Later On

Very important message to get out in order to help end the War on Drugs—which otherwise is an endless war. Paul Butler writes in the NY Times:

IF you are ever on a jury in a marijuana case, I recommend that you vote “not guilty” — even if you think the defendant actually smoked pot, or sold it to another consenting adult. As a juror, you have this power under the Bill of Rights; if you exercise it, you become part of a proud tradition of American jurors who helped make our laws fairer.

The information I have just provided — about a constitutional doctrine called “jury nullification” — is absolutely true. But if federal prosecutors in New York get their way, telling the truth to potential jurors could result in a six-month prison sentence.

Earlier this year, prosecutors charged Julian P. Heicklen, a retired chemistry professor, with jury tampering because he stood outside the federal courthouse in Manhattan providing information about jury nullification to passers-by. Given that I have been recommending nullification for nonviolent drug cases since 1995 — in such forums as The Yale Law Journal, “60 Minutes” and YouTube — I guess I, too, have committed a crime.

The prosecutors who charged Mr. Heicklen said that “advocacy of jury nullification, directed as it is to jurors, would be both criminal and without constitutional protections no matter where it occurred.” The prosecutors in this case are wrong. The First Amendment exists to protect speech like this — honest information that the government prefers citizens not know. . .

Continue reading. For more on authoritarianism, see the free PDF book The Authoritarians.

Did Greeks of the Classical era (ca 500-400 BCE) chew with their mouths shut as a matter of etiquette? Or did they chomp away with food flying in every direction? (It makes a difference in my visualization of the feast in Plato’s Symposium.)

UPDATE: I’m thinking that chewing with your mouth shut was not a point of etiquette in Classical Athens. Reason: If it were, in the plays and comedies and other writings we would probably encounter people characterized as “uncouth” by their manner of eating. The lack of any such references is consistent with customs that allowed the type of eating seen in some cultures in which visceral enjoyment of food is communicated with eating noises: lip-smacking, open-mouth vigorous chewing, slurping, belching, and the like. Given the olfactory challenges of life at that time (as described in Extra Virginity), I think a modern visitor transported to the time might view the people of Classical Athens as pigs on stilts. Possibly.

First, the stage is set:

Lamb chop, garlic, fresh thyme and rosemary, and Penzey’s Northwoods seasoning. Also used kosher salt and freshly ground pepper. Bagged:

The bag after I tried to vacuum-seal it:

It wasn’t a very good vacuum seal, and in fact it leaked. But, hey, I’ve had lamb cooked in water before, and it didn’t leak much. I tried to fix.

The key fact I overlooked is that the beer coolers are designed to keep heat out, not keep heat in. Thus the bottom and sides are well-insulated, but the top not so much—no need if you’re packing cold stuff: cold air sinks, so once the chest is cold, it will stay pretty cold even without a lid (as anyone who’s tried to defrost something in a deep bowl has discovered), so the lid that’s there is thinly insulated—at least more thinly than it would have been if these coolers (significant name) had been designed to also keep foods hot.

So the insulating cover of towels is very important to maintain heat, as I discovered: without them, the heat drops fairly fast.

Still, the chop was in water around 145ºF for three hours: it was definitely done. I discarded the aromatics, heated a little oil in a cast-iron skillet, and quickly browned the chop on all sides, particularly the fat.

Incredibly tasty and juicy and good. This really does work well. I immediately ordered a better way to vacuum-seal bags, and tomorrow when I cook a swordfish steak sous-vide (only with olive oil instead of the butter suggested at the link, and also thinly sliced Meyer lemon, crushed garlic, thyme, chopped Kalamata olives), I’ll use some freezer bags I have that use a double-ziplock seal and hope that keeps out the water. And tomorrow I’ll remember the layer of towels.

On Wicked_Edge I suggested that a favorite search for “Hoffritz” on eBay and a patient wait will sooner or later deliver a mint-condition Hoffritz Slant Bar with notation from seller, “No box. Razor seems bent. BIN $3.50″.

I got to thinking about the ethics exploiting the seller’s ignorance to buy something of great value at a pittance. The prime example, I suppose, is the guy who bought a very valuable star sapphire at the Tucson gem show (which The Wife attends)  and paid $10 for while knowing the actual value. That much is true, though the “actual value” was in the thousands rather than millions. (See the Snopes explanation.) Whether thousands or millions, it was acquiring something whose value greatly exceeded the price the seller had set, and the buyer knew that. Ethical? or not?

Now this is different from the buyer thinking something is more valuable than does the seller—indeed, were it not for such differences of opinion, the stock market (to take one example) would cease to exist.

So: what is one to do? In the case of evident ignorance of the value of the item, does the ethical buyer educate the seller? I think so. But in an ordinary transaction? The very transaction depends on our differing opinions.

I guess the question is: When is a bargain such a bargain that the purchase is unethical? One thinks of people with their backs to the wall having to sell treasures for pittance. I think it’s one thing to trade a Rembrandt for a pot of potatoes when the person selling the potatoes doesn’t really want to sell them but recognizes the need of the buyer and accepts the trade because the buyer has pride and nothing else to offer, and quite another when the swank lad from uptown gets out of his limo to snatch up a Rembrandt (which he could readily afford at retail) for the price of a meal or two.

I suppose at heart I’m not really much of a capitalist, though I do recognize some strengths of capitalism. But few systems are completely free of all weaknesses, and lately those weaknesses that plague capitalism have been on full display.

A discussion at Wicked_Edge on the sapphire-bladed razor ($100,000) brought up the idea of obsidian razors, which is intriguing:

The illustration is from this page of an anthropology text.

Those stupid scientists! Don’t they realize that the whole obesity thing has already been resolved? “Eat less, move more”: that’s the full story right there. But pesky scientists keep looking around and finding new things, like:

The image above is from a very intriguing PDF (click it twice to enlarge to full size), which itself is linked to an article by Beverly J. Tepper and Kathleen L. Keller:

The first inkling of a genetic basis for perceiving fat came from research on a different sensation: bitterness. One anecdotal report from the 1960s suggested that people who were more sensitive to the bitter taste of the thiourea PTC had leaner bodies than those who were less sensitive. This sensitivity correlated with other anatomical changes in the mouth that could allow for detection of fat by way of its texture.

Read the full story.

From TYD:

Here’s the general procedure, and here’s a lamb-specific recipe. I’m doing a single lamb chop, 0.4 lbs (including the bone)—probably about 5-6 oz meat: enough for a hearty meal.

It will be a modest meal. What with one thing and another, my weight slipped up above the Panic Point (180 lbs), to 184. But now I know what I’m doing, and this morning it’s 179.2. I still have to get it below 175 (175-180 is the red zone for me, above 180 the panic zone), so I’m following my regimen of the two fruit snacks, my good breakfast (even better with the cocoa powder), and lunch and dinner following the meal template. The key is not willpower but patience. It will go down, that I know.

This shave goes out to Zaine Ridling, happy owner of a new OSS, the featured razor in today’s shave:

The superprep was my breaking in four new Omega boar brushes: soaked them all while I showered, and then worked up with each a good lather, lathered my beard well, working it in, then rinsed and set aside the brush, rinsed off the lather, and went to the next brush.

After all four brushes had been exercised, I rinsed again and washed my beard with my latest pre-shave soap experiment, Neutrogena (thanks to Steve of Kafeneio for the suggestion). Neutrogena turns out to be another high-glycerine soap that leaves a pleasant slippery residue after a partial rinse, and I applied the excellent Czech & Speake lather I worked up with the Wee Scot.

Man, was my beard prepped! The OSS simply glided over the skin, stubble wiped away in the process. The previously used Shark Super Chrome blade is still in excellent shape, and I had a fully enjoyable shave.

A splash of Alpa 378, and I’m ready for the day.

Tune in again tomorrow for another fine shave.

I got to thinking more about groups and how we see ourselves as members of various groups. Groups, save for “groups” based purely on physical proximity, are really defined by memes: Americans, Boy Scouts, surfer, Raiders fan, whatever: groups are defined by certain memes.

I was thinking about how organic, natural processes are “wasteful” in a sense: do “a lot, because most will mess up, but some will make it, and that’s enough to continue” sort of thing: semen, mayflies and mayfly eggs, and so on and on. And at every level this pattern—a core of healthy survivors surrounded by an extensive fringe of specimens with a various range of defects.

On the physical level, we have natural athletes (very few), most of us, and people with severe physical problems/deformities (very few): the well-known Bell curve. But save for a very few, people have some degree of physical imperfection, ranging from minor to serious.

Same thing with our brains/minds: some few spectacularly successful, some going wrong one way or another (dull, evil, crazy, neurotic, whatever).

And the same way with memes—let’s assume, just to keep going, that memes and groups are equivalent: every meme defines a group, every “group” exists because of a (set of) memes. But some groups (i.e., memes) go bad, are unhealthy, get sick/deformed. I was thinking of the coterie of crooks and frauds polluting the global food supply with poisonous adulterants (I’m thinking of the olive oil book I’m reading, but think of the Chinese, the American meatpackers, the…  well, you know what’s going on), when I suddenly recalled the sick, damaging, and ultimately deadly hazing rituals of the Florida A&M Marching Band. Now there’s a group that has gone terribly bad.

Well, of course: won’t groups follow the same pattern as our physical selves and our mental selves: some few that are excellent, the rest all flawed, most of them moderately, but some seriously bad. That’s just the way reality works.

So I started watching Carrier, a documentary series about a six-month deployment of the carrier Nimitz to the Persian Gulf. The documentary opens at the beginning of the crew, with some talks to the new crew. The differences between the reality and as depicted in movies is interesting: for example, most people seem terribly miscast, and it’s hard to spot the protagonist(s), and without background music to guide you, it’s easy to miss significant things, and the talks are more straightforward, down-to-earth, and practical/sensible than talks in most movies I’ve seen.

I realized that I was watching the deliberate (and practiced) formation of a healthy group: setting in place the structures/expectations/worldviews/assumptions to form and guide the group so it would be functional. And everyone buys in: they all want the group to succeed, and they know their lives may depend on the group being a healthy group. Some of the talk is directed to forming healthy subgroups so that the overall group will be healthy.

It shows what is possible, though of course a carrier is smaller than a city, much less a country. But when people pull together—and know what they’re doing—healthy groups can form quickly. And of course the military has had a lot of practice doing this, knows quite well that their lives may depend on a group’s being healthy (not to say that all military groups are: think Abu Ghraib), and has procedures in place to build groups and good group consciousness in terms of the effects on and from groups of things like “command presence” and the like.

So we have lots of groups, some few healthy, some very sick, most to some extent dysfunctional. How does one fix a group?

In talking with The Wife, I mentioned gangs as groups gone wrong, and she told me of hearing how individual gang members do things that they personally disagree with or even abhor, simply in order to maintain credibility as a member of the group. Even when every single member of the gang privately believes (for example) that killing a random member of another gang for retaliation or reputation is wrong, they will do it any way because the group meme includes that: “We are members of Gang X, and Gang X always takes revenge—that’s part of who we are,” and indeed, remembering how people derive identity from a group, that indeed is part of who they are and in fact controls their action, more so than their “private” identity: the group meme says to kill a member of Gang Y, so the member of Gang X does that even though his or her inner thought is that it is wrong. But the meme is in control, not the individual. This is an example of the meme totally controlling the group, so that each member is forced to do things against his or her individual will because the meme is in control.

That, The Wife said, is an example of cult-like behavior: doing something you consciously do not want to do because the group meme requires it—in particular if no single member of the group wants to do it.

So how do you fix it? It’s now clearer to me why it’s so difficult to remove a person from such a group: the group is who s/he is. The group decides what s/he will do. The group is in charge, and the person is but a member of the group. So leaving the group feels to the ego (sucked up into the group) like dying, ceasing to exist. No wonder they fight it.

Of course, many such groups do indeed die out: they can’t hold together because of the problems. But some, like gangs and the military, are skilled at finding and indoctrinating new members and also have strong enforcement mechanisms.

So one way groups change is by mutation, as it were: a person from within the group and is recognized as part of the group, gains power and gets the group to change direction. Charlemagne is an obvious example. This works because the changer is accepted by the group and also understands the group.

Changing a group from the outside, like the Italian government’s hopeless (and hopelessly compromised) attempt to regulate the olive oil industry, is practically impossible: you can wound the group, but it recovers and recruits new members—grows new arms and legs—and continues: the meme defining the group is strongly reinforced by multiple other memes and thus difficult to dislodge.

It would be nice if I knew precise and defined terminology for talking about group mechanisms, structures, and processes. I suppose I should read up on small-group sociology just to get vocabulary and concepts.

From Livestrong.com:

When the National Sleep Foundation announced that Americans were sleeping less with each passing year—and spiking in 2011—it ignited an immediate red flag. For one, it made me focus more on my own sleep struggles. (yes, I’m guilty too) But more importantly, it highlighted a strong potential underlying cause of the obesity battle in adults. Sleep isn’t just important for creating mental clarity, reducing the risk of diabetes and heart problems, and fighting off depression. The amount of sleep you get is directly linked to the ease with which you lose weight and build muscle.

Consider the following facts:

Just three consecutive nights of bad sleep can increase insulin resistance, says researchers. Translation: you’re more likely to store fat.

People who sleep less than 6 hours per night also eat an ADDITIONAL 220 calories per day.

Sleeping less alters your hormones, forcing you to experience great and more intense feelings of hunger.

See the trend? Sleep might be the most under-rated aspect of living a healthy life. And that’s exactly why we should all make it a bigger priority in the upcoming year. No excuses.

Other tips at the link.

I suspect we’ll see more and more of the sort of thing described in this article as more and more data are readily accessible in digital form, and as pattern recognition algorithms become more varied and powerful. Rachel Ehrenberg reports in Science News:

Two extraordinarily large trading days for Citigroup shares in the fall of 2007 hint that someone may have been manipulating the stock, say analysts who mine financial data using powerful computers and mathematical algorithms.

Researchers from the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Mass., were examining stock trading data for the period January 2007 to January 2009 when they noticed two unusually large spikes in volume and other measures related to Citigroup shares. On November 1, 2007, the team noted, the number of borrowed Citigroup shares jumped by 100 million, reaching a value of almost $6 billion. Six days later, a similar number of borrowed shares were returned on a single day, the team reports online December 14 at arXiv.org. The estimated gain for the investors who made the transactions was at least $640 million.

Such extreme events would be expected only once in a few hundred years, says Yaneer Bar-Yam, coauthor of the work. The likelihood of seeing those events six days apart is once in 4 billion years, the researchers’ calculations show. This suggests to Bar-Yam and his colleagues that the stock was being manipulated to artificially drive down Citigroup’s stock price.

The researchers were investigating short selling, whereby an investor borrows shares and sells them immediately, with the promise to buy them back at a later date to repay the loan. If the stock’s price drops between the transactions, the borrower will make a profit.

Selling short can benefit the market by providing a check on overvalued stocks. But traders can also conspire to sell short with the intent of forcing a stock price down artificially. Such a move, known as a bear raid, is considered market manipulation. . .

Continue reading.

More on harmful effects of BPA, a common accidental ingredient in many foods stored in plastic or in cans with special lines (as with canned tomato products). Janet Raloff reports in Science News:

Bisphenol A toys with the female heart, a new study finds. And under the right conditions, its authors worry, this near-ubiquitous pollutant might even prove deadly.

BPA is a building block of clear hard plastics, dental sealants and the resins lining food cans. Studies have shown that throughout the industrial world, nearly everyone regularly encounters the compound, albeit at trace concentrations.

That’s small consolation, says Laura Vandenberg of Tufts University in Medford, Mass.: In the new BPA study, “the most effective dose was very close to — if not completely overlapping — what’s been reported in humans,” she says.

Parts-per-trillion concentrations of BPA triggered heart-muscle cells to begin beating to their own internal drummers. These cells should instead hold off beating until they receive signals from a central pacemaker, explains Hong-Sheng Wang of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, whose team conducted the new study. The resulting arrhythmia, known as fibrillation, caused by unsynchronized beating can trigger sudden cardiac death, Wang says.

BPA mimics the hormone estrogen in the body. In 2009, the Cincinnati team showed that both estrogen and BPA could alter contraction rates in heart cells — but only those from female animals. The researchers recently linked this finding to estrogen’s effect on calcium, which plays a pivotal role in heart-cell contractions. Both estrogen and BPA — especially together — fostered a leakiness of calcium within female heart cells, the team reported in the Sept. 27 PLoS ONE.

Those researchers have now linked this gender-specific effect to . . .

Continue reading. The FDA currently has no problems with BPA, but under pressure they are beginning to investigate. I believe that the EU has long since taken action on this.

A question was raised about the relative merits of the Frank Shaving brushes and Lijun shaving brushes, so I used both in this mornings shave.

I also tried a puck of A Wild Soap Bar’s Sassafras shaving soap. Ingredients:

Premium saponified organic extra virgin olive, organic palm, organic coconut, organic cocoa butter & organic castor oils, organic aloe, essential oils (orange, lavandin, cinnamon, patchouli, clove, bay), calcium bentonite clay, wild sassafras root bark, organic cinnamon, vegetable glycerin, sea salt

The presence of olive oil in a shaving soap is a red flag, in general, and this soap exhibited why: dying lather. The third pass was made with scanty lather because olive-oil based shaving soaps seem unable to create a lather that will last for more than one or two passes.

OTOH, the shave worked out well, and I discovered that the Frank brush seemed softer and denser than the Lijun, which was more resilient. Both were perfectly adequate and both worked well, but the Frank was somewhat more luxurious feeling.

I came across the l’Occitane Cade shaving oil in doing some rearranging and used it today afer the third pass, for an Oil Pass—mainly because I like the fragrance.

My Edwin Jagger razor did its usual excellent job. I’m somewhat surprised at the popularity of the Merkur 180 when an Edwin Jagger DE8x is available at the same price with a better head. So it goes.

Geo. F. Trumper Coral Skin Food to end a fine shave.

I’m reading Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, and it’s just as fascinating as I expected. Two passages, the first from page 19:

Olive oil is the only commercially significant vegetable oil to be extract from a fruit rather than from seeds, like sunflower, canola, and soy oil. [I assume avocado oil is from the fruit as well, and corn oil is another oil extracted from seeds. - LG] Since the fruit contains considerable water, extraction can be done by mechanical methods alone, with a centriguge or a press, whereas extracting seed oils generally requires the use of industrial solvents, typically hexane. To remove this solvent from seed oils, as well as to eliminate the unpreasant tastes and odors they normally have, they must be processed in a refinery, where they undergo high-temperature desolvenization, neutralization, deodorization, bleaching, and degumming. The end result is a tasteless, odorless, colorless liquid fat. Olive  oil, instead, can simply be pressed or spun out of the olive pulp, yielding a fresh-squeezed fruit juice with all of its natural tastes, aromas, and health-enhacing ingredients intact. By the same token, olive oil is the only oil for which the quality of the raw materials—the olive fruit–is of fundamental importance to the quality of the oil. You need prime olives to make extra-virgin oil, but you can extract industry-standard seed oil from low-grade seeds.

And later, from page 21:

The vast majority of producers in the region were turning out lampante oil [instead of extra-virgin - LG], which they made from overripe, windfall olives gathered up off the ground. Lampante oil was sold to refineries, where its unpleasant flavors and odors were removed with heat treatments, activated carbon, and other processes, yielding “refined olive oil,” a clear, tasteless, odorless liquid fat which, with the addition of a small amount of extra-virgin oil, is sold in stores as “olive oil.”

The book explains the great problem of counterfeit extra-virgin olive oil, with a Gresham’s law operating in the industry that is driving producers of true extra-virgin olive oil out of business: the cost of making true extra-virgin olive oil is substantially above making the refined product described above and then labeling it “extra-virgin olive oil.” As he writes on page 23:

To meet the legal requirements for taste and chemical properties of the extra-virgin grade, an oil must be made from healthy, expertly picked olives, milled within twenty-four hours of the harvest to preserve their flavors and avoid spoilage. So it’s far more difficult, expensive, and labor intensive to produce than lampante oil from windfall olives. Yet if law enforcement is lax, extra-virgin oil can easily be cut with cheaper oils, made with inferior olives or other substances entirely, creating unfair competition for honest producers. “Some of my customers see that I charge €8 for a liter of oil, a price that barely covers my costs, and they call me a thief,” Grazia said with a bitter smile. “They tell me they’ve just bought a 100 percent Italian, extra-virgin oil at the supermarket for €1.90. But behind the fancy label, I want to see what’s really in that bottle, when even lousy, fake extra virgin oil sells wholesale for €2 a liter!”

It’s a scary book, and on my trip to Whole Foods to buy a few things for an anchovy-spinach-tomato-mushroom-onion-garlic-lemon sauce for some pasta (cooking in the sauce now: I prefer to cook pasta in sauce rather than in water; YMMV), I also bought a bottle McEvoy extra-virgin olive oil, “grown, harvested, milled, blended, and bottled entirely on the ranch” here in California. That, I trust.

I highly recommend this book to you if you ever eat olive oil, or even have thought about eating olive oil, or have not considered eating olive oil.

The situation described in this NY Times op-ed by Nicholas Peat shows serious failures of leadership and education:

WHEN I was 14, my mother told me not to panic if a police officer stopped me. And she cautioned me to carry ID and never run away from the police or I could be shot. In the nine years since my mother gave me this advice, I have had numerous occasions to consider her wisdom.

One evening in August of 2006, I was celebrating my 18th birthday with my cousin and a friend. We were staying at my sister’s house on 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan and decided to walk to a nearby place and get some burgers. It was closed so we sat on benches in the median strip that runs down the middle of Broadway. We were talking, watching the night go by, enjoying the evening when suddenly, and out of nowhere, squad cars surrounded us. A policeman yelled from the window, “Get on the ground!”

I was stunned. And I was scared. Then I was on the ground — with a gun pointed at me. I couldn’t see what was happening but I could feel a policeman’s hand reach into my pocket and remove my wallet. Apparently he looked through and found the ID I kept there. “Happy Birthday,” he said sarcastically. The officers questioned my cousin and friend, asked what they were doing in town, and then said goodnight and left us on the sidewalk.

Less than two years later, in the spring of 2008, N.Y.P.D. officers stopped and frisked me, again. And for no apparent reason. This time I was leaving my grandmother’s home in Flatbush, Brooklyn; a squad car passed me as I walked down East 49th Street to the bus stop. The car backed up. Three officers jumped out. Not again. The officers ordered me to stand, hands against a garage door, fished my wallet out of my pocket and looked at my ID. Then they let me go.

I was stopped again in September of 2010. This time I was just walking home from the gym. It was the same routine: I was stopped, frisked, searched, ID’d and let go.

These experiences changed the way I felt about the police. After the third incident I worried when . . .

Continue reading.

The plan is complicated, but if you really want to use nytimes.com to read stories, you now must pay $195/year. That seems pretty steep to me, so I doubt that I’ll buy it—and thus fewer news articles, which on the whole is probably a plus, given the negative direction of the news.

I understand that $195/year = 53¢/day, and perhaps I can get myself to think of it that way if I need to justify the expense. But I’m going to try going without.

Of course, we have already had examples in which bad-faith performance on the part of prosecuting attorneys and district attorneys turns out to be protected: officeholders are immune from prosecution regardless of dishonesty in the discharge of their duties—specifically hiding evidence that proves the person under indictment was innocent. See this decision regarding Harry Connick, Sr., a serial offender in this sort of thing. (Google will show you what I mean—or even Wikipedia. This NY Times article is also of interest.)

Texas has a terrible track record, and they continue their course, as reported in the LA Times by Molly Hennessy-Fiske and David G. Savage:

The case of a grocery store clerk wrongly convicted of murdering his wife has rocked the legal system across Texas, and not just because an innocent man served 25 years of a life sentence.

Supporters of Michael Morton, who was set free in October, say he might never been convicted if a prominent prosecutor had shared significant evidence with the defense at the time of the trial.

“Mr. Morton was the victim of serious prosecutorial misconduct that … completely ripped apart his family,” said Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project in New York, which represented Morton in his appeal.

On Monday, Morton and his lawyers plan to ask District Judge Sid Harle to take action against the lead prosecutor in the case, Ken Anderson, now a county judge.

The case highlights what critics say has become a recurring problem in Texas and across the nation: prosecutors concealing evidence that could undercut their cases.

The Supreme Court, in the landmark Brady vs. Maryland ruling in 1963, said prosecutors have a duty to share evidence that indicates a defendant is not guilty. But critics say more checks are needed to ensure prosecutors hand over such evidence.

“We have similar problems with discovery everywhere,” Scheck said, speaking of the process in which the defense and the prosecution disclose their evidence to each other. “True discovery reform is really needed. We have to have real transparency.” . . .

Continue reading.

We succeed by standing on the shoulders of others.

This morning I wanted to use my D.R. Harris stick, both to confirm its excellence for me and to try the Lavender fragrance of this new stick. Because I liked the Omega 11047 boar+badger so much, this morning I used the Omega 599 badger: all badger instead of a mix. It’s a fine brush, and I got a copious, dense, lovely lather. But is it 3 times better than the 11047 (selling at $49 vs. $16)? I would say not. I like both brushes, and the badger may be a little better, but not that much better.

Still, with a terrific lather applied atop my Dr.-Bronner-washed beard, I greatly enjoyed a very smooth and close three-pass shave using a Schick Platinum Plus blade in my Gillette Toggle: an unusual design, but a shaving action indistinguishable from a Fat Boy.

A hearty splash of Paul Sebastian, and I’m ready for the day: to the PO (thank heavens for the pre-printed shipping labels that allow me to drop off Priority mail without waiting in line), to Whole Foods (starting to accumulate nuts and berries for our Christmas dinner—specifically, pecans and dried cranberries for the wild-rice pilaf suggested by The Eldest), and to await a Wicked_Edge redditor who plans to stop by.