Incredibly bad taste. I hope you hate the 9/11 reference as much as I did. Jeez.
Also, A great list of vacation spots. You probably knew most of this, but interesting to see it complied in one place.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Finally some new content on Culinary Intelligence. com
Read our review of the Henckels Four Star II Santoku (an Asian cooking knife shape) on the Culinary Intelligence site.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Reading List, Lately
On the off chance that anyone cares, I thought I'd list a few of the things I've been working my way through (especially since some of them were Christmas presents that I haven't adequately thanked people for.)
A word about these "essential histories;" they come from Osprey Publishing, and are usually well-written, furnished with a small but adequate set of maps and illustrations, and are pretty well-edited (although the Iran-Iraq book transposes "Iraq" for "Iran" in one caption, confusing me mightily for a while until I figured out it was a mistake.) If you want a quick briefing on a war or a campaign and they have a title for it, you could do a lot worse.
Bones: Recipes, History, and Lore; Jennifer Mclagan Nice big cookbook on the topic of, well, bones. Of course, there's roast marrow bones, lots of stock recipes, and more.- Secret Ingredients, The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, David Remnick This is a lovely compendium of stuff from the whole history of the New Yorker. Note that the the 1939 article about "beefsteaks" cited in this NYT piece is included in the book.
- Cooking for Kings, Ian Kelly. Charming, well researched life of the Mario Batali of the early 19th century.
- The Physiology of Taste, Brillat-Savarin. This link is to a modern version - I read a facimile of the 100-year anniversary (1925) translation of Brillat-Savarin's 1825 original. Chatty, with little "physiology" in it, but still the original, in many ways.
- The Falklands War 1982 (Essential Histories). Quick Survey of the Thatcher/Galtieri war whose most useful outcome was ending Al Haig's career.
The Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 (Essential Histories). Another quick read, catching up on a conflict that I more or less ignored in the 80's, when it was happening.- The Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905 (Essential Histories) A refresher course, as a run-up to the following.
The Czar's Last Armada, Constantine Pleshakov. Gossipy, Russian - point - of - view tale of the dispatch of the 2nd (and later, 3rd) pacific squadrons of the Czarist Navy from the Baltic, half way around the world to fight the Japanese. Led to the first real naval battle of the 20th century, and marked the emergence of Japan as a naval power.
A word about these "essential histories;" they come from Osprey Publishing, and are usually well-written, furnished with a small but adequate set of maps and illustrations, and are pretty well-edited (although the Iran-Iraq book transposes "Iraq" for "Iran" in one caption, confusing me mightily for a while until I figured out it was a mistake.) If you want a quick briefing on a war or a campaign and they have a title for it, you could do a lot worse.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
From 1998 - Wackier than Tom Cruse
For no good reason, a piece from all of 10 years back, about a I guy I haven't thought of for at least that long.
Ann Arbor: There's a moderately good book out there this Summer (of 1998, that is, Ed),
"Why People Believe Weird Things," by Michael Schermer. It talks about religious and other beliefs, including the bizarre cult surrounding Ayn Rand and her luke-warm libertarianism. It reminded me of a pattern I believe is identifiable in at least western culture: the association, gradual or sudden, of a group of cynical, profit-minded hangers-on with an aging, soft-in-the-head literary figure. Think of L. Ron Hubbard, Ayn Rand in her old age, and now, we find, Carlos Castaneda. The pattern usually includes outsider allegations that the group is imprisoning and controlling the figurehead individual, fights over his or her estate, and astonishingly bald and high-handed financial exploitation. There may even be dark hints of foul play and mysterious lacunae in the facts. Certainly, the case of Castaneda exhibits all of the above.
If you were wise enough to skip reading the pseudo- anthropology of the late 60's and early 70's (think Desmond Morris and Ashley Montague), you may not be familiar with Carlos Castaneda. He was a burnt- out anthro student who almost certainly invented a character named Don Juan Matus; Castaneda claimed that Matus was a Yaqui witch doctor, and chronicled the drug-induced philosophizing of the old man in a series of rambling books, starting with "The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge." What the book demonstrates most clearly is that -- like many academic disciplines -- anthropology in the 60's attracted a subset of intellectual misfits who were unprepared for the reality of social science and were looking for something quite other than what Ewan MacColl calls "... some understanding of all your fellow men." I should know: I went to school with several of these people -- hell, I could have been one, except for being saved by the holy silicon. People like Castaneda and some of my fellow students really thought Anthropology was digging up jade idols and finding lost tribes. When it wasn't -- when it turned out that it meant squabbling sordidly over afine groups or bitter resentment of a colleague's name appearing before yours on a paper about Ojibwa lithics, they either found other toys to play with -- went into business with their roommates, doing something mysterious with these funny new computers that don't need punch cards -- or they just invented their own anthropologies. It's not unlike some kinds of science fiction: you don't need to understand a technology, because you make it up yourself. So it seems to have been with Castaneda: he made up a set of alternate realities, wrote 'em down, and lots of people bought 'em. I read the first one, said, "Another druggie," and went back to whatever it was I was doing. Seems, though, that not everybody was that blase', since people kept on buying his stuff. And then, somehow, he became the primary product of a group called Cleargreen who began marketing him, wrapped up in a package called "Tensegrity."
After Castaneda's death (which may have been kept secret for some time), a member of Cleargreen told a New York Times writer, "Carlos knew exactly what was true and what was not true. But the thing that's missing when people talk about Carlos is not (sic) whether Don Juan lived or not, or who lived in what house. It's about becoming a voyager of awareness, about the 600 locations in the luminous egg of man where the assemblage point can shift, about the process of depersonalization he taught." Oh.
Now, this may be a useful paradigm (at least it keeps people who talk like that off the streets), and I'm seriously considering trying it in the next difficult meeting I'm in ("No, actually, it's not about whether the product is ready or not. It's about becoming a voyager of softwareness, about the 437 pathological couplings of your data model where the entry point can shift in the luminous egg of garbage collection"), but still, like the luminous egg of the Bimota Mantra, we have to ask: who buys this stuff? Who goes to these seminars? And why?
And, as you probably suspected all along, I have a theory. It's part of a larger and increasingly well- documented theory of group dysfunctionality. It hypothesizes a unifying psychological characteristic or complex of characteristics, linking together individuals who exhibit a need to be told, at a large fee, about luminous eggs. It suggests that they're idiots.
--
The WCA News Service has been brought to you by the Odd Town Tavern and by the upcoming bestseller by Carlos McLuggage, "The Teachings of Don Tempeh: A Yucky Way of Knowledge."
Ann Arbor: There's a moderately good book out there this Summer (of 1998, that is, Ed),
"Why People Believe Weird Things," by Michael Schermer. It talks about religious and other beliefs, including the bizarre cult surrounding Ayn Rand and her luke-warm libertarianism. It reminded me of a pattern I believe is identifiable in at least western culture: the association, gradual or sudden, of a group of cynical, profit-minded hangers-on with an aging, soft-in-the-head literary figure. Think of L. Ron Hubbard, Ayn Rand in her old age, and now, we find, Carlos Castaneda. The pattern usually includes outsider allegations that the group is imprisoning and controlling the figurehead individual, fights over his or her estate, and astonishingly bald and high-handed financial exploitation. There may even be dark hints of foul play and mysterious lacunae in the facts. Certainly, the case of Castaneda exhibits all of the above.
If you were wise enough to skip reading the pseudo- anthropology of the late 60's and early 70's (think Desmond Morris and Ashley Montague), you may not be familiar with Carlos Castaneda. He was a burnt- out anthro student who almost certainly invented a character named Don Juan Matus; Castaneda claimed that Matus was a Yaqui witch doctor, and chronicled the drug-induced philosophizing of the old man in a series of rambling books, starting with "The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge." What the book demonstrates most clearly is that -- like many academic disciplines -- anthropology in the 60's attracted a subset of intellectual misfits who were unprepared for the reality of social science and were looking for something quite other than what Ewan MacColl calls "... some understanding of all your fellow men." I should know: I went to school with several of these people -- hell, I could have been one, except for being saved by the holy silicon. People like Castaneda and some of my fellow students really thought Anthropology was digging up jade idols and finding lost tribes. When it wasn't -- when it turned out that it meant squabbling sordidly over afine groups or bitter resentment of a colleague's name appearing before yours on a paper about Ojibwa lithics, they either found other toys to play with -- went into business with their roommates, doing something mysterious with these funny new computers that don't need punch cards -- or they just invented their own anthropologies. It's not unlike some kinds of science fiction: you don't need to understand a technology, because you make it up yourself. So it seems to have been with Castaneda: he made up a set of alternate realities, wrote 'em down, and lots of people bought 'em. I read the first one, said, "Another druggie," and went back to whatever it was I was doing. Seems, though, that not everybody was that blase', since people kept on buying his stuff. And then, somehow, he became the primary product of a group called Cleargreen who began marketing him, wrapped up in a package called "Tensegrity."
After Castaneda's death (which may have been kept secret for some time), a member of Cleargreen told a New York Times writer, "Carlos knew exactly what was true and what was not true. But the thing that's missing when people talk about Carlos is not (sic) whether Don Juan lived or not, or who lived in what house. It's about becoming a voyager of awareness, about the 600 locations in the luminous egg of man where the assemblage point can shift, about the process of depersonalization he taught." Oh.
Now, this may be a useful paradigm (at least it keeps people who talk like that off the streets), and I'm seriously considering trying it in the next difficult meeting I'm in ("No, actually, it's not about whether the product is ready or not. It's about becoming a voyager of softwareness, about the 437 pathological couplings of your data model where the entry point can shift in the luminous egg of garbage collection"), but still, like the luminous egg of the Bimota Mantra, we have to ask: who buys this stuff? Who goes to these seminars? And why?
And, as you probably suspected all along, I have a theory. It's part of a larger and increasingly well- documented theory of group dysfunctionality. It hypothesizes a unifying psychological characteristic or complex of characteristics, linking together individuals who exhibit a need to be told, at a large fee, about luminous eggs. It suggests that they're idiots.
--
The WCA News Service has been brought to you by the Odd Town Tavern and by the upcoming bestseller by Carlos McLuggage, "The Teachings of Don Tempeh: A Yucky Way of Knowledge."
Monday, January 21, 2008
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Betting the farm on India?
It's kind of a toss up, in my opinion, whether China or India are headed for worse social upheaval. The more their disparity in income and opportunity divides them into haves and have-nots, the more the tension builds. For a quick update on the old, old problem of caste, read this story from the Washington Post. I'd think twice before I moved another dime's worth of business off-shore, unless I was damn sure I could pull it back in short order.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Old WCA Rant from March 23, 2000. So, how wrong was I?
THE ACTUAL PLATFORM
Ann Arbor: One of the marginally interesting things about the current presidential campaign is the belief that people voted for McCain or Bradley because they were mavericks or counterweights or somehow different from the two officially- sanctioned pols they were trying to defeat. (Note: in the 2000 Primary, lots of Michiganders voted for McCain to annoy the Republicans, who of course wanted them to vote for Bush. Ed) People with a particularly annoying set of blinders on are agonizing over this effect and over what they seem to believe is the "outrageous" practice of the major parties deciding ahead of time who their preferred candidates are. There are some important holes in this point of view. First of all, few people are likely to have voted for ANYONE on the grounds of what he or she believed about the candidate. The vast majority of people who voted for McCain did so because they a) hate George W. Bush, b) hate John Engler, and/or c) hate old what's-his-name, the right-wing talk radio guy. Second, no one -- as in not one single person in the United States -- believes that any of the candidates actually holds any distinguishably different set of positions. For the record, here are the actual positions of everyone running for President (with the exception of Ambassador Duke and J. Francis McLuggage, of course),
Reproductive Rights: All of the major candidates are men (In 2000, this was true. Ed.), and all of them restrict their concerns with abortion to a kind of simple- minded gratitude that their parents didn't go for it. That's it. They have no other concerns with it at all -- not even personal ones -- our most sexually irresponsible President of the last fifty years hasn't been accused of fathering any unwanted children. No, what our boys on the hustings want is just to say the right, soothing things to one or the other side of this deeply polarized issue. And they don't like polarized issues -- it makes them choose among possible voters. In reality, every last one of the bastards would be just as happy to see a constitutional amendment guaranteeing reproductive choice, as long as they could just wake up one morning and have it over with -- anything so as not to have to take a position.
Campaign Reform: I'm reminded of the strip where Dilbert suggests doing the right thing and his boss says, "Oh, right. And let's pull our neckties until it hurts." No one within a 150 mile radius of the White House wants to enact any kind of campaign funding reform. Nobody. End of story.
Taxes: Oh, please. All this issue provides is an illustration of our country's horrifyingly poor math skills. You cannot cut taxes. Can't. Won't. Will not happen. (Don't agree? Can you say, "alternative minimum tax?" Ed.) What will happen, regardless of who is elected President, is that expenses will get moved around so that both parties can CLAIM to have cut taxes for somebody, somewhere. But regardless of how it's implemented, you will pay more taxes next year than you did this year and more the year after that and so on. If your income taxes go down, your sales taxes will go up. The price you pay for a vehicle will go up. The price you pay for a gallon of gas will go up. Unless you have some ideas about perpetual motion machines, reversing entropy, or turning the US into several tens of millions of little anarcho-syndicalist communes and living on nuts and berries, you can take the above as immutable.
Foreign Policy: One hundred percent of the candidates want to impose the will of the American People on foreigners without getting American kids killed. (I was apparently really, really wrong about this one. Ed.) Talk loudly and wave a big stick from a safe distance about sums it up. The will of the American People, by the way, appears to be that foreigners are not allowed to kill each other over religious differences -- we reserve that right for ourselves -- and if they do, we get to kill them, but without running much risk while doing it. This is not as futile as it sounds, since the old military hardware industry is going great guns on developing unpersoned vehicles, brilliant bombs, and all kinds of other cool, expensive stuff to whack recalcitrant Serbs and others with at long range, thus keeping lots of executives and engineers employed. (See "Taxes.")
The Family: If there is a candidate for any office, let alone President, out there who is willing to define "family" as anything other than two heterosexual white people with a slew of kids, a yorkie, and a new Voyager, then he or she is doing a damn good job of concealing the fact.
THE ACTUAL PLATFORM
Ann Arbor: One of the marginally interesting things about the current presidential campaign is the belief that people voted for McCain or Bradley because they were mavericks or counterweights or somehow different from the two officially- sanctioned pols they were trying to defeat. (Note: in the 2000 Primary, lots of Michiganders voted for McCain to annoy the Republicans, who of course wanted them to vote for Bush. Ed) People with a particularly annoying set of blinders on are agonizing over this effect and over what they seem to believe is the "outrageous" practice of the major parties deciding ahead of time who their preferred candidates are. There are some important holes in this point of view. First of all, few people are likely to have voted for ANYONE on the grounds of what he or she believed about the candidate. The vast majority of people who voted for McCain did so because they a) hate George W. Bush, b) hate John Engler, and/or c) hate old what's-his-name, the right-wing talk radio guy. Second, no one -- as in not one single person in the United States -- believes that any of the candidates actually holds any distinguishably different set of positions. For the record, here are the actual positions of everyone running for President (with the exception of Ambassador Duke and J. Francis McLuggage, of course),
Reproductive Rights: All of the major candidates are men (In 2000, this was true. Ed.), and all of them restrict their concerns with abortion to a kind of simple- minded gratitude that their parents didn't go for it. That's it. They have no other concerns with it at all -- not even personal ones -- our most sexually irresponsible President of the last fifty years hasn't been accused of fathering any unwanted children. No, what our boys on the hustings want is just to say the right, soothing things to one or the other side of this deeply polarized issue. And they don't like polarized issues -- it makes them choose among possible voters. In reality, every last one of the bastards would be just as happy to see a constitutional amendment guaranteeing reproductive choice, as long as they could just wake up one morning and have it over with -- anything so as not to have to take a position.
Campaign Reform: I'm reminded of the strip where Dilbert suggests doing the right thing and his boss says, "Oh, right. And let's pull our neckties until it hurts." No one within a 150 mile radius of the White House wants to enact any kind of campaign funding reform. Nobody. End of story.
Taxes: Oh, please. All this issue provides is an illustration of our country's horrifyingly poor math skills. You cannot cut taxes. Can't. Won't. Will not happen. (Don't agree? Can you say, "alternative minimum tax?" Ed.) What will happen, regardless of who is elected President, is that expenses will get moved around so that both parties can CLAIM to have cut taxes for somebody, somewhere. But regardless of how it's implemented, you will pay more taxes next year than you did this year and more the year after that and so on. If your income taxes go down, your sales taxes will go up. The price you pay for a vehicle will go up. The price you pay for a gallon of gas will go up. Unless you have some ideas about perpetual motion machines, reversing entropy, or turning the US into several tens of millions of little anarcho-syndicalist communes and living on nuts and berries, you can take the above as immutable.
Foreign Policy: One hundred percent of the candidates want to impose the will of the American People on foreigners without getting American kids killed. (I was apparently really, really wrong about this one. Ed.) Talk loudly and wave a big stick from a safe distance about sums it up. The will of the American People, by the way, appears to be that foreigners are not allowed to kill each other over religious differences -- we reserve that right for ourselves -- and if they do, we get to kill them, but without running much risk while doing it. This is not as futile as it sounds, since the old military hardware industry is going great guns on developing unpersoned vehicles, brilliant bombs, and all kinds of other cool, expensive stuff to whack recalcitrant Serbs and others with at long range, thus keeping lots of executives and engineers employed. (See "Taxes.")
The Family: If there is a candidate for any office, let alone President, out there who is willing to define "family" as anything other than two heterosexual white people with a slew of kids, a yorkie, and a new Voyager, then he or she is doing a damn good job of concealing the fact.
Monday, January 7, 2008
Quick Update
Well, here it is January and things are just -- well, dreadful. I still feel like hell, plus poor Linda has a bad cold. I don't even have anything wise-ass to say. But if you don't hear from us for a bit, assume we're resting and being slug-like.
I'm going to try to answer some of the individual mail I've gotten in the next hour or so, but if I don't get to you, don't be offended. Even typing takes energy ...
I'm going to try to answer some of the individual mail I've gotten in the next hour or so, but if I don't get to you, don't be offended. Even typing takes energy ...
Saturday, December 29, 2007
What's the treatment for the treatment?
Well, the good news is that I got released from Karmanos on Chrismas Day. And according to them, I'm doing fine.
Hmmm. Actually, on my own self-devised outcomes measurement scheme (which uses common household pets to symbolize the patient's well-being), I'm at the "cat" level (sleeping 18 hours a day, eating almost nothing, and feeling like hacking up hair balls all the time.) My goal is to reach "dog" by next week (which is identical to "cat" except without the picky appetite and hairballs part.)
Being in the hospital for 12 days was not fun, especially with the effects of one of the nastier chemo drugs manifesting themselves, one by one. I did get to study language diversity, ranging from the pert, starched young woman who sometimes brought food and announced herself as "diatectic," to the older, more ample employee who kicked the door open, saying "Got your brekfoose!"
My favorite moment, though, was the one night they thought they needed a chest x-ray of me. By the time the orders for this filtered through the layers of bureaucracy, it was 8:00 PM when they finally sent a cart for me. Covered in a blanket and wearing a respiratory mask, I was wheeled down through the bowels of the hospital and left lying in a bleak corridor. Eventually, a huge, impressive Star-Trek style set of automatic doors swung open. A disembodied voice said, "Ah, kiss my ass," and the doors swung shut again.
Ah, and then the food. Let a few photos suffice to describe it.
Hmmm. Actually, on my own self-devised outcomes measurement scheme (which uses common household pets to symbolize the patient's well-being), I'm at the "cat" level (sleeping 18 hours a day, eating almost nothing, and feeling like hacking up hair balls all the time.) My goal is to reach "dog" by next week (which is identical to "cat" except without the picky appetite and hairballs part.)
Being in the hospital for 12 days was not fun, especially with the effects of one of the nastier chemo drugs manifesting themselves, one by one. I did get to study language diversity, ranging from the pert, starched young woman who sometimes brought food and announced herself as "diatectic," to the older, more ample employee who kicked the door open, saying "Got your brekfoose!"
My favorite moment, though, was the one night they thought they needed a chest x-ray of me. By the time the orders for this filtered through the layers of bureaucracy, it was 8:00 PM when they finally sent a cart for me. Covered in a blanket and wearing a respiratory mask, I was wheeled down through the bowels of the hospital and left lying in a bleak corridor. Eventually, a huge, impressive Star-Trek style set of automatic doors swung open. A disembodied voice said, "Ah, kiss my ass," and the doors swung shut again.
Ah, and then the food. Let a few photos suffice to describe it.
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Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Off we go ...
Today, I check into Karamanos for several weeks of rest and relaxation. I should be emailable, even if the wifi doesn't work, since I'll have the Treo along. Enjoy the chaos of the holiday season!
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