Shredder lubricant: who knew?

It makes sense that the cutting blades of a document shredder would need lubrication. And so Staples has these, which are flat sealed packs containing (I suppose) something like an oil-soaked paper towel. You don’t open the pack: you just take one and shred it, and then briefly reverse the shredder to complete the lubrication.

Leisureguy’s Last-Pass Shave Oil™

Bongoman has an interesting idea in a comment below: make one’s own shaving oil. That sounds appealing to me. After an experimental batch, I’m now using the following mix. I dropped Jojoba oil from the formula because I thought that it didn’t add much and also because all the others are cooking oils—so that if I mix up a little batch and have some left over, I can then just pour it into the sauté pan or use it on a salad (before the essential oils are added, of course).

2 parts Almond oil
2 parts Avocado oil
2 parts Olive oil
1 part Grapeseed oil
1 part Macadamia nut oil
1-2 drops essential oil(s) (for fragrance)—or however much you want

The essential oils I picked to try: sandalwood, lemon, vanilla, neroli, ylang ylang, and majmua. (One at a time, generally speaking, though I did do a batch of lemon + vanilla, which was very nice.) It’s important, BTW, to add only one (1) drop of the essential oil and then try the mix—you can always add another drop if needed, but removing a drop is impossible.

Useful equivalences for making small batches: 2 Tbs = 1 fluid ounce, and 3 tsp = 1 Tbs. Knowing this, you can readily figure out how many ounces you’ll make if you use regular measuring spoons: for example, if 1 part = 1 tsp, the result 1 1/3 fl oz. If 1 part = 1 Tbsp, the result is 4 fl oz (which is 1/2 cup).

All the oils listed have well established histories of cosmetic use and don’t tend to go quickly rancid (as does, say, flaxseed oil). They are all listed as being good for the skin. And with the Jojoba oil out of the mix, they are all cooking oils.

You could also pierce a few vitamin E capsules and add 2000 IU of vitamin E if you want. (We used to squirt some vitamin E into the cooking oil in the sauté pan so that it wouldn’t oxidize so quickly.) But several of the oils already contain vitamin E, so it’s probably coals to Newcastle.

You can readily find plastic dispensers: for example this one (natural) or this one (cobalt blue). The “treatment pump” top (which you can get in white or in black) works just right to dispense a drop or two per push: exactly the right top for this application.

Now I’ve printed up some labels with Leisureguy’s Last-Pass Shave Oil™ and I’m good to go with gifts for all the shavers I know. (Great stocking stuffers, eh?)

Notes from a nice day

For lunch I made the Soroboro, following the recipe at the link except that I added some crushed red pepper to the sesame oil at the beginning. It was delicious over rice, and I realized that this was exactly what I used to have a little Chinese restaurant behind Bookshop Santa Cruz back in the pre-earthquake days. It was called “spicy dan-dan,” and you could get it over noodles or rice. I always got spicy dan-dan over rice with steamed vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, etc.), and I loved it. A great lunchtime treat. I’ll keep this on hand from now on. (I used ground bison for the meat.)

For dinner, The Wife and I had Lobel’s Natural Prime dry-aged 12-oz boneless ribeye steaks, cooked in the hot oven/skillet method. I used Maldon salt, she used coarse sea salt, and we both used pepper. My god! it was good. We had a very good Italian wine, somewhat like a Barbera, and two sliced tomatoes. Pretty much a carnivore’s meal.

The steak was from a gift certificate from The Son and The Younger Daughter, so we called them to let them know how luscious the steak had been. Now I want to figure out what to cook in the cast-iron skillet tomorrow to use that flavor…

Why the telecoms are desperate for immunity

Because they’re guilty as hell:

One sunny day in San Francisco two winters ago, a retired telecommunications technician with an understandable distrust of telephones stepped off a BART train after a short but fateful ride. His name was Mark Klein, and his destination was a red brick office building in an untouristed part of the city dominated by low-rise warehouses. There he met with a small group of maverick, tech-savvy lawyers called the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

For Klein, then 60, this trip was a long time coming. As a veteran telecommunications technician and computer network associate at AT&T, he had in recent years obtained several company documents that described in specific, technical terms a secret room he says the National Security Agency (NSA) had set up on the sixth floor of an AT&T building downtown. Klein entered the room itself only once, and that was just for a couple of minutes. (Generally, people needed a security clearance to gain access.) However, just one floor above, he managed the Internet-traffic room to which it was electronically connected. Through that work, the documents he gathered, and conversations he had with other employees, Klein came to understand that his employer was colluding with the federal government to siphon a copy of billions of domestic Internet communications into that secret room, every second of every day. And all without a warrant. “Even Nixon didn’t go that far,” Klein thought. As he later told MSNBC, the situation made him think of George Orwell’s classic 1984. “Here I was, being forced to connect the Big Brother machine.” However, after complaining to a supervisor, with no result, he did not pursue the matter. He retired in 2004.

Then, in December 2005, the New York Times outed the Bush administration’s warrantless domestic-surveillance program, which the administration subsequently defended as an effort to monitor no more than a handful of phone calls to the Middle East. This convinced Klein that the time was finally right to share his inside information.

His timing was better than he imagined: When he knocked on EFF’s door that day in January 2006, the lawyers inside were already working feverishly to craft a class action against the nation’s largest telecommunications company.

Inexpensive organization for storage

This is a cute idea—and quite useful, too.

Al Gore vs. Big Oil

A recent commenter provided the surprising (to me) information that Al Gore’s revenue from his involvement in fighting global warming will dwarf the profits of Exxon/Mobil. (I was pointing out that Exxon/Mobil’s statements about global warming might be influenced by the money they make from oil.)

Unfortunately, the commenter failed to provide a link to Al Gore’s projected earnings, but I thought this information might be of interest:

With the announcement that Exxon Mobil has “beat its own record for the highest profit ever recorded by a U.S. company,” Climate Progress notes that the other Big Five oil giants — BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Shell — have seen similar trends:

From the link in the article:

By any measure, Exxon Mobil’s performance last year was a blowout.

Thanks to surging oil prices, the company beat its own record for the highest profit ever recorded by a U.S. company, with net income rising 3 percent to $40.6 billion last year. The company’s sales – over $404 billion – exceeded the gross domestic product of all but the 24 richest countries in the world.

Exxon also had its most profitable quarter ever. It said Friday that net income rose 14 percent to $11.7 billion, or $2.13 a share, in the fourth quarter.

So Al Gore will make enough from his global warming work to dwarf $40.6 billion a year. What would that be? $400 billion a year? Amazing!

US “broadband” scam

While most of the focus right now is on poor job creation, there are other disturbing trends in the US economy — for example, our noticeable lag in broadband access.

But the Bush administration has an answer: move the goalposts, and declare Connection Accomplished.

Seriously, this is disgusting. Declare that 200 kb/second is broadband; declare that if anyone in a Zip code has broadband so defined, everyone has broadband access; and then have the Commerce Secretary laud the president’s policies for creating this “success.”

The reality is that the failure of US policy to create effective competition in broadband access has, predictably, put us behind. One more achievement of the Bush administration.

Do you feel safer now?

Staffing regulatory agencies with industry lobbyists and sympathizers turns out to be (surprise!) a bad idea:

After mechanics at Northwest Airlines went out on strike on Aug. 20, 2005, Federal Aviation Administration safety inspector Mark Lund began to see troubling signs. One replacement mechanic didn’t know how to test an engine. Another couldn’t close a cabin door. Many did not seem properly trained. In Lund’s view, their inexperience resulted in dangerous mistakes. One DC-10, for example, had a broken lavatory duct that allowed human waste to spill onto vital navigation equipment. The leak developed during a flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis. Northwest planned to let the plane continue on to Honolulu with the perilous and putrid problem unfixed—until one of Lund’s fellow safety inspectors in Minneapolis intervened.

Just two days after the strike began, Lund fired off a “safety recommendation for accident prevention” letter to his supervisors and to FAA headquarters in Washington. It was the loudest alarm he had the authority to ring. Claiming that “a situation exists that jeopardizes life,” Lund proposed cutting back on Northwest’s flight schedule until mechanics and inspectors could do their job “without error.” But instead of taking harsh action against the airline, the agency punished him. On Aug. 29, Lund’s supervisors confiscated the badge that gave him access to Northwest’s facilities and gave him a desk job. That happened to be the same day the airline sent a letter to the FAA complaining about Lund’s allegedly disruptive and unprofessional conduct. The FAA says it treated Lund fairly.

Another goodbye forever

Sad:

There’s something poignant about a final wave goodbye. We’ve all experienced them — perhaps holding back the tears at the airport or bus station, or seeing someone off as they slip away in a hospital bed. The heartbreak is tempered with fond memories, yet those same fond memories can intensify the heartbreak.

Conversely, we hear of the demise of various species often now, yet for most of us, it falls into a part of our mind relegated for things that are either not relevant to us, or to that area in our brain where we store thoughts we don’t know how to deal with, or that we decide are not our problem. There’s no heartbreak, no tears, no wave goodbye. We’re detached, separate, unfeeling.

Today the BBC ran an article on the Panamanian Golden Frog (technically it’s a toad, but let’s not split hairs). It’s an amazing piece of footage of the final wave goodbye (literally and figuratively) of a beautiful creature few ever came to know. Watch the clip.

The whole species is now extinct in Panama – this was one of the last remaining populations. Its final wave was in our programme. — BBC

Barney Kessel, 1923-2004

Barney Kessel was one of the great jazz guitarists. I saw him in concert (along with Herb Ellis and Charlie Byrd) when I lived in Iowa City, a great pleasure. Wikipedia:

In the 1950s, he made a series of albums called “The Poll Winners” with Ray Brown on bass and Shelly Manne on drums. He was also responsible for the prominent guitar on Julie London‘s definitive recording of “Cry Me a River“. Also from the 50s, his three “Kessell Plays Standards” volumns contain some of his most polished work.

Kessel was also a member of the Oscar Peterson Trio with Ray Brown in the early 1950s. The guitar chair was called the hardest gig in show business since Peterson often liked to play at breakneck tempos. Herb Ellis took over from Kessel after a year or so.

And here he is with Herb Ellis:

The Do-Nothing Supreme Court

Editorial in the NY Times:

President Bush’s excesses in the name of fighting terrorism are legion. To avoid accountability, his administration has repeatedly sought early dismissal of lawsuits that might finally expose government misconduct, brandishing flimsy claims that going forward would put national security secrets at risk.

The courts have been far too willing to go along. In cases involving serious allegations of kidnapping, torture and unlawful domestic eavesdropping, judges have blocked plaintiffs from pursuing their claims without taking a hard look at the government’s basis for invoking the so-called state secrets privilege: its insistence that revealing certain documents or other evidence would endanger the nation’s security.

As a result, victims of serious abuse have been denied justice, fundamental rights have been violated and the constitutional system of checks and balances has been grievously undermined.

Congress — which has allowed itself to be bullied on national security issues for far too long — may now be ready to push back. The House and Senate are developing legislation that would give victims fair access to the courts and make it harder for the government to hide illegal or embarrassing conduct behind such unsupported claims.

Last week, Senator Edward Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, and Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, jointly introduced the State Secrets Protection Act. The measure would require judges to examine the actual documents or other evidence for which the state secrets privilege is invoked, rather than relying on government affidavits asserting that the evidence is too sensitive to be publicly disclosed. Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and an important supporter of the reform, has scheduled a hearing on the bill for Feb. 13. Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, expects to introduce a similar measure in the House.

Of course, legitimate secrets need to be protected, and the legislation contains safeguards to ensure that.

To allow cases to go forward, the bill gives judges the authority to order the government to provide unclassified or redacted substitutes. It also gives those making claims against the government a chance to make a preliminary case using evidence that they have gathered on their own.

In October, the Supreme Court passed up an opportunity to rein in the administration’s abuse of state secrets claims and establish new procedures for dealing with potentially sensitive evidence.

The justices declined to take up the case of Khaled el-Masri, an innocent German citizen of Lebanese descent who was kidnapped, detained and tortured in a secret overseas prison as part of the administration’s extraordinary rendition program. Lower federal courts had dismissed Mr. Masri’s civil lawsuit, reflexively bowing to the administration’s claim that proceeding would compromise national security.

Since the Supreme Court has abdicated its responsibility, Congress must now act. Too many laws have been violated, and too many Americans and others have been harmed under a phony claim of national security.

Global warming increasing hurricane activity

The impacts of global warming continue:

A paper published yesterday in Nature for the first time measures the contribution of rising sea surface temperatures to changes in hurricane frequency and intensity. The authors found that about 40 percent of the increase in Atlantic hurricanes between 1996 and 2005—in comparison to the average over the 1950-2000 period—is due to the increased heat of the sea surface—about 0.5 degrees centigrade on average. In the past, it’s been argued that changes in near-surface trade wind speed were the cause of increased hurricane activity. The British authors of the study, Mark Saunders and Adam Lea, do not claim that their analysis can establish whether global warming is responsible for the increase in sea temperatures. But it seems likely that it is, at least partly. The only other explanation is something called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. The latter is a hypothetical natural cyclic shift in the ocean’s temperatures.

According to the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is “more likely than not” that manmade climate change has contributed to hurricane intensification since the 1970s. The IPCC also predicted that as the earth and seas continue to grow warmer, hurricane winds and rainfall will continue to grow more intense.

Worldwide, the number of strong hurricanes and cyclones has increased by 75 percent since 1970.

Aging awkwardly

Steve has an interesting post today on the psychology of the aging. What I note in myself is that the absence of workplace pressures to conform have made me feel freer to ignore things that matter little to me and focus more on things of interest.

For example, I’ve never been much interested in dress, and my wardrobe has shrunk to a few serviceable shirts and khakis that I keep clean and wear daily.

I don’t cling to driving and nowadays take considerable efforts to drive only during daylight hours, since night vision diminishes with age. When time comes to relinguish the wheel, I’ll not fight it. Of course, my self-image is not tied to driving. I’ll fight more to continue reading, for example. (OTOH, I’m reducing the library to more manageable proportions, no longer using books to define myself.)

But self-knowledge remains difficult. I don’t know how others see me.

Coconut and jojoba oil

Not together: the soap was Geo. F. Trumper Coconut Oil Shaving soap—and the brush was the redoubtable G.B. Kent BK4. Terrific lather, and I put a new Tiger blade in the Edwin Jagger Lined Chatsworth and did three passes, producing a face that would usually count as an excellent shave. No nicks or irritation, beautifully smooth.

But now, the Oil Pass: a few drops of jojoba oil, rubbed all over my face, and with the left hand feeling for any passing roughness, the right hand shaved it away. In the process I got a tiny nick on my upper lip, but that is not, I think, the fault of the jojoba oil: it was the only nick in the entire process, and My Nik Is Sealed put an immediate top to it.

Result: once again an extremely smooth result. The Oil Pass really works, and jojoba oil does a fine job, though it lacks some of the enhancements (fragrances, menthol, etc.) of the commercial shaving oils. OTOH, it costs about 1/20th as much per ounce.

Aftershave: Acqua di Selva, and feeling good about it.