Later On

Back from a day of fun, travel, and adventure, including a stop by a hardware store to pick up a 6-gallon cooler. Tomorrow morning I brave Whole Foods to get something to cook in it—a lamb chop or a steak, I imagine.

A couple we know through The Wife’s job is having a big holiday open-house today, so a shave seemed appropriate.

The thing on the left is Edwin Jagger Hydrating Pre-Shave Cream. It is unlike a pre-shave oil, and in an unusual turn, the product page lists things that are NOT in the product (e.g., parabens) but does not list the ingredients actually used. I’m a little taken aback by this approach, especially since the list of things not in the product is woefully incomplete (for example, I expect that list includes also coal tar, bananas, pencil shavings, …  a very long list), and we’re completely in the dark about things the product contains, that being of interest to people with allergies and skin sensitivities. I think we can take it as read that the product includes water (aqua), but what else? Don’t know.

Does it work? It’s hard to say after only one use, but it seems possible: unlike shaving oils, this product did not seem to interfere with the lather. OTOH, to determine whether it truly helps, one has to use it for a while. Certainly not a night-and-day difference, but I did get a very nice shave today, for which this may be partially responsible.

I also used, as you see, Martin de Candre soap, and once again picked up the Omega 11047 boar+badger brush. It works more like badger than like boar, BTW, and it does a super job.

The S3S with its Personna 74 blade performed superbly, as usual, and three passes later I was splashing on the Pashana.

UPDATE: In comments, someone in effect wanted the ingredients of the EJ cream:

Aqua, Cetearyl Ethylhexanoate, Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Extract, Butyrospermum Parkii (Shea Butter), Glycerin, Alcohol Denat, Glyceryl Stearate SE, Cetearyl Alcohol, Titanium Dioxide, Menthol, Cetearyl Glucoside, Ricinus Communis (Castor) Seed Oil, Zinc Oxide, Equisetum Arvense Extract, Arnica Montana Flower Extract, Retinyl Palmitate, Tocopheryl Acetate, Xanthan Gum, Camphor, Menthyl Lactate,  Methylchloroisothiazolinone, Methylisothiazolinone, Magnesium Nitrate, Magmesium Chloride.

For comparison, the ingredients of Noxema Deep Cleansing Cream:

Water, Stearic Acid, Linum Usitatissimum Seed Oil (Linseed), Glycine Soja Oil (Soybean), Fragrance, Ammonium Hydroxide, Camphor, Menthol, Eucalyptus Globulus Leaf Oil, Propylene Glycol, Gelatin, Calcium Hydroxide

The commenter suggested that the two products are the same. I don’t see that.

So my weight went up, and now I’m getting it back down by a return to rigorous observance of sensible eating. I had My Breakfast as usual, then for lunch and dinner:

2 tsp olive oil in 8″ cast-iron skillet. Heat, then add:

1/2 large onion, chopped

Sauté until onion softens and begins to brown, then add:

4 large cloves garlic plus 1″ piece of fresh ginger, minced (I used my Veggichop, which I’ve been making much use of lately)
2 handfuls chopped celery
7 oz sardine fillets, packed flat in sunflower oil (I drained rinsed with hot water to remove oil)
1/2 bunch red kale, chopped (including stalks)
1/2 c water

I cooked that briefly to wilt the kale some, then added:

1/4 c red quinoa, rinsed well
freshly ground pepper

I covered and simmered for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally and once adding a little water.

It made a nice dish, of which I planned to eat half for lunch and half for dinner. But it was tasty,and before I knew it the amount remaining was not 1/2 but 1/3.

So I spooned that out and brought water to boil in the kettle and poured about 1/2 cup over a like amount of dried Porcini mushrooms to reconstitute them.

While they sat, I put into the skillet:

1 tsp ghee
1/2 chopped onion

As before, I let that simmer, and while it simmer, then added:

1 big handful celery
1 small jar chopped pimento
10 Kalamata olives, halved
1/2 bunch red kale, chopped

I sautéed that for a while, added the leftover grub from lunch and the bowl of mushrooms with the water, covered, and cooked it for 30 minutes.

At the end of that time, it looked quite good. I added 2 Tbsp of red miso, mixed it in well, and it’s a delicious new dish, with few additional calories.

God knows the Iraqis didn’t like it, nor the Afghans, and now the discontent has spread to Libya as well. What on earth could make them react so hostilely to that sort of thing? It surely wouldn’t bother us, would it?

Thanks to The Son for pointing this out. Brace yourself:

This razor is one item in a giveaway on Wicked_Edge. The old scales were replaced by dirtychrome, as described here. The giveaway is described here. (It’s still active until midnight 31 Dec 2011, so sign up if interested: all you do to get the razor is post a comment saying you’re interested (step 1) and be lucky (step 2).) More photos of the razor.

And they’re not from Levenger (though you can buy them through Amazon). Note that they come in various sizes, as do books: Lilac, Clover, Jasmine, Freesia, and Rosemary are the sizes. (Challenge: Without looking, arrange those in order of bookstand size.) Here’s the home site. Do take a look: they’re ingenious, and there’s more to them than meets the eye in a casual glance. For example:

I don’t use a Neti pot myself, but until now it hasn’t been because of a fear of brain-eating amoebae. Still, that is in itself a pretty good reason to avoid them. Natalie Wolchover reports in Live Science:

Louisiana’s state health department has issued a warning about the dangers of improperly using nasal-irrigation devices called neti pots, responding to two recent deaths in the state that are thought to have resulted from “brain-eating amoebas” entering people’s brains through their sinuses while they were using the devices.

Both victims are believed to have filled their neti pots with tap water instead of manufacturer-recommended distilled or sterilized water. When they used these pots to force the water up their noses and flush out their sinus cavities — a treatment for colds and hay fever — a deadly amoeba living in the tap water, called Naegleria fowleri, worked its way from their sinuses into their brains. The parasitic organism infected the victims’ brains with a neurological disease called primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAME), which rapidly destroys neural tissue and typically kills sufferers in a matter of days. . .

Continue reading.

Interesting article by Bruce Bower in Science News on how face-recognition problems following brain injury helps understand how our brains process visual recognition. From the article:

. . . Support for the idea that brains use a general mechanism to recognize complex objects comes from deaf people who communicate with American Sign Language. Just as upside-down faces look weird and often unrecognizable to healthy volunteers, so do upside-down signs shown to fluent ASL users, say psychologists David Corina of the University of California, Davis, and Michael Grosvald of the University of California, Irvine.

Because healthy individuals perceive faces as whole entities, topsy-turvy faces look bizarre, Corina says. Likewise, ASL users learn to see signs as integrated sets of movements that look peculiar when inverted, the researchers propose in a paper published online December 6 inCognition. . .

Matt Hulan in comments was earlier speculating that our minds exploit a basic pattern-recognition routine in all sorts of contexts, and this is certainly consistent with that.

Take a look at this primer (and workarounds) for trying out sous-vide cooking. Sounds like it’s worth a while.

Thanks to TYD for pointing out the article. The heroine in question is a tiny (4′ 8″) nurse—read the story by Clark Boyd in The World:

Sixty-seven years ago today, the Battle of the Bulge, the largest and bloodiest battle of World War II, began in the Ardennes area in Belgium. The town of Bastogne was at the heart of that fight. Through the years, many stories of heroism emerged from Bastogne, but none quite like the one military historian Martin King tells of a 4’ 8” volunteer nurse who was born in the Belgian Congo.

King says that to fully understand her story, you have to understand the battle. So, he drives me around Bastogne in his battered Ford minivan.

At one point we pass a memorial commemorating Easy Company, 101st Airborne Division — the guys made famous by “Band of Brothers.”

Before long, King and I leave the van and go on foot through the trees. The temperature drops, as cold rain and sleet begin to fall.

King tells me that these are the very woods where Easy Company was dug in back in December 1944. The ground is still marked by deep craters.

“What I find remarkable,” King says, “is that 67 years after the fact, you can still quite clearly see the foxholes here.”

Originally from Scotland, King has lived and worked in Belgium for thirty years now. He’s interviewed countless veterans, and co-authored a book called “Voices of the Bulge.”

This, he tells me emphatically, was the scene of some of the most ferocious front line action in the Battle of Bulge. But he says to get the real flavor, you have to imagine it with two feet of snow, the ground frozen solid, and the fog so think you can’t see five feet in front of you.

“And the Germans,” he notes, “would have been a few hundred yards away.”

The German shelling and bombing of Bastogne were horrific back in December, 1944.

Allied medical supplies and personnel were hard to come by. Some locals, though, volunteered to help as nurses.

You might remember that in HBO’s “Band of Brothers” mini-series, there’s a scene set in Bastogne.

In it, a white Belgian nurse chats with an Army medic outside an aid station. They’re discussing another volunteer, a black nurse.

“Where’s she from? The black girl?” asks the medic.

“From the Congo,” answers the white nurse.

It turns out that “the black girl from the Congo” is not a fictional character. Her name’s Augusta Chiwy, and hers is one of the great untold war stories, says historian Martin King.

“The Snow! Oh, the Fog!”

“Augusta’s story is the most incredible thing I ever heard,” King tells me.

“You can take the hero story – he did so much that day, and shot all those people, and he had big guns. But this, to me, had something else. It had a humanity that I’d never come across.”

Augusta Chiwy was born in 1921 in the Belgian Congo. Her father was a white veterinarian, originally from Bastogne. Her mother was Congolese. . .

Continue reading.

Yesterday I used Dr. Bronner’s liquid Castile soap as my pre-shave soap, and today I thought I’d try the bar as a pre-shave soap. Quite good: once again, a wonderfully slick lather and finish. Dr. Bronner is a definite possibility for a pre-shave soap—and Zach even uses it as a shaving soap.

Today’s shaving soap is Provence Sante, another French soap. Like yesterday’s Joris and the day before’s Pré de Provence, I got a fine lather. This soap, like the Pré de Provence, also contains shea butter.

The star of the shave—well, perhaps a co-star—is the Omega 11047 boar/badger brush. I also had the Grosvenor boar/badger, but it didn’t work so well for me: the center of the knot seemed hollow somehow. But this Omega is a totally different story: excellent lather generation and amazing capacity, this brush is one that I’ll be using much more frequently. It’s just been sitting up there, on the top shelf, waiting its turn, but by Joe, this is a fine brush. Someone just asked me on Wicked_Edge about boar/badger combo brushes, which is why I brought it out, and now I’m glad I did. You should try it: at $16 it’s a cheap thrill, and I think it would make a dynamite travel brush in a prescription plastic pill bottle.

I let the brush soak in hot water while I showered—I find that badger doesn’t need this, but did it for the boar in the brush—boar likes the soaking. I got loads of lather for three very pleasant passes, using my Edwin Jagger Georgian with a newish Kai blade. A good big splash of D.R. Harris Pink After Shave, and I’m looking forward to a fine weekend. Hope you are, too.

Replanting the desert is a wonderful dream. You may be familiar with this movie, made from the novel:

A Dutch agronomist has invented a device to assist in the planting of trees in the desert:

His organization, Groasis, is at work on this project now. Here’s a Popular Science mention.

A report worth reading. Our legislators are paralyzed, however, so I don’t anticipate much constructive action for the next few years. George Murkin writes at the Count the Cost blog:

Far from eliminating drug use and the illicit trade, prohibition has inadvertently fuelled the development of the world’s largest illegal commodities market – a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars, controlled solely by criminal profiteers. Produced in collaboration with project supporters Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, Transform Drug Policy Foundation, Release, theInternational Centre for Science in Drug Policy and Harm Reduction International, the latest Count the Costs briefing outlines how this illicit, unregulated market generates:

• Organised crime
• Street crime
• Mass incarceration
• Violent crime
• Crimes perpetrated by governments/states
• Vast economic costs in terms of drug war-related enforcement

The briefing will form a key part of our outreach to mainstream NGOs working in the criminal justice sector, building on the endorsements Count the Costs has already received from organisations such as the Howard League for Penal Reformand Make Justice Work.

Evidence from across the world reveals that although law enforcement can show seemingly impressive results in terms of arrests and seizures, impacts on the drug market are inevitably marginal, localised and temporary. Indeed, as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime acknowledges, one of the unintended consequences of the war on drugs is the so-called “balloon effect”, whereby rather than eliminating criminal activity, enforcement just moves it somewhere else. When enforcement does take out criminals, it also creates a vacuum, and even more violence, as rival gangs fight for control.

The Count the Costs initiative has the widely shared goal of a safer, healthier and more just world. It is time for all sectors affected by current approaches to drugs, particularly those agencies, organisations and individuals concerned with crime reduction, to call on governments and the UN to Count the Costs of the war on drugs and explore the alternatives.

Take a look. Could be useful.

A very fine all-French shave. The Joris soap is new, and I unfortunately situated the box to hide the brand. But it is Joris (as is the razor), and it made a fine lather with the Plisson Chinese Grey brush which The Wife brought me from Paris one time—a different time from when she brought me the Joris razor in the photo: palladium plated, holding a Gillette 7 O’Clock SharpEdge blade.

This is, I believe, the same head as the new Mühle open-comb, and psywiped on Wicked_Edge is right: it works fine if you maintain a very shallow angle: focus on keeping the cap’s leading edge, just behind the cutting edge of the blade, in contact with the skin and forget about the guard altogether. With this orientation, the razor does an efficient, smooth, and trouble-free job, but if you increase the angle at all, by placing the combed guard on the face, watch out! Razor burn and frequent nicks. The proper angle, however, tames it totally.

A splash of New York aftershave from Parfums de Nicolaï (of Paris), and I’m good to go.

UPDATE: Oops, not a completely French shave, unless Dr. Bronner is French. After reading this encomium to Dr. Bronner’s as a shave-related soap, I went and bought a little bottle of the Peppermint. Now that will wake you up, and menthol fans will love the cooling sensation. I used it as a pre-shave soap, and it definitely did the job: very slick, very nice prep for lather. I haven’t tried it as a shave soap yet, and I think I might acquire a bottle of the Lavender. I did also get a bar of the Rose soap (a solid bar), which I want to try as a pre-shave soap as well.

In the next edition, the pre-shave soap section will be greatly enhanced.

I jumped the gun—first time that‘s ever happened. The package, mailed the Monday after Thanksgiving, was delivered tonight, just a bit ago. That’s a long time compared to usual package transit time from here to there. (This isn’t the first package I’ve shipped.) But all’s well that ends well.

A new wrinkle on immunity from the rules. This is a natural extension: officers (field rank and above) and many in positions of power (Supreme Court justices, for example, who do not have to recuse themselves for blatant conflicts of interest; CIA torturers; banks (foreclosing on mortgages that had already been paid in full and retired), and so on—the list grows longer and longer as the US slowly sinks into the sunset, cruising away from the rule of law and into the rule of oligarchs in a plutocracy: a very well-armed and highly informed plutocracy). In this case the corruption is the whole process that taints the decorations it awards.

UPDATE: I’ve revised the title and above in acknowledgment that the fault lies not with the Marine himself, who seems more or less a pawn in a “decorations-awarded war” among the services. It’s the corruption of the process that is properly the (unpunished) villain in the piece, not the recipient of the award.

I have just begun A Beautiful Blue Death, by Charles Finch, and on page 12 come upon a description of the welcome arrival of tea time on a wintry afternoon in 1865. We are in the London abode of a bachelor, age around 40 and of independent means (note the significant plural—the singular plural, one might say—below):

The tea tray sat on a small side table by his chair, next to a stack of books, several of which had fallen to the floor, where he had left them the night before. The servants had learned by now to leave his library as he left it, except for an occasional dusting. He poured a healthy cup of tea, took a large scoop of sugar and a splash of milk, and then turned his attention to the plate of toast. Graham had thoughtfully added a small cake, which was a rare treat. But then, it had been a trying day.

At that point it struck me that, to a Martian observing the scene, it would be much like any situation in which a person has a large and dangerous pet—say a pet lion—and thus studies carefully the animal’s habits and disposition and goes to some lengths to keep it placid at least, happy even better—but not too happy. But definitely not irritated and at all costs not angry.

So little treats—like the cake on a trying, cold, dark, wintry day: little enough to do, really, at this point an automatic adjustment to the master’s mood to keep things on an even keel.

And I suspect the same lessons and understandings must be imparted to the master as to the lion: yes, the other is big and powerful and it’s really no contest, BUT: we must understand whom is in charge, and we must establish the lines that cannot be crossed. Et cetera.

Were I in service, I would definitely picture it this way, internally: it makes the whole thing so much more interesting.