Later On

No photo: no time. I’m leaving in a few minutes for the surgery center. (For outpatient surgery—sort of a drive-thru surgery center, in effect.)

Martin de Candre soap, the big Mühle soft silvertip, the Merkur gold Slant, and a new Kai blade. Three smooth passes, flawless finish. Alum block only: no lotions, creams, etc., before eye surgery. (Mascara is out of the question .

Will resume blogging later. Have a good day. I’m hoping for the same for me.

This story is at the very least consistent with Coach Joe having gotten an early warning of possible lawsuits and acting to keep his assets away from injured parties. Reported in the NY Times by Mark Viera and Pete Thamel:

Joe Paterno transferred full ownership of his house to his wife, Sue, for $1 in July, less than four months before a sexual abuse scandal engulfed his Penn State football program and the university.

Documents filed in Centre County, Pa., show that on July 21, Paterno’s house near campus was turned over to “Suzanne P. Paterno, trustee” for a dollar plus “love and affection.” The couple had previously held joint ownership of the house, which they bought in 1969 for $58,000.

According to documents filed with the county, the house’s fair-market value was listed at $594,484.40. Wick Sollers, a lawyer for Paterno, said in an e-mail that the Paternos had been engaged in a “multiyear estate planning program,” and the transfer “was simply one element of that plan.” He said it had nothing to do with the scandal.

Paterno, who was fired as the football coach at the university last week, has been judged harshly by many for failing to take more aggressive action when he learned of a suspected sexual assault of a child by one of his former top assistants.

Some legal experts, in trying to gauge the legal exposure of the university and its top officials to lawsuits brought by suspected victims of the assistant, Jerry Sandusky, have theorized that Paterno could be a target of civil actions. On Nov. 5, Sandusky, Penn State’s former defensive coordinator, was charged with 40 counts related to the reported sexual abuse of eight boys over 15 years. Paterno, 84, was among those called to give testimony before a grand jury during the investigation, which began in 2009. . .

Continue reading. Later in the story:

. . . Lawrence A. Frolik, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in elder law, said that he had “never heard” of a husband selling his share of a house for $1 to his spouse for tax or government assistance purposes.

“I can’t see any tax advantages,” Frolik said. “If someone told me that, my reaction would be, ‘Are they hoping to shield assets in case if there’s personal liability?’ ” He added, “It sounds like an attempt to avoid personal liability in having assets in his wife’s name.” . . .

Of course, he said that the last time as well. I personally would have proceeded with the case: the guy obviously has little respect for the law or his own commitments and responsibilities. A.G. Sulzberger and Laurie Goodstein report in the NY Times:

In a deal to avoid a second round of criminal charges, a Roman Catholic bishop in Kansas City has agreed to meet monthly with a county prosecutor to detail every suspicious episode involving abuse of a child in his diocese for the next five years.

Bishop Robert W. Finn of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph was indicted in October by a grand jury in neighboring Jackson County for failure to report suspected child abuse by a priest he supervised. He is the first American bishop to face indictment on charges of mishandling an abuse case.

The agreement announced on Tuesday between Bishop Finn and the prosecuting attorney of Clay County, Daniel White, leaves the bishop open to prosecution for misdemeanor charges for five years, if he does not continue to meet with the prosecutor and report all episodes.

Both cases relate to the bishop’s supervision of the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, who has been accused of taking pornographic photographs of young girls in local parishes and homes. The bishop learned of the pornographic photos last December after a technician fixing the priest’s computer expressed serious alarm, but the diocese did not turn them over to police until May. During that period more photographs of children were taken. . .

Continue reading. Somehow this sounds a lot like the crew at Penn State: anything to avoid “scandal”, and a sentiment along the lines of “They’re only kids. We must protect the important people here.”

This post outlines quite a clever approach to the To-Do list, always a vexing problem. Here’s what the post will show you:

. . . While you can manage that to-do list from the text file yourself, editing your to-do list in a flat text file using an editor like Notepad.exe or TextEdit isn’t the fastest or most ideal way to do so. As such, a number of excellent to-do programs have cropped up that work with plain text to-do files, including (but not limited to) TaskPaper/TodoPaper, Org-Mode, and our very own Gina Trapani’s Todo.txt. Today, we’ll show you how to get started with Todo.txt (our favorite plain-text to-do program) and show you all the things you can do with the resulting text file—like display it on your desktop, add it as a widget to your phone, and even synced to all my other computers via Dropbox.

Note that Todo.txt is truly a geek’s to-do list. You manage it from the command line and have to deal with editing config files to get it all set up. However, while there is a bit more work up front, it does actually make it faster and easier to manage your tasks if all you need to do is type a quick command and hit enter—there’s no clicking, dragging, opening files, other other nonsense. However, if you prefer the mouse and want something with a GUI, you can use the same system with previously mentioned Todotxt.net, which is a bit more graphics-driven (but still takes advantage of all that plain text has to offer). And, no matter what system you’re using, any plain text file can take advantage of our other plain text tricks, so take a gander at the last section of this article either way. . .

Another reason I no longer fly. ProPublica has some reports worth reading:

U.S. Government Glossed Over Cancer Concerns As It Rolled Out Airport X-Ray Scanners

Europe Bans X-Ray Body Scanners Used at U.S. Airports

These machines are making a lot of money for some company (think of the volume of dollars required to put several at every airport), some of which is undoubtedly funneled back to the government agencies and Representatives involved in establishing the requirement. I have no specific information; I base that statement on how things seem to work now.

From the first article linked above:

. . .Today, the United States has begun marching millions of airline passengers through the X-ray body scanners, parting ways with countries in Europe and elsewhere that have concluded that such widespread use of even low-level radiation poses an unacceptable health risk. The government is rolling out the X-ray scanners despite having a safer alternative that the Transportation Security Administration says is also highly effective.

A ProPublica/PBS NewsHour investigation of how this decision was made shows that in post-9/11 America, security issues can trump even long-established medical conventions. The final call to deploy the X-ray machines was made not by the FDA, which regulates drugs and medical devices, but by the TSA, an agency whose primary mission is to prevent terrorist attacks.

Research suggests that anywhere from six to 100 U.S. airline passengers each year could get cancer from the machines. Still, the TSA has repeatedly defined the scanners as “safe,” glossing over the accepted scientific view that even low doses of ionizing radiation — the kind beamed directly at the body by the X-ray scanners — increase the risk of cancer. . .

So the TSA is giving people (only a few) cancer in order to protect them. I recognize the song—burning the village to save it—but it now has new words. The second article begins:

The European Union on Monday prohibited the use of X-ray body scanners in European airports, parting ways with the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, which has deployed hundreds of the scanners as a way to screen millions of airline passengers for explosives hidden under clothing.

The European Commission, which enforces common policies of the EU’s 27 member countries, adopted the rule “in order not to risk jeopardizing citizens’ health and safety.”

As a ProPublica/PBS NewsHour investigation detailed earlier this month, X-ray body scanners use ionizing radiation, a form of energy that has been shown to damage DNA and cause cancer. Although the amount of radiation is extremely low, equivalent to the radiation a person would receive in a few minutes of flying, several research studies have concluded that a small number of cancer cases would result from scanning hundreds of millions of passengers a year.

European countries will be allowed to use an alternative body scanner, on that relies on radio frequency waves, which have not been linked to cancer. The TSA has also deployed hundreds of those machines – known as millimeter-wave scanners – in U.S. airports. But unlike Europe, it has decided to deploy both types of scanners.

The TSA would not comment specifically on the EU’s decision. . .

I doubt that I will blog for a day or two, but who knows. Indeed, I’m so antsy and unsettled today that I probably won’t blog much today, either. Plus a party in the next apartment woke me up and I started thinking about the surgery and had trouble getting back to sleep. (Not a serious problem, just novice apartment dwellers who don’t understand that standing around outside talking and laughing late in the night does affect other apartments—probably they are people who grew up in a detached dwelling.)

I know the surgery is very easy and free of problems, but: my eyes. I’ll be fine.

Edward Wasserman writes in McClatchy about the privatization of censorship:

A comment posted to London’s Guardian newspaper said it best: “Censorship, like everything else in the West, has been privatized.” The writer, somebody called “edensasp,” was referring to news that WikiLeaks — the online whistleblower that has been embarrassing governments and corporations worldwide by disclosing their secrets — was suspending operations.

Why? Had its leader, the mercurial Julian Assange, been indicted? Had the black choppers swooped in and taken him out? No, nothing that cinematic. It was the bankers. A handful of big money handlers decided they wouldn’t process donations to WikiLeaks, it had exhausted its reserves, and it was going broke.

The fund cutoff started in December 2010. That’s when Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union, Amazon and Bank of America discovered their patriotic duty. At the time, five of the world’s top news organizations — The Guardian, The New York Times, El País, Le Monde and Der Spiegel — had begun publishing articles based on a remarkable trove of U.S. State Department cables shared with them by WikiLeaks. The organizations had spent months sifting from among the documents, eliminating those they thought might cause needless harm. They then launched a barrage of articles derived from candid reports from U.S. diplomats that exposed official lies, both our country’s and dozens of others’.

But official lies have their supporters too, and there was a huge fuss. Because the secret cables were American — even if the people whom the secrecy protected often were not — U.S. politicians led the charge against WikiLeaks. Assange was denounced as “a high-tech terrorist,” lawmakers demanded his head, and Attorney General Eric Holder launched a criminal investigation of his operation.

And so the money-handlers stirred to action. Within days WikiLeaks was under a financial stranglehold, and it now says its revenues dropped from $140,000 a month to less than a tenth that. Why did the companies do it? PayPal, the flagship paymaster of the digital world, said it forbids payments to anything that “encourages” illegal activity, and MasterCard said its “rules prohibit customers from directly or indirectly engaging in or facilitating any action that is illegal.”

Really? “Indirectly facilitating” an illegal act? Think about that. It’s a formulation a second-year law student could tear apart as not just unenforceable, but unintelligible. Doesn’t selling gasoline “indirectly facilitate” speeding? How much of what we consider normal commerce would escape that catchall? Shouldn’t Bank of America require you to apply for your next ATM withdrawal, just in case?

Besides, what was the illegal act that was facilitated? Nobody has suggested the publications that used the material acted illegally. And don’t we normally punish after conviction, not before? (Nearly a year later, WikiLeaks hasn’t even been charged.)

The explanation was hogwash, of course. It seems obvious the money-handlers’ actions were political, not legal. The financial industry isn’t particularly popular right now, and in the wake of the worst banking meltdown in generations Obama administration officials had made a special point of denouncing the consumer finance sector for its furtive charges and extortionate rates. With regulation looming, tossing a bone to the Justice Department had to make sense.

And they’ve gotten away with it, largely because . . .

Continue reading.

I no longer have a fireplace, but when I did, I really liked these fire starters: terrific fragrance.

That said, these are equally effective, ever so much cheaper, and are easily made.

UPDATE: First link fixed. Apologies.

As you might guess, that’s a Rod Neep brush. I just got the Pitralon soap, which (like the aftershave) has an unusual but not unpleasant fragrance—and it makes a fine lather.

The Slant I loaded with a previously used Super Iridium blade, which turned out to be on its last legs. Into the little blade bank at the end of the shave, but I still ended with a good shave.

I used the Slant to elicit some comments from other Slant uses. Zaine, a commenter, was asking for a better description of the Slant’s configuration and action, and I’ve pretty much run into a wall on that: the razor holds the blade at an angle, so the blade is slanted as it shaves, slicing instead of doing a straight-ahead chop. I don’t know how to describe it better, but perhaps some other Slant users can help.

I will say that the Slant shaves easier, more smoothly, and perhaps more closely than a traditional DE safety razor. Indeed, I (repeatedly) recommend that a shaver’s second DE razor should be a Slant (for all the good it does: I don’t think anyone heeds this advice). For some reason, the Slant’s efficiency at removing stubble—in particular, thick, tough stubble—makes people fearful. It is a comfortable razor, and “aggressive” in the sense of efficiency is not “aggressive” in the sense of harsh. Perhaps it should be called an assertive razor, particularly with respect to stubble.

Could other Slant users please comment and help explain this razor. I’m not doing a good job.

I recently read a highly favorable profile of James Garner in the Atlantic Monthly, written by Clive James. The article begins:

STAND ASIDE FOR Maverick! Stand aside again for Jim Rockford! They live forever in the shining presence of one man! Let his name ring out: James Bumgarner!

• The Garner Files: A Memoir

  By James Garner and Jon Winokur

  Simon & Schuster

Or perhaps not. At the appropriate moment, he changed his moniker. It was his one and only fiddle with the facts. Let this neatly written and well-supplemented little book—all of his friends provide relevant stories and fond judgments—set a new standard of integrity for the genre. But for a book to have that, the subject has to have the same, or he will have falsified the facts even before fame got to him.

James Garner, you can bet on it, has never told an important lie in his life. He really is like the men he plays onscreen, even unto the modest requirements symbolized by the humble trailer that serves Jim Rockford for a residence. He is thoughtful, honest, and fundamentally gentle, although he has knocked men down when riled. On the evidence given here, one doesn’t doubt that they asked for it. One doesn’t doubt this guy at all.

Every sane person’s favorite modern male movie star, Garner might have done even better if he’d been less articulate. In his generation, three male TV stars made it big in the movies: Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, and Garner. All of them became stars in TV Westerns: McQueen in Wanted: Dead or Alive, Eastwood in Rawhide, and Garner in Maverick. The only one of them who looked and sounded as if he enjoyed communicating by means of the spoken word was Garner. McQueen never felt ready for a film role until he had figured out what the character should do with his hands: that scene-stealing bit in his breakout movie, The Magnificent Seven, in which he shakes the shotgun cartridges beside his ear, was McQueen’s equivalent of a Shakespearean soliloquy, or of a practice session for a postatomic future in which language had ceased to exist.

As for Eastwood, he puts all that effort into gritting his teeth, because his tongue is tied. Garner could learn and deliver page after page of neat Paddy Chayevsky. If you can bear the idea of watching Eastwood struggling with a long speech, take a look at his self-constructed disaster movie White Hunter, Black Heart, in which he plays John Huston at the theoretical top of his mad male confidence: it’s like watching a mouse choke. Like McQueen, Eastwood never really left the Wild West, where little is said except by a six-gun. When McQueen and Eastwood moved up, they took the Wild West with them. Or at any rate, they took a context in which the important things are all unspoken, because nobody really knows how to speak.

Garner or his narrator could really have told us more about just how leaden-tongued modern Hollywood is. Writers like Chayevsky and Aaron Sorkin are rare cases, and the preferred way of writing is to bolt together clichés that have already been tested to near-destruction. When Garner speaks here about the marvelous Joan Hackett, he forgets to say that she spoke beautifully. Of what use was that, in a medium that spoke—still speaks—in a string of sunsets and crashed cars? . . .

Continue reading.

The article made me want to see one of his movies, so I watched Tank via Netflix. It turned out to be a very interesting movie, ostensibly a comedy, though the first part of the movie is anything but amusing. Garner plays the role of a division sergeant major arriving at an Army base in northern Georgia. This was at a time when parts of the South were still virulently racist, though I am told those days are all past.

As it turns out, the town is under the corrupt, iron-fisted rule of a sheriff (and, we learn, of his brother-in-law the judge, whom we don’t see). When Garner runs afoul of the sheriff in a violent confrontation with the deputy (played perfectly by James Cromwell, who I have to say looks quite buff in his nude scene), the sheriff takes his revenge by attacking Garner’s son: drugs are planted, and the boy is sentenced to 3 years hard labor with the sheriff promising Garner (explicitly) that his son will be raped.

This part of the movie is grim: the sheriff has the power and the law, and when Garner’s wife (played by Shirley Jones) brings in a lawyer—a “Jew lawyer from up north” as the sheriff says, clearly referring to still-recent wounds of the Civil Rights struggle—the lawyer is also jailed.

Not so funny so far. But then something strange happens: the movie veers sharply into a completely unrealistic wish-fulfillment fantasy, without any consideration of reality or the likely cost of the actions Garner takes to rescue his son. And the movie ends on this note, with a heavy-handed demonstration of diverse people working together to combat evil.

It was a bad movie, but the contrast between the opening and the wish-fulfillment part was striking—and it made one wonder about that opening. The movie there is so dark and strong that one wonders whether the writer knew someone in the situation—or, who knows?, had been in some such situation himself twenty years earlier—and wrote the script following the way he wished it had turned out.

I thought the movie was striking—and the wish-fulfillment part transparently obvious.

Very good tip on deicing car windshields.

I like to observe what my unconscious self is up to, and I was interested to see his “thoughts” on grocery shopping now that I’ve reached goal. Would he simply go back to my old eating habits?

Apparently not. It’s been a long time since I ate the way I did—I started this in June 2010, and today makes roughly 18.5 months I’ve been following (more or less) a new diet. (The weight loss averages out to 4.3 lbs/month—patience is more important than willpower.)

First thing I noticed was that fruit was very attractive. I went to get the 3 oz goat cheese and Medjool dates I needed to make the truffles. (I have vanilla and cocoa powder.) The dates are in the fruit section, and I immediately bought a bag of clementines, an excellent winter snack, and also a small box of blackberries and three persimmons (one of which I ate in the car: it was snack time). The fruit was just irresistible, which I think is pretty clearly a response from the unconscious: I know for sure that I was consciously deciding the fruit was irresistible, though my conscious mind does exercise veto power when needed.

I got milk for yogurt—can one make yogurt from buttermilk? I don’t know, so I got 1% regular milk. And when I glanced at the display case of guacamole and hummus (lemon hummus!), my unconscious shouted, “I want!” I thought about it, and decided that I am now indeed on maintenance, and I could once again incorporate these into my diet in moderation, so I got a small (1-cup) carton of each, along with some Ak-Mak crackers (4 crackers = 110 calories: I still keep rough track of my intake).

I went to the cheese counter for the goat cheese and got a little piece of 0.22 lbs (3.5 oz instead of the three the recipe requires, but I’ll just add another couple of dates and a little more cocoa and make a bigger batch). I was interested to note that none of the cheese was particularly compelling. Nor were the meats.

I never have been that interested in confectionery and other sugar-based foods, so my lack of interest there was not surprising. But I was intrigued to find fruit, guacamole, and hummus so attractive.

Obviously I’ll be continuing the daily weighing, so I’ll stay on top of it.

Excellent article forwarded to me by The Eldest. Written by Karie Meltzer for The Post Game, it begins:

A crowd of Penn State students in school sweatshirts huddled together near an old university building to listen to a call for unity, healing and peace. They wiped away tears, rested their heads on friends’ shoulders and reflected on a week that stained the place many of them see as a second home.

“We are what makes the university thrive,” said T.J. Bard, student body president, the day after his peers rioted in the streets to defend the firing of coach Joe Paterno. “And we are the ones who must restore glory to Penn State.”

Why them? What happened on their campus wasn’t their fault. Most didn’t even know Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky and Mike McQueary. Usually in society, when something as horrific as child molestation happens, people around the alleged perpetrators cut all ties. They reject. So why not protest Sandusky preying upon children instead of rioting against the board for firing a football coach? Why not feel satisfaction in the punishment of an old guard that collectively made serious leadership errors, rather than oppose the rightful dissolution of a system that protected evil?

“If they were completely objective, they would say, ‘These people did something terrible and I can’t support them, I cannot be in their corner.’” says Dr. Don Forsyth, a psychology professor specializing in group dynamics at the University of Richmond. “But they aren’t objective.”

What’s happening to the students in Happy Valley is a common psychological phenomenon. The rest of the country watches the students and thinks they’re missing the point. But in the students’ minds, the story is happening to them. After all, “We are Penn State.”

This is somewhat similar to the reaction to the rioting in Vancouver after the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup. Only a few hoodlums caused trouble, but the entire nation reeled in shame. Why?

Social psychologists use two terms: BIRGing and CORFing — Basking in Reflected Glory and Cutting off Reflected Failure. In the first, . . .

Continue reading.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that another way of describing this is to say that the egos of students had incorporated Penn State and its football program into itself: that’s basically what BIRG and CORF are about. So when Penn State and its football program are threatened, the egos of those students who have made this identification is also threatened. Moreover, a weak ego is more readily threatened and will react more strongly in “self-defense.” Add to that a couple of things—that a weak ego is more likely to try to draw strength from external sources (e.g., a football team or program), and that (I would think) adolescents’ egos are not so strong as they later become—and you get the panicked riot and overturning of media trucks and the like.

This morning’s weight was 170.1 lbs, BMI of 23.0. I think losing any more would be just pointless virtuosity. I now can control my weight, whoop-de-doo. A lot of people don’t have to learn this, they just do it. OTOH, by having to learn it, perhaps I can better identify the components.

I’ve said that it’s a matter of practical knowledge: you can read a book on how to lose weight or to play the piano or to play basketball, and you can thereby substantially increase your theoretical knowledge—which is important: knowing the theory helps immensely in making plans and decisions. For example, tackling a weight-loss program with no knowledge of the nutritional profile of the foods you’re picking and no knowledge of cooking is a mug’s game.

Practical skill is also required, but that also is insufficient by itself. Even if you practiced (say) basketball skills—dribbling and shooting—until you were quite skillful, but you lacked all knowledge of the game’s rules and strategies, you would not be much of a player. OTOH, knowing the games rules and strategies might make you a marvelous spectator, but without the physical skills acquired through practice, you would not be a team asset as a player except perhaps in settling disputes about the rules.

I entered this effort with excellent theoretical knowledge and even some practical skills (I knew how to cook, for example). But I had to bring it all together, practice, record, study, and repeat until I fully understood what was going on and what was required. “Fully understood” means, I think, that my unconscious grasped the ideas and goals. A beginning musician must think consciously of the position and movements of his hands and fingers as he plays, and he must continue doing this repeatedly until he finds he’s no longer thinking of those things: he simply looks at the notes on the score and plays them. Ultimately, his conscious mind simply thinks a musical phrase and his unconscious self goes to work and brings it out of whatever instrument he’s playing. The difference is practice. (Insert mandatory Carnegie Hall anecdote here.)

After seven months of practice I knew what I was doing, and the rest was merely a matter of patience and continuing the drill. I knew it would work because I now got it.

The meals will continue much as before, but with a bit more starch and protein. I think I’ll resume making yogurt now—I discontinued that when introducing it into my diet stopped my weight loss. (I’ve been wondering what would happen if I tried to make yogurt out of buttermilk.) I’m happy to be at 170 lbs (and wearing trousers with a 32″ waist) and I plan to remain in this neighborhood. A BMI of 23.0 is safely within the normal range:

• Underweight =  less than 18.5
• Normal weight = 18.5–24.9
• Overweight = 25–29.9
• Obesity = 30 or greater

BMI figures are a rule of thumb. A professional football player, with very little body fat and enormous muscle mass, may well show up as “obese” according to his BMI, so readers who are professional athletes can safely ignore BMI readings. OTOH, should you (like me) happen not to be a professional athlete, and also do not have anomalously heavy bone structure, the BMI can be a useful measure. (To get my BMI down to 18.5, I would have to lose another 33-34 lbs. Not going to happen.)

I’ll wait until February to prove that (a) I’ve really arrived at goal and (b) can survive a holiday season (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s) and still maintain my weight. Then I’m going to write a book of what I’ve learned and how I did it. Faithful readers of the blog already know the essentials of the story, but I think others (and the “others” constitute the larger group) might find such a book useful.

I think I’ll stop by Healthy Way this morning for a victory lap. That program was extremely helpful to me by forcing me to continue daily recording of what I ate and what I weighed (far beyond the point at which I would have quit doing it on my own), and also provided excellent practical tips (for example, the mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack of a piece of fruit: when I stopped the snacks, I stopped losing weight). I’m sure that, had I not committed to that program, I would have “dropped out” and given up—particularly at those times when I had a “long” plateau (2-3 weeks), at the end of which I gained a pound or two: those are the moments when one thinks, “To hell with it,” and goes out for a massive meal. But I couldn’t do that: I would have to record it and then have that awkward conversation with the diet counselor. So I kept going until I realized that I was (as it were) simply reading the score without having to consciously place my hands for each note.

UPDATE: A comment on “willpower.”

I pretty frequently get comments on how much willpower it takes to go from 250 lbs to 170 lbs. I did not find that to be the case, but I consciously worked to minimize demands on my somewhat unreliable willpower—I’m an impulsive sort of guy.

First, I placed various kinds of barriers between me and inappropriate foods—mainly the barrier of inconvenience. If the food is not in the house, it’s usually just too much trouble to go get any. So I don’t have on hand various impulse foods such as popcorn, cheese, croutons, chocolate, and other foods of that ilk. I see them in the store, but it’s easier to refrain from buying them there (and I never go to the store when I’m hungry—I go right after a meal or snack) than it would be to refrain from eating them if they’re in the apartment.

Some foods it’s even difficult to refrain from buying, so I don’t go down those aisles in the grocery store: the barrier this time is visual. If I don’t actually see the treat, I can avoid buying it, thus avoid bringing it home, thus avoid eating it. By putting in a little barrier (don’t go down the aisle), I avoid two instances of having to exercise willpower (the willpower not to buy once I am gazing at it, hypnotized by the prospect of its deliciousness, and the willpower not to eat it once it’s home—and let’s face it, why bring it home if you’re not going to eat it? What’s the point? Bringing it home is tantamount to eating it—not instantly, perhaps, but later, after you’ve unwrapped it.)

Moreover, most of the time I was focusing not on what I could not do but on what things I could do: making up good recipes, figuring out how to cook good meals, looking for exercise that I would enjoy and continue, and so on: a focus on the positive (what I can do) and not the negative (what I shouldn’t do). There’s a song about that.

And I spent a fair amount of time trying to think up new strategies, foods, routines, and the like: exercising my creativity is fun and thus attractive, and all I had to do was point that exercise in the right direction.

Overall, I would say that patience is much more important than willpower, especially if you set things up to minimize demands on willpower. I don’t know how to minimize the demands on patience.

UPDATE 2: A friend points out that I omitted an important component of the program: the desire to lose weight: ya hafta wanna.

Per commenter request, a comparison of Irisch Moos and Creed’s Green Irish Tweed shaving soaps, complicated somewhat by IM being a shave stick and the Creed’s being a tub soap.

The Alt-Innsbruck pre/post balm I intended to use both pre- and post-shave, but habit took over and before I applied it I was rubbing my (MR GLOed) beard with the IM stick. So it goes. I’ll try it pre-shave another day.

I used the black Frank Shaving brush with the metal base for the IM—I’ve used that brush before, and I thought perhaps that would help it in making/holding the lather. Felt good—it’s a good shave soap—and the first pass of the Merkur vintage Slant (with a Schick Platinum blade) was very smooth and nice.

A guy on Wicked_Edge was reluctant to try the Slant because he had heard it was terrible aggressive, which made me realize that “aggressive” has a couple of connotations in shaving. There’s the neutral meaning of the term:”removing stubble easily and efficiently.” And there’s the pejorative meaning: “harsh and unforgiving.” The Merkur Slant is aggressive in the first meaning, the Mühle 2011 model of the R41 is (for me) is aggressive in the second sense.

This distinction came to mind on the first pass: the Slant seemed quite gentle and comfortable, but the razor was wiping away stubble with no effort at all: doing what a Slant does best. The Slant should be any DE shaver’s second razor—but I’ve said that before. Maybe I should preface the statement with “Listen up.”

Second pass, and so I used the other Frank Shaving brush to make lather from the Creed. As I applied the lather I realized that this new brush—first use—is really excellent. I think this will be one of my (many) favorites.

Beautiful lather, another pass—across the grain—and I’m still thinking that this Slant is so comfortable and good—why would anyone call it “aggressive”? (in the second sense).

Final pass: Irisch Moos lather on one side of my face, Creed’s on the other. Against the grain, once again smooth, easy, comfortable, and efficient. (If you’re a DE shaver and you have not tried a Slant: You don’t know what you’re missing.)

A little of the Alt-Innsbruck as an aftershave balm, just a dot of it. This balm really leaves my skin feeling soft and moisturized. It takes a while to dry/be absorbed, but the ultimate result is really smooth, soft skin. I think guys who live in colder climes, where the relatively humidity drops drastically in the winter, should give this one a go. I’ll try it again, as a pre-shave, and report.

So that’s it. Great shave, fine outcome, new discovery of any aftershave. Thanks for reading.

Oh, about the two soaps. Both are excellent, but in my view, once again, no contest: Creed’s GIT all the way. I know it’s expensive, so this one is an excellent gift suggestion. It’s a stunningly good soap. Get it quick before they reformulate it.

Blood-orange honey-glazed five-spice tart with almond cream. Please.

No? How about Olive-oil cake with candied orange, then?

Thanks to Jack in Amsterdam for passing along a link to this graphic:

Recall the strict ISO criteria for grub:

• Not more than 2 tsp oil
• 3-4 oz protein
• A scant serving of a starch
• A leafy green
• Vegetables
• Only a pinch of salt (1/2 pinch for those with large fingers)

The “scant serving of starch” is mainly for me, a type 2 diabetic. A serving of a cooked starch is typically 1/2 cup, and I use 1/3 cup.

The idea of grub came from several months of recording what I ate and breaking it down into categories similar to the above. I finally grasped that I should start with the categories and then pick a food—for example, the protein might be tofu, tempeh, chicken, pork, fish, beef, or, as in this case, turkey breast tenderloin. So grub is food cooked more or less without regard to anything except nutritional balance.

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Very interesting recipe from this article by Felisa Rogers in Salon, which also includes the idea of sautéing broccoli slaw in olive oil and using that in lieu of pasta:

INGREDIENTS

• 10 Medjool dates
• 3 oz. goat cheese
• 1 tablespoon vanilla
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 2 tablespoons cocoa powder for dusting

1. Pit dates (If you are using a blender instead of a food processor, chop the dates before putting in the blender.)

2. Put dates, goat cheese, 1/4 cup of cocoa powder and vanilla in food processor and blend for 20 seconds. When the mixture is entirely smooth and coming together into a ball, it’s ready.

3. Put remaining cocoa powder on plate. Wet your hands slightly. Using your hands, roll the dough into little balls. Dust balls in cocoa powder.

4. Refrigerate for 30 minutes, and serve.

UPDATE: Forget about using the small bowl in the food processor: this requires the big one. It’s also very messy—and the resulting compound is extremely sticky, though rolling in the cocoa powder helps. I think this will be the last batch I make.

UPDATE 2, DAY 2: Well, maybe I was hasty. After sitting in the fridge overnight, these little puppies are terrific: rich, delicious, and not too sweet but definitely a sweet: very like regular truffles, in fact. I guess this is a keeper after all.

But I’m now thinking that, once you’ve processed them, it might be a good idea to chill them a bit so they’re not so sticky. Another test batch in the offing.

This is a useful article. Given that the Kitty Genovese account is now so much tainted by urban legend, I would prefer that it had been omitted, but the interviewee makes some good points.