Later On

Cooks are always looking for new kitchen tools. The microplane graters now so popular began life as a woodworking tool until a cook saw their kitchen potential. Quite a few tools cross over from workshop to kitchen—among them these (on Cool Tools).

There’s something quite appealing about the idea of moving into a recreational vehicle so that you can relocate at a moment’s notice: Weather lousy here? Let’s move a couple of states over and see how that is. Leaves starting to turn? Let’s head to Maine and then move slowly south with the turning so that you watch the peak of the fall for weeks instead of days.

The Wife spotted this very nice RV: $3 million (£1.9 million).

Dianne Feinstein’s campaign just called for a contribution. Every now and then Sen. Feinstein supports some progressive measure, but she’s deeply conservative about business and has a strongly reactionary stance on drug legalization. I was happy to cut the conversation short.

I was thinking that I really have no idea what steps to take when a family member dies at home. (I assume that hospitals know exactly what to do.) I’m of a certain age, though of course we are told that death can happen at any time, and I got to wondering…

So nowadays one simply Googles “death checklist” and lo! one finds quite a few useful guides for a stressful time. In looking at them, it’s clear that this is well-trodden territory—people have been doing this for thousands of years and even longer—and in fact quite a few steps are involved: lots of different entities to notify.

Take a look: here’s one, here’s another, and here’s a third. I’m hoping that you wouldn’t have need to look at one of these anytime soon (save for “fire drills” of a sort), but it’s nice to know that this sort of guidance is available.

I used my New Forest brush this morning because it was being discussed at The Wicked_Edge. As Mantic59 observes at the second link, it’s densely packed and yet is also soft. My worked up an extremely nice lather.

But let’s begin at the beginning. I’ve never been much of a pre-shave balm/oil/gel sort of guy: they just don’t seem to do anything for me. Musgo Real Glyce Lime Oil soap (MR GLO) does a great job—a pre-shave soap—but that’s the only pre-shave to date that’s made much of a difference.

However, I got a sample of The Shave Den’s Pre-Shave Balm and tried that, partly because the ingredients were so good:

Shea Butter, Lanolin, Jojoba Oil, Avocado Oil, Sweet Almond Oil, Vitamin E, and fragrance.

The balm’s effects were noticeable throughout the shave and even provided a sort of “Oil Pass” feeling for the final pass, with my skin still lubricated. It’s a solid paste, so it’s not like a pre-shave oil, but obviously it does contain a lot of oil.

I ordered a full jar, but when that arrived it was a liquid rather than a paste. It  turned out that the supplier’s most recent batch of shea butter had a lower melting point than the previous batch. I let Joanna know, and she immediately replaced the jar (and no harm done), and this new jar is indeed the same paste as the original sample.

I’m still working out how/when to use it. This morning I did my usual shower, then washed my beard at the sink with MR GLO and rinsed sketchily with just a splash (as usual). Then I took a small amount of the balm and rubbed it well into my beard.

The Scodoli shaving soap can be ordered in round pucks should your bowls and cups happen to be round, though obviously the square shape works better for those who have square bowls and cups. The ingredients list for the shaving soap:

Contains saponified oils of coconut, palm and safflower, shea butter, glycerin (kosher), sorbitol, sorbitan oleate, soy bean protein, wheat protein, thassoul clay, iron oxide, and fragrant oils.

The vendor notes:

A very intoxicating masculine fragrance with dominant notes of pipe tobacco and black tea, and hints of fruit and spice. This scent reminds the Madame of sitting in the parlor of the troupe’s stygian Horned Devil Man.

Caveat emptor: The fragrance oils in this soap tend to be particularly harsh.  ***Not for sensitive skin.***

It did fine for me, and the lather was excellent. I’m always nervous about artisanal soaps that I’ve not previously tried, but this one worked fine, and I have a couple more to try from the same vendor.

I used my Mühle three-piece razor this morning: although Merkur prefers the (ostensibly) two-piece razor (cap and handle/baseplate), the Merkurs are actually four-piece razors (cap, handle/baseplate, tightening knob/shaft, and friction ring to hold the shaft inside the hollow handle) that do not lie flat. The Mühle is a true three-piece razor that, when disassembled, lies flat. This one carries a previously used Astra Keramik Platinum blade.

Three smooth passes, and the pre-shave balm did a fine job with apparently no adverse effect on the lather. I’ll keep using it, off and on, to get a better feel for exactly what it’s doing, but I think this one is worth a try.

Finally, a splash of Gabels bay rum, which I read about on the Wicked_Edge. It is indeed a pleasant bay rum, though not so rich a fragrance as Captain’s Choice. Still, not bad, and I’m tempted to try Gabels Drops of Lime aftershave: only $3, though of course the $10 shipping charge changes the picture. Probably best purchased at the store.

Zach’s venture in Glorious One-Pot Meals (see my previous posts on GOPMs) inspired me to return, and one of my faves was the fresh-sardine variety—which is now in the oven.

Thanks to Mr. Beetner for pointing out this article by Alan Schwarz in the NY Times:

Sarah Benson last encountered college mathematics 20 years ago in an undergraduate algebra class. Her sole experience teaching math came in the second grade, when the first graders needed help with their minuses.

And yet Ms. Benson, with a Ph.D. in art history and a master’s degree in comparative literature, stood at the chalkboard drawing parallelograms, constructing angles and otherwise dismembering Euclid’s Proposition 32 the way a biology professor might treat a water frog. Her students cared little about her inexperience. As for her employers, they did not mind, either: they had asked her to teach formal geometry expressly because it was a subject about which she knew very little.

It was just another day here at St. John’s College, whose distinctiveness goes far beyond its curriculum of great works: Aeschylus and Aristotle, Bacon and Bach. As much of academia fractures into ever more specific disciplines, this tiny college still expects — in fact, requires — its professors to teach almost every subject, leveraging ignorance as much as expertise.

“There’s a little bit of impostor syndrome,” said Ms. Benson, who will teach Lavoisier’s “Elements of Chemistry” next semester. “But here, it’s O.K. that I don’t know something. I can figure it out, and my job is to help the students do the same thing. It’s very collaborative.”

Or as St. John’s president, Chris Nelson (class of 1970), put it with a smile only slightly sadistic: “Every member of the faculty who comes here gets thrown in the deep end. I think the faculty members, if they were cubbyholed into a specialization, they’d think that they know more than they do. That usually is an impediment to learning. Learning is born of ignorance.”

Students who attend St. John’s — it has a sister campus in Santa Fe, N.M., with the same curriculum and philosophies — know that their college experience will be like no other. There are no majors; every student takes the same 16 yearlong courses, which generally feature about 15 students discussing Sophocles or Homer, and the professor acting more as catalyst than connoisseur.

What they may not know is that their professor — or tutor in the St. John’s vernacular — might have no background in the subject. This is often the case for the courses that freshmen take. For example, Hannah Hintze, who has degrees in philosophy and woodwind performance, and whose dissertation concerned Plato’s “Republic,” is currently leading classes on observational biology and Greek.

“Some might not find that acceptable, but we explore things together,” said Ryan Fleming, a freshman in Ms. Benson’s Euclid class. “We don’t have someone saying, ‘I have all the answers.’ They’re open-minded and go along with us to see what answers there can be.”

Like all new tutors, Ms. Benson, 42, went through a one-week orientation in August to reacquaint herself with Euclid, and to learn the St. John’s way of teaching. She attends weekly conferences with more seasoned tutors. . .

Continue reading. I did my undergraduate work at the Annapolis campus (at the time, the only campus) and a decade later was for three years a tutor and director of admissions at the same campus.

This morning I went The Shave Den for the entire shave. I tried my new jar of Pre-Shave Balm (ingredients: Shea Butter, Lanolin, Jojoba Oil, Avocado Oil, Sweet Almond Oil, Vitamin E, and fragrance), which arrived in fine shape. I’m not sure yet how to incorporate this into the routine, so this morning I started with washing my beard with MR GLO, then rubbed a small amount of the balm over all my beard and used my fingertips to work it into the beard, and then showered with the balm on my beard.

Back at the sink, I used the Vie-Long horsehair brush, which immediately worked up a fine lather from TSD’s Victorian Rose shaving soap: thick and abundant. Three passes with the vintage Merkur Slant holding a Schick Plus Platinum blade and then a splash of TSD’s Victorian Rose aftershave: starting the week with an extremely smooth and fragrant countenance.

I like the balm, but I need to figure out how best to use it.

It was a deliberate decision by American businessmen. Take a look at this article in Orion magazine by Jeffrey Kaplan. From the article:

. . . FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS of the Age of Consumerism there were critics. One of the most influential was Arthur Dahlberg, whose 1932 book Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism was well known to policymakers and elected officials in Washington. Dahlberg declared that “failure to shorten the length of the working day . . . is the primary cause of our rationing of opportunity, our excess industrial plant, our enormous wastes of competition, our high pressure advertising, [and] our economic imperialism.” Since much of what industry produced was no longer aimed at satisfying human physical needs, a four-hour workday, he claimed, was necessary to prevent society from becoming disastrously materialistic. “By not shortening the working day when all the wood is in,” he suggested, the profit motive becomes “both the creator and satisfier of spiritual needs.” For when the profit motive can turn nowhere else, “it wraps our soap in pretty boxes and tries to convince us that that is solace to our souls.”

There was, for a time, a visionary alternative. In 1930 Kellogg Company, the world’s leading producer of ready-to-eat cereal, announced that all of its nearly fifteen hundred workers would move from an eight-hour to a six-hour workday. Company president Lewis Brown and owner W. K. Kellogg noted that if the company ran “four six-hour shifts . . . instead of three eight-hour shifts, this will give work and paychecks to the heads of three hundred more families in Battle Creek.”

This was welcome news to workers at a time when the country was rapidly descending into the Great Depression. But as Benjamin Hunnicutt explains in his book Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day, Brown and Kellogg wanted to do more than save jobs. They hoped to show that the “free exchange of goods, services, and labor in the free market would not have to mean mindless consumerism or eternal exploitation of people and natural resources.” Instead “workers would be liberated by increasingly higher wages and shorter hours for the final freedom promised by the Declaration of Independence—the pursuit of happiness.”

To be sure, Kellogg did not intend to stop making a profit. But the company leaders argued that men and women would work more efficiently on shorter shifts, and with more people employed, the overall purchasing power of the community would increase, thus allowing for more purchases of goods, including cereals.

A shorter workday did entail a cut in overall pay for workers. But Kellogg raised the hourly rate to partially offset the loss and provided for production bonuses to encourage people to work hard. The company eliminated time off for lunch, assuming that workers would rather work their shorter shift and leave as soon as possible. In a “personal letter” to employees, Brown pointed to the “mental income” of “the enjoyment of the surroundings of your home, the place you work, your neighbors, the other pleasures you have [that are] harder to translate into dollars and cents.” Greater leisure, he hoped, would lead to “higher standards in school and civic . . . life” that would benefit the company by allowing it to “draw its workers from a community where good homes predominate.”

It was an attractive vision, and it worked. Not only did Kellogg prosper, but journalists from magazines such as Forbes andBusinessWeek reported that the great majority of company employees embraced the shorter workday. One reporter described “a lot of gardening and community beautification, athletics and hobbies . . . libraries well patronized and the mental background of these fortunate workers . . . becoming richer.”

A U.S. Department of Labor survey taken at the time, as well as interviews Hunnicutt conducted with former workers, confirm this picture. The government interviewers noted that “little dissatisfaction with lower earnings resulting from the decrease in hours was expressed, although in the majority of cases very real decreases had resulted.” One man spoke of “more time at home with the family.” Another remembered: “I could go home and have time to work in my garden.” A woman noted that the six-hour shift allowed her husband to “be with 4 boys at ages it was important.”

Those extra hours away from work also enabled some people to accomplish things that they might never have been able to do otherwise. Hunnicutt describes how at the end of her interview an eighty-year-old woman began talking about ping-pong. “We’d get together. We had a ping-pong table and all my relatives would come for dinner and things and we’d all play ping-pong by the hour.” Eventually she went on to win the state championship.

Many women used the extra time for housework. But even then, they often chose work that drew in the entire family, such as canning. One recalled how canning food at home became “a family project” that “we all enjoyed,” including her sons, who “opened up to talk freely.” As Hunnicutt puts it, canning became the “medium for something more important than preserving food. Stories, jokes, teasing, quarreling, practical instruction, songs, griefs, and problems were shared. The modern discipline of alienated work was left behind for an older . . . more convivial kind of working together.”

This was the stuff of a human ecology in which thousands of small, almost invisible, interactions between family members, friends, and neighbors create an intricate structure that supports social life in much the same way as topsoil supports our biological existence. When we allow either one to become impoverished, whether out of greed or intemperance, we put our long-term survival at risk. . . .

Read the whole thing and think about what might have been.

James Fallows has just run three excellent posts on the misreporting of Senate dysfunction. Take a look at this post, and this one, and (especially) at this more recent post. (These are three consecutive posts—in chronological order—and together they tell a depressing story of malfeasance and/or misfeasance by journalists whose job it is to inform the public.

So far as I can tell, the “journalists” who fail in their basic mission of informing the public by not describing clearly what is happening in the Senate must necessarily fall into one (or more) of very few categories:

Category 1: The journalist in question simply does not understand what is going on — this seems unlikely, but OTOH, the lack of a clear description (the fundamental requirement of the basic mission of journalism) suggests that it’s a possibility.

Category 2: The journalist is deliberately providing cover for the GOP so that the GOP can continue their program to wreck the country if necessary, simply to defeat Obama — this seems more likely, given the Washington Post’s current management and what I suspect are their hiring practices (cf. how Monica Goodling hired staff in Bush’s DoJ—hmm. Does Pat Robertson’s Regent University have a school of “journalism” the way they have a school of “law”?).

I was going to continue the list, but I think those two categories exhaust the possibilities: either the journalist doesn’t understand what is happening and thus the report is muddied and incomplete, or the journalist does understand and his/her report is deliberately misleading.

I can see no other possibilities, but perhaps you can think of one.

Very interesting piece in the Washington Post by Steve Fox:

Antidepressants or antipsychotic medications are among the most common ways to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and the insomnia, anger, nightmares and anxiety that often come with it.

Unfortunately, they’re not guaranteed to be much help.

That’s what a study in August’s Journal of the American Medical Association suggested. Risperdal, a widely prescribed antipsychotic, is no more effective in treating PTSD than placebos, it reported. This finding adds to earlier research on the ineffectiveness of most PTSD medications.

But there is a drug that has been shown to alleviate the symptoms of PTSD. Unfortunately, Veterans Affairs doctors can’t recommend it, and the federal government won’t allow research to proceed that could prove its effectiveness. What’s the drug? Marijuana.

Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have medical marijuana laws on the books, but we are still a long way from general acceptance of the drug as a medicine. If we’re serious about seeking an effective remedy for post-traumatic stress, and serving the hundreds of thousands of veterans with the disorder, this needs to change. It’s not a guaranteed solution, but sufficient evidence exists to show that it’s a treatment that needs to be explored further.

In 2006, one of the pioneers of medical marijuana in the United States, the late Tod Mikuriya, published a paper in a cannabis research journal reporting on his experience with PTSD sufferers. He compared marijuana to commonly prescribed medications and noted that the former worked better to control chronic stressors, without adverse side effects. “Based on both safety and efficacy,” he wrote, “cannabis should be considered first in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

A few years later, the Israeli psychology researcher Irit Akirav published a study in the Journal of Neuroscience that alluded to the potential benefits of marijuana for PTSD patients. She found in an animal study that cannabinoids — the active chemicals in marijuana — may reduce the effects of PTSD. “The results of our research,” Akirav noted, “should encourage psychiatric investigation into using cannabinoids in post-traumatic stress patients.”

In New Mexico, where PTSD was added as a qualifying condition to the state’s medical marijuana program after an evaluation of the available research, more patients use marijuana for PTSD than for any other condition.

Veterans, if given the option to use marijuana to alleviate PTSD, would probably take advantage of the opportunity. In September, the military newspaper Stars and Stripes published a story about Army Sgt. Jamey Raines, who talked openly about how he had used marijuana to treat PTSD triggered by heavy combat duty in Iraq. Marijuana was not just helpful, Raines said — it was the only substance he found effective.

Of course this evidence is still limited and in some cases anecdotal; for conclusive answers, we need FDA-approved research to assess the benefits of marijuana in a clinical environment. Fortunately, earlier this year, the FDA approved such a protocol to study the therapeutic potential of marijuana for veterans suffering from chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD. But that’s where the good news ends.

If this were any other drug, the researchers would probably be organizing or conducting trials now. But this isn’t a new chemical compound dreamed up by a pharmaceutical company. It’s marijuana, and the anti-marijuana forces in the federal government are powerful.

Here is how this research has been stymied. . .

Continue reading.

What is the word for a person who fights to prolong human suffering to satisfy their ideological position that lacks factual support?

Although artisanal straight razors are readily found (for example, the kamisori), you don’t see artisanal double-edged blades. Here’s why:

Great video. Watch the whole thing:

Somehow I wanted to make this:

2 tsp hot chili olive oil
1/2 large onion

Let that sauté in 7-qt pot until onion just begins to brown. Add:

10 large mushrooms, cut into big chunks
10 large cloves garlic, minced
1 cup finely chopped celery
6 cayenne peppers, minced
4 oz extra firm tofu, diced small
salt, pepper

Sauté that for a while, and as the mushrooms begin to cook, add:

2 bunches scallions, chopped,
1/2 bunch kale, rinsed and chopped including stalks
1 bunch red chard, rinsed and chopped including stalks
1 bunch spinach, roots removed, rinsed, chopped
1 pint dry-farmed tomatoes, with canning liquid
1/2 cup “forbidden” (black) rice
1/2 cup cut pasta (tubetti, specifically)
1/2 cup red wine
1 cup water

That’s now covered and simmering. I’ll probably add some homemade Worcestershire sauce as well, and probably a glug of Amontillado sherry at the end.

It’s simmering covered now, and I’m going to let it go 40 minutes.

UPDATE: I obviously used too much liquid, at least for the way I like my grub. I should have omitted the 1 cup water. So now I’ve added 1/2 c old-fashioned oatmeal to add protein and fiber and, not incidentally, thicken the mix. Plus I imagine the rice and pasta will continue to absorb water for a while.

Thanks to Joanne for the link via Facebook.

A new batch of pepper sauce:

This batch is darker because in addition to the cayenne peppers I used a good handful of dried chipotles and also a small handful of dried chiles de árbol. Other ingredients: 10 large cloves of garlic, a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and a good squirt of Sriracha (for the sugar as well as the flavor), the usual vinegar (mostly white, but a fair amount of sherry vinegar as well), and 1/3 cup of salt.

I made about a quart: these two 12 oz bottles and a smaller 8 oz bottle. I still have some of the previous batch, but these can age until I need them.

I realized that cayenne peppers are popular for hot sauce because they taste so good.

I can’t believe they overlooked the theory of relativity in the recent experiment that seemed to have neutrinos going faster than light in a recent CERN experiment in which neutrinos were clocked between two locations 450 miles apart. TYD sent a link to this article, which points out that the clocks used to time the travel were moving rather rapidly with respect to the experiment. And what happens when clocks move with respect to our frame of reference? All together: The clocks run slow. This is such a basic finding of relativity—not even General Relativity, this comes in Special Relativity—that one is sort of aghast that they overlooked that.

So it goes. Relativity once again survives a challenge.

These wraps look like a great idea for a portable lunch (e.g., to school or work), and fairly easy to tailor to different tastes.

My one quibble is with the protein content: 2 Tbsp of peanut butter has but 7g of fat. And commercial peanut butters (as opposed to peanut butter made simply by grinding peanuts, as at healthfood groceries) tend to include trans fats and other undesirables—plus they add more peanut oil to make it smoother, further raising the fat content. One egg has 13g protein, so you can see the drawback. Update: I’m totally wrong on that: as Geo. points out in the comment, an egg is about 6g protein. Still, I would prefer a lunch with more protein, so I would still want to boost the protein.

So I would fool around with figuring out how to boost protein content and perhaps reduce fat content. But I like the overall idea.

I’m restraining myself from daily use of MdC, but I figure I can go wild on the weekend. The Mühle 39K256 synthetic brush, which strikes me as synthetic horsehair, did a great job. (Scroll down at the link to find the brush—and note those terrific Mühle travel brushes along the way.)

Very fine lather, and the rhodium-plated Gillette 1940′s Super Speed (with a notched bar, so not from the very first release of this product) did a very fine job with a previously used Astra Superior Platinum blade. A splash of Obsession, and I’m ready for the day.

Yesterday was exciting: The Wife got a large new sofa—very challenging to get into her apartment, with three guys struggling for quite a while—and in the middle of the move in (around 7:00 in the evening) we had a power outage so the move was completed by flashlight…

It certainly took way too long to hold bishops accountable for breaking the law. But—at long last—at least one bishop will face prosecution for covering up for a priest’s child abuse (sexual photos of young girls). The bishop has pleaded not guilty, though the facts seem to undercut that defense. Here’s the story in the NY Times by Sulzberger and Goodstein:

The Roman Catholic bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Robert Finn, and the diocese he leads have been indicted by a county grand jury on a charge of failure to report suspected child abuse in the case of a priest who had been accused of taking lewd photographs of young girls.

The indictment is the first ever of a Catholic bishop in the 25 years since the scandal over sexual abuse by priests first became public in the United States.

Bishop Finn is accused of neglecting to report abuse that occurred as recently as last year — almost 10 years since the nation’s Catholic bishops passed a charter pledging to report suspected abusers to law enforcement authorities.

The bishop has acknowledged that he knew of the existence of the photos last December but did not turn them over to the police until May.

During that period Bishop Finn and the diocese had reason to suspect that the priest, the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, might subject a child to abuse, the indictment said, citing “previous knowledge of concerns regarding Father Ratigan and children; the discovery of hundreds of photographs of children on Father Ratigan’s laptop, including a child’s naked vagina, upskirt images and other images focused on the crotch; and violations of restrictions placed on Father Ratigan.”

The indictment was announced on Friday by the Jackson County prosecutor, Jean Peters-Baker. It had been under seal since Oct. 6 because the bishop was out of the country. He returned on Thursday.

“This is about protecting children,” Ms. Peters-Baker said. . .

Continue reading. Later in the story:

. . . Stoking much of the anger is the fact that only three years ago, Bishop Finn settled lawsuits with 47 plaintiffs in sexual abuse cases for $10 million and agreed to a long list of preventive measures, among them to report anyone suspected of being a pedophile immediately to law enforcement authorities.

Bishop Finn, who was appointed in 2005, alienated many of his priests and parishioners, and won praise from others, when he remade the diocese to conform with his traditionalist theological views. He is one of few bishops affiliated with the conservative movement Opus Dei.

I suppose his defense will rely on “immediately” meaning “5 months later.”