largest donor to Rick Perry during the latter’s 10 years as governor of Texas, according to official figures tabulated and analyzed by Texans for Public Justice, a nonprofit watchdog group in the state capital of Austin.

Bob Perry contributed $2,531,799 directly to Rick Perry from January 2001 to July 2011, TPJ reports in “Crony Capitalism: The Republican Governors Association in the Perry Years.” That puts him well ahead of such other notable donors as Koch Industries, the energy conglomerate owned by David and Charles Koch, the chief funders of the Tea Party, and Contran Corp., whose efforts to establish a nuclear waste dump in Texas have succeeded thanks to regulators appointed by Perry. (As Justin Elliottreported this week, Perry is also a leading funder of Karl Rove’s American Crossroads political action committee.)

But to truly understand Rick Perry’s “pay-to-play” approach, TPJ executive director Craig McDonald told Salon, one must also look at contributions to the Republican Governors Association, which he chaired from 2008 through August 2011.

In an apparent and possibly illegal attempt to hide the money’s true origins, Bob Perry has routed $11,450,000 — five times the amount he has contributed to Gov. Perry directly — through the Governors Association since 2006.

That same year, Perry donated $1 million to the Governors Association, which days later channeled $1 million to Gov. Perry’s troubled reelection campaign. When Chris Bell, Gov. Perry’s Democratic challenger in 2006, filed suit alleging campaign finance violations, Perry’s campaign agreed to settle the case and pay Bell $426,000, nearly half the amount of the contribution at issue.

The Governors Association, however, refused to settle. In 2010, state Judge John K. Dietz ruled that the group had violated Texas law by not registering as a political committee and not reporting the $1 million contribution until after the election. The judge awarded $2 million to Bell, a ruling the Governors Association is appealing.

“I think it was a pass-through,” Bell told Salon. “They were trying to hide the source of the contribution.”

Bell speculated that the Perry campaign wanted to avoid charges of hypocrisy after criticizing Bell for accepting a $1 million contribution from a Texas trial lawyer, a contribution that Bell announced publicly. Texas law allows individuals to contribute unlimited amounts to candidates.

“Bob Perry had contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Rick Perry’s campaign prior to 2006,” Bell said. “So why else would he pass it through the Republican Governors Association, if they weren’t trying to hide the source of the contribution?”

That $1 million contribution by Bob Perry could come back to bite Rick Perry during this year’s presidential campaign. Romney could also face trouble. He was the chairman of the governors group in 2006 and reportedly participated in the decision to channel money to Perry’s campaign.

As reporters Murray Waas and David Henderson of Reuters revealed on Wednesday, court documents describing Romney’s role indicate that two of Gov. Perry’s closest aides may have given “false or misleading testimony under oath” in their depositions for Chris Bell’s civil suit: . . .

Continue reading.

What Petraeus has put in motion is bad for this country. He approaches problems from a military point of view: What to wreck and whom to kill to make things work the way I want? That’s well and good unless the solution is not to be found in killing and wrecking—and it’s especially bad if the killing and wrecking exacerbate the problem, as it seems to be doing. Fred Branfman has an interesting article in today’s Salon:

Few issues are more important to America’s future than reducing the threat of future terrorist attacks, which not only risk killing Americans but also provoking a U.S. government response that could destroy our democracy. As Bob Woodward has warned: “Another 9-11 … could happen, and if it does, we will become a police state.” It could thus be a matter of the survival of American freedom that the media, instead of continuing to simply record official claims of militants killed by ground and drone assassinations, also report on the compelling evidence that these killings are weakening our overall national security.

Congress, the mass media and public are overlooking evidence that the current U.S. “counter-terror strategy” of global assassination by drones and special operations commandoes, isn’t working.  No small part of the problem is the lack of critical thinking about former Gen. David Petraeus, perhaps the most important architect of this strategy, and now the director of the CIA.

This week’s assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and Muslim cleric, alleged to have orchestrated attacks on Americans, will no doubt be touted as another victory for Petraeus.

But such victories have a way of proving elusive. The killing of various “al-Qaida leaders” is not heroically “turning the tide” in the war on terror, as unnamed U.S. officials are no doubt explaining to credulous columnists right now. In fact, most of the data from the drone war theater indicates that the Petraeus assassination strategy is increasing the numbers, motivation and geographic scope of America’s foes. It is making our allies are weaker. We face more potential suicide-bombers. And we have managed to increase — not decrease — the danger of nuclear materials falling into terrorist hands.

Yemen, in fact, is a useful case-study of how the Petraeus assassination strategy is creating more new anti-American enemies for every Awlaki it illegally kills. Last May,  the Washington Post reported that U.S. drone and air strikes in the country have depressed the local economy, increased support for anti-U.S. groups and demonstrated “the potential for U.S. policies to have harmful, if unintended, consequences in this politically brittle nation.” Despite the air strike campaign,” reported the New York Times, “the leadership of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula survives, and there is little sign the group is much weaker.”

The Petraeus record is not pretty.

It is a strategic and military failure. The issue is critical. For if Gen. Petraeus’ policies are backfiring and, God forbid, there is another domestic terror attack committed by Muslims, like the Times Square bomber, angered by U.S. murder in the Muslim world since 9/11, the present U.S. “counter-terror” strategy will be largely responsible.

If Pakistani nuclear materials fall into the hands of anti-U.S. terrorists, or there is a coup by pro-Islamist Pakistani military officers, Petraeus’ misguided policy toward Pakistan will bear much of the blame. If Yemen becomes a new center of anti-U.S. terrorism, it will be at least partly because U.S. drone strikes and ground assassinations have increased, not decreased, anti-U.S. sentiment.

Assassination as policy

Petraeus began focusing on widespread assassination of suspected terrorist  during his time  in Iraq.

“Beginning in about May 2006,” Bob Woodward reported in his book “The War Within,” “the U.S. military and the U.S. intelligence agencies launched a series of top secret operations that enabled them to locate, target and kill key individuals in extremist groups. A number of authoritative sources say these covert activities had a far-reaching effect on the violence and were very possibly the biggest factor in reducing it.”

When Petraeus took over Central Command in 2008, he . . .

Continue reading. Simple solutions fail in a complex, interconnected world. Cutting one cord of a tensegrity structure can have severe (and often unpredictable) consequences that go far beyond the parting of a cord.

Some time back, I quoted a post by Ed Brayton on the State Department’s approval of the TransCanada (and transUS as well) pipeline for tar sands oil. At the time I wondered how on earth the State Department suddenly considered itself qualified to do the work of the Environmental Protection Agency. Specifically, environmental approvals are not the job of the State Department, and it makes the Obama Administration look completely disorganized when statements that properly belong to one department are issued by another. It looks very much as though no one were in charge at the top.

Now we learn more, and it looks increasingly ugly—and another example of how businesses are taking over our government. Elisabeth Rosenthal reports for the NY Times:

With the Obama administration about to decide whether to green-light a controversial pipeline to take crude oil from Canada’s oil sands to the United States Gulf Coast, e-mails released Monday paint a picture of a sometimes warm and collaborative relationship between lobbyists for the company building the billion-dollar pipeline and officials in the State Department, the agency that has final say over the pipeline.

Environmental groups said the e-mails were disturbing and evidence of “complicity” between TransCanada, the pipeline company, and American officials tasked with evaluating the pipeline’s environmental impact.

The e-mails, the second batch to be released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the environmental group Friends of the Earth, show a senior State Department official at the United States Embassy in Ottawa procuring invitations to Fourth of July parties for TransCanada officials, sharing information with the company about Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s meetings and cheering on TransCanada in its quest to gain approval of the giant pipeline, which could carry 700,000 barrels a day.

“You see officials who see it as their business not to be an oversight agency but as a facilitator of TransCanada’s plans,” said Damon Moglen, the director of climate and energy project for Friends of the Earth. While the e-mails refer to multiple meetings between TransCanada officials and assistant secretaries of state, he said, such access was denied to environmental groups seeking input. Environmental groups argue that the pipeline, known as the Keystone XL project, would result in unacceptably high emissions and disrupt pristine ecosystems.

Before he was TransCanada’s chief Washington, D.C., lobbyist, Paul Elliott was a top official in Mrs. Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential campaign.

Many of the new e-mails are between Mr. Elliott and Marja Verloop, the counselor for energy and environment at the embassy in Ottawa. On Sept. 10, 2010, in response to an e-mail from Mr. Elliot announcing that Senator Max Baucus was supporting the pipeline, Ms. Verloop wrote: “Go Paul!” In an e-mail to David Jacobson, United States ambassador to Canada, she described TransCanada as “comfortable and on board” with some developments in the review process.

Wendy Nassmacher, a State Department spokeswoman, disputed that the e-mails showed a pro-pipeline bias. “We are committed to a fair, transparent and thorough process,” she said in an e-mail Sunday. “Throughout the process we have been in communication with industry as well as environmental groups, both in the United States and in Canada.” She noted that the State Department had conducted hearings in communities along the route of the proposed pipeline last week.

The State Department is tasked with permitting pipelines that cross national borders according to the “national interest,” and is weighing the environmental impact of Keystone XL against the benefit in expanding the fuel supply for the United States. Its third and final environmental impact statement, released in late August, said that the pipeline would have “limited adverse environmental impacts” if operated according to regulations. The Environmental Protection Agency, which may offer comments on such pipelines but is not empowered to rule on their authorization, had sharply criticized the State Department’s previous environmental assessments as inadequate, but has not yet weighed in on the most recent judgment. . .

Continue reading. When the environmental disaster strikes after the pipeline is in operation, these same officials will say that no one could have predicted the disaster and, of course, will suffer no repercussions—dismissed from their government job, they will secure a multimillion-dollar position as lobbyist for the oil companies they helped. That’s the way it works.

Corruption walks with money, and one reason I support public financing of elections is to cut off the flow of money into the pockets of politicians—along with the money come strings, and those strings are there to be pulled as needed, with the politician acting as the puppet.

And it’s not just politics: take a look at this story by Amy Silverstein in Mother Jones:

If you’ve ever bought something pink to support breast-cancer research, there’s a good chance a portion of the money went to Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the largest nonprofit in the world solely dedicated to eradicating the disease. Famous for its fundraising races and pink gear, the foundation has been fighting breast cancer for three decades. So it may come as a surprise that Komen has posted statements on its website that dismiss links between the common chemical bisphenol A (BPA) and breast cancer, even while funding research that explores that possible connection.

BPA is found in all manner of consumer goods, from plastic water jugs to receipts to the liners of food cans. Critics have pointed out that Komen receives generous donations from private industries who use those same chemicals in their products, and who also downplay health concerns. Is that what’s driving Komen’s position on BPA? “Absolutely not,” said Katrina McGhee, Komen’s Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. In multiple interviews with Mother Jones, Komen executives were adamant that their sponsors have no effect on any of their policy decisions.

“I want to be very clear,” said Komen President Elizabeth Thompson. “We are not influenced at all by any subpart of any one of our funders.”

And yet, it’s hard to ignore mounting scientific evidence that strongly suggests a link between BPA and cancer. The United States’ President’s Cancer Panel concluded in 2010 that “more than 130 studies have linked BPA to breast cancer, obesity, and other health problems. A number of studies have found that the chemical causes breast cancer in lab animals. In human cell cultures, BPA has caused breast cancer cells to proliferate and has also reduced the effectiveness of chemotherapy. In September, a study by the California Pacific Medical Center found that BPA even made healthy breast cells behave like cancer cells and decreased the effectiveness of yet another breast cancer drug. Frighteningly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that BPA is in the urine of more than 90 percent of the United States population. Researchers believe this figure reflects continuous exposure to the chemical.

In April 2010 Komen posted an online statement saying that BPA had been “deemed safe.” And a more recent statement on Komen’s website about BPA, from February 2011, begins, “Links between plastics and cancer are often reported by the media and in email hoaxes.” Komen acknowledges in its older statement that the Food and Drug Administration is doing more studies on BPA, but also says that there is currently “no evidence to suggest a link between BPA and risk of breast cancer.”

“I think that’s at best, misleading, and at worst, demonstrating really significant ignorance by whoever at the Komen Foundation wrote that,” said University of Missouri biology professor and BPA expert Dr. Frederick vom Saal in a telephone interview, reacting to Komen’s 2011 BPA statement. “When you think of this as a foundation that’s out there supposedly protecting women from factors that are involved in breast cancer, I find that statement to be just astounding.”

Komen’s chief scientific advisor, Dr. Eric Winer, . . .

Continue reading. The article includes this inset:

Which foods have the most BPA?

What does BPA do to your body?

And does Governor Paul LePage of Maine really think that the worst-case scenario of BPA exposure is “some women may have little beards“?

I don’t have an iPad, and I’m waiting now to see how the Kindle Fire will develop and what effect it will have on iPad pricing, among other things. But developments are afoot, as reported by Walter Pacheco for the Orlando Sentinel and reprinted by the LA Times:

Winter Garden – The newest arrival at Health Central Park nursing home is barely a year old, but it’s already making an impact with the elderly.

The west Orange County nursing home is using Apple iPad 2tablets to jump-start residents’ memory, mobility and social skills that have deteriorated through age, Alzheimer’s disease or other types of dementia.

“It came to us as a happy accident,” said Judy Skilton, Health Central Park’s director. “What started out as one resident’s curiosity about … an iPhone turned into something that is helping them spell, track items, make choices and read words. It’s amazing.”

The iPad’s innovative approach with the elderly could open doors to new geriatric and Alzheimer’s research as the nation’s baby boomers near retirement age and tablets increase in popularity, experts say.

“They are on the cutting edge of technology and geriatric care,” said LuMarie Polivka-West, president of Florida Health Care Association, the state’s largest advocacy organization for long-term-care providers and the elderly. “We hope to encourage the use of this new technology.”

In Florida, 3.2 million residents are age 65 and older, U.S census figures show. Alzheimer’s Association statistics reveal that nearly 13 percent of those suffer from the disease.

Devices that monitor an elderly person’s movements, habits, temperature in their home and remind them to take their pills have existed in the market for years — with varying degrees of success — but the iPad is one of the first in the high-tech field to interact with them.

Activities coordinator Ed Dobski said residents whosehands are atrophied or unable to type on a keyboard or hold a mouse will swipe their hand across the tablet’s smooth glass.

“It’s lightweight and looks like a book,” he said. “It’s instant gratification.” . . .

Continue reading.

Interesting article by Andrew O’Hehir in Salon on a documentary that includes footage of actual interrogations. It begins:

In the wake of the extrajudicial killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and several other people in Yemen this week, we’re faced (once again) with the realization that the United States Constitution has become a largely meaningless totem. It gets waved around enthusiastically by people on all sides of the political spectrum whenever it seems to serve their interests, but nobody pays much attention to what it actually says. Presumably President Obama, the military-intelligence establishment and the mainstream media are declaring Awlaki a special case. Thanks to the secret provisions of secret laws, he was deprived of all the rights of citizenship and not subject to the ordinary rule of law that extends back not merely to the Constitution but to the Magna Carta (at least).

Some similar exemption must also be made for the Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, who was 15 years old when he was found, badly injured and barely alive, after a 2002 firefight between U.S. troops and Taliban forces in Afghanistan. (Khadr’s father, an al-Qaida supporter and fundraiser, had apparently dropped him off at a Taliban compound a few weeks earlier.) Based on what we see in the painful, revealing documentary “You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo” — the first film to show actual interrogation footage from inside the secret American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — Khadr became a sort of ritual sacrifice by the Canadian government, an offering to its American allies and/or overlords. His case became a hot political issue north of the border, where Canadians pride themselves on a society that is more egalitarian, and more civilized, than that of their American neighbors.

Following a Canadian Supreme Court decision, most of Khadr’s seven-hour interrogation at Gitmo by CSIS officers — the approximate Canadian equivalent of the CIA — has been declassified, and veteran lefty documentarians Luc Côté and Patricio Henríquez use that claustrophobic, low-resolution 2003 footage as the basis for “You Don’t Like the Truth.” That sounds like something the interrogators might have said to Khadr, but it isn’t. It’s what he tells them after realizing they don’t want to hear his allegations that he was tortured by American forces, and that all his supposed confessions about knowing Osama bin Laden and attending al-Qaida barbecues were made up on the spot, to stop the pain.

You won’t see Khadr suffer physical torture on these surveillance tapes, although the interrogators rely on time-honored tactics of psychological abuse, alternately berating him and plying him with Big Macs. You will see a teenager who speaks idiomatic North American English, and who is obviously relieved to see fellow Canadians, whom he naively assumes have come to help him. And you’ll see him go through a near-total breakdown, sitting alone in the room weeping for his mother, after he realizes that no one cares about what happens to him and that he’s only interesting to his interrogators as long as he keeps making up stories about Osama and al-Qaida.

I have no idea whether Khadr actually threw a grenade that killed a U.S. Delta Force soldier, as was alleged after his capture. (Khadr has consistently denied it, and photographic evidence suggests that he had been shot through the back and was out cold before the soldier’s death.) But the Canadian interrogators barely mention it, and it feels suspiciously like an inflammatory distraction, thrown in mostly to alienate all possible North American sympathy. At best it’s an ancillary question. If Khadr was a genuine military combatant, then he can’t be prosecuted for killing an enemy soldier in battle. Furthermore, he would have to be considered a child soldier under international law, which theoretically immunizes him even for war crimes. Convicting him on such charges, as the government eventually did in a secret court on secret evidence, required the finding that he wasn’t a soldier but a civilian terrorist (even though he was supposedly linked to two organizations, al-Qaida and the Taliban, with whom the U.S. government has repeatedly said it’s at war). . .

Continue reading.

As I’ve mentioned previously in talking about Pilates, our bodies are tensegrity structures: the bones held in place by tensions along the myofascial merdians: stretchy “ropes” of tendons, ligaments, and muscle fascia providing the tensions, the bones providing the rigidity. Like this:

Cool Tools today discusses some useful (and inexpensive) tools to create your own tensegrity structures.

Tom Myers wrote a book on the tensegrity structure of the human body: Anatomy Trains, which was reviewed at Cool Tools—a review that’s definitely worth reading. In the video below he provides more information on the tensegrity structure of the body—watch it and you can see how Pilates work, which recognizes and exploits the way the strips of muscle, tendons, and ligaments determine our posture and movement, can have such a profound effect on the body.

If you’re interested, you can watch more YouTube videos on tensegrity structures; that list includes some specifically on Tom Myers and his work.

This soup sounds absolutely delicious—and also very easy. Ingredients:

4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter
1 small onion, chopped
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon curry powder
1 to 2 teaspoons ground cumin
Salt and black pepper
1 1/2 pounds celery root, peeled and cut into 1- to 2-inch chunks
6 cups chicken or vegetable stock or water
1/2 to 1 cup cream, half-and-half, or milk, or to taste
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro or parsley for garnish

There’s a video at the link, along with the full recipe.

Martin de Candre is the current rock star of shaving soaps, the one that evokes excitement in the forums. As you can see, some of my brushes immediately lined up to try the soap. As explained on the Martin de Candre site:

Created in 1974, the traditional soap factory Martin de Candre has chosen to emphasize on one of its specialities, with a high demand : the shaving soap..

It is really a “soap”, that is a paste that we realise entirely in the factory as from the saponification between 100% vegetable oils (olive, coprah) and with potasse (Alcali). The particularity of this shaving soap is the development of an abundant foam, which stick to the skin : you obtain on the face, a sweet and unctuous cream.

With the shaving soap Martin de Candre, shaving becomes a real pleasure !

What are the main characteristics of the shaving soap?

The foam is so soft and sweet, you will quickly become “greedy” and you will not hesitate to spread underneath your chin and ears.

The experience of a smooth shaving without the feeling of a cutaneous aggression.

The importance is to obtain a shaving of quality, to relax with a good gesture, a generous foam deliciously light, fresh and unctuous.

It is not without reasons that we have decided to restart this technique of saponification: so many persons have asked for this technique, even if we are now having electrical shaving !!! But the results are not the same. Up to you to test and judge !…

To allow you to benefit of all our products (shaving soaps, foam-bath, shampoo, eaux de toilette, …) wherever you are, the traditional soap factory Martin de Candre puts to your disposal the e-shopping.

The soap is also available from a domestic source (though the order is still shipped from France, so no joy in shipping costs).

It’s a very hard soap, and I am not one who soaks his shaving soap. But in fact almost as soon as the brush began its work, the lather emerged eagerly. I started with the Vie-Long because I wanted to go for a Creamy Lather and horsehair’s the best route I’ve found. And I immediately got a very nice Creamy Lather with no problem.

The first pass with the Merkur 39C “Sledgehammer” Slant Bar, holding an Iridium Super blade, went fine, but I do not like the fine spiral engravings on the handle. My little finger under the base of the handle kept it from twisting, but it constantly wanted to twist. To hell with it. This is just not a good razor for me, and it will soon go on the market. Never again. After the first pass, I went to the standard Merkur Slant Bar, the 37C.

The second pass gave my Morris & Forndran its turn. It quickly gathered enough soap, and once against I had a very thick lather—Creamy Lather without effort.

After the pass across the grain, this time with a comfortable Slant Bar, I used my Rod Neep brush—again, the thick creamy lather of the first two passes.

The final pass went fine, and the splash of Paul Sebastian was quite pleasant.

This is a fine shaving soap, and if you know a shaver, it would make a terrific gift. It’s available in a travel size and in various types of bowls. You get a lot of shaving soap for your money, and given its evident density, I suspect it will last a long, long time. So in terms of cost/shave, I would be it’s among the bargains.

UPDATE: I should note that those three guys were already lined up for the big Martin de Candre debut last night: they stayed in line the whole night. Now, that’s dedication for you.

I think we all like our garlic toys, and I just used this one for real today. Points to note:

1. The way it says to peel the cloves—whap the clove with the flat side of the press—works quite well. It’s similar to crushing the clove with the side of the knife, but faster and does a better job.

2. The chopping/mashing/crunching is very quick and easy. The plastic teeth are dull, so the cloves are broken apart somewhat messily—mincing, it’s not. But it gets the job done.

3. I tried it out yesterday and deliberately left crushed cloves in it overnight to dry and stick to see how hard it is to clean. Not hard at all: the stuff just rinsed right out.

On the whole, I’m quite happy with this. I use quite a bit of garlic, so efficiency in that area pays off.

I found a couple of new entrants in the pepper section: bright red corno de toro peppers—no heat: like a thin-walled elongated (and yes, horn-shaped) red bell pepper—and cayenne peppers, which I don’t recall seeing fresh before. They’re almost fake looking, though cute: bright shiny peppers with wrinkly folds, and the cap and bright green with fringes, exactly as if it were being worn like a hat.

Thin-walled, not especially hot. I used two good-sized ones in a 3-qt batch of grub. They seem to provide a laid-back heat, slow-starting and long-lasting, a pleasant afterglow from the spoonful of grub. Some hot peppers get in your face, assaulting your tongue at the outset (jalapeños), some wait a beat and do little, then suddenly ramp it up to 11 (habaneros), and the cayenne seems at first not to be there, then you detect it and are able to enjoy the gradual warmth, which seems mostly to build after the bite is swallowed: the phantom bite.

Take a look. It’s a Cool Tool.

I liked the Queen Charlotte Soap so much yesterday and I had to do a repeat. I’ve asked the vendor about the change in formulation: the shaving soap now is a tallow-based soap with shea-butter and glycerine, it’s quite firm, and it creates a great lather. The earlier formulation, right after he started, was a soft shaving soap that worked more like a shaving cream. I’ll post what I learn.

I got another Creamy Lather with no problem, thanks in part to the Vie-Long horsehair brush. This one is another good performer and at $18.50 is a good buy.

Three passes with the Pils, carrying a previously used Swedish Gillette blade. Very pleasant, very smooth. The Pils may indeed be overpriced, but it shaves extremely well: somehow the head design stretches the skin perfectly for shaving.

Although I’m not a balm guy—I prefer splashes—the Avocado aftershave balm from Saint Charles Shave is really extremely nice. Now I need to match this with a shaving using TOBS Avocado shaving cream. This one’s worth trying, and she does sell small samplers of it. (BTW, Neroli fans note her Neroli Aftershave Milk with a little menthol.)