Archive for August 2011
Meta-startup: Memetic evolution in high gear
Quite an interesting development, I think, reported in the NY Times by David Freedman:
Hari Kaur has been teaching yoga for 20 years as a private instructor and at other people’s studios, most recently in New York, but it was only late last year that she decided she wanted to start her own Jazz Yoga school — the world’s first, as far as she knew. What she didn’t know was much about how to start and run a business.
But one of her students happened to be an experienced entrepreneur who had recently started his fourth company, and he gave her some smart-sounding advice on funding, marketing and leasing a space. When she came up with more questions, he told her she ought to check out that latest business of his, which happened to be a free online service focused on … how to start a company.
Web-based tools are becoming nearly essential to many aspects of running a business, so why not bring them into the process of creating and executing a business plan? That’s the idea behind Wicked Start, the brain child of Bryan Janeczko, the yoga student. Mr. Janeczko had been a management consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and then on his own, and later did a stint as a vice president at J.P. Morgan. But his real entrepreneurial awakening occurred, he said, when in 2003 he set out to found a company that delivered meals to dieters: “I thought, ‘I’m smart, I have an M.B.A., how hard could this be?’”
You know the answer to that one. . .
Continue reading. (I love recursion.)
Interesting Pilates lesson
I’m (very) gradually becoming aware of how these movements and exercises work. One interesting lesson today: at the end of the exercise, recovery must be as controlled and balanced as the exercise itself. For example, I was standing with “Cossack arms” (folded in front of me as if for a Russian dance) in front of the Wunda chair, standing with one foot on the ground, the other, heel raised, ball of foot on the springboard. The exercise is to stand straight, and move the springboard up and down, while you are completely balanced.
I do a number of these, and then when the exercise was over, I raised the springboard, then relaxed and went floppy and got off.
No. Wrong. Instead, raise the springboard, then remain balanced with muscles working to maintain stance, remove foot from springboard once the board has returned to its rest position and place foot next to the unmoving foot, all the while maintaining posture and control.
Very different. The instructor said that a lot of learning takes place in the controlled finish of the exercise and that sometimes that finish is the point of the exercise: you do the movements to get your body ready to hit that note, as it were.
This reminds me of the flashcard idea that you continue to keep a flashcard in the current session until you get it right, even if you’re down to that one card, saying the answer, looking, getting it wrong, then do the card again—you don’t top until you get the answer right because at that instant, getting the answer right sort of cements the answer in place.
Interesting look at Libertarianism
Fascinating column—especially, I imagine, for Libertarians.
I make common cause with Liberatarians on some issues, but sharply diverge on others (the social safety net, for example: essential, in my view; completely inappropriate, in the Libertarian view).
The US military and Hollywood
Interesting column by David Sirota in Salon. I had already realized that some movies are little more than lengthy recruiting ads, but the strength of the US military’s grip on Hollywood is instructive as the US moves strongly right. The military always plays a major role in authoritarian governments.
Sirota’s column begins:
Yesterday, I had a big article in the Sunday Washington Post looking at the long-term legacy of “Top Gun” – a film that turned 25 years old this summer. This is part of my unofficial beat reporting on the Military-Entertainment Complex – reporting I first started a few years back as part of the research for my book “Back to Our Future.”
For too long, the media has ignored the relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon. Knowing this, I figured my Washington Post piece would vanish into the ether. However, to my surprise, it came out in the same week that the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal provided stunning new details about how the shadowy relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon is setting new standards for government-subsidized propaganda.
Hollywood As Complicit As Ever
First and foremost, both the Times and Journal tells us that collusion between the military and Hollywood – including allowing Pentagon officials to line edit scripts – is once again on the rise, with new television programs and movies slated to celebrate the Navy SEALs. They also give us up-to-date proof that major Hollywood directors remain more than happy to ideologically slant their films in precisely the pro-war, pro-militarist direction that the Pentagon demands in exchange for taxpayer-subsidized access to military hardware.
The Journal, for instance, quotes director Peter Berg saying that his upcoming cinematic tribute to the SEALs was approved by Pentagon-compliant studio execs specifically because the project avoids any nuanced take on the politics of war. “The idea of a good old-fashioned combat yarn, in which the politics are very clear – we support these men – was more appealing to them,” he said, noting that his film will be “an unabashed tribute to the courage of (the SEALs).” . . .
Profits before environment
Very interesting column in the NY Times by Mark Bittman:
I wasn’t surprised when the administration of George W. Bush sacrificed the environment for corporate profits. But when the same thing happens under a Democratic administration, it’s depressing. With little or no public input, policies that benefit corporations regardless of the consequences continue to be enacted.
No wonder an April 2010 poll from the Pew Research Center found that about only 20 percent of Americans have faith in the government (it’s one thing upon which the left and right and maybe even the center agree). But maybe this is nothing new: as Glenda Farrell, as Genevieve “Gen” Larkin, put it in “Gold Diggers of 1937,” “It’s so hard to be good under the capitalistic system.”
But is anyone in power even trying? Last winter, the Department of Agriculture deregulated Monsanto’s genetically modified alfalfa, despite concerns about cross-pollination of non-genetically modified crops. It then defied a court order banning the planting of genetically modified sugar beets pending completion of an environmental impact study.
Monsanto engineers these plants and makes Roundup, the herbicide they resist. But Roundup-ready crops don’t increase long-term yields, a host of farmers are now dealing with “superweeds” and there is worry about superbugs, nearly all courtesy of Monsanto. In fact, this system doesn’t contribute to much of anything except Monsanto’s bottom line. Yet Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack gave Monsanto the nod, perhaps yielding to pressure from the White House.
The United States exerts that same kind of pressure abroad. WikiLeaks cables show that U.S. “biotechnology outreach programs” have promoted genetically modified crops in Africa, Asia and South America; they’ve also revealed that diplomats schemed toretaliate against any European Union countries that oppose those crops.
Sacrificing the environment for profits didn’t stop with Bush, and it doesn’t stop with genetically modified organisms. Take, for example, the . . .
I think the problem is that capitalism makes all decisions based on the impact on profit. Unfortunately, that’s too narrow a basis, but the rapid evolution of the memes “capitalism” and “corporation” have resulted in corporations that simply cannot consider any other basis for decisions, even legally: they MUST increase shareholder value. Indeed, as we saw with the Pinto and the Ford Motor Company, corporations now are perfectly willing to break the law if the cost of breaking the law is significantly less, overall, than the profit achieved by breaking the law. Ford knew that they would be sued for designing a car that would burst into flames in a low-impact collision, immolating the occupants, but their calculations showed that the profits of building the car in that way would far exceed what they were likely have to pay in jury awards or settlements. So they went ahead with it, and people died.
And, of course, there are companies who directly realize a profit from selling products harmful to health and ultimately lethal: tobacco leaps to mind. But that side of the equation is a trivial cost to the company in comparison to the profits they can reap—plus there’s always hope of undermining the law by gaining greater control of the legislative branch.
Basically, corporations are willing to do ANYTHING—even things immoral, unethical, dishonest, and/or illegal—if doing that will increase their profits. And they’re getting better and better at it, and now have the funds to basically purchase control of the US government—they’ve long since had a secure hold on most state governments.
One of our own terrorists
Terrorism seems to come along with nation formation—proponents for Israel’s nationhood used terrorism on the British, and of course we know about Hamas and Hezbollah (and others) using terrorism on the Israelis. Northern Ireland had both Protestant and Catholic terrorists busy at work. And the US has its own terrorists, notably John Brown of pre-Civil-War fame.
But I hadn’t really understood that Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys were, for all practical reasons, terrorists. A recent biography clarifies:
Ethan Allen: His Life and Times
by Willard Sterne RandallA review by Robert K. Landers
By 1771, a conflict over frontier settlements in what is today Vermont had begun to turn violent. Colonial officials in New York, eager to profit from making land grants in the territory between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut River, refused to recognize grants already made there by the New Hampshire colony. The Hampshire settlers themselves, meanwhile, were determined to hold on to their property and not pay twice for it. Ethan Allen, a major property owner in the region known as the New Hampshire Grants, emerged as the leader of the opposition to New York’s efforts.
In June 1771, getting word that a New York surveyor was running lines in the woods 20 miles away, Allen and some of his followers went to the scene. Dressed as Indians, with soot-blackened faces, they threatened to kill the “Yorker” — who fled with his crew. Later that year, Allen formally organized the “Green Mountain Boys” to defend the Hampshire settlements and scotch any New York-backed settlements. He and his “boys” torched fences and haystacks as warnings to New York settlers reluctant to leave; in October, the Green Mountain Boys burned down the cabin of a Yorker who refused to depart.
In Ethan Allen, historian Willard Sterne Randall cites the behavior by the nascent folk hero and his men — who in extreme cases flogged defiant Yorkers — and links it with “the tactics of intimidation used by ten thousand Sons of Liberty in the period before the Revolution” to raise “an unsettling question: was America founded, at least in part, on terrorism?” Mr. Randall does not attempt an answer, however.
The author and his publisher call Ethan Allen a “founding father,” presumably to appeal to all those readers with a seemingly insatiable appetite for books about those so designated, but if Allen was a founding father, it was of Vermont, not of the United States. Still, by my reading of Mr. Randall’s exhaustively researched and insightful (but overly long) biography, Allen did make two significant contributions to the war for independence, each the result, directly or indirectly, of his recklessness.
The first was what many considered a premature attack on . . .
Censored by the CIA (to hide its failures)
Laura Miller has an interesting post at Salon:
News that the CIA has demanded “extensive cuts” from a forthcoming book by former FBI agent Ali Soufan made the front page of the New York Times last week. But Soufan’s isn’t the only recent memoir to earn the intelligence agency’s wrath by, in part, criticizing its use of brutal interrogation techniques in the decade since 9/11. There’s also “The Interrogator,” by Glenn Carle, a 23-year CIA veteran who was given the task of questioning a purported al-Qaida kingpin in 2002. Carle’s book was published earlier this summer with many passages — and occasionally entire pages — blocked out with black bars to show where the agency had insisted on redactions.
Soufan has called many of the CIA’s excisions from his own book “ridiculous,” pointing out that some of the “classified” information is a matter of public record and appears in the 9/11 report and even in a memoir by former CIA director George Tenet. Carle had a similar experience; “The Interrogator” is laced with caustic footnotes explaining that redacted passages revealed the agency’s incompetence, rather than sensitive information.
When I reviewed Carle’s book in July, I made a few guesses about facts the author was obliged to leave out of “The Interrogator.” Less than a day had passed before I learned that most of my guesses were wrong. Readers sent me helpful emails with links to articles supplying all the missing details, including the identity of the detainee Carle interrogated, a man he eventually came to believe was innocent.
If the CIA is trying to prevent information in Soufan’s and Carle’s manuscripts from reaching the public, they’ve obviously already failed. If anything, the agency’s efforts to censor these and other books only seem likely to inflame interest in the forbidden material, which will surface anyway. Does the CIA’s power to vet the writings of former government employees have any teeth in the Internet age? I decided to call up Carle to ask about his experience with the agency’s censors.
Carle explained that an author negotiates the approval of his or her book with the CIA’s Publications Review Board, a handful of staffers who coordinate input submitted by several agency departments. “My goal was not to piss them off to the extent that I couldn’t get anything that I wanted,” he said. “Their goal was to intimidate me. That was quite clear.”
Because Carle knew and even respected some individuals on the board, he felt that its members were exceptionally (and perhaps recklessly) candid with him. At one point, a man standing next to him at a urinal remarked, “Don’t you realize that people could go to jail for this?” referring to passages in “The Interrogator” where Carle alludes to detention and interrogation practices he regards as illegal.
The two things a former CIA officer is instructed to keep secret, Carle says, are “sources and methods.” However, like Soufan, he soon discovered that the PRB had no intention of stopping there. “They told me, ‘We will not allow you to take the reader into the interrogation room. We will not allow you to make the prisoner a human being. To the extent that we can, we will take out anything that gives him a personality.’ I couldn’t say I saw fear in his eyes, or that he was a middle-aged man. They had no right to take that out. But they did.”
Like Soufan, Carle complained when the PRB insisted on cutting information from his book that was already common knowledge. Two reasons are offered for such demands. One is the “mosaic theory of classification,” characterized by Carle as “one of the most harmful consequences of eight years of the Bush administration. And that is not a partisan statement.” According to Carle, “The White House freaked out after Michael Scheuer’s book [“Imperial Hubris” (2004), originally published anonymously] came out. They thought the CIA was out to get them. Bush said, ‘I don’t want anything to come out of the agency. Shut this down.'”
The mosaic theory alleges that pieces of information that may seem innocuous enough on their own — including material that has already been cleared by the CIA — can, when combined with similar pieces of information, present a potential threat that might be of use to the enemy. “By that rationale,” Carle observed, “you should take every chemistry textbook out of every high school in America.”
To get around the PRB’s objections, Carle had to resort to some unusual tactics. When forbidden to describe in much detail the bombed-out wasteland surrounding one overseas prison where he worked (because this would reveal the location to be Afghanistan, a fact obvious to any informed reader), he ended up quoting T.S. Eliot. “They forced me to be more pretentious than I actually am,” Carle joked.
The other justification the agency commonly offers for redacting material is . . .
Continue reading. I stick with my earlier characterization: “CIA” means “Criminals in Action.” At the end of the column appear these links:
Further reading:
The New York Times reports on CIA efforts to censor Ali Soufan’s book, “The Black Banners.”
Salon’s review of “The Interrogator: An Education” by Glenn Carle
Salon’s review of “Imperial Hubris: How the West Is Losing the War on Terror” by Michael Schueur
Some interesting facts about the US
This whole column is worth reading (and pondering), but let me just tempt you by showing you the update:
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former Chief of Staff to Gen. Colin Powell when Gen. Powell delivered his infamous Iraq/WMD speech to the U.N., is certainly aware of these omitted facts and is unwilling to ignore them. I was on Democracy Now with him this morning, talking about Dick Cheney’s book, and he had some very interesting things to say. He’s what someone with a moral conscience sounds like after being involved in some very bad acts. It’s well worth watching. Raw Story has the story and the video here, and the transcript is here.
The big DHS scam
Companies are reaping billions in taxpayer dollars and we endure weird airport procedures. For what? Greenwald looks at the issue:
The Los Angeles Times examines the staggering sums of money expended on patently absurd domestic “homeland security” projects: $75 billion per year for things such as a Zodiac boat with side-scan sonar to respond to a potential attack on a lake in tiny Keith County, Nebraska, and hundreds of “9-ton BearCat armored vehicles, complete with turret” to guard against things like an attack on DreamWorks in Los Angeles. All of that — which is independent of the exponentially greater sums spent on foreign wars, occupations, bombings, and the vast array of weaponry and private contractors to support it all — is in response to this mammoth, existential, the-single-greatest-challenge-of-our-generation threat:
“The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It’s basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year,” said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.
Last year, McClatchy characterized this threat in similar terms: “undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism.” The March, 2011, Harper‘s Index expressed the point this way: “Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 — Minimum number who died after being struck by lightning: 29.” That’s the threat in the name of which a vast domestic Security State is constructed, wars and other attacks are and continue to be launched, and trillions of dollars are transferred to the private security and defense contracting industry at exactly the time that Americans — even as they face massive wealth inequality — are told that they must sacrifice basic economic security because of budgetary constraints.
Despite these increasing economic insecurities — actually, precisely because of them — the sprawling domestic Security State continues unabated. The industry journal National Defense Magazine today trumpets: “Homeland Security Market ‘Vibrant’ Despite Budget Concerns.” It details how budget cuts mean “homeland security” growth may not be as robust as once predicted, but “Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman . . . have been winning more contracts from DHS”; as a Boeing spokesman put it: “You’ll still continue to see domestically significant investment on the part of the government and leveraging advances in technology to stand up and meet those emerging threats and needs.”
Of course, the key to sustaining this Security State bonanza — profit for private industry and power for Security State officials — is keeping fear levels among the citizenry as high as possible, as National Defenseexpressly notes, and that is accomplished by fixating even on minor and failed attacks, each one of which is immediately seized upon to justify greater expenditures, expansion of security measures, and a further erosion of rights:
Polls still show that there is increasing public concern about another terrorist attack. It is this fear and an unrealistic American perception of risk that will continue to propel some aspects of the market, analysts say. . . .
Small-scale attacks, whether successful or not, will continue to prompt additional spending, the market analysts at Homeland Security Research Corp. say. They point to the failed 2009 Christmas plot of a man trying to blow up a flight to Detroit with explosives sewn into his underwear and the attempted car-bombing in Times Square early the next year. Though unsuccessful, these events led to immediate White House intervention, congressional hearings and an airport screening upgrade costing more than $1.6 billion.
The LA Times, while skillfully highlighting these wasteful programs, depicts them as some sort of unintended inefficiencies. That is exactly what they are not. None of this is unintended or inefficient but is achieving exactly the purposes for which it is designed. That’s true for two reasons.
First, . . .
Continue reading. Normally, of course, Congress would be taking a hard look at pointless and expensive projects, but now Congress has come under control of the people who make money from these things, so Congress will never object. The mainstream media are owned by large corporations that themselves are eager to control Congress, so the media are not going to attack this. And the US populace seems to be increasingly beaten down and frightened by financial worries, so they are becoming increasing manipulable. Not a good time.
Made it! 5th edition now published!
I wanted to get the 5th edition of Leisureguy’s Guide to Gourmet Shaving published in August, and I made with hours to spare. As you see at the right, it’s now available at the CreateSpace estore. List price is now $12.95.
A lot has been added. I noted in a comment earlier that the lists (of vendors, sampler packet sources, artisan soap makers, etc.) have of course been updated. I also reorganized the chapter on lather quite a bit and added a new section on water, with some additional subsections. I added several new makes of razors to the list and various additional hints.
The book as a whole seems much more solid now. I added enough material that I had to drop the font a point size to keep the page count down.
The book also acquired a theme, of sorts, which I touch on in the new preface and that arises from time to time in the book itself, a theme I might term sic transit gloria mundi. As one sees over just a few years’ time vendors of quite fine artisanal products arise and then, after only a few seasons, vanish, one recognizes the transitory nature of life’s glories—and indeed of life itself. Something about the daily cutting of the beard seems to echo that.
Back to practical matters: I have ordered a small supply to send to various friends and vendors, but I won’t have them for a week. If you order from the “Buy it now” link at the right, you’ll probably get your copy before I get mine.
Sales will also be made through Amazon.com, but that will take a week, and based on previous experience, initial sales will be with no discount: full list (though if you’re an Amazon Prime member you of course get free shipping). After a few months of sales experience, their discount algorithm seems to kick into action and from then on the Amazon copies will have a discount. But that’s some months away.
I’m happy to answer questions, and I’m eager to hold the new book in my own hands—but that’s at least a week away.
CSF experiment with MWF
Very nice lather from the Vie-Long horsehair brush shown and MWF. The Coral Skin Food was for an experiment: put a few drops of CSF on top of MWF to see the effect on the lather. The only effect I noticed was the rose fragrance, but that was pleasant. However, I normally get good lather from MWF in any case.
Three passes of the Edwin Jagger DE89 DE87 [correction thanks to sharp eye of Mantic59: videographers see things others miss. – LG] holding a Feather blade: still smooth and awesome. A question arose about whether a DE8x might have the older head by Merkur rather than the new head designed by Neal Jagger with the Müller brothers of Mühle-Pinsel. I didn’t think so: I got one of the new heads to try when they first came out (using on my Chatsworth) and as I recall the DE8x came out after that. And, as it turns out, my memory was (in this case) correct; from an email received this morning from The English Shaving Company:
Have spoken with NJ. This is the response as I thought but needed to clarify. The New DE8 styles always had the EJ head Never the Merkur. The original EJ head was upgraded in 2009. Both the black ones illustrated on Amazon and Highland Menscare have the latest head. The one you illustrated from Fendrihan has one of the original new style heads; not sure where that image came from as they buy regularly and would not have stock from so far back.
This was to respond to a question that arose on Wicked_Edge.
After the shave, the aftershave, and Alt-Innsbruck, with its menthol/tobacco fragrance (Salem cigarettes?) kickstarting the morning.
I’m getting one for The Wife
This truly is a Cool Tool for the groggy-when-awakened. And I think The Wife will like it, too.
Better software alternatives for Windows
The ones I have actual experience with, I agree with the writer. Here’s the post.
Pens and happiness
I am getting a good deal of pleasure these days from my fountain pens and fine stationery. As I wrote to The Niece this morning on a sheet of handmade Crane 100%-cotton-rag stationery, now no longer made, a little-known secret of letter-writing is the enormous amount of pleasure one gets in writing with a good pen and ink on good paper. (The Crane’s has quite a bit of tooth, so I used the Montblanc Agathie Christie—a black pen in which the gold nib has on it a silver snake’s head engraved, and the clip is a silver snake slithering down the cap, with rubies for its eyes. John Mottishaw did the nib work to make it a perfect medium italic point, and it writes a little wet, just right for this paper. The ink was Noodler’s Ultrablack or whatever it’s called: their blackest, most light-absorbent ink. On the creamy white stationery, it made quite an impact.)
So, if you’re going to write a letter, you can really pump up your enjoyment of the task by using really nice stationery. It’s just as in shaving: if you have a task you feel you must do, then exert some ingenuity to make the task a pleasure. If you’re going to have to do it anyway, become drawn to it by the pleasure that doing it affords: shaving in the one case, letter-writing in the other. And so for all tasks, to the extent that you can: cooking, cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, and so on. (I have not succeeded with all, but with more than you might think.)
One impetus for this post was, not the Agatha Christie, but another pen I brought out just now for use: I can’t even recall the name of maker or model… ah, but they’re thoughtfully engraved on the cap: it’s a Marlen Eclisse, and the “Eclisse” refers to the moon theme: a sort of faux-primitif flat silver clip, slightly rounded, with an odd little offset at the top, stamped with a Sun at the top of the clip, an Earth at the bottom, and (quite out of scale) somewhat below the Sun, a partially eclipsed Moon.
The moon theme continues—because an eclipse is all about the moon, of course—with the color—black, with whorls of color, iridescent and inside the plastic, forming a haloed moon on the side, though you don’t at first see it—and also with the cap screwing onto the barrel eccentrically. You get quite an odd feeling when you start unscrewing the cap and it begins by going a bit sideways. And as you continue to unscrew it, it bobs eccentrically about as if on an epicycle (as the moon in its orbit, as we so painstakingly learned when we read worked through Ptolemy’s Almagest).
It should go without saying, but: regardless of how you start the cap, it screws back on—again disconcertingly eccentrically—to stop a final flush finish with the barrel: no remaining eccentricity to be detected. (I take that as a comment on the eccentricity that we each harbor within, however conventional a façade we present.) And the same thing happens in reverse on the opposite end, as you stow the cap for writing: you screw it onto the eccentric knob, watching it swing in and out, as if on an epicycle, and then finish, flush again with the barrel.
This pen has an extremely nice point—another italic point made by Mottishaw. As I filled the pen—a converter, but you can’t have everything—I thought about having tried all sorts of inks—excellent inks: the Noodler stuff I got recently, some Private Reserve, and I even have two unopened bottles of the redoubtable (but now unobtainable) Doctor Black, the darkest, most bulletproof ink known: proof against water, sun, outdoor weathering… incredible (The guy who does (or did) the ink sampler books had a permanency test in which he dabbed some ink on paper and put it out for 24 hours on the roof. One time he forgot, went on a two-week vacation, it rained off and on, and when he finally remembered and checked his samples, all but a few were simply blank paper. Only one was absolutely crisp, dark, and distinct: Doctor Black.)—and though I have tried and liked many of the inks, I keep coming back to Waterman: Florida Blue when I want washability, Blue Black for permanency.
That little thought, when I unpacked it as I went, was larger than I expected. The whole point is that I like Waterman inks, a thought I had when I filled the pen, but I suppose the context is part of the thought.
And, actually, this post (the one I’m writing) itself has its own context, which for it is another post, pointed out by the ever-invaluable Jack of Amsterdam. Worth reading, and he (rightly) advises clicking the Strauss link therein.
Another thing recently giving me great pleasure is (appropriately) rediscovering Epicurus. As I read the slim booklet that remains of his writings, I realize that it was this book that led me to St. John’s… but enough context for now, I think.
UPDATE: I’ve been searching for a good photo of the Marlen pen, and I discover that Eclisse is not the particular model I have (the model I describe above), but a more general name for Marlen pens. I do not in fact know the name of this particular model. I’ll have to track it down. Maybe Detlef Bittner knows—he’s the one who sold it to me in his little Carmel store.
UPDATE 2: The moon being so close to the Sun bothered me, so I just spent some time looking again at that clip. I realize now I had it backwards: the top emblem stands for the Earth—this is a Ptolemaic clip, in which the Earth is the pre-eminent body in the equation, and I had been looking at the clip with post-Copernican eyes, assuming that the major and most important body in the system shown would (naturally) be the Sun. Except that people don’t live on the Sun, they live on Earth, so it’s the important one. And then, just down from the Earth lies the waxing or waning Moon, and at the very end of the clip, off in the distance, is the Sun, its disk just beginning to be eclipsed.
Quite an extraordinary pen.
Slowly shrinking once more
I ballooned up to 185 lbs after spraining my ankle and entertaining visitors with nice meals. But now I know what to do, so it’s not a big deal. This morning I’m under 180, heading to 170.
I was at 173 before, but the speed with which I zoomed to 185 was unnerving. My thought is to take it back to 170 and treat 175 as the panic point.
No magic: just following the lessons I learned along the way. I do note that this week I’m very fond of spinach as my green, but I think I’ll go back to kale for a while—though if they have good-looking dandelion greens when I go to the store today, I’ll get some of those: not so much nutritional value as kale—by a fair amount, as I recall—but a lovely bitter taste that I like. And: greens.
I continue to use an egg for breakfast protein (along with chia seed and hulled hemp seed) and tofu or tempeh for lunch and dinner. However, last night I dreamed up a short-ribs dish for the slow-cooker that I plan to make when I reach 170:
Brown short ribs in skillet, then deglaze pan with dry vermouth. (I want a good beef taste, so I’m not using red wine.)
Put all that into slow cooker on top of a mirepoix of carrots, celery, and onions, along with:
A few crush cloves of garlic
Some thyme
Salt & pepper
1 Tbsp horseradish
1 Tbsp Worcestershire
The horseradish in that amount adds a nice flavor—noticeable but elusive. I’ll serve that over buttered and peppered egg noodles.
Something to look forward to.
Otoko and 1904
I do like Otoko Organics shaving soap. I got a very fine lather using the Vie-Long brush shown, the mate to my Pogonotomy.com 2011 brush. The 1904 with the Treet Durasharp carbon-steel blade did a fine job—second shave on the blade, no rust visible to naked eye. Once again, at the end of the shave I swished the head in high-proof rubbing alcohol so that it would be totally dry.
Very nice shave indeed, and a dab of Saint Charles Shave’s Aspect was a fine finish: my skin feels quite nice.
In other shaving news: I found a problem in the “final” PDF, made the correction, uploaded the “final final with corrections” and now am awaiting approval from CreateSpace, which I hope to receive late today. I will then release the kraken the book for printing. I’m told that it can take several business days before the book appears on Amazon, though the CreateSpace storefront will be immediately open.
Yesterday I retired the 4th edition, though there may some still in the pipeline. Still, no new sales should go through.
I’m greatly relieved to have this edition done, and I think this version is really complete. I’m hoping that this can remain stable for a few years, but of course turnover among vendors—some closing down, more opening up, to which I allude in the book—may require a new edition sooner.
“Congress isn’t broken—it’s fixed by special interests”
Thanks to Jack in Amsterdam for pointing out this column by Daniel Weeks:
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, in calling for a political donor strike, wasn’t the first and won’t be the last in a line of sensible citizens to observe that Washington isn’t working for the American people.
With congressional approval ratings near their lowest point on record, and leaders in both parties stubbornly unable to solve the fiscal crisis and start creating jobs, it’s hard not to want to starve all politicians of campaign cash.
If only We the People could.
Barely 1 percent of our citizens fund campaigns today. In fact, less than a quarter of 1 percent (0.24 percent) provided 90 percent of campaign money in 2010, with lobbyists and special interests in Washington, D.C., alone accounting for more than 32 states combined.
In such a system, it is little surprise that members of Congress spend more time raising money from a wealthy few than working with bipartisan colleagues to solve the nation’s fiscal crisis and start creating jobs for the good of all Americans. Indeed, Washington isn’t broken – it’s fixed.
Americans perfectly understand the principle of private enterprise that you are accountable to your investors. Our children understand when mom and dad pay the bills, they get to call the shots. Yet we consistently fail to apply that same logic to government.
Our problem today is not a broken government but a . . .
No more 4th Edition
I just talked with CreateSpace to retire the 4th edition. The 5th edition will not be available probably until sometime next week, but I thought it was appropriate to end now the 4th edition sales.
Later On 