Later On

I didn’t know about this one: The Wirecutter.

Take a look. Some amazing photos. And I didn’t know the Jobs tribute came from China.

Read what Scott has to say about Siri.

I seem to be somewhat restless about movies, quite often dropping a movie within the first reel. I did really like The Bad Sleep Well, which has quite a contemporary feel (save for the background music—a different style—and the use of wipes as scene transitions). I particularly like the way the story gradually opened up and how the movie kept changing directions. Quite good.

But hard to find good movies. Quite a few seem to have pushing consumerism as their focus: the movie is set in Las Vegas or on a cruise liner, and you get the impression that you’re watching an “entermercial” (like an “infomercial” but with entertainment rather than information as the bait). Endless recreation, a lot of which seems to involve shopping. Product placement gone wild, with no limits.

When I want to read a product catalog, I’ll do that. When I watch a movie, I want the focus on something other than trying to get me to spend money on vacations, products, trips, cars, and the like.

We need to wrap up our Xmas shopping soon. I like to ship the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to avoid Xmas rush and lines. (The PO is pretty empty the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I find.)

We’re in pretty good shape—I have The Wife’s gift, for example—but still a few odds and ends to get.

I’m not getting through so many books as I want. I’m enjoying the book on Bayes’ rule, despite the occasional glitch—e.g., a reference to the word “bit’ as being derived by Claude Shannon (of Bell Labs and information-theory fame) from “binary dibit” which sort of stunned me: it was derived from “binary digit”, as every schoolchild knows. (My recollection is from a Friday night lecture given by Al Clark when the lectures still were given in the Great Hall with the question period in the King William Room of the Library—near to the Liberty Tree: now all changed, alas. I verified my recollection in Wikipedia: “He attributed its origin [the origin of the word "bit" - LG] to John W. Tukey, who had written a Bell Labs memo on 9 January 1947 in which he contracted “binary digit” to simply “bit”.”)

The book has other infelicities, including a certain vagueness in describing findings in particular cases, but it is still an entertaining read. I continue to be bemused to see how such a powerful tool was in effect suppressed for so many years.

But I need to focus more on reading and on sticking with a book until I’ve finished instead of keeping so many going at once. “Slow and steady wins the race” argues for completing a book before moving on. Maybe I should start a book journal to assist with that: some piece of software in which a list of book titles can serve as index and access point… hmm. Anyone ever use iData3.com?

In the meantime, I continue reading McNeill’s A World History (3rd edition), various library books, etc.

This morning I weighed 173.1 lbs, body fat 17.3%—undoubtedly the “173″ theme is coincidental. So I am close to my 170 goal, and returning to one-pot meals (450ºF for 45.0 minutes—another numeric coincidence) hasn’t seemed to hurt. I realized that these GOPM are really grub in another guise, and I approach them the same way by answering two questions: what’s the starch? and what’s the protein? I go for 2/3 serving/meal for the first, and 3-4 oz/meal for the second.

Lately I’ve favored my Staub 3.5-qt round cocotte in lemon, from which I get 3 meals. (At the link the capacity is given as 4 qts, but 3.5 qts is accurate—well, 3.5 to the bottom of the ridge just under the top; 4 qt if you fill to the absolute brim.)

I don’t worry about the fat—I trim it from meat and add 2 tsp oil to the dish (for the three meals). I fill the pot with vegetables—always some onion and garlic and celery (now that I know the trick of chopping the entire bunch when I get it, drying the pieces, and storing in the fridge ready to go), and always the prime consideration is which leafy greens to include.

My breakfast cereal has now settled at 2 Tbsp each of oat bran, rolled oats, chia seed, and hulled hemp seed, along with the 1/2 tsp of turmeric. I pour 1 cup boiling water (from the pot I bring to boil to make my morning cup of tea) over that, and it takes only a couple of minutes to thicken on the heat. Then I stir in homemade pepper sauce and top with an egg, cooked over easy in 1/2 pat butter. Top that with Bac’Uns and you have a tasty breakfast that will stick with you.

Today’s GOPM:

converted rice
sliced leek
chopped celery
Pacific Dover sole
pepper, crushed red pepper
peeled and chopped lemon
capers
thinly sliced fennel
asparagus cut into pieces
slivered dried tomatoes
conundrum: chopped green cabbage? or green beans?

Maybe I’ll put a sliced tomato in there somewhere: on top of the cabbage, if I use it, or perhaps atop the lemon-and-caper layer.

One nice thing about GOPM meals: no penalty for improvisation, so long as you cover the basics. Eggplant is also a possibility in this one, as are mushrooms. I’ll just see how the layers go…

Here are some photos of my new iKon that just arrived. It’s heavy, solid, and substantial, and very nicely machined and polished. I’ll use it Monday.

Another view:

As you see: asymmetrical.

Another view:

Finally:

The Frank Shaving brush did a fine job. I don’t know why I seemed to have problems, but everything is working well.

Once again with The Shave Den’s Pre-Shave Balm, then wash with MR GLO, a very nice lather from the Martin de Candre, and three passes with the Apollo Mikron.

A splash of Captain’s Choice Bay Rum, and I’m good for the day.

I just finished Lee Child’s latest Jack Reacher novel, The Affair, which I thought was quite good—in marked contrast to George Pelecanos’s The Cut, an exemplar of bad writing, apparently from one of those “write a novel/screenplay” programs that let you describe the characters, etc. He seems just to have dumped the character descriptions directly into the novel, and he’s setting up a series, so with each new character we get a backstory, all written in a totally wooden way. This one wasn’t even phoned in. His rants, political critiques, book and movie recommendations are somewhat interesting, but they don’t add up to a novel.

Via Facebook:

I personally dote on words. A friend just pointed out wwword.com. Take a look.

Via James Fallows:

Fallows comments:

This is reminiscent of how it feels when you “flare” before landing a plane, but Oh so much more elegant. These videos also remind you that owls are cats that happen to have wings*. And that it’s a good thing they are not much bigger than their real size. . .

*Update: And thanks to various Chinese friends for the reminder that the Chinese word for owl, maotouying, is written 猫头鹰. Which character-by-character is “cat head eagle,” or more vividly “cat-faced eagle.” Long before slo-mo they got the point.

Thanks to Eddie in Australia for the pointer:

New soap and aftershave balm, and I trotted out the Frank Shaving Finest badger brush. It did a totally good job. Now I want to try the other, but this one was fine.

The Moss Hill shaving soap (I seem to have gotten the Blue one) lathered quite well, and the three-pass shave with the Progress, which held a Swedish Gillette blade, was quite nice. Once again The Shave Den’s Pre-Shave Balm seems to have helped the shave.

A tiny dab of Moss Hill aftershave balm—innocuous and pleasant—finished the shave. Feels good.

I’m reading quite an interesting book: The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy, by Sharon McGrayne. This passage struck me (starts on page 42 of the book):

While Bayes’ rule was helping to save the Bell System, financiers were rushing to build American railroads and industries. Government safety regulations were nonexistent, however, and 1 out of every 318 industrial workers was killed on the job between 1890 and 1910, and many more were injured. The country’s labor force suffered more accidents, sickness, invalidity, premature old age, and unemployment than European workers. Yet, unlike most of Europe, the United States had no system for insuring sick and injured workers,

[And let me interject that the lack of such a system is why the US was having those problems: if companies had to be paying out money to cover those accidents---or if the government had been paying to cover them, even more---you can be sure that safety regulations and inspections would quickly follow and the death and injury rates would plummet. But so long as it's the worker getting stuck with the bill, neither business nor business-dominated government care - LG]

and most blue-collar families lived one paycheck away from needing charity. Federal judges ruled that injured employees could sue only if their bosses were personally at fault. In 1898 a U.S. Department of Labor statistician could think of no other social or legal reform in which the United States lagged so far behind other nations.

The tide turned as growing numbers of workers joined the American Federation of Labor and as local juries started awarding generous settlements to their disabled peers. At that point employers decided it was cheaper to treat occupational health as a predictable business expense than to trust juries and encourage unionization. In an avalanche of no-fault laws passed between 1911 and 1920 all but eight states began requiring employers to insure their workers immediately against occupational injuries and illnesses. This was the first, and for decades the only, social insurance in the United States.

[It seems pretty obvious that those bills were written to protect businesses more than workers---and I would bet that businesses themselves wrote the bills in most cases. I would also bet that the eight states that did not pass laws requiring insurance were the Deep South. - LG]

The legislation triggered an emergency. Normally, the price of an insurance premium reflects years of accumulated data about such factors as accident rates, medical costs, wages, industrywide trends, and particulars about individual companies. No such data existed in the United States. Not even the most industrialized states had enough occupational health statistics to price policies for all their industries. . .

Still, premiums had to be priced accurately: high enough to keep the insurance company solvent for the life of its insurees and individualized enough to reward businesses with good safety records. In an extraordinary feat, Isaac M. Rubinow, a physician and statistician for the American Medical Association, organized by hand the analysis, classification, and tabulation of literally millions of insurance claims, primarily from Europe, as a two- or three-year stopgap until each state could accumulate statistics on its occupational casualties. “Every scrap of information,” he said, must be used.

Rubinow called together 11 scientifically minded actuaries and formed the Casualty Actuarial Society in 1914. . . Rubinow became the organization’s first president but left almost immediately when the insurance industry and the American Medical Association opposed extending social insurance to the sick and aged. Rumors swirled that Rubinow, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, had “socialist tendencies.”

The exact same fight as in our current healthcare struggle: the Right does not want to cover people who need coverage. They observe (correctly) that if healthcare goes only to those who don’t need it, the costs will be much lower. This, of course, shows as complete a misunderstanding of the purpose of healthcare insurance as it is possible to have, but… well, have you taken a look at their presidential nominees? This is not a party that shows much capacity for insight and understanding.

Note how the AMA was already a bastion of flint-hearted conservatism. And that it was somehow “bad” for society to care for its vulnerable members, which I see as one of the main reasons society exists.

This shave began, as my shaves now do, with rubbing a little of The Shave Den’s Pre-Shave Balm into my beard, then a shower, and then I wash my beard at the sink with MR GLO, “rinsing” roughly with a splash of water.

I got a full-size puck of C&S in hopes that my difficulties were in part due to the smallness of the travel puck, and indeed today’s lather was much better. In fact, I got ample lather for three passes, and it was a good lather as well.

Credit in part must go to my Rod Neep brush, which did a fine job. And this Gillette open-comb Aristocrat #22 is definitely a favorite razor: extremely nice action and the Swedish Gillette blade continues to deliver a great shave.

A splash of Saint Charles Shave’s Neroli Blend, and I’m set.

I do think TSD’s Pre-Shave Balm is helping, but I will try a week’s shaves without after I’ve used it for a week.

Obama seems to have made that decision, as Glenn Greenwald notes:

President Obama, October 13:

Iran has been hypocritical when dealing with the Arab Spring — their ability to prop up the Syrian regime when they are killing their own citizens. Increasingly, the international community will consider [that] out of bounds and punish Iran.

UPI, yesterday:

A top U.S. diplomat confirmed Tuesday the United States has finalized a $53 million weapons deal with the Persian Gulf Kingdom of Bahrain.

Stephen Seche, deputy assistant secretary of state for Arabian Peninsula Affairs, said the deal is part of a move to defend Bahrain from aggression, Gulf News reported.

How can those hypocritical Iranian monsters stand up in public and praise the Arab Spring while propping up a regime that kills its own citizens for demanding democracy and even imprisons doctors for the crime of treating injured protesters? As President Obama pointed out, “the international community will consider [that] out of bounds and punish” whomever does it.Meanwhile:

In the aftermath of the American military strike that killed wanted al-Qaeda operative [sic] Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S. government has turned up the volume on its praise for the embattled government of Yemen.

“This success is a tribute to our intelligence community and to the efforts of Yemen and its security forces who have worked closely with the United States over the course of several years,” President Obama said in remarks about the assassination of the terrorist leader.

CNN, today:

Eleven people were killed Tuesday during clashes with Yemeni security forces after anti-government protests again filled the streets of the country’s capital, according to a hospital official.

Crowds marched through downtown Sanaa, where government forces allegedly gunned down protesters — the latest in a series of confrontations between those loyal to embattled President Ali Abdullah Saleh, demonstrators and rival factions.

[And note, as As'ad AbuKhalil points out, that "when a pro-US dictator kills protesters it is 'fighting', and when a non-pro-US dictator kills protesters it is considered a massacre, according to Western media standards," even though "it is a massacre in both cases"; compare, for instance, "Syria's Ramadan Massacre" to "Street battles raged for a third day on Tuesday in Sana, Yemen’s capital" and "Eleven people were killed Tuesday during clashes with Yemeni security forces " and "Bahrain Fighting Moves from Roundabout to Villages".]

We also have this, from the official White House site:

President Obama spoke to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia today . . . the President and the King reaffirmed the strong partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia.

That would be a “strong partnership” with the regime that sent troops to Bahrain to support that regime’s crushing of citizen protests and that continues to provide vital support to Yemini President Saleh as he repeatedly kills his own protesting citizens, to say nothing of its own still extreme domestic repression (it’s also to say nothing of the Obama administration’s drone killing of several teenage boys in Yemen this week who were related to Anwar Awlaki, including Awlaki’s son, a natural-b0rn U.S. citizen). When President Obama stands up and condemns Iran for rhetorically supporting the Arab Spring while simultaneously propping up regimes that crush it with violence, does he actually expect anyone other than American media outlets to avoid noticing all of this? . . .

Continue reading.

James Fallows had an excellent comment on the previous GOP debate.

Totally wonderful shave today with various new things. First, in my efforts to find the best way to use The Shave Den’s pre-shave balm, I decided to even try following the instructions, which I did today: rub a small amount into my beard before showering, then at the sink wash my beard (as usual) with Musgo Real Glyce Lime Oil soap (MR GLO), “rinse” with a splash, and lather up.

My Rod Neep Dreadnaught brush has enormous knot, but it still did a good job face-lathering though it took noticeably longer to load the brush with soap. This brush has a 1984 Jefferson nickel set into the base of the handle, 1984 being the year I moved to California. Scodioli’s Hierophant shaving soap made a fine lather:

The Hierophant’s purpose is to bring the spiritual down to Earth. This crisp, clean blend of sweetgrass and aromatic sage with supporting notes of bergamot, geranium and amber will do just that. A light and mystifying scent.

Hierophant includes French Green Clay, which has a natural ability to absorb dirt, oil and bacteria from your skin & pores. Your skin will be left gently cleansed, soft & vibrant.

Three smooth passes of the Eclipse Red Ring holding a previously used Swedish Gillette blade produced an extremely smooth visage. I have to say that I have finally found a pre-shave treatment (beyond MR GLO) that actually makes a difference for me. I’m astonished.

I used a good splash of Saint Charles Shave’s New Spice aftershave (scroll down: aftershaves in alpha order). This is quite a pleasant fragrance, and not an attempt to mimic Old Spice (neither the original that I recall from high school in the mid-50′s nor the less pleasant version sold under that name today), but rather a lighter fragrance with a different spice mix: very pleasant. Saint Charles Shave aftershaves have some note or feeling that is distinctive—and very hard to describe.

Altogether a first-class shave.

Zach has reawakened the slumbering beast: the sardine GOPM I made yesterday was utterly delicious—although I’m using fresh sardines (I fillet them, of course), there is not a strong fish taste. Partly I sprinkle them with chopped peeled lemon and capers, and partly (I think) it’s the cooking method which steams the fish and sort of melts it into the rice, which turns out incredibly rich-tasting.

But that was then, and tomorrow night I thought of egg noodles I have and realized that they would be perfect in a GOPM because they would just be the bottom layer—no need to boil in a separate [shudder] pan.

And I immediately thought of lamb, so I quickly got this structure, from the bottom up in a 2-qt cast-iron dutch oven—I’ll actually use my 2.25-qt Staub round cocotte:

chopped onion and/or scallions
chopped celery
wide egg noodles
garlic
lamb cut into chunks
salt, pepper, red pepper
chopped black olives
capers
sliced peeled cucumber
chopped peeled lemon
chopped fresh spinach
tomato slices

Mix together and pour over the pot contents:

2 Tbsp Bragg’s vinaigrette
2 Tbsp red or sherry wine (I’ll decide tomorrow)
1 Tbsp Dijon mustard
1 Tbsp horseradish
1 Tbsp homemade Worcestershire sauce

Cover, cook at 450ºF for 45 minutes, let sit 5 minutes.

Serves 2.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that I can also include amounts. For example, 2 oz is a serving of noodles or pasta (dry weight before cooking), so for this dish I will measure out 3 oz of egg noodles (1.5 servings for 2 meals: I de-emphasize starches). Protein is 3-4 oz, so I’ll get half a pound (8 oz) lamb and trim it of fat and use that. Nothing else requires measurement other than fitting into a layer in the dutch oven. I might add mushrooms as well. I’m uncertain about whether to slice cucumbers, which would for a solid-like layer, or chop them coarsely, which would not build a floor the way slices would.