So you think you want to remodel your kitchen?

My blog has moved!

2010-11-03T20:27:00.000-07:00

I've finally moved my blog over to erinvang.com.

Please update your bookmarks; nothing new will be happening here.

Answer key for the Nov 2010 ballot

2010-10-31T14:20:00.000-07:00

Here, for the benefit of my fellow left-leaning progressive egalitarian voters in the Montclair District of Oakland, is the answer key for Tuesday's election. For the rest of y'all, this is an opportunity to learn why you should be glad you don't have to vote here, where democracy is not a sport for amateurs.

If I've made any factual errors, please correct me in the comments. If you have any insights on the issues where I'm perplexed, please enlighten me. If you're a right-leaning regressive bigot, don't bother to comment, because we won't persuade each other. If you have a reasoned disagreement and are interested in respectful debate, then by all means, comment away!

We have three freaking ballots!

Holy crap! Between state offices, state measures, and local ranked-choice questions, we have not one, not two, but three tests to fill out!

Ballot the first: from Jerry Brown to "Who the heck is Katy Foulkes?"

Governor: Jerry Brown.

C'mon, folks, this one's easy.

Governor Moonbeam did a great job thirty-some years ago when California was the land of opportunity that drew Meg Whitman to come earn her ill-gotten fortune here. And he dated Linda Ronstadt. Who can argue with his taste? Linda Ronstadt is not, by the way, Rosanne Cash.

Mayor Moonbeam did wonders for Oakland, with most of the benefits of his sensible leadership only now becoming visible to people who didn't pay attention and thought he was an evil pro-business Republican in disguise. He's not; he's a sensible guy who understood that if you want scary areas to get scarier, you make them unattractive for business, and if you want scary areas to become nice, you attract businesses and make them places people would want to live.

Attorney General Moonbeam had the dignity not to defend Prop H8. In fact, he saw to it that his office gave Prop H8 the discredit it deserved.

We need Governor Moonbeam again.

And he's my neighbor! No kidding—he lives about a mile from here, along my jogging route. Every so often, I run into him and his wife while I'm walking Kjersti the chocolate lab in Redwood Park. We exchange nods and smiles, I pretend he's just some ordinary guy, and he pretends I'm just some ordinary woman with a ridiculously cute dog.

As for Meg Whitman, she's got hideous politics, she made a ton of money by doing a bad job as eBay's CEO, and she treats her domestic help as disposables, not as people. I don't even want to have a beer with her, and I love beer.

As for the others, I imagine the Green candidate is fine, but we need Jerry to win. Don't waste your ballot; this one's too close for comfort. Anything but a 99-point margin over Meg is too close for comfort.

Lieutenant Governor: Gavin Newsom

I wouldn't have voted for him for Mayor of San Francisco, either, but once he took office, he turned on his wealthy supporters and started doing the right thing all over the place. He legalized gay and lesbian marriage in San Francisco, and the pictures of crowds of happy people in love changed the conversation. For that alone, Gavin deserves some more time in politics.

Yes, he appears to be a slime-ball, but he's our slime-ball.

Et cetera: vote for the Democrats

Unless they have such a huge lead that you can safely vote for the Greens. I'm too lazy to figure out which ones those are.

Attorney General: Kamala Harris

She's the real thing, and she prosecutes crimes that matter instead of BS that's good for headlines, and there are some cretins spending serious money to smear her. Don't be fooled.

United States Senator: Barbara Boxer. Repeat, Barbara Boxer. Repeat, Barbara Boxer.

A lot of politicians who are on the right side nevertheless make a lot of weaselly votes, pander to idiots, and generally fall shockingly short of acting on even their own convictions. Not Babs. She's one of the few who actually speak the truth and bring up the issues that matter.

Carly Fiorina has a lot in common with Meg Whitman: she was a lousy CEO, her politics are hideous, and she doesn't treat her inferiors with respect. About all I can say in her favor is that she's a lot better looking than Meg Whitman. I'm happy for her about the cancer thing. I wish her well, but she needs to pay a lot more taxes, and the idea of her replacing Barbara Boxer as my Senator scares the bejesus out of me.

I once performed at a Barbara Boxer benefit event, and not only did she give a great talk, but when the event was over, she and the headliner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, came right over to thank us musicians and stand with us for several pictures. That's before either one of them shook a single wealthy hand, mind you. They said thank you. To the musicians. The hired help. The nobodies.

Class act, Barbara Boxer.

And she's WAY shorter than you can possibly imagine, even when she's standing in some high scary-ass heels, as she was. The mere fact that she can walk in those things should earn her your great respect.

US Representative: Barbara Lee. Barbara Lee speaks for me!

Barbara Lee was the only dissenting vote in the appalling, embarrassing, unworthy, unamerican rush to blow Iraq to hell and gone because a terrorist organization in Afghanistan attacked the United States again. She was the only person in all of Washington to say no to Dubya and Cheney's blood lust. One person in Washington voted with integrity. It was Barbara Lee.

Member of the State Assembly: Sandré Swanson

Even though he robo-called me more than once. Haven't we proven to ourselves enough times that not having a majority in the Assembly leads to absurd stalemates over basic things like passing budgets and writing reasonable laws?

Judicial Yes and No people: I have no clue

I have absolutely no idea how to vote on these justices. Never have. There are no reliable resources that I know of that are of any help whatsoever on figuring out who, why, or why not. The only voter guides that we pay attention to that say anything say yes for all of them. Okay, I guess.

Seriously, though, WTF? If intelligent people who are willing to put some work into this voting thing can't figure it out, then isn't something broken?

Update! NO on Ming Chin! NO on Ming Chin!

With a tip of the hat to Zoe for supplying this helpful link: http://www.calitics.com/diary/12705/november-2010-statewide-endorsements

Superior Court Judge, Office #9: Victoria S Kolakowski

Most of the leftie voter guides are split on this one. John Creighton appears to be decent enough. Here I go with the advice of Alice B Toklas
organization and the local Green Party Voter Guide, both of which prefer Victoria Kolakowski for a variety of reasons. She's progressive and transgendered, and I'm all for some diversity on the court. About darned time.

Good thing she's not a write-in candidate.

By the way, even if you're not a Green (I'm not, although I wish I could be), their voter guides are considerably more helpful than most. They actually explain their endorsements and supply facts that are helpful for weighing the fuzzier matters.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction: Yech

Even the Greens can't figure this one out. They're both pretty lame. Torlakson seems slightly less awful; at least he doesn't harp on and on about test scores.

AC Transit District Director, At-Large: Joel Young

Thanks, Greens.

EBMUD Director, Ward 3: Katy Foulkes

Thanks, Greens. She's decent on ecology and lousy on labor. She's also unopposed. I guess we might as well vote for her.

Ballot the second: from legalizing marijuana to funding for the Oakland Police Department

Fasten your seatbelts. The propositions are where democracy is at its most challenging in California. Holy crap, I hate our so-called voter initiative process. Let's face it, most of the propositions are so poorly worded that it's hard to figure out how to vote even after you've figured out how you feel about the issue. Most of them address things our Assembly is too wimpy to do, more badly than even the Assembly could manage to do them. Most of them are heavily funded by massive corporations who do not have the needs of California citizens in mind.

So, my first rule is always: when in doubt, not just no, but hell no.

Now let's struggle through each one of them.

Proposition 19 Legalize marijuana: yes

No, I've never smoked it myself, and the way the smell makes me want to hurl, that's unlikely to change any time soon. I know some people who've messed themselves up pretty badly with the stuff, too, and lots more who haven't, but here's why I'm voting yes: because it's time to stop wasting resources on treating its personal use, cultivation, and purchase as a crime.

Prohibition was a lousy idea, and it didn't work either.

Proposition 20 Redistricting: No

I know, it seems like a good idea when you read it, but look who's supporting it: big business. Who's opposed? Everyone from the ACLU on down. That's all I need to know.

Proposition 21 State park vehicle fees: Yes

It's a flat tax, which is generally regressive, but the Greens make a good argument for why to vote yes, anyway. Short answer: the parks need money, and it ain't coming from the Assembly.

Proposition 22 Confusing jibber jabber about moving money around: No

As theballot.org puts it, "Complicated & suspicious way to prevent state borrowing from local agencies." The good guys all say no, the bad guys all say yes. This is a great example of "When in doubt, no." Lots of propositions are just plain bad ideas, written as badly as possible so as to confuse people into supporting something they'd never in their right minds agree with.

Proposition 23 Postponing planetary health: No

Why on earth would anyone in their right minds postpone enforcing the environmental protection laws that aren't strong enough in the first place? Because big bidness told them it had something to do with why they don't have jobs, of course! Bullshit. Not just no, hell no.

Proposition 24 Repeal some tax loopholes: Yes

This one is basically about getting big bidness to pay more taxes by ditching some ridiculous loopholes. A rare example of a proposition we need. Not just yes, hell yes.

Proposition 25 Drop the supermajority budget thing: Yes

California can't pass anything to do with budgets without a two-thirds majority, which basically means it can't get anything done. When do the good guys ever have a 2/3 majority? That's right. It's a stupid, stupid, stupid law, and it's time for it to die. Not just yes, hell yes.

Unfortunately, this isn't a great proposition, but it's a start.

Proposition 26 Create a new supermajority budget thing: No

See above under Proposition 25. The supermajority budget thing we already have is a disaster. The last thing we need is yet another supermajority budget thing. Not just no, hell no.

Proposition 27 Undo bogus redistricting scheme: Yes

This one goes with Proposition 20 but gets it right. It's not perfect, but the Governator's bogus system is a pile of crap. As theballot.org puts it, "Eliminates that sketchy redistricting commission (see Prop 20)." Barbara Lee says yes, as do most but not all of the good guys.

Oh, boy! There's more! It's county, school, and city stuff!

Measure F Paying $10 more to improve Alameda transportation: Oh, OK, I guess so.

Measure L Paying $195 more to do something about the embarrassment that is the Oakland school system: Yes, unfortunately

Measure V Raising taxes on medical marijuana. Sure!

Raise almost a million bucks? Yeah, sounds good to me.

Measure W Paying $15 more a month to keep Oakland from breaking off and sliding into the Pacific Ocean. Well, okay.

This is another sucky flat tax that hurts poor people far more than wealthy people, but we do sort of need to keep the lights on somehow.

Measure X Paying $360 more to do something about crime or something. Uh-uh. No. Hell no.

Uh-uh. This is another bogus "scare the people into passing yet another regressive tax measure that hurts poor people and lets rich people off easy by reminding them that their city is full of black people and implying that somehow this will do something to pay for more police somehow without actually doing so" measure. No. Hell no. And, no.

Sandré Swanson says he's for this one. Seems like a good reason to look forward to Rebecca Kaplan filling his seat in a few years to me.

Measure BB Something about police something something. Yes.

I can't for the life of me figure out what this one means. I can't even figure out what the Greens say it means. I'm tired after doing the first, third, and all but this question on the second test. I can't take it anymore. The Greens say yes and I'm leaving it at that.

Ballot the third: from Don Perata to "Who the heck is Gary Yee?"

Oakland Mayor: not Don Perata

That's the most important thing. Yes, he's got lots of name recognition, because he's under investigation for corruption and he's been a famously lousy politician for freaking ever. Even by Chicago standards, he's too corrupt to elect to anything else.

After that, this one's hard for me. Ranked-choice voting is a good thing here, because it means we actually get to vote the way we want, not the way we feel we have to. So for me it's the Green guy first, Don Macleay, because he's actually a smart guy with good ideas. What a concept!

Second, I go with Jean Quan. She's earnest and basically on the right side of most things, but I also think she's prone to some wimpiness for the sake of gathering votes, and she does lots of smarmy crap that makes it embarrassing to support her. Still, she's decent, she's on the right side of most of the most important issues, she's kept her staffers busy doing good stuff for Oakland and its citizens, and she's a credible candidate. Second choice.

My reluctant third is Rebecca Kaplan. I want to like her a lot more than I do. She's smart, Jewish, feminist, lesbian, left, progressive, and lots of other good stuff. But she's gotten a lot of criticism for temperamental behavior, which isn't generally a recipe for effective leadership, and she's got her sights on higher office; this run for mayor is widely seen as a grab for attention just to up her name recognition for the Assembly position when Sandré Swanson terms out. I think she'd probably push more issues that I care about than Jean Quan, but I think Jean Quan would get more stuff done. Let's go with Jean for the executive position that needs to get stuff done, and let's look forward to voting in a few years for a scrappy rabble-rouser to join the Assembly that desperately needs them. Yes, here it is, my 2013 endorsement of Rebecca Kaplan for State Assembly. She'll be awesome there. She'd probably be a pretty good mayor, too. I won't be upset if she wins.

Either one of them would be fine and a heck of a lot better than Don Perata. Did I mention that he's under investigation for corruption?

Update: You know, let's switch 2 and 3. I like Kaplan better. I just do. And see the comments below.

Member of City Council, District 4

My wife did the work on this one, and here are the answers according to her survey of the endorsements.

First, Libby Schaaf, because she worked for Jerry Brown, he supports her, and all the good guys endorse her. Second, Jill Broadhurst, because she's a mensch and has started lots of good stuff. Third, Clinton Killian, because he's the smart black dude who went to Stanford and UC-B Law School and he walked Montclair.

Just writing down what she says here, folks. My wife's smart; you best listen.

Uh-oh. We've got an update—she says maybe it should be Daniel Swafford instead of Clinton Killian. Swafford does look good.

City Auditor: Courtney Ruby

She's the incumbent and has been doing a great job. No second or third choice.

School Director, District 4: Benjamin Visnick

Thanks, Greens. No second or third choice.

Tuna noodle hotdish

2010-08-30T14:37:00.000-07:00

My recent Multilingual column mentioned tuna noodle hotdish. For those readers who aren't familiar with this snowbelt classic, here's a recipe.

This is an old standard for Norwegian-Lutherans in the USA snowbelt—it's what we make when our neighbor's recovering from surgery, or when a friend has just had a death in the family, or when we need to bring something for the church potluck, or if it's a cold night and we're hungry.

It's not a fancy recipe—and that's the whole point. It's cheap, easy comfort food.

one can of tuna
one 12 oz bag of egg noodles
one can of cream of mushroom soup
a few slices of Velveeta
salt
pepper
oregano
potato chips

Prepare one package of egg noodles in boiling, salted water according to directions on the bag. Drain. Add tuna, cream of mushroom soup concentrate, about half a soup can of water, Velveeta, salt and pepper, and oregano. Stir, return to heat, and heat through. Correct seasonings. Top with crumbled potato chips.

Variation: instead of heating on stovetop, top with potato chips and heat in oven-proof casserole at 350˚F for about 30 minutes.

Nano-opera: Evgeny Onegin

2010-07-02T15:16:00.000-07:00

Pride and Prejudicesky.

Nano-opera: Gounod's Faust

2010-07-02T13:19:00.000-07:00

In Act I, a geezer wants to off himself because he's a geezer. Handsome bass devil who sings better and is several feet taller talks him into sticking around, exchanging youth for some dubious duties later on. Spotting a beautiful, young woman who is actually just a soprano and neither of those things, he agrees, drinks a potion and becomes a handsome, young man who's actually just a tenor and neither of those things. The soprano's brother sings goodbye for a long time before marching off to war. A crowd has formed so that the devil has an excuse to sing some more, the crowds get revenge by bursting into singing of their own, and finally our unhandsome tenor fails to woo our unbeautiful soprano.

Before Act II, the audience members adjourn to Pauline's for pizza and beer.

Nano-opera: Die Walküre

2010-07-01T12:47:00.001-07:00

(If I'm any good at this, it will be obvious that my nano-operas owe a great debt to Anna Russell. There's no point trying to outdo Dame Russell's great analysis of the Ring of the Nibelungen, which you must immediately view here, here, and here if you haven't already. My own humble effort here is just a summary of the recent San Francisco Opera production of the second episode of Wagner's famous soap opera about gang warfare and a dysfunctional family.)

In Act I, twins separated at birth find each other in a forest, but the female twin's husband doesn't take kindly to sheltering the guy who'd done in a bunch of his gang before the opera and suggests they take it outside the next morning. Said guy is weaponless and figures he's a goner, but then he falls in love with his twin sister, they pull a magical sword out of a tree, and it's not looking good for hubby.

Between acts, the twins do the nasty.

In Act II, Al Gore is wearing a pirate-style eye patch and flirting with his daughter from Security in the penthouse boardroom while instructing her to help his son kills his twin sister's hubby so that junior can get busy saving Valhalla Inc. Daughter's all over it, until Tipper arrives and asks, "WTF, Al? Incest and infidelity between the kids? I don't think so. Junior's got to go." We can tell she's pissed, because she doesn't even bring up the thing about the masseuse. We can tell Al's worried about an expensive divorce, because he doesn't even bring up the thing about global warming. He makes nice with Tipper and calls off the hit-daughter, explaining he made a bad deal a couple operas ago and Valhalla might be going belly up—something about a ring, some giants he'd contracted to build a subdivision until one of them got killed and the other became a dragon, and a lot of nonsense about needing to hire a whiz kid he doesn't know to save Valhalla, without getting HR involved or anybody writing a job description. Daughter's not buying it, though, so she belays Al's belay. Al's stuck doing his own dirty work, so he whacks Junior's magical sword with a spear, then whacks the ungrateful hubby while Daughter makes off with other daughter.

In Act III, still more of Al's daughters are staffing up Security for Valhalla Inc. Daughter stops by with other daughter, now preggers from that quickie between acts, hears Al's still pissed, and sends her preggo sister off to play with her broken sword in the dragon's 'hood. Al reads her the riot act, fires her, and gives her a heavy-duty date-rape drug. She whines about the unfairness of it all, so on his way out he staffs out setting a ring of fire around her to protect her until her nephew's old enough to leave dragonville and come rape her.

In praise of neti pots

2010-06-29T10:04:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, after seeing a character in Six Feet Under use a neti pot, I mumbled something to my wife about having always been curious to try a neti pot. A few days later, she brought one home from the store for me, and I've been a neti pot fanatic ever since.

I've spent my entire life dealing with various hay fever-like symptoms, just like my mom, brother, grandfather, and numerous other relatives. Since it was normal in my family, I thought my way of life was universal, but it turns out that normal people do not, in fact, always have at least one Kleenex in their pockets at all times. I was in college before I realized that some families don't even buy Kleenexes unless someone has a cold. Everyone in my family keeps a box of Kleenex in nearly every room of the house!

Apparently it's also not normal to wake up in the morning so congested that you can't wait to take a shower, because that's where you keep your neti pot, and after using your neti pot in the shower, your nose is cleared out enough that you can breathe through it again.

I've never been sure why I'm so full of snot, exactly. I was treated for allergies during my teen years by several allergists whose methods are scoffed at now, and allergists I've seen since then have all told me I have no allergies. The last one I saw told me I have "non-allergic" or "mechanical rhinitis," which basically means that my body reacts to just about any foreign body as if allergic to it, indiscriminately. So, I'm not actually allergic to dust, molds, mites, tobacco, smoke, smog, pollen, dander, or any of the other hundred typical allergens that they tested me for, but my system freaks out and puts on an allergy party for all of them anyway. The basic hay-fever symptom is for your immune system to detect an allergen, trap it with mucus, and evacuate it. My system does that, and how exactly this is different from actually having allergies to all those things is beyond me. One difference seems to be that if these were actual allergies, then somebody would have a clue how to help me.

It wouldn't be that big a deal if my system would evacuate mucus efficiently, like it's supposed to, but it doesn't. Apparently there are several reasons for this. One, rhinitis patients' snot is thicker than normal, so it gets stuck. Two, there's more of it, so the body gets behind in clearing.

Three, until last week I had a deviated septum. The septum is the thin bone that divides right nostril from left. It's a tongue-and-groove kind of thing, and mine had gotten derailed from its groove so that the front tip was off the rails toward the left, and the back end was off the rails toward the right. It was basically diagonal, which is why my nose has always looked a little curved if you looked closely. My ENT knocked it back into the groove and then shaved it down on one side until it was even. This is bones we're talking about, people. Mine were seriously out of whack. They've been that way since 1994—therein lies a story.

I was walking from the Dempster train station to my apartment by the lake in Evanston, IL. I was coming from a gig downtown and had my (heavy) horn backpack on, and I was hurrying home to eat and change for a gig I had to drive to, so I was pitched forward and walking fast. As I walked past a coffee shop (Café Express, which most of us nicknamed "Café Repressed"), I kept walking fast but turned to look in the window to see if anyone I knew was there. Another pedestrian, also moving fast but toward me, was doing the same thing. We slammed into each other, the right side of my nose striking her left cheekbone. We hit so hard we both fell backwards. We helped each other up, made sure we were both okay, exchanged apologies, felt stupid, and continued on our ways.

My nose hurt like hell and soon I had a pounding headache. While eating my hurried dinner, I tried to remember what the checklist for concussion was and concluded that if I was coherent enough to be working on that problem, I was probably okay, although my head pounded, my vision was blurry for a while, and my cognitive functioning was off kilter. I drove to the gig, navigating Chicago and operating my vehicle successfully but was completely unable to comprehend "All Things Considered" no matter how hard I tried to focus on it.

I got through the gig somehow, and by the time I drove home, I was better able to understand the radio.

Remembering (I thought) something about not taking pain meds or sleeping when you have a concussion, I held off as long as I could on both but finally gave up and did both. I spent most of the weekend with a headache, and my nose was sore and creaky, but I seemed to be okay, so I made a non-urgent appointment to see my regular doctor that Thursday.

By the time I got to my doctor on Thursday, something else had come up that took over the visit (boring story) and it was literally as an afterthought that I said, "Oh! The reason I came here in the first place was..." and then I told the tale of my nose injury. She checked it out, confirmed that my nose was creaky (gosh, thanks!), and said she just saw a little swelling but that it was nothing to worry about.

And now I know--it was creaky because I'd banged it off the rails and made it diagonal! Sheesh! (In my 1994 internist's defense, my ENT didn't realize it was deviated until he saw a sinus CT, and I got the impression in talking with him about it after the surgery that he didn't even know the details of how it was deviated until he was performing the surgery, but I could be mistaken about that.)

Four, until last week, I had oversized turbinates. Turbinates are bones on either side of the nose covered with fleshy material, and they function as humidifiers. Mine were too big, which meant they were narrowing the passages that are supposed to handle drainage. In March my ENT had done a less invasive procedure (zapping them with a small RF probe) to reduce them, which had helped but not enough. This time he used sharp tools to cut them down to size, and on the right side he actually had to shave down the bone, which apparently was way too large--just bad genetics there.

Once I've finished recovering from all that, my nose should work much better. I'm looking forward to it!

Anyway, back to the neti pot…

A few tangents and years ago, my wife had bought me a neti pot. She'd gotten me one of these little guys at her favorite hippie-dippy pharmacy in Berkeley: http://www.himalayaninstitute.org/store/product/d0e29a4e-507c-417e-86d0-f5c05320fbbe.aspx

I procrastinated figuring out how to use it for several weeks. Like most people, I was afraid. I've had those awful swimming pool experiences that make you dread getting water up your nose.

Then one morning, I heard a story on Morning Edition about neti pots and decided to get over my bad self. I googled up some video demonstrations like this one and then got to work. Five minutes later I was triumphant but unimpressed. It wasn't that bad, and I did get some crud out of my system, but it didn't feel revelatory.

About an hour later, though, I could feel things unplugging, and gradually everything opened up like never before. My voice even sounded different. It was great.

A few days later, I left on a business trip to Tokyo, and to save luggage space, I decided not to bring my new neti pot along. What a mistake! I'd forgotten that the Great Dust Cloud of China hasn't been very good about staying inside China's borders. I spent the entire week in China looking for neti pots or anything else that could possibly work as a temporary neti pot. Toward the end of our visit, my colleagues and friends Trish and Katja and I visited Kappabashi Market, a neighborhood famous for its restaurant supply stores. All three of us dropped far too many yen at a particularly nice ceramics store, and my browsing was considerably slowed down by my quest to find a small teapot or soy sauce pot or some other kind of pot whose spout would have the right fit for my nostrils—without actually testing the spouts on my nostrils, of course. I did not succeed. I also was unable to find a bottle of water with a sport top, something I'd seen pressed into emergency neti pot stand-in duty on somebody's blog. Nor did I successfully purchase plain old salt, mistakenly thinking it was called "aji no moto," which is actually MSG. Oops. (Fortunately I figured that out when I got back to my hotel room and tasted it before attempting to use it in my nose.) Nor, in short, did I figure out any other strategy during my visit. I made many puddles on my hotel bathroom's counter trying, though.

When I got back home to Oakland, I had one whole day to unpack, do laundry, and repack for the next business trip—to China. My wife and mom were coming along on that trip, and Mom actually flew into SFO from Montana the same day I did from Tokyo. On our day-in-between, I told Mom all about my neti pot and how much I'd missed it. She was curious (you might recall from about a page ago that I inherited my useless nose from her), so I gave her a demo, and then she tried it herself. She was impressed right away, so later that day, she insisted we visit Victoria's hippie-dippy pharmacy. She bought several extras to give to other members of our phlegm-plagued family.

I also told Mom about how the Great Dust Cloud of China and its awful pollution meant we'd definitely want our neti pots along. We did not regret allocating luggage space to them, and anyone who saw the heinous black crud that came out of my nose twice a day would need no further persuasion to buy themselves a neti pot before visiting China. We coudn't persuade Victoria to give it a try, though—early in our visit, she'd tripped on an unexpected curbstone and broken her shoulder while trying to stop her fall, and that pain had her full attention.

It wasn't long before I decided to upgrade to a larger stainless steel neti pot, which is what I strongly recommend. A number of my family and friends got these for Christmas last year. I like this kind better because:

I'm a klutz. It was only a matter of time before I would drop and break the ceramic one.
I travel a lot, and fragile stuff in luggage breaks sooner or later.
It's a lot larger. I needed to measure and mix salt four times with the other kind to complete my routine, and I can get it all done with one batch in this one.
Its shape is convenient. With a little effort, you can find a nonbreakable container that will hold several weeks' worth of salt and fit inside the neti pot for compact packing.

About a year ago, Victoria finally got on the neti pot bandwagon. She'd bought herself one but kept refusing to try it, but sooner or later she decided that if Mom could do it, so could she. Also, her internist recommended trying it, and later her internist recommended using it twice a day if once a day was helping but she was still having trouble. It's now a part of her morning shower routine. She says, "I like it! And I have to say, I like the big stainless steel pot that you got me much better than the little plastic jobber I started with. It fits well, and you can get a lot of salt water in it. It's a good tool!"

So how do you get started?

If you're not convinced yet, read why this is such a good idea at WebMD or the New York Times.
Buy, borrow, or steal a large stainless steel neti pot.
Buy, borrow, or steal the biggest nonbreakable container you can that will fit inside it. I use the container some chocolates I bought in Korea came in. It's perfect!
Fill that container with kosher salt or uniodized sea salt. I use Diamond brand kosher salt because that's what Barbara Tropp used, may she rest in peace. (Other blog posts will harangue you on why you should throw away your other salt and start using kosher salt in the kitchen.)
Optionally add some baking soda to your salt and shake it up. Supposedly baking soda gives your nasal passages a bacteria-hostile pH. Mom adds just a spoonful to her salt container, but a little googling reveals that other people believe in a one-to-one mixture of baking soda and salt. I've just begun trying Mom's method after years of using just kosher salt, and I haven't formed any opinions yet.
Find a cheap teaspoon or 5ml measuring spoon and do a Uri Geller number on it so it'll fit inside your neti pot, too. I find that a heaping tablespoon per pot is about right for me, and too much salt is far better than too little, but decide for yourself.
Keep all this stuff in or near your shower. Shower-temperature water is perfect, and if you do your neti routine in the shower, you don't have to worry about dribbling on your clothes or needing to rinse yourself or the sink.
Read and watch how to do it.
Give it a try. You will not die. It's not even uncomfortable.
After you've been successful for a few days with the basic technique, learn how to do "jala neti stage 2" and give that a try. If you suffer from postnasal drip, this is awesome. I typically do a quarter pot stage 1 for each nostril then do a quarter pot stage 2 for each nostril.

If it hurts, then you're doing it wrong

If it's the least bit uncomfortable, you're doing something wrong:

Stinging: the salt level isn't right. Either too much or too little is bad, but if you ask me too little is worse than too much. Get in a habit of tasting your water before you use it each time, and you'll quickly develop a sense of the optimal salt level for you. It should taste pretty salty—about like your tears.
Aching: the temperature isn't right. It's probably too cool. A lot of people recommend body temperature or room temperature, but I like it warmer than that. To me, my regular shower water temperature is perfect.
Burning: the temperature is too hot.

Keep it simple

You can buy special salts and pre-mixed packets of salt and all kinds of other crap, but don't bother. You're just making things fussier and more expensive for yourself.

You can also buy various neti pot "solutions," where you're typically supposed to add an eyedropper full to your salt water. Don't bother. I tried one that was recommended for sinus infections—some kind of homeopathic or herbal junk, but I can't remember the details—and it actually made things worse for me.

Have you tried using a neti pot?

I'd love to hear about your experiences. Leave me a comment!

An original cocktail: Montmartre

2010-05-05T10:37:00.000-07:00

Montmartre is a hill (the butte Montmartre) which is 130 meters high, giving its name to the surrounding district, in the north of Paris in the 18th arrondissement, a part of the Right Bank. [Wikipedia]

A few years ago I was staring at the lovely bottle creme de cassis in our liquor cabinet I'd hand-carried home from Paris and thinking what a shame it is that I don't like Kir Royales all that much.

Kir Royales (Kirs Royale?) are fine. It's just that if the Champagne or sparkling wine is good enough, I don't want to ruin it with sweet black currant flavors, and if it isn't good enough, sweet black currant flavors aren't going to help much. Another worthy option is to use it in a Rouge Gorge--add a dollop of creme de cassis to a glass of red table wine that needs some help. But here again, same problem.

I decided it was time to develop a new cocktail that would take the creme de cassis out of the back of the cabinet and put it on proud display. My starting point was a sweet Manhattan: bourbon, sweet red vermouth, Angostura bitters (or as our friend Jane calls them, "Agnostic bitters"), and a maraschino cherry. A lovely drink.

My concept was to substitute creme de cassis for the sweet red vermouth, but the combination of sticky cassis and sweet bourbon is just too much--I knew that without needing to taste it. My solution: rye! An under-appreciated cousin of bourbon, rye is basically the same stuff, but it's made with a bigger proportion of rye than corn or other grains. If you don't like members of the brown liquor family, you'll think rye tastes the same as bourbon, but if you do like them and are paying attention, rye has a much brighter taste. The perfect foil for cloying cassis, I thought.

I kept the dash of Agnostic bitters, and I added a dash of West Indian Orange Bitters, again for brightness in contrast to the cassis.

But now the dilemma: what to do about the maraschino cherry? In early versions of the Montmartre, I attempted to keep them, but they're a hideous color, and they taste as artificial as they look. They were horribly outclassed by the cassis.

I tried a few variations on the citrus theme, but they were all too bright, losing the specialness of the cassis and burying the subtle brightness of the rye.

Eventually I hit upon the ideal garnish: sour cherries. Whole Foods sells a brand called Zergütt that are, despite the name, pretty good. However, their syrup is too sweet and thick. My solution? Pour off about half the syrup (save it for Old Fashioneds--trust me on this), replace it with rye, and stick it back in the fridge for at least a few days. Use a splash of this rye/juice in the cocktail, too.

So here it is, the final draft. This has become a favorite at our house and also at our friend Jane's house. Jane's much better about writing things down, so every so often when I forget a detail on one of my cocktails, I call her to ask. With thanks to Jane for her service as cocktail archivist, here is:

Montmartre

Fill a cocktail shaker halfway with crushed ice.
Add an 8-to-1 ratio of rye whiskey and creme de cassis, i.e. 4 shots rye to 1/2 shot cassis. If you like your drinks sweeter, go 4-to-1.
Add a dash each of Angostura bitters and West Indian Orange Bitters.
Garnish martini glasses with three sour cherries soaked in half the syrup and half rye.
Splash a little of the rye/syrup from the cherries into the cocktail shaker.
Shake well and strain into the cocktail glasses.

Notes:

Blood Orange bitters or Regan's Orange Bitters are worthy substitutes for the West Indian Orange Bitters, but there is no substitute for the Angostura Bitters, which are essential.

Many people would tell you cocktails should be mixed with large, hard, super-cold cubes of ice. They are right in many cases. Harder, larger, colder ice gives you a colder cocktail with less water diluting the spirits. However, some drinks benefit from some ice-melt, and in my opinion, the Manhattan family and the martini family are two such categories. Both gin and whisky can keep their flavors buttoned-up, and adding a small amount of water unbuttons their shirts and reveals glorious cleavage and alluring scents.

"Bruising" is the term some people use, and although it sounds pejorative, bruising is in some cases exactly what the liquor needs. When you add a few drops of water to the room-temperature spirit and you see oily swirling reactions taking place, what's happening is that certain oils and esters are being disturbed, releasing their aromas (thus flavors) to your noise and tongue. Scotch whisky afficionados intentionally add a very few drops of "branch water" to their single malts for this very reason.

For the Montmartre in particular, using crushed ice accomplishes several things: it increases the surface area of ice available to the liquid, thus cooling it faster or further; it increases the melting and dilution, thinning the potentially goopy texture of the creme de cassis; and it reveals the subtle flavor dimensions of the rye whiskey.

Santé!

A Bloody Mary recipe for people who think they don't like them

2010-05-03T13:38:00.001-07:00

Here, by popular demand, is my recipe for a Bloody Mary that even Bloody Mary-haters are likely to like. I should know, because I was one of them. I thought the Bloody Mary was a pretty disgusting drink, but I had friends and for a time a partner who liked them, so I tried to accommodate their requests but also create something I could enjoy with them. I succeeded a little too well--now I crave them myself from time to time, I'm disappointed when other people's still suck, and I end up having to recreate my recipe for a lot of people. Some people have described this is an alcoholic cold tomato soup or a pureed gazpacho with a kick, and those are pretty valid descriptions.

My usual recipe caveat: I don't use or write recipes. I have a vague method that changes a bit each time, and I'm probably forgetting a few things. I'll try to post corrections if I figure out what, and please feel free to raise your concerns in this regard in the Comments section below!

The most important thing is to recognize that a Bloody Mary is not V8 with vodka in it. It's also not Mr & Mrs T's with vodka in it. It's spicy tomato juice with a whole bunch of good stuff and gin in it. Trust me on this--if you do your research, you will learn that the traditional Bloody Mary is made with a London Dry-style gin, not vodka--that's a later variation, same as martinis.

Now, I suppose you could start with V8 if you happen to like it, but I happen to hate it--the carrot flavor is way too dominant for me. Yuck. I start with a quart jar of spicy tomato juice, and a brand that I've found to be pretty good is Knudsen's. There are others, I'm sure, and Spicy V8 is a reasonable choice if you do actually like V8. Whatever you get, taste it before you start, so that you have a sense of how salty and spicy it is already and you can adjust the rest of the process according to your taste.

Next, an essential, traditional ingredient is--believe it or not--beef stock. Yes, indeed. Sorry, but this is not a drink for vegetarians. You could experiment with vegetable stocks, or maybe a good dashi without the miso, though; the goal is an umami (savory, meaty) flavor, and for my money, beef stock is where it's at. I like Farmer Brothers "Special Soup Base Beef Flavor," which comes as a glossy brown goo in ginormous tubs and has a lot less MSG than most options. I take a heaping tablespoon of that goop and mix it in a 2Q mixing bowl with just enough almost-boiling water to dissolve it, no more--say, 3-4 tablespoons.

(The plan here is to mix up a one quart batch of Bloody Mary base that you'll store in your refrigerator. To serve, you'll shake some of it with booze in a cocktail shaker.)

To this I add several hefty squirts of every kind of Tabasco sauce and similar product that I can find in our refrigerator. Currently we have:

red Tabasco
green Tabasco
chipotle Tabasco
Frontera Grill Red Pepper Hot Sauce
Cholula Hot Sauce

I'd be happier with a few more. Now add:

several cloves of garlic, crushed (and "several" could be a lot, really)
a hefty scoop of fresh grated horseradish, or a heftier scoop of the pregrated stuff that comes in a little jar
a dash of Liquid Smoke if you have it (or an extra squirt of chipotle Tabasco, if you don't)
a squirt of extra virgin olive oil (because most of the flavors are fat-soluble)
kosher salt (you get what you deserve if you substitute iodized table salt--feh!)
ground cumin (really can't overdo it here)
ground coriander
ground cayenne
ground Spanish smokey hot paprika
oregano
celery seed (not too much)
ancho chili powder, if you have it
any other chili-esque variations on the theme that you can think of
a dash of the brine in your jar of green olives (see below)
juice of half a lime
freshly ground black pepper (I like Telicherry)

Mix all this up and then add it to your spicy tomato juice. Now taste, adjust, and add what you think is missing. If this is way too strong for you, then you've made enough base for two quarts of your favorite tomato juice.

Fill a cocktail shaker halfway with crushed ice. Add a shot or two of a good London Dry gin (I like Beefeater for these, but there are many good choices. I think Tanqueray is too fruity for a BM). Add your tomato juice mix. You want approximately a 4:1 juice-to-booze proportion. Shake well, because these liquids have very different viscosities and they need to be persuaded to play nicely with each other.

Strain into a highball or lowball glass half-filled with more crushed ice, several stuffed green olives, a hand-squeezed lime wedge, and an optional narrow, leafy stalk of celery.

An excellent alternative to gin is a good akevit, preferably with strong caraway flavors, such as Ålborg's standard akevit in the green bottle. (The Jubilæum is good too, but I don't think it's as good a choice here.) When you make a Bloody Mary with akevit instead of gin, it becomes a Danish Mary.

Another good alternative is Hangar One Chipotle Vodka. I know, I said vodka's all wrong, but that stuff if so good, it's the exception to prove the rule. I wouldn't bother with any old brand's pepper vodka, though--the Hangar One Chipotle stuff is a multidimensional, rich, savory, picquant, difficult vodka.

Please note a few things that you do not want to add under any circumstances, at least not if you're planning to serve these to me:

Worcestershire sauce
celery salt
vodka

~~Clamato~~ (Yech! That stuff is disgusting, and if you like it, the drink goes by a different name--for a reason! It's a different drink!)

That's my method, best I can remember. Please enjoy it, let me know what you think, and by all means raise an alarm in the Comments if you think I might have missed something.

Salut!

Nano-opera: Carmen

2010-05-03T10:50:00.001-07:00

This nano-opera comes to us from my Twitter friend, SAS expert Michael Tuchman (http://bit.ly/cnY8m8):

Carmen: Soldier doesn't want to marry nice girl. He chases bad one. He gets cold feet. She dates hot celeb, so he kills her.

Opinionated computer purchasing advice

2010-04-28T19:17:00.000-07:00

People ask me about which Mac to buy often enough that I thought I might as well post here a recent reply I wrote to a friend who is looking at a career change from corporate programming to consulting, possibly, or another corporate gig, or who knows what.

Caveat emptor: I am a software professional. A way geek. My everyday work is computing intensive. I usually have at least six applications running at once, and not because I'm not paying attention but because my work requires it. Some of my applications require fast processors and huge amounts of RAM. I need a big-ass disk or several. My extracurricular activities as a professional musician who does some recording and composing are also computer-intensive at times, and I read the New York Times online daily with a Times Reader subscription--yet another computer-based activity. My work frequently requires travel, and even during leisure travel there is the possibility that I will need to work on some code or something else where my iPhone or a netbook wouldn't cut it.

Normal people do not have such extreme needs! Normal people would get along just fine with the computer I was using five years ago.

Oh--and I'm a Mac bigot. I truly believe that Macs work better and let you get more done with less hassle. If you need to some particular software that's only available on Windows or Linux or whatever, then buy Parallels or VMWare or try one of the open source virtualization programs to run those programs--and only those programs--in a window on your Mac. That's what I do, and many of my clients are Windows-only shops, so it's not like I can afford to be without access to Windows myself.

Still, people ask me, because they know I care and have researched these things to death, so here goes.

I love laptops, and I think that in consulting and/or uncertain job futures it's best to emphasize flexibility. You never know when you'll need to give a talk, or demo something at someone else's office, or fix something while you're on vacation, or work while you're on the road. You can't do much of that on an iPad or iPhone (except correspondence and basic iWork stuff). You can do it all on a laptop, and you also have a built-in uninterruptable power supply (battery!) in cases of lightning knocking out the power just as you accomplish something important that you haven't saved yet. You also have, in a laptop, a built-in free primary display, and when you connect a big-ass LCD as your external display, you have tons of real estate when you're at your desk.

And anything the iPad can do, your laptop can do, except for being light, sexy, etc. But you'll have an iPhone for that. Get an iPad later when you can resist no longer. (I plan to usurp the one my wife bought this afternoon.)

My friends with iMacs love them, and one friend in particular who lives in a one-bedroom apartment uses his as his computer, TV, DVD, DVR, stereo, virtual aquarium, and digital picture frame as well as computer. He uses his iPhone on the go. He's delighted with both. He does NOT make his living in software, though, and he doesn't travel for same. He's a musician who does Mac stuff at his day job, sometimes works from home, does a variety of things at home, and just needs basic iPhone apps when away from home. That said, I doubt he'd say no if somebody offered him their two-year-old MacBook--and I also doubt he'd get rid of the iMac.

I like a big screen and as much power and as many kinds of ports as possible, especially when a fair amount of work-away-from-office is expected, but even just when reading Times Reader. So, for me the top of the line MacBook Pro 17" will always be the no-brainer choice. Next best for me is last year's version of same, from craigslist or a bargain Apple refurb unit. That said, 17" weighs a lot more than 15" weighs a lot more than 13", and unless you use a backpack, you want to avoid unnecessary weight. (And don't forget it's not just the laptop--it's the cables, the camera, the books, the banana, the carrying bag itself, and everything else you schlepp around in your purse^H^H^H^H^Hbriefcase or backpack.

If you're bent on an iMac and an iPad, maybe a good compromise would be an iMac for your desk and a refurb Air for travel, and a Dropbox account to be sure that the most important things are always on both. See the Apple store, lower right corner forrefurbs etc.--or craigslist.

Craigslist rocks. For retail, see if you have any friends/family with access to academic discounts, then check refurb, then check:

http://www.appleinsider.com/mac_price_guide/

http://www.techound1.com/blog/

Did I mention craigslist?

Nobody pays me anything for blogging about this stuff. Or rather, companies don't. My friends and family repay me amply in ways too numerous to count. Thank you, all of you--you probably don't realize who you are, but I do, and I'm grateful to be blessed with such an embarrassment of riches.

Expiration Date Soup

2010-04-20T14:48:00.001-07:00

Many of my family and friends have gifts for foraging--recognizing all the funky greens, vegetables, mushrooms, and so forth in their habitats, and knowing when and how to harvest. I don't have the gift--or rather, my repertoire is rather limited. I know cress, dandelions, and other basics, and most of the Rocky Mountain region edible berries, but that's about it. I think I recognize some mushrooms, but then I remember the great care with which my biologist mother examines mushrooms (spore patterns and all), the most recent headlines about mushroom poisonings flood in, and I let braver souls have the harvest.

I do, however, have a gift for pantry and refrigerator scrounging. I remember with pride an ex remarking, "Wow. You're really good at making whole meals out of nothing." Where she saw an empty refrigerator, I saw enough odds and ends for a soup, a funky salad, a crossover stir-fry, or whatever.

Today's lunch is a good example. I'm calling it "Expiration date soup." I just threw together several quarts of a hearty, yummy miso soup using almost nothing but food that was supposedly due for the dump:

several quarts of water (nearly the only ingredient that was not expired)
two packets of bonito stock powder dating back to the Clinton administration (I also have ancient konbu and hana katsuo and I am not afraid to use them, but starting my dashi from scratch adds twenty minutes and some risk, which is not ideal for a quick lunch break from work)
the bottom of an ancient bag of wakame
the bottom of an ancient bag of black fungus
a tub of tofu that expired three months ago (but was unopened and fine), diced
a few sad cloves of garlic, peeled and thinly sliced
the dried-out sludge at the bottom of an ancient tub of red miso (I had to mince it and whisk it inside a strainer to get it to dissolve into my broth)
a slug of semi-ancient sesame oil
three eggs from an urban farmer friend of who knows what age, lightly mixed and stirred into the soup, off the flame (egg-drop soup style)
several shakes of sesame seed/bonito flakes/mystery ingredients "rice topping" stuff that I think I bought when I lived in Chicago, which is to say before 1994

I prepared the soup by dumping these things into a pot over a medium-high flame roughly in the order listed above, as I found them, and by the time I had everything in the pot, it was ready to eat.

Yummy. Probably not something any self-respecting Japanese chef would acknowledge as food, but I liked it, and I'm going to enjoy it for several more lunches.

Weather announcements and youthful indiscretions

2010-03-11T18:18:00.000-08:00

Something I've found wonderfully amusing is that ever since Dad got on the email bandwagon in the mid 1990s, we Vangs (and in-laws) have received email nearly every weekday and often on the weekends that opens, invariably, with a weather report. Dad's a farmer's son, which probably has something to do with the obsession, and if not, then living in Grafton, ND for a few years and hearing all the farmers complain about the weather no matter what it was probably would have done the job.

I find the Butte, MT weather reports particularly amusing since they often serve as a reminder to me that I'm probably experiencing some kind of weather, too. Left to my own devices, I could probably go weeks without noticing it. Other than deciding whether to grab a rain coat or a fleece vest before heading outside with the dogs, I'm clueless on the subject. It's sunny and warm today, but I can't for the life of me remember what yesterday was like. Did it hail? Or was that Tuesday? I have no idea.

In my defense, SF Bay Area weather is considerably more boring than most places. I cracked up the day I was listening to KQED, the NPR affiliate station, and one of my favorite announcers said, "Weather today--mid 60s by the bay, warmer inland, with light breezes; warming to 70s midday, warmer inland, with cooler temperatures expected in the evening and lows in the 50s overnight. [Beat. Beat.] Gee, that's a surprise. [Beat. Beat.] Traffic this morning is..."

It reminded me of something from my salad days...

One of the stranger-looking lines on my resume notes that I was an announcer at KFJM-FM, the University of North Dakota's NPR affiliate station, the summer after college.

We were required by law or by farm country morality or something to announce the weather several times an hour no matter what. You'd stop by the wire service machine and tear off a four-inch strip from the never-ending trivia printout spilling out of that thing, park it on your rack in the booth, and read off the usual bits at the prescribed times. Although it was only occasionally an interesting topic (I have an amusing story about the tornado warning emergency that I had to deal with the day I was also simultaneously running AM and FM, whose stations were on opposite ends of the building), it was a BIG DEAL and could not be skipped, ever. Unfortunately, I often forgot to grab the latest weather wire before heading back into the booth, since they were so damned boring, so on more than a few occasions, I actually just dug the hour-old strip out from under my pile of album covers and CD hoojies (technical term) and invented slight changes from whatever the weather used to be. I was shameless. As far as I know, my invented barometric pressures and wind speeds never hurt anybody, and my temperature guesses were probably within the margin of error of the actual readings and forecasts anyway. But my dad is probably still deeply disappointed by my ethical lapses in this area--if he even knew about them until now, that is.

He knows now. I hope he can cope.

Perhaps I'm being cocky, but I don't think the FCC is going to read this and revoke my license for it.

I was grateful for the weather wire a few times, though. Several times a month, you're required by the FCC to do a test of the Emergency Broadcast System (that awful beeping thing with the stupid "this is a test, this is only a test" patter). Because KFJM operated both FM and AM stations, but only one of those stations had EBS hardware, you needed to take control of both stations to do the tests or actual EBS events. So that it's somewhat graceful, you'd do these at very specific times with an agreed cue ("Time now, 2:14") so that the AM station could plan its programming and announcements just so, so that your taking control from the FM booth could sound seamless. Meanwhile, on the FM side, I'd have to play my program down to the minute, also.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the printed band-timings on LPs are frequently incorrect, and not by just a little bit. More than once I'd have a piece bottom out on me quite a bit ahead of schedule, and I'd have to vamp to fill the extra minute or three until the EBS break-in, or the satellite feed at the top of the hour, or whatever. There's only so much detail you can read off about the piece we've just heard and the upcoming programming, and throwing in promo carts (those brief pre-recorded spots where Noah Adams invites you to listen to All Things Considered, blah blah blah) is surprisingly tricky and not something you generally want to have to do on the fly, and especially not when you've patched your board over to the EBS, and that channel just happens to be the channel that normally is used for the weird 8-track-tape-style thingy that plays the promo carts and would have to be repatched on the fly, too.

So, when you suddenly find yourself with an entire minute to kill, nothing left to say about the music past or future, and way too many knobs and switches to deal with to play a cart while also trying to say something reasonable into the microphone, you do the only thing you can do: you read off the current and predicted temperatures, wind speeds, directions, barometric pressures and whether they're rising or falling for every damned town in the entire upper Red River Valley, and you try not to slash your wrists.

And you wonder how many farmers' days you've just made.

Is there anybody out there reading this now who would actually have cared? Anybody? Please use that Comment button!

Putting disasters in perspective, or Our crappy economy isn't so bad

2010-01-13T18:41:00.000-08:00

[Note: I originally wrote this for my consultancy's blog, where references to localization make more sense. You can read it here if you prefer: http://blog.globalpragmatica.com/?p=62]

Many people are depressed these days, for many valid reasons. The economy is still a disaster. The localization industry is a mess in more ways than I can count. (I don't think I'll get much argument about that, but if anybody questions that, please leave a comment, and I'll elucidate in a future blog post.) Many of us are out of work and have been for a frighteningly long time. Many of us are clinging to scaled-back jobs. Many of us are worried about how long the work we're grateful to have will last.

When even the blue chip companies are slashing workforces and budgets and the banks themselves are declaring bankruptcy, we know our economy is a disaster.

Looking outside the devastated economy of the developed world, let's consider the vastly greater struggles in the two-thirds world.

Terminology break! (T9Y break!) When people say "third world," they mean "undeveloped or developing nations," and these represent over two-thirds of the world's population, so let's stop saying that and say what we really mean: "two-thirds world."

In the news today, hundreds of thousands of Haitians are believed dead after a major 7.0 earthquake hit, its epicenter right in the most populous part of an already fragile island. Most Haitians are black and live on less than US$1 a day. Putting this in perspective, fewer than 3000 people will killed in the horrifying 9/11 attacks. However, I fear that history will show the great failure of our humanity when the global public response to the crisis gets those metrics backwards.

Because I have spent several decades working in statistical software in various roles, I can't help wanting to look at the desperation quantitatively. Here are some graphs that will probably startle most people---and I hope horrify many of you into taking some kind of action, today. Mind you, I'm expecting to startle and horrify even the well-educated, privileged, mostly white people in the developed world who have the means to read my blog.

First, let's compare the death tolls from a handful of disasters that have filled our headlines in recent years. Before you look at the graph, which do you think was worse?

9/11 terrorist attacks
Hurricane Katrina
Indian Ocean tsunami
Haiti earthquake
2008 Earthquakes in the People's Republic of China

And how do you think the economies of these places compare?

First, the scale of the disasters. For my North American readers: remember how devastated you felt watching the TV coverage of 9/11 and of Hurricane Katrina, please.

That's right. The devastation of 9/11 and Katrina combined are trivial compared to any of the others.

Now let's consider the economies of these places. Most of us know that USA's wealth dwarfs that of most countries by most measures. A relevant measure for this situation would be the gross domestic product per capita--that is, the total economic output of each state or nation, divided by its number of people.

We all know that New York is wealthier than Louisiana, but did you realize that the New York-Louisiana comparison is almost meaningless in the big picture? Even the difference between those two tall bars dwarfs the size of the bars in the two-thirds world nations!

So now let's put those two ideas together: let's look at the wealth in each place lined up with the scale of the disaster in each place, as measured by GDP per capita

This composition of the most massive bloodbaths in big red bars lining up directly with the meager economic means of each place in tiny green bars is the most devastating graph of all. The biggest disasters have taken place where people are least prepared to cope with them.

There are many ways to help, and of course there are many craven imbeciles who take this opportunity to scam the people of goodwill with fraudulent donation methods. Here are some ways that have been vetted and determined to be reliable: http://www.google.com/relief/haitiearthquake

Here are some flaws in my analysis that could distract nitpickers from the clarion call to our humanity:

My national and state GDP data are from different years and sources, and they're probably inflation-adjusted differently.
I'm considering these events to have taken place in New York, Louisiana, Indonesia, China, and Haiti, where the most deaths occurred, although other states and nations were affected.
The costs of 9/11 and Katrina were borne nationally, but the victims were (mostly) local, so I considered the state economies instead of the national economy.
Estimates of the death tolls in the two-thirds world are always much fuzzier, because the poorer you are, the less likely you are to be accurately counted.
Estimates of the death toll in Haiti are wildly premature. Some sources say "hundreds of thousands," and while they might mean "100,000 give or take a few 10,000," a careful speaker would mean the far more frightening "100,000 or 200,000 or 300,000" by that description.
It's a little weird to measure ability to recover by comparing the GDP per person to the number of persons dead. The dead people are dead, and no amount of money will help them. But the people left behind are living in economies that are more or less capable of recovering.
These data are confounded, if you consider that poorer nations have a lesser ability to build safety into their communities. Wealthier nations have higher survival rates in times of disaster because their buildings are sturdier, more of their citizens live in buildings in the first place, their bridges and roads and so on are more prevalent and higher quality, their emergency responders are more numerous and better-equipped and -funded, and on and on and on. The ways in which wealth mitigates disaster and the lack of wealth compounds disaster are numerous and heartbreaking.

My data sources:

The analysis was my own, and I prepared all the graphs using JMP's Graph Builder.

Wagnertuben available for rentals, with or without players

2009-10-29T16:47:00.000-07:00

Fellow San Francisco Bay Area freelance hornist Alicia Telford and I own a matched set of four historic Wagnertuben that are available for rental, with or without players.

Our tuben are a matched set of Alexanders picked out by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1952, during the Fritz Reiner era. We have a pair of single B-flat tuben and a pair of single F tuben. They were the CSO's main set of tuben for several decades. In 1988, the CSO sold the set to the Dallas Symphony, who used them through 1999. That's when we bought them.

Since then, our tuben have appeared with the Marin Symphony, Santa Rosa Symphony, San Jose Symphony, Berkeley Symphony, San Diego Symphony, Pacific Symphony, Symphony Silicon Valley, Santa Cruz Symphony, and many others. Renter either arranges local pickup or pays two-way shipping costs; we provide shipping boxes and include tube stands, valve oil, pencil clips, and so on.

Wagnertuben are traditionally played by horn players, but even horn players need to spend some time with them to master the instruments and be able to play them at the same high professional level they expect of themselves on horn. Therefore, when we rent out our Wagnertuben, we try to arrange a monthlong rental, so that your players have time to work with them, practice Kopprasch etudes, get used to the transpositions, and otherwise master them.

We can also supply experienced professional players along with the tube rental as needed. For local rentals with your own players, we offer coaching sessions with your hornists. For a moderate hourly rate, we will introduce the fundamentals, field questions, help players get comfortable holding and tuning the instruments, and generally get your players up to speed fast. There are many tricky aspects to playing Wagnertube well, and having played just about all the Wagnertube repertoire ourselves, we know what you're up against and can get you going fast.

We recommend using one of your usual horn mouthpieces, but be sure to try all of your favorite mouthpieces; you might find that your second-favorite mouthpiece for horn is actually the better one for Wagnertube. What I like best is a Lawson F680 with a B23G-730 rim, but that's an unusually large mouthpiece. Many players might prefer a Lawson F660 or F670 with a 695-sized or 705-sized rim in the contour of their choice.

Just switch to Mac, already

2009-10-29T15:59:00.000-07:00

We all have computer problems, and that doesn't stop with Mac, but it sure gets easier. I find myself telling one friend after another to switch to Mac. Sometimes the objection is, "but I absolutely have to have Windows for my job" because of some Windows-only application or another.

If that's the case, then you especially should get a Mac. Because face it, sometimes Windows goes south, and when it does, would you rather revert to the Windows machine you had yesterday that was running fine, or would you rather troubleshoot Windows for a week and still not know what's wrong? Would you rather spend two minutes restoring yesterday's virtual machine or two hours driving to a geek squad?

If you don't need Windows apps, then you'll be much happier on a Mac. If you do need Windows apps, you'll still be much happier on a Mac, with Windows running as a virtual machine.

Meanwhile, just because you have one or two essential applications that are Windows only, that doesn't mean you should have to put up with Windows software for everything else you do, like email, web, calendar, address book, photos, music, documents and spreadsheets, etc. Use your Mac for everything you can, and use Windows only as much as you absolutely have to.

You have at least two good choices: Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion. Both work pretty well and have roughly the same features. For me VMWare has worked a little better and the little problems I've had to figure out haven't been as confusing on VMWare as they used to be on Parallels, but I've heard other people say the opposite.

If you want to try VMWare, I think this link will get you a discount. I'm not being paid for this blog post, but if enough people buy VMWare through this link, I get a $10 gift certificate to Amazon or something like that. But that's not why I'm posting it--I'm posting this because I think people with Macs get more done.

My tech support policy for family and friends? Mac: free, unlimited. Windows: you're on your own; next time get a Mac. So far my family and friends who have listened to me have sooner or later been glad they switched.

Smørgåsbord Step 14: Make meatballs

2009-02-23T19:25:00.000-08:00

Two years ago, we started blogging about how to throw a smørgåsbord in several thousand easy lessons, and recently a loyal smørgåsbord attendee, our good friend Katja, asked me where to find the meatball recipe on the blog.

Well, the sad truth is that we never quite got that far in our smørgåsbord blog. Meatballs are always something we make either that day or the day before, when we're just too swamped to do any journalism. But it's a great recipe, so herewith, Norwegian meatballs!

"Not Swedish meatballs?" I hear you gasp.

Nope, Norwegian meatballs. These are the meatballs that came down to me from my grandparents and great-grandparents, and they're Norwegian, not Swedish. They're probably not too different, though--it's not like the border between the two countries kept food traditions on each side. If they're different than your Swedish meatball recipe, it's probably because they're also different from other Norwegian meatball recipes, and you'll probably find a Norwegian version of your Swedish meatball recipe, too, if you look hard enough.

That said, we did have a Norwegian vs. Swedish meatballs contest one year, because V is Swedish, and her recipe is different from mine. Still, it probably would have been more accurate to call it Vang's vs. Williams's. If you're curious, the big differences are that mine use a mixer and heavier spicing, and hers use cream.

This is an amalgam of Beatrice Ojakaangas' recipe and what I remember from my gramma's recipe. It's a pretty forgiving recipe, so certainly you should free to mess around with it, resting assured that nothing will go too terribly wrong. The recipe is for a massive party-sized batch, and since my measurements are vague anyway, you shouldn't have any trouble scaling it down. It's more of an approach than a recipe, really.

Norwegian Meatballs, jultide smørgåsbord edition

Start with a very large mixing bowl. This batch feeds several dozen people at a smørgåsbord, or probably a large family as the main attraction of a normal meal. I usually double or triple it, depending on how many people we're expecting. When in doubt, go larger; we have rarely had leftovers.

Preheat oven to 400˚F.

2 c breadcrumbs (I use matzoh meal, or I buzz actual matzohs up in my Cuisinart; a gluten-free alternative is to buzz up dried shiitakes and then rehydrate them in hot water)
2 c milk

Let stand. Add:

2 large onions, minced (coarsely chop, then use the Cuisinart)
3 eggs
2-1/2 t salt
3/4 t nutmeg
3/4 t allspice
1/3 t cloves
1/2 c flour
2 lbs ground beef
1 lb ground pork

Using an electric hand-held mixer (or a gigantic stand mixer), beat at high speed until light and fluffy. The idea is that you're stretching the fats around everything else, and the result is cohesive, tender meatballs instead of tough meatballs that fall apart.

You could melt butter in a hot skillet and fry the meatballs, but when you're making this big a batch, it's much easier to oven-fry them. When you pan-fry them, it's boring to wait for one pan at a time, but it's hard to keep up with more than one pan at a time. If you get the slightest behind, the result is a tremendous amount of smoke, and even an 1800 cfm vent won't be able to keep up with it. This means that your smoke alarm is going to start blaring and keep blaring, your security service is going to phone you, you're going to have to open every window, and still you're going to be dealing with a smoke alarm for quite some time. You'll have to explain to the security people that your house really isn't on fire, even though the alarm won't stop, and they'll only dimly understand why meatballs are a perfectly sensible explanation for the problem. Meanwhile, dealing with windows and alarms and phones will cause you to burn at least half a pan's worth. Ask me how I know this.

To oven fry them, lightly oil (or spray Pam-like substances on) 3-4 large jelly roll pans or similar. You definitely need a pan with a lip, because these puppies express. Using a small ice cream scoop, several spoons, your hands, or whatever, make small meatballs, say 1" diameter. Squish them into tight rolls on the pans. Roast 10-15 minutes until nicely browned and firm. Use a large, stiff spatula to lift them from pans into a crockpot (or large stockpot). Scrape and drain any drippings into a large saucepan that you have standing by. Repeat until done. Once done, use a scant amount of beef stock (see below) to deglaze the pans into that saucepan of drippings.

Next, make gravy:

Have healthy pinches of all the meatball spices (see above) mixed and standing by.
Heat about 3-4 c beef broth to a boil and then hold at a gentle simmer. (I use a high-quality beef stock base, but bouillion would probably do the job)
Bring drippings and 2 sticks butter in the large saucepan almost to a sizzle, over high heat.
Slowly stir in 1-1/2 c (or more) of flour and your spice mixture. Ideally you will have made lefse earlier and saved all the browned flour that you brushed off the lefse griddles and lefse. If not, you might consider browning the flour in a separate pan in advance of this step. My grandmother swore that browning the flour is crucial, but I'm not sure I agree. My aunt learned that the answer to the question, "How long do you brown the flour?" is "Until the smoke alarm goes off."
You're making a roux. Cook and stir continuously with a large, long-handled whisk, until what you're seeing is a dark, shiny, smooth glop. You might need to add more butter or more flour to reach the perfect balance. Making roux is a bit of an art; you might want to learn more about it before attempting this recipe. Be careful, because making roux is also a self-burning hazard.
Once your roux is beautiful and perfect, slowly start dribbling the hot beef stock into the roux, whisking furiously. The goal is to end up with gravy, not roux-lumps in broth, and this requires slow, steady addition of nearly-boiling liquid to the roux. When you've gotten at least a third of the broth into the roux, you can switch directions and dribble the roux-mixture into the rest of the stock, continuing to whisk furiously—again, this is because you want to make gravy instead of roux-lumps in broth.
Once all the roux and broth are combined, continue to cook while stirring until the gravy is clear and smooth. The goal is to cook out any starches, and the way to tell is you're done yet is by tasting it. If you taste flour or feel flouriness, keep going. When it's smooth, rich, beefy, and yummy, you're done.

Pour the gravy over the meatballs in the crockpot or large stockpot. If serving immediately, heat through and call people to the table. If serving the next day, cover, refrigerate, and turn the stockpot on high about two hours before serving time.

If you try this recipe, be sure to leave a comment here about how it works out for you. I hope you enjoy it!

I need help

2008-12-28T12:39:00.001-08:00

It was starting to feel this way around here yesterday.

I'd finally had it with my AppleTV STILL trying to finish syncing less than 20gb from the night several months ago that my friend Noel helped me mess with channels, realized that 2 of my 3 Expresses were not 802.11n (or whatever that number is) capable, and reconfigured it as a WDS with two remotes and told me to put my oldest Express in my briefcase to use in hotels. It was better but obviously my AppleTV's inability to sync a lousy two seasons of "Mad Men" in two months demonstrated that it still had serious problems.

So finally I did two days of seriously geeking out on wifi networking, even downgrading two base stations' firmware to 7.3.1 and playing with KisMac for several hours to determine exactly what all my neighbors have going on with their wifi networks. (Most are running Cisco routers on the default channel 6 with WPA encryption, and only half have bothered to hide their easily-guessed ssid names. One has something like a dozen devices attached to his network, so despite inferences clearly available from this email, I am not the neighborhood's worst geek. And FWIW, KisMac is one scary-ass powerful piece of open source software. With a few more days of KisMac monitoring I could be the evil neighbor who announces "all your base stations are belong to us" and then reconfigures everybody's networks to be more secure and to use different channels for less interference with each other. Really, it would be a public service! And it would be more convenient for me when I need to Google something from my iPhone while walking the dog! Please explain these things to the public defender assigned to my case.)

When none of this improves anything, I finally break down and RTFM.

Apple's "Designing AirPort networks" reveals that WDS was a bad idea, because it pretty much forces everything to use the slow 802.11b/g protocol. For 802.11n you're supposed to use Airport Utility's much-simpler checkboxes to configure your boxes to extend and join networks.

The doc explains dual radio mode on p48, which was 47 pages further into the details of how wifi works than I've ever wanted to get before, and that idea was the ticket. So the new plan is this: run my main base station (the Time Capsule in my office), the music room's Airport Express station, our laptops, and the AppleTV on a primary network that is 5Ghz only. Run Ethernet from the Time Capsule to another Airport Express in the office, and use that as a bridge to broadcast a second, differently-named 2.4Ghz network with another Airport Express remote upstairs on the channel KisMac revealed to be least busy for benefit of my iPhone and guests with older laptops! Ten minutes and very few mistakes later, I'm done. Problems solved! AppleTV finished syncing!

Only took me two and a half months! Let's hear it for RTFM being within the first ten things you try to troubleshoot computer problems instead of being what you do when ten weeks of Googling and futzing doesn't produce results!

So I see this comic this morning while lying in bed and playing with my iPhone, because several friends have posted this web comic's link to FaceBook. That's when I realize that if I explain all these things to my friends, they will help me get help. They will know that it's time to send me away for a while...

But make sure I figure out why Victoria's laptop isn't joining the new network before you do... I probably need to delete her Airport preferences, then repair permissions, restart, empty caches, zap her PRAM, upgrade to Leopard, and upgrade my base stations back to 7.3.2...

Hmmm, time to wrap this up--I have to get out of bed and get to work now...

Leadpipes and statues and boats, oh my!

2008-12-05T23:27:00.000-08:00

Dag to i Oslo began with the promised better strategy at breakfast. I started on the hot side but unfortunately found that the pølser weren't as good as the day before and the weird thick pancake things were definitely some kind of fiskekake--not bad, though. The potatoes were hot and yummy, but the egg-sausage scramble was awful. Mom came up with smørbrod combo she likes quite well, putting both Jarlsberg and gjetost together on a sandwich with a slice of ham or whatever. Seems weird to me, since Jarlsberg is tangy and savory and gjetost is sweet and gooey, but it works for her. (Today she finally tried a piece of bread with gjetost on one half and just butter on the other, with two kinds of jam going in halves the other direction, for a cunning sampler mosaic. She says the orange marmalade on gjetost quarter was best.) Once again we each assembled an extra smørbrod to smuggle out in Mom's spare ziploc bag for a free lunch on the go. (Today we spotted a sign in the breakfast buffet saying we'd be welcome to make a lunch packet for 85kr/person, about $12. We smuggled once more instead. We have a perfect record going, after all!)

After breakfast, I called Dan the horn maker and made an appointment to go out to his shop in Stabekk. I was on a mission to pick up a new leadpipe for my friend Alicia. He kindly met us at the train stop and walked us to the shop on a tricky walking path through the houses, which saved us a ton of time. I tried both leadpipe options and quickly decided with Mom's agreement that the one Alicia was leaning toward was indeed the better choice. Dan advised us on how to get to our next destination, walked us to the bus top, and promised to meet us at our last destination for the day with a finished leadpipe. (Leadpipes start life as straight chunks of tapered brass tubing, and after you choose one, it has to be filled with pitch, bent into shape, cut to the right final length for your horn, and have a ferrule added to reinforce the first six inches or so against bending, banging, and other calamities. It's an hour or two of work, and we didn't feel like sitting around wasting our limited Oslo time any more than he probably felt like having a bunch of old women watching over his shoulders. Plus I've been there and done that--I spent a whole weekend at Kendall Bett's Lawson Horns shop last winter, and although it was fascinating, I didn't think the rerun would be.)

We took the #38 bus to Olav Kyrres plasse, changed to the #20 bus (or maybe those numbers are the other way around), and accidentally rode it past our intended Vigelandparken stop to Frognerstadium or something like that one stop further. Fortunately the stops aren't that far apart so it wasn't any big deal to walk back to where we meant to get off. We arrived at the park gate a few minutes later needing a restroom stop but were confounded by a 5kr coinbox to get in (about 75 cents). Fortunately there was a cafe next door where we could get change. I feel rude going into businesses just to ask for change, so I decided to buy a something for 15kr with my 20kr coin so I'd get 5kr change instead. Unfortunately, either the price was marked wrong or the clerk made a mistake, because he charged me 20kr for the ice cream bar I'd chosen, so then I had to ask him to give me two coins for my 10kr coin. He gave me a knowing grin along with the coins. Oh, well--I tried.

Here's a weird tangent: I couldn't think of the name "ice cream bar" so I asked Mom, who said when she first got to college in Minnesota she was confused by her classmates' excitement about having Cheerios at a welcome picnic. She coudln't figure out why the oaty breakfast cereal would be such a big deal at a picnic for college students, but when she got there she found a pile of ice cream bars branded "Cheerios." Seems like a trademark-protection problem to me!

Our business done, we strolled into the park. It was quite cold out, so we were wearing out ski caps and gloves and still shivering a bit, and we were eating an ice cream bar. Are we snow-belt natives or what? I was a tiny bit proud of us for that.

Vigelandparken is an incredible and overwhelming thing. It's a huge park with sidewalks spoking out from a central "monolith" sculpture zone and a whole mess more sculpture along the main axis from 6 o'clock to 12 o'clock, and another piece out at 3 o'clock. In the outer zone it's mostly bronze figures, and the inner zone is all granite figures. Wrought iron gates along the way also feature silhouettes of figures. All the figures are nude, male and female, every age from infant to geezer, always touching each other or interacting with each other somehow, many tangled together as if in ballet poses or love making or cuddling or comforting, occasionally in an unrealistic way, like the man with babies all around him, in his arms, flying out from him at various directions, one hovering in air above a foot that appears to be lifting it up from the ground the way a talented hackysack player might lift a grounded sack with his foot. There are some animals--dogs, wolves, bears I remember--and a few puzzlng ones with skeletons. The central "monolith" features a huge granite obelisk carved with a ginormous stack of entangled nude people. What these sculptures all have in common is that the figures are real-people looking, usually both muscular and hefty (no scrawny ones or fashion model or body builder magazine lean ones, even though most are clearly muscular and strong), and they're all nude. No matter what combination of ages and genders appear together and in what apparent situation or relationship, there is a joyful, connected, sexual energy in their interactions. It's not smutty or perverse, though--it's human and joyful and real. There are penises and breasts all over the place, and there is no way these would appear in a public park in the US, but it all comes across somehow as very wholesome and affirming. Somehow in making every set of figures overtly sexual he has deemphasized sexuality from the charged, controversial thing that it is (at least in contemporary American society) back to the natural, everyday, lifelong thing that we know it really is. It's fascinating, liberating, and comforting all at once.

I promise to add some photos to illustrate these points when we get back home and I have a little more time.

We then walked over to the Vigelandmuseum, which is a massive building the city of Oslo gave him to live and work in for the rest of his career, in exchange for his current and all future work belonging to the city, most in the massive sculpture park. Stroke of civic genius! The building is now a museum displaying more sculpture, clay models, sketches, tools, displays explaining how he worked and how models were converted to granite sculptures by teams of stone carvers, and so on. Even the smaller-scale models are mammoth and imposing. Even knowing he had an at times huge crew, it boggles the mind to imagine how one man created so much, let alone such creative, beautiful, thought-provoking, and technically impressive stuff.

From there we caught the #30 bus back down to Olav Kyrres plasse, changed to the #20, and rode down to the Norge folkmuseum in Bygdøy. We arrived at 2:45 and were informed the indoor attractions all closed at 3, but we were welcome to walk around outside until 6pm. We hurried, therefore, to the main attractions--a stave kirke from the 1200s and a farm village from following centuries called Setesdahl. We arrived at the stavekirke in time to hear a lengthy description and explanation along with a group on a guided tour. Stavekirker are built on huge posts (staves) at four corners and more huge posts at corners of an exterior wall. The weight of the elaborate roof of many slopes is carried on the interior staves and also transferred diagonally down to the exterior staves much like flying buttresses, except that the exterior staves are also surrounded by walls, creating a covered pathway all around the church that is in between outside and inside. I found a book in the gift shop that had many explanations for this, including: it made a place for people to wait for services to begin, for the unbaptized to be near but not in the church, for the observant to "walk circles" around the church, which apparently was an early ages ritual to mark importance and ownership, and so on. Interestingly, many of the farm houses also had this same basic architecture (though much simpler, of course) including the exterior surrounding compartment. I'm assuming this was used for many of the same purposes and perhaps also for livestock, but I'll need to research that.

Finally we walked a few blocks to the Vikingskipsmuseum, which houses four big Viking ships and numerous smaller boats and artifacts. They were huge. One thing that impressed both of us is how much extra effort they put into carving elaborate, beautiful decorations on their boats, their furniture, even their barns. Is this the product of a long winter? A society so prosperous that it has excess time on its hands? A slave economy? Superstitions? Praise? Probably a bunch of all of the above.

Meanwhile, we'd texted Dan to let him know we'd arrived there, and he texted back that he'd be there in half an hour. We'd arrived 15 minutes before closing, so we had close to 15 minutes standing in the parking lot freezing to death, but we were rewarded with a ride back to our hotel in a nice warm car instead of numerous changes of bus and subway. We got to experience a little slice of normal life in Oslo sitting in mild rush-hour traffic, too. It wasn't too bad, but you could definitely see how it could get bad and be frustrating without too much more traffic.

After dropping our stuff and the new leadpipe in the hotel and having a glass (okay, plastic cup) of wine, we set off on foot for dinner. We looked for an Italian restaurant we'd found on Google maps (neither of us were in the mood for julebord menyen) but couldn't find it. After a long circular route we ended up back at an Ethiopian place near the hotel. We had a delicious but shockingly expensive meal of kitfo lebleb and doro tibs. I also had a beer, and I think our tab was around $75. Prices like these are pretty much how it goes, though--we have yet to find a cheap meal in Norway.

Back at the hotel, we both fell asleep within half an hour. This time Mom slept soundly most of the night, but I woke up around 2 and stayed awake until about 6, then finally fell asleep in time to be groggy for breakfast. I spent most of the time tapping away at the computer, chatting about the home fires with Victoria, chatting about art criticism with Meg in Massachusetts, reading lots of newspapers, answering a bunch of email, and so on.

Our adventure continues in the next installment, which shall discuss "Norway in a Nutshell," our scenic trip by train, train, boat, bus, and train to Bergen by way of Flåm, Gudvangen, and Voss.

Oslo and the collective unconscious

2008-12-02T23:26:00.000-08:00

It's Wednesday morning here.

Mom and I both slept abysmally Monday night, though Mom better than I did. I think I got maybe 5 hours total. We both gave up around 1:30am and had a wine break, and then Mom got back to sleep by 2:30ish and slept most of the rest of the night. I slept maybe an hour, then woke up again and read news on my iPhone most of the rest of the night. I finally fell back asleep around 6am and was extremely groggy when Mom got me up at 9am.

We had a pretty good breakfast in the hotel (Hotel Anker, a short walk north of Oslo Sentralstasjon on Storgata). I needed a better strategy, though. I started at one end of the buffet and took small amounts of everything that looked good, and when my plate was full, I discovered stuff that looked even better. Net result was a huge breakfast. Lousy coffee, as you might expect, but a wonderful selection of sliced meats and cheeses, whole grain breads, knikkebrøder, gjetost, syltetøy (the latter I feel obligated to eat in honor of our Siamese kitties of the same names), soft- and hard-boiled eggs, herring (nei, takk!), and so on. Mediocre machine jus (eple, lemon, orange--anyone need translation?). Lots of milk and that yogurty-liquid stuff that I haven't yet worked up the courage to try. Decent tea bag selection.

And then I discovered the hot food! They had roasted potatoes (not hot, unfortunately), several kinds of pølse (little hot-doggy-looking sausages conveniently chopped into beanie-weanie-sized bites), and a very funky looking thing that I have yet to figure out. It looked like a small, fat pancake, but the texture was chewy and the flavor was decidedly savory. If I were in Japan, I'd have decided it was a fish cake, but it didn't taste fishy. I wonder if it's some kind of potato sausage? It was good, whatever it was. Today I'll start in this part of the line.

Since I clearly had too much food, I decided to do a frugal traveler move and assemble a little smørbrod (literally means "buttered bread" but practically speaking it's the national lunsj, an open-faced sandwich of whatever you like on buttered bread) for lunsj on the go. Mom decided that was a good idea and followed suit.

(If anyone's curious about my horrible spelling, I'm taking up Nikki's challenge to keep mixing up my languages and throwing in lots of Norwegian words as I go.)

We finally set off on foot for Sentralstasjon to pick up our "Norway in a Nutshell" tickets for later in the week, and then to the tourist information desk to pick up our Oslokorter (Oslo cards), which get us transportation and admission to just about everything for two days at a reasonable price. It was probably 11:30 by the time we had all that sorted, and then we continued on foot down Karl Johann's Gate for a walking tour of the central Oslo shopping district. We passed by the cathedral dome, enshrouded in plastic (or fish skin? see below) and closed for extensive renovations, alas, but Mom spotted a fun photo op: a neon sign in the building next door reading, "Cathedral restaurant bar" and proving for any who still doubted that lutefisk Lutheranism is a much happier version of Christianity than some.

After taking a few pictures of the royal palace, we turned north and walked to the Cultural History Museum. We decided only to look at the Norway-specific exhibits, one on early to Viking times, and another on polar life. Both were fascinating. Lots of the usual archaeological treasures, of course, but with some fun discoveries. I particularly enjoyed seeing the little metal critter in the shape of a moose and pointed out to Mom, "Look, they even had a travel mus!" in reference to a quip of Jane's years back about a tiny stuffed moose we saw in a gift shop being a convenient travel-sized moose. We had a good chuckle about that and then read the description--this was a weight! Commerce was so important to them that not only did they have all kinds of balance scales and weights and measures, they even took the time to make their weights into fun moose shapes! Gotta love those Vikings.

A little further on we saw displays of Viking-era jewelry (that would be "jewellery" på norsk), and although they were clearly early, primitive pieces (we're talking bronze and iron ages, after all), we both thought some of the items were surprisingly attractive. Mom and I talked about how maybe Carl Jung was onto something with his idea of the collective unconscious, because we both found these works to be viscerally appealing. (We're Norwegian-German, in case you're confused.) You wouldn't think much of that, necessarily, except that we've recently seen much fancier stuff from earlier periods in China, Korea, Japan, and Afghanistan--on Saturday we went to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco--and although lots of it was undeniably pretty and much fancier, more elaborate, and technically advanced than the Viking stuff, we both liked the Viking stuff a lot better. Go figure.

In the Arctic/Antarctic exhibition, we saw still more cool stuff including an early raincoat stitched together from a bazillion panels of what we later learned was fish skin--translucent and strangely modern-looking--and we both particularly liked the Sami clothing and preprosterously fancy hats. We wondered what purpose such elaborate hats served, and I suggested that perhaps they were inspired by their reindeer-friends' antlers. A taxidermified reindeer in the exhibit was indeed quite cute, and shorter than we expected--kind of large dog-sized--but pictures showed larger ones, too.

I admired the early kayaks, very little changed from the one I use today except for the materials and colors.

We then walked around the block to the Nasjionalgalleriet (sp?), another free museum with some really nice paintings. Gee, there's an impressive bit of art criticism for you! Once again I pondered my "collective unconscious" notion, because numerous painters of similar era and technique to more famous ones captured my fancy more--e.g. the JMWHMSPinafore Turner guy whose gloomy landscapes fill the Tate Britain in London leave me completely cold, but a Norwegian dude who was clearly his contemporary did technically similar paintings that I just liked a whole lot more. Mom agrees.

Of course, Munch's paintings are the main reason to visit the Nasjionalgalleriet, and they didn't disappoint me even on second viewing (I saw them when I was here in 1998). There's something about his stuff that just speaks to me, I guess. Mom liked them, too, but commented that she couldn't see hanging them on her walls where she had to look at them every day--she's not into people paintings as much as scenery. Her remark made me realize that a huge share of the paintings we were seeing in the gallery (not just the Munch room) had people in them--even the landscapes. Mom says those are appealing, though, because they're not about the people so much as the situation. I kind of agree with her when it comes to portraits--unless there's something about portraits that give me a glimpse of daily life ("oh, so that's what it looked like inside their houses!" and so on), I move quickly.

From there we walked toward Akerbrygge while eating our purloined smørbroder, stopping along the way to check out Heimen Husflid in the Hotel Bondeheimen on a tip from Ruth. Good tip! Lots of gorgeous sweaters and all kinds of other stuff. I drooled over some thick felt slippers and some elk-hide-and-mystery-fur slippers, but they started around $100/pair, so I decided I could survive without them. We found quite a few gorgeous sweaters, but none in the needed sizes. A few blocks further on, though, we popped into UniQue, another sweater-heavy joint, and parted with a bunch of our money. By this time it was getting darned cold out, so we both got hats to match our sweaters, and within half an hour, we were both wearing our new hats. I think today I'll probably be wearing my new sweater, too, because although it's only 32ish out, it's COLD and snowing, and I've gotten wimpy after 14 years in California.

We tried to check out the Norge Hjemmefrontmuseum (Norwegian resistance museum), but it had closed at 4 and it was now almost 5, so we strolled around a bit of the Akerhus Festning (fortress), but it was quite dark by now (only 4:30pm) and the wet and sometimes icy cobbles seemed a bit treacherous, so we cut that short and proceeded on our way toward Akerbrygge. There was a big village of tents selling Christmas stuff, so we walked through and poked into a few tents.

Then we continued to Akerbrygge and decided fairly quickly that it was time for warm indoors and dinner. We settled on Albertine Cafe, where we shared half a liter of Barbera, Mom got a red wine-braised lammeskank with potato puree and lemon-thyme saus, and I had a venison stew (hjortegryte! what a great name!) also red-wined braised on potato puree with loganberries. Yum! A basket of yummy ciabatta-like olive bread further tempted us from our supposedly gluten-free diets. Yeah, right--not here!

After nearly falling asleep in our plates, we decided to hike back to the hotel, taking a slightly different route through the town center, and by 8:30 we were both falling asleep over our books. I slept solidly until about 3, when I gave up and poured some juleøl and resumed my book. Mom had been mostly awake since about 1, so she also gave up, got up, poured some wine and resumed her reading. We were up for an or so and then both went back to sleep. I slept pretty well until the phone vibrated around 5, and then I was up for good. Mom says she slept fitfully, but I know she got a lot more sleep than I did after our reading break.

It's 9:15 now, and we're both showered and dressed, so we're going to head down to frøkost and try to improve our strategy from yesterday.

Breakfast in SFO, dinner and breakfast on LH, lunch in FRA, dinner in OSL

2008-12-01T10:53:00.000-08:00

Mom and I flew to Oslo yesterday and today, hence the complicated meal plan. Our flight took off early Sunday afternoon from SFO, where we killed time with brunch at Andale--Mom had yummy chili verde and I had a pretty good burrito carne asada.

We flew Lufthansa to Frankfurt, and I am trying to figure out how it is that American airlines are all going bankrupt and can't afford to give us meals or drinks, but Lufthansa can provide two decent hot meals and lots of wine and booze on basically the same ticket pricing structure. Dinner was pretty decent--I had pasta with mushrooms and marinara, and Mom had some kind of chicken rice dish. We both got edible rolls, okay salad with good dressing, and a tiny triangle of chocolate cake with whipped cream and a strawberry. There were good Ritter chocolates available in the galley overnight when I went up to get us drinks. For breakfast we had another good roll, an omelet that wasn't great (when are eggs ever good in an airplane?) but was at least a lot better than some of the eggs I've had in United Business lately, and fruit salad just like every other airplane fruit salad: red grapes and pieces of underripe melon; oh, well. But still--two hot meals and plenty of free alcohol, on a route that United would have given us one hot meal, one disgusting breakfast snack, and drinks for $5.

We had lunch in the Senator Lounge at Frankfurt airport, which has a pretty nice buffet, including Frankfurters, chicken meatballs and Shanghai noodles, a funky tuna salad, some beautiful Christmas breads that I didn't try, some serviceable minestrone (perfectly good but not a knockout like some German airport lounge soups I've had), olives, After lunch I enjoyed a campari-gin-bitter lemon and some Jelly Bellies. I wish we could buy bitter lemon in the States. Maybe I can figure out how to make it, now that I've got a CO2 tank and am not afraid to use it.

The unhappy part of our stay in Frankfurt was that my new AT&T mobile account didn't seem to include international roaming after all--the guy I talked to when I switched said I was all set, but that turned out not to be the case. This wouldn't be that big a deal, except that I needed to check my email and voicemail right away to find out whether I had an appointment with a natural horn or not. It turns out I didn't. But what I had to go through to get AT&T to fix things is absurd. Since my phone didn't work, I couldn't use it to call them. I can't remember the last time I saw a pay phone anywhere, so that meant I had to buy an hour of wifi and $10 of Skype credit so that I could use Skype and wifi to phone home, whereupon I reached an agent who said I'd have to call back after 7am Eastern when a certain department opened up--which was when we were boarding our flight to Oslo. In the end I couldn't get it all straightened out until we got to the hotel, where I connected on the free wifi and again used Skype to call AT&T. Naturally just as we were getting things working, the call dropped and I had to call in AGAIN and finally got things working--and got the news that it's $1.29 a minute for anything, including receiving but not answering calls, receiving voicemails, or actually receiving or placing calls. It's highway robbery. Of course, when getting or missing a call means getting or missing a gig that pays $100ish or more, it's worth it, and calculations like that are why wireless companies get away with charging so darned much. Argh!

Back to food, it was a good thing we ate in the airport, because SAS charged for everything on the connection to Oslo, with prices starting around three euros for coffee or soda. We were happy to pass.

We landed in Oslo at 3:45, collected our bags, got cash and airport express tickets, and were in downtown Oslo by 4:30. Our first order of business was to pick up our train tickets, which was only partially successful. Now that I've got email access again, though, I've got the various confirmation numbers I'll need to get the rest of them. After that we searched out a vinmonopolet (literally "wine monopoly"--other than weak beer, all alcohol in Norway is sold by the state) and picked up some provisions for our hotel room so that we'll be equipped to cope with any jet lag, and as I type this Mom and I are enjoying a lovely, fruity juleakevitt by Linie. Since we were tired and only vaguely hungry, we ate supper in "Erwin's spiseri" right in the same food court.

So for our first Norwegian meal, Mom had "husets kremefisksuppe" or the house special cream fish soup, which we both thought was quite yummy. I had the "julelunsj tallerken" or "Christmas lunch plate" (I think) of gravet laks and sweet mustard sauce (yum), pickled herring (ick), a slice of ham, a slice of brie, a pile of the most iodine-y bay shrimp I've had in a long time, bread and butter, and a mound of--of all things--Waldorf salad. The Waldorf salad was good but I think it's the first time I've had Waldorf salad since I was in the hospital with pneumonia during second grade. Somehow I remember eating a lot of Waldorf salad in that hospital, and for me it's a dish lost to time. It's kind of a perfect Norwegian salad, though--white, bland, sweet, and everything from a can. "Except the apples," Mom pointed out, but I can't say that I found any apples in there. I washed it all down with a pretty good juleøl (dark Christmas ale) by Ringnes.

After dinner, we walked the rest of the way to our hotel, which isn't fancy but seems decent enough and has free wifi.

In electronics sadness, somehow I managed to erase everything from my iPod before we left, so I couldn't do language immersion learning by zoning out to Norwegian podcasts during the long flights as I'd hoped. Not exactly tragic, but how on earth did I do that, and how will I make sure I never do that again? Fortunately we had decent movies on the long flight: "Happy Go Lucky," a diverting but pointless Mike Leigh film (someone please enlighten me if there was a plot) and "Nanny Diaries," which wasn't as good as the book but was entertaining enough.

I'm still a little stuck on the Sunday NYT crossword but I'm not ready to give up and seek help from Rex Parker's blog yet.

Nano-opera: Boris Godunov

2008-11-13T15:21:00.000-08:00

16th century Tsar Boris proves he is Russian by wallowing in guilt for three hours until finally dying of guilt. Librettist proves he is Russian by giving long list of characters long names but very little to do. Composer proves he is Russian by giving long list of instruments very little to do but sound colorful.

But who cares about any of this when Samuel Ramey is singing?

A military perspective on Obama vs. McCain - the MAJORITY perspective

2008-09-18T18:41:00.001-07:00

Here's an email I got from a friend of mine, whose husband is in the Air Force. I think it's worth reading.

Dear family and friends,

TO ME THIS ELECTION IS A LIFE OR DEATH ISSUE (no exaggeration).

Most of the public is completely disconnected from the wars on a personal level (which was my life before) so I want to try to personalize it for you:
My husband is in the Air Force and I have had the humble (& challenging) privilege of learning about the military world for almost 10 years now. I have seen first hand, the toll that this war has taken on countless families. When our daughter was a baby I took her to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in DC for checkups, where I saw soldiers with limbs and/or parts of their head missing from combat. When our close friends are in war zones, I pray for their safe return. My heart hurts when I see children suffering due to an absent parent (for 15 months!!) and spouses struggling to keep their families together. Due to frequent moves, we typically do not have the luxury of living near family and close friends, so we often bear the burdens on our own. Military members and spouses are some of the STRONGEST, most HONORABLE and IMPRESSIVE people I have ever met.

Regardless of your position on the war(s), if you appreciate the sacrifices that our MILITARY (over 4,000 dead, many with serious lifelong physical and mental issues, increased numbers of suicide) and their families are making to serve our country, I BEG you to THINK about THIS COMPELLING FACT (from the NON-partisan Center for Responsive Politics), and PLEASE pass the info along to as many people as possible:

DEPLOYED TROOPS ARE CONTRIBUTING TO OBAMA 6:1 OVER MCCAIN.

To me, this says everything. If so many of the troops don't want McCain as their Commander in Chief (and Veterans groups support OBAMA far more than McCain), THE PUBLIC REALLY NEEDS TO TAKE NOTICE (particularly because this is supposed to be McCain's strength).

I have joined a group called Blue Star Families for Obama (www.bsf4o.com). We are military families who are PRO-MILITARY and PRO OBAMA, and we are working hard to get the word out that many military families want Barack Obama to be our next President.

The deadline to register to vote is rapidly coming up (especially for people serving overseas) - please see voter registration info below. PLEASE participate in this historic election.

With love, ACTION and FAITH in our goodness,
Kimberley Taylor-Beer

-----

Kimberley -

Registration deadlines are coming up soon. Tell your friends, family, and neighbors to check out our new one-stop voter registration website.

Just forward this message.

VoteforChange.com makes it easier than ever to register. Instead of tracking down the right forms, all you need to do is answer a few basic questions and you'll be ready to vote. You can also:

Confirm your existing registration
Apply to vote absentee
Find your polling place
If you don't know your own registration status or you'd like to learn more, take a minute to visit the site right now.

This race is too close and too important to stay home on Election Day.

It's people just like you who will transform this nation.

Thanks,

Barack

On Sarah Palin

2008-09-10T11:15:00.000-07:00

All this excitement about Sarah Palin is bizarre. Sure, she's funny and pretty, but her opinions about and track record on governance are scary! How is a funny, pretty scary politician any better than an ugly, boring scary politician?

My friend Alicia has taken to calling her "Caribou Barbie."

I think Hillary Clinton got it right:

I don't think [Palin is] what this election is about. Anybody who believes that the Republicans, whoever they are, can fix the mess they created probably believes that the iceberg could have saved the Titanic.

Nano-ballet

2008-02-20T16:39:00.000-08:00

Recently we attended the San Francisco Ballet's Program 2, which opened with Mozart's "Divertimento 15" and choreography by Balanchine, continued with Mark Morris' "Drink to me only with thine eyes" on piano etudes by Virgil Thomson, and closed with Stravinsky's "Firebird" and the original Diaghilev choreography by Possokhov.

I'm not a dancer, I'm a musician, and my reaction to the program can be summed up as briefly as: "I'm a hopeless modernist."

The Mozart was performed well and the dancing was lovely, but all I got out of it was, "Oh, look at the pretty dancers. Oh, hear the pretty music. They make it look and sound so pretty and easy. Ho-hum. Zzzzzz." Honestly, I think I would have gotten more out of the music if the dancers hadn't been there doing their repetitive arm-y fluff-y things every beat. They made pretty shapes, sure, they looked graceful, and for the first movement, it was all very pretty. After that I was bored silly. My dancer mate Victoria loved it. (I've lived with ballet dancers. I've roomed with them at summer camps. I've learned all about toe-tape and how broken dancers are from all the crazy stuff that they have to make look easy and natural. I have tremendous respect for the accomplishment of it all, and then I'm bored.)

I loved the Morris/Thomson. The visuals perfectly matched the music and added to it. The dancers embodied what I hear in the music, carving melodies with arms, tracing harmony in the space. Not only did it all match what I as a musician-geek hear in the music, it also created a complementary new, spatial dimension that was right and appealing, making the music fresh. This is pretty much always my response to Mark Morris's work, and it's a sharp contrast to the Balanchine, where I think I'm probably seeing ballet the way amateurs hear music: the way I used to hear music before I had all this music education: "oh, look at/listen to the pretty dancing/music!"

And then came the Stravinsky/Possokhov! It suddenly hit me what the problem is--I'm a modernist!
The classical Balanchine stuff bored me silly, the newest stuff was fascinating, and the big shocker from about a hundred years ago seemed perfectly natural to me. Instead of being tempted to riot, as Stravinsky's first audiences apparently did, I felt at ease watching the narrative play out. I got it in both large and tiny strokes, from the blocking to the fingers fluttering and the flirty eyelashes. I still saw plenty of tutu-arm-fluffy stuff, but with a backdrop of evocative music that keeps spinning out at least an abstraction of a story. And for this musician, finally seeing the ballet was a revelation. I noticed lots of music that didn't make it into the Firebird Suites we always play in orchestral concert presentations, and I've decided that's just as well, but I also noticed many passages where familiar music made sense for the first time, seen in its narrative context.

I was puzzled by some details. I'm not sure where the schoolgirl picnic fits into the story. I'm not sure why the one character had a train of chiffon coming out her ass; it reminded me of when our black lab eats too much grass and then has the so-called "Klingon effect" when she poops.

So you think you want to install Elfa closet systems?

2008-01-09T18:01:00.000-08:00

Recently a friend planning an Elfa closet system asked if I had any tips, since he knew I'd built three Elfa closets after our big hardware flooring project this summer. Do I ever! The Elfa system has worked out really well for us, but I do have a few tips about designing, purchasing, and building an Elfa system.

First, it's largely a waste of time to go through their online design process, as the guy on the other end will invariably make a dozen stupid mistakes (switching around numbers, misunderstanding your requests, etc.) that will take you a while to discover and correct. However, it's worthwhile to fill out the form a few times, just to make sure you have all the necessary measurements and are clear on which measurement is which, and also to make sure you have measured out how much hanging space of each length (shirt, pants, dress) that you need. You might even measure your longest shirts, pants, and dresses just to be sure that their norms make sense for you. V and I are both tall, so we disagreed with some of the defaults.

So, go to the store (we went to Container Store) and do the design in person--that's how they fill out your order, anyway, and you can lean over their shoulder and make tweaks. While they're doing it, keep an eye out for wasted space--we were able to add four inches here and there, squeeze in way more shelves closer together for shoes, and so on. For example, our master bedroom closet goes up a ridiculous 8', and we're both tall, so we had them move the double closet rods about a foot higher than they thought was reasonable, and then we put TWO rows of 12" shelves all the way across the bottom for three rows (one on the floor, two on the shelves) of shoes. Above the closet rods we have two and three rows of shelves for wicked-hard-to-reach storage of out of season clothes, fat pants and skinny pants, etc. They weren't willing to think of these things because they're inconvenient, but for us it was important to cram every list smidgin of storage into all three of our closets. We even have one hanging rod that is intentionally too long--it sticks out the side and runs to the wall, because the closest-fit Elfa framing was that many inches narrower than the space. It bought us hanging space for 15 more of Victoria's dresses. It might look weird to the Container Store people, but in our closet it makes perfect sense.

Second, choose between chrome or white. Ignore all the other choices (wood types, etc.) because they're just extra pieces that they charge you extra for that you slap on as the very last step, and it's a pretty bogus way to run up costs for no extra value whatsoever. Choose a basic color, build your whole system, and if you still care, go back and get the decorative bits.

Third, they'll sell you a whole bunch of little bits that you don't need, like closet-rod ends, shelf bracket covers, and so forth. Again, skip them and go back later if it turns out you care. Also note that for drawer stacks, they have lots of options, and they'll start by trying to sell you the most expensive kind, which you don't need. You also might not want top-covers

Fourth, before you leave the store, count every last doodad. We had to make three trips back to the store during our installation to get the pieces they'd forgotten to pack. They were nice about taking us at our word, but it was a royal pain that we did NOT need while building.

Fifth, if you have any trouble at all sinking the screws/bolts into your wall, run (don't walk) to your nearest Home Depot and buy (a) a screw gun (the best $80 I've ever spent) and (b) some boxes of drywall screws at 1/4" lengths from 1-1/4" to 2". Get the HD guys to show you how to use the depth-adjusting choke collar thingy--it's a little weird but very handy. Our contractor friend George assured me that the drywall screws are plenty strong for the situation, and believe me, they were way easier to get into the wall. I started with the default hardware where I could, then used 2" screws where I couldn't, and if those didn't work, I used progressively shorter screws until I could get one all the way in. Depending on what's going on behind your drywall, these are likely to work a lot better than the default hardware, and I ended up using a big old mix of fasteners in different places.

Sixth, make sure you have a long level--say 30" minimum. Mark where you think the hanging brackets should be, then use that long level to make sure that height is going to work all the way across the closet. Closets tend to be way crookeder than you expect. Don't get hung up on the height that the Elfa design recommends--it might make sense to hang your system as high as possible, as it did for us. Now, attach the first bracket by sinking the first screw through it, and use the level to hold the bracket in place and sink the next screw. This step requires a helper for the longer brackets, which are heavy. Now you're done with the level until you sink the rest of the screws and are ready for the next bracket. This way is much easier than trying to make and understand pencil marks with any precision.

The rest is pretty straightforward--as long as you're not missing any pieces!

Oh! And while you're at Home Depot, get a small tub of joint compound and an assortment of putty knives from 1-1/2" wide to about 6" or more inches wide (in the drywall department). When you demolish your old closet fittings and when you make mistakes on the Elfa installation, you'll get holes in the drywall. You'll quickly swipe a generous lump of joint compound with the smallest logical putty knife into the gouge, then use the largest putty knife to smooth it out. If you end up with any massive holes (like I did a few times because I was using the pry bar wrong), then crumple newspaper into the hole first, and then use the joint compound. Don't worry about bits of newspaper sticking out of the compound--they'll sand off easily when dry. If your closet walls are white, you might not even care about painting over the joint compound zones. --Erin

Nano-opera: Rake's Progress

2007-12-11T15:51:00.001-08:00

Another nano-synopsis, this time for Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress," on a libretto by Auden and some other dude: Boy gets rich, abandons girl, abandons virtue, abandons reality. It's yet another twist on the Faust tale, where boy sells soul to devil, only this time he finds out the terms of the deal after the fact, and then weasels out of it by getting lucky at cards, but loses his mind, so spurned girl gets to be dumped one more time, this time by the harsh reality that boy is not just a jerk but also bonkers. Yet another misogynist libretto with a likable woman who's too spineless, stupid, or both to dump the jerk from the outset or at several more intervals in the plot--yeah, right.

And fabulous music. SFOpera's production was quite wonderful, with lots of movie-like devices and references, goofy stagecraft, wacky costumes, and clever comic touches.

Nano-opera: La Rondine

2007-11-23T14:21:00.001-08:00

La Rondine is your basic "girl meets guy, blows off icky rich husband, runs off with guy, wimps out, returns to rich husband, blows off and breaks heart of good guy" story set to equally boring music.

So, yet another misogynist libretto and forgettable music, performed well by the San Francisco Opera, conducted adequately by some dude with regrettable Kent Nagano hair. A violinist friend in the opera orchestra (nameless here for reasons about to become obvious) said his hair was the only reason they could follow him: he attempted to give beats 1, 2, and 3 with his stick and did give a really clear beat 4 by running his other hand through his hair. The violinist mentioned that it's a good thing his hair is long, or else beat 4 would have been only an eighth note.

Victoria pointed out that the lead diva had nice breasts. (She sang well, too.) A backstage friend in the opera company (nameless here for reasons about to become obvious) replied that it was no accident that only she had low-cut costumes, and then admitted that it was probably just as well given most of the figures in the chorus.

How could I have forgotten the wine?

2007-11-23T14:14:00.000-08:00

Well, we didn't--I just forgot to write about it.

We repeated something fun from last year's Thanksgiving, was that we had an informal contest to see who could come up with the best wine pairing for the meal. The prize is bragging rights, and the fact that all the dishes were departures from tradition made this year's contest extra challenging.

Pretty much everything we had was really good, but one wine did eke out a victory--the Navarro pinot noir that Noel and Ayse brought. David the Violinist brought a wonderful New Zealand sauvignon blanc by Isabel, along with a late harvest sauvignon blanc that we enjoyed with dessert. David the Bassist also went white, with two bottles of Chateau St. Michelle riesling. Victoria and I served two champagnes, one a yummy Scharffenberger and the other an even yummier Dampierre that Katja had given us at last year's smørgåsbord. We also entered a white table wine from Hagafen called "Don Ernesto's Collage" and a Tayerle pinot noir.

They were all good, and most of us agreed that each wine was optimal with a certain dish, but the Navarro pinot noir won as the best overall match for the meal.

A radical take on Thanksgiving menu traditions

2007-11-23T11:33:00.001-08:00

I inherited a gluten intolerance from my mom, which means I'm not supposed to eat bread or anything else made from wheat, rye, oats, barley, or malt. Fortunately, I don't have celiac disease, the most extreme form of gluten intolerance where consuming gluten slowly destroys your intestines, so when I cheat, the immediate suffering is the only consequence. I am generally willing to cheat if it's for a good enough reason; the bread Hayes Street Grill served with our pre-opera dinner on Wednesday night, for example. My mom's Thanksgiving stuffing is another worthy exception, and I probably would have been willing to cheat for it again this year--since Ayse was making dessert, we knew to expect baking miracles, so I knew I was going to be eating some gluten anyway, and she didn't disappoint us. Still, I decided to make a breadless stuffing.

Let me back up.

We'd decided that this year's potluck Thanksgiving should have radical takes on all the classic menu items.

Dessert

Starting from the end of the dinner and working backwards, Ayse came up with a brilliant replacement for the traditional pumpkin pie: an amazing peanut butter pound cake baked in the shape of a turkey (who knew that turkey-shaped cake pans even exist?), surrounded by an assortment of cookies, including crunchy-gooey meringues and an absolutely brilliant update of the classic peanut butter with chocolate kiss cookie: peanut butter cookies with integrated Reese's peanut butter cups! We served this with espressos and lattes. Noel gave me a much-needed refresher lesson in making espresso and got me back on my espresso game.

Potatoes

Instead of mashed potatoes, we had Noel's scalloped potatoes, which featured a secret. They were incredible, and nobody could guess the secret: he'd deep-fried the thin potato slices before assembling the casserole, which he finished under the broiler. I have no idea what else was in them. Radical and fabulous.

Vegetable

Instead of some traditional gloppy cooked vegetables, David brought a tossed salad with goat cheese, cherry tomatoes, microgreens, a classic vinaigrette, and a surprising key ingredient: figs! Wonderful, and the acid/sweet contrast was a welcome palate-cleanser in such a rich meal.

Cranberries

Victoria wouldn't let Thanksgiving go by without her favorite cranberry sauce, so I did make a batch of cranberries according to what I think of as Mom's recipe (the one from the back of the bag where you run cranberries and whole oranges through a Cuisinart, then stir in a pile of sugar, a couple slugs of Triple Sec, and a dut of Kirschwasser), except that I had run out of sugar and substituted 1/4 C of Splenda where I was supposed to use 2 C of sugar. That turned out well. The key to working with Splenda seems to be to use about an eighth of the sugar amount--or at least start with that, taste, and increase slowly until you're satisfied. Remember that anything served cold needs to be a little sweeter than you want it to be while it's still warm. I couldn't find my Kirschwasser, so I used some German apple-pear brandy that was right in the front of the liquor cabinet instead, and that added a nice, subtle extra dimension. Serve cold.

To keep the radical rule, though, I also made the most unconventional cranberry sauce recipe I know of, which is the classic Mama Stamberg recipe that Susan Stamberg has recited on NPR every year since the beginning of NPR. As she admits, it sounds disgusting--cranberries, sour cream, onions, horseradish, and sugar?! in the freezer?!--but it's actually quite good. Kind of a Jewish chutney, if you will.

I guess if horseradish is good on a Hillel sandwich (matzoh crackers, the chopped-apples-and-walnuts mixture called charoset, and fresh grated horseradish), why not in cranberry sauce? Our next door neighbor, Jaryn, serves horseradish with just about everything, including her St. Patrick's Day corned beef, and I have to admit it's what corned beef has always needed.

Yams

Okay, I broke the rule with the yams and made the same yams I've made just about every year since Josie first brought them to my Thanksgiving back in the 90s: they're her mashup of two different recipes, and my version of them is basically to roast and peel a mess of yams, then pour a mixture of melted butter, orange juice, and bourbon over them, add pinches of your basic sweet spices, and bake. This year I made a slight twist by adding cardamom to my usual choices of cinnamon and mace. However, we did do something a little bit radical when it came to serving them: the pot was really hot, and we were out of room on the table for anything requiring a trivet, so I set them up on the window ledge instead. And there they sat, forgotten, until we were clearing for dessert. Can you believe nobody had yams with Thanksgiving, and nobody noticed they were missing? We all had a token serving as a separate pre-dessert course.

Turkey

I'd tried to talk folks into having a goose instead of a turkey (the ultimate radical menu change!), but everybody insisted we had to have turkey. Victoria especially insisted, and I know better than to disappoint her on something fundamental.

Our turkey was pretty straight-ahead. It was your basic bargain-basement non-orgasmic cage-raised boringly-fed bird, seventeen pounds, brined since Monday in Emeril Lagasse's brine (at John Watkins' suggestion), but with the addition of juniper berries (from Barbara Kafka's brine). As usual, I followed Barbara Kafka's instructions for roasting at 500 degrees (actually I set the oven for 450 with the convection fan on) for only two hours. This method puts out a lot of smoke, so we had the hood running pretty much the whole time. It also results in a very darkly-browned skin with some crunchy bits.

Another twist was that this year, instead of attempting to carve the bird the way my dad does, I decided to try the method recommended in a New York Times' article I'd read the day before, "The Butcher Carves a Turkey," which was accompanied by a helpful video demonstration. The basic idea is to part the roasted bird off its carcass first, then slice it, and to arrange it all on the platter a certain way that keeps the white and dark meat separated but still looks attractive. I did this for two reasons. One, even though he's tried to teach me several times, I suck at trying to do it Dad's way, but I'm pretty good at butchering raw birds, so I figured I'd be better at butchering and then slicing a roasted bird than I've ever been at trying to carve the traditional way. Two, I agree with all the points the butcher makes about why it's a better way. Dad manages to make the traditional way work out really well, but as the butcher points out, the big problem with the traditional way--besides that it's difficult--is that you end up slicing with the grain of the meat instead of across it.

I'm completely sold. I had the entire thing neatly sliced and plattered in the time it would usually take me to make a mess of half the bird. I knew what I was doing. I wasn't trying to carve around all the weird shapes; I was just slicing hunks on a board. The slices were coherent and tidy. The light and dark were nicely separated. The platter looked good. I could throw all the weird bits into my gravy pan, which was simmering away while I was slaughtering. We had a platterful of sliced meat to put away after dinner instead of a big, messy carcass. It was easy to pack our guests off with leftovers. Noel had a tidy carcass to take home for making stock, something I won't be having time for this weekend, since I'm making a mileage run to Frankfurt and back, Saturday-Monday.

However, I would add two tips to the butcher's instructions: one, wear a full-length apron, not a waist-down one like I did; two, if you have two boning knives, use the one you don't like to get the chunks off, then use the one you do like to do the slicing. That way, you can save the good knife's slicing edge for slicing after the dirty work is done by the more expendable knife, and if you're working one hunk at a time, you simply switch knives instead of having to steel your knife repeatedly.

Gravy

My gravy was only a little off from tradition. I always make a stock from the odd bits of the turkey, celery, onion, and herbs. This year I used the spent herbs from my unstuffing custard (see below), cream and all, along with chicken stock (since our bird had almost nothing on the way of odd bits), onions, garlic, and celery. That simmered away all afternoon. After pouring off the turkey fat from the roasting pan, I deglazed it with the strained stock, then kept tossing in the weird and fatty bits from my carving process as it simmered away on the burner, reducing to about half while I carved, and then straining out the chunks before thickening. As usual, I added several slugs of marsala and a bunch of salt and pepper, then thickened it with a gluten-free cornstarch slurry, and I broke with tradition by adding a dash of Pernod pastis to finish it. I don't think you could quite taste the pastis's anise in the gravy, but it did have a more complex flavor. Also, since I'd roasted the bird at 500 degrees, the pan drippings were nearly scorched, resulting in a wicked-dark brown gravy that miraculously didn't taste burnt.

Stuffing

Which brings me to the main point of this blog post: my "unstuffing custard." The goal was to make something that would be as satisfying and delicious as my mom's classic breadcumb stuffing, without the bread or any other gluten. Since I'm better off with low-carb eating, it ideally wouldn't have carbs at all, but I wasn't going to be stubborn about that in a meal that's already hopelessly carby.

My version of Mom's stuffing is to make a huge bowl of bread cubes from at least three kinds of bread--usually a dark pumpernickel, white sourdough, and something medium-brownish like a whole-wheat. Saute onions and celery in a lot of butter. Drizzle over the bread cubes. Add salt, pepper, and a ton of crumbled sage leaves--enough to make Dad sneeze, and then a little bit more. Moisten with boiling water, stuff into bird, roast, extricate, and serve with a ton of gravy.

The miracle of Moms' stuffing is the wonderful, overpowering sage flavor. I figured the key to my unstuffing would be to do something with enough fat to draw out the celery and sage flavors, and I'd need to come up with some kind of base that would have the rich, puddingy texture of a traditional breadcumb stuffing. I thought maybe some kind of savory custard recipe would be the starting point, so I googled a bit and found this one from the New York Times: Baked Savory Custard with Cheese. This looked close to what I was hoping for, so I decided to use it as the skeleton of my new recipe. Since I haven't made a lot of custards but know that they can be tricky to get right, I also did some reading on the science of custards from both Cookwise and Harold McGee's latest book. My particular question was whether adding a lot of fat, such as butter or olive oil, would interfere with the thing setting up. I couldn't find any commentary on that, so I just decided to plunge in. What else is new? I'll cut to the chase and tell you that it all worked out, and if I say so myself, it was pretty fabulous. So, here's the recipe that I developed and why I did things the way I did. Most of the measurements are approximations from memory, because I'm really not a measurer, and somehow I seem to get away with that.

Unstuffing Custard

2 C cream
several springs fresh thyme, oregano, rosemary
almost a whole bunch of sage sprigs
3 large cloves of garlic
4 stalks celery
1/2 stick salted butter
1 medium onion
1 shallot
1 C dried shiitakes, rehydrated with boiling water
pinch of cayenne
1/3 package of cream cheese
salt and pepper
4 C finely-grated Emmenthaler, parmesan reggiano, pecorino romano
3 eggs plus 2 yolks

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F and put a kettle of water on to boil.

Put all the herb sprigs and the cream in a small saucepan and bringly slowly up to a simmer. The original recipe just wants you to scald the cream, but I wanted to simmer it for a while to extract as much herb flavor as possible, so I let it "simmer" just below a simmer the whole time I was doing everything else. At some point it did start to boil because of my inattention, but I got it off the heat right away and then continued with the sub-simmer simmer.

Pour boiling water over the dried, sliced shiitake mushrooms to rehydrate them. (Or use fresh.)

Chop the onion and celery into hunks and run them through the Cuisinart, not quite to a puree but close. (It's about juice, as I'll explain in a bit.) Melt half a stick of butter in a small saute pan, then add the onion-celery glop and let simmer over medium heat--just high enough that you're not sweating the vegetables, just low enough that you're not browning them much, either. Run several large cloves of garlic and a shallot through the Cuisinart and add those to the pan. Add a pinch of cayenne (a few taps-worth from the shaker jar), kosher salt, and freshly ground black telicherry pepper. You want all this to cook gently for quite a while, so that as much juice as possible steams off. I think adding the salt to this part of the recipe also helps with the water-dispersal, but I'm not certain about that. The kitchen scientists warn about the danger of water from vegetables seeping out and making the custard have runny bits, so that's why I took all these juice-minimizing precautions.

Crack three eggs into a medium casserole (I used a deep souffle dish). The original recipe has you use ramekins, but that didn't seem right for a Thanksgiving stuffing. Crack two more eggs over the dog's food dish, separating the whites into her food dish and the yolks into your casserole. The dog also gets the egg shells, and if you're lucky, she sticks around to clean up any other little messes that arrive on the floor. Back to cooking, lightly beat your share of the eggs.

Strain the shiitake juice into the stockpot that's going to end up in the gravy (see "Gravy" above). Just about wring those suckers out--get all the extra moisture out, as explained earlier. Buzz the cream cheese up with the shiitakes in the Cuisinart, then stir this mixture into the eggs. I don't think the cream cheese ended up being very important, especially given the next step, but we had some sitting around, and I wanted to give my custard every chance of setting up. I was worried that all the water in the celery, onion, and mushrooms would make my custard a watery mess, as the scientists had warned, but as it turned out, my custard set up quite well, so I probably could have skipped the cream cheese.

Grate about 4 cups of semi-hard or hard cheeses. We had a hunk of Emmenthaler, a smaller hunk of parmesan reggiano, and a tiny hunklet of pecorino romano, so that's what I used. Stir about two-thirds of this into the egg mixture, and reserve the rest.

Slowly stir the sauteed vegetables into the egg mixture. Strain the cream slowly into the egg mixture while stirring constantly. Toss the used herbs into the stockpot, cream-coating and all. (Why not?) I had Victoria pour the cream slowly through a mesh strainer into my mixing bowl, while I was folding the mixture with a silicone scraper. I'm not sure how you'd accomplish this without a Victoria; I suppose you'd have to pre-strain the cream into a convenient pouring container and then pour with one hand while stirring with the other. The key in this step (and the steps above) is that you're never shocking the eggs with a sudden influx of heat, which would cook and curdle them; instead, you're first diluting them with all the other cold ingredients, and then you're slowly stirring in the hot veggies and finally the hot cream.

Place the souffle dish in a somewhat larger pan that's at least as deep and at least half an inch wider--an inch all the way around would be better still. Fill the larger pan up to the level of the glop in the souffle dish with boiling water. Try not to splash water into the custard as I did, but if you do, use a paper towel to soak it up and out. Baked custards need to bake in a water bath, so that the heat is gentle and consistent, and the custard can set up slowly. Too hot, and you get scrambled eggs in runny slop; too cool, and you get wobbly goop. At least that's what the kitchen scientists say. I decided not to use the convection fan on my oven, reasoning that it would make the top of the custard cook too quickly.

Bake uncovered until it's almost done, then scatter the reserved grated cheese over the top and let that melt and brown while the custard finishes. "Done" is defined as the point where most of it has set up, but the center is still a bit wet and wobbly. The center will finish setting up from carryover heat while it rests and cools. The kitchen scientists say to have courage about taking it out before you're convinced it's done, because if it cooks any longer, the eggs will curdle and the fluids will weep out and form runny rivulets. Ish kabibble, as my great-gramma would have said. I had mine in about half an hour, plus ten more minutes with the cheese, but apparently the shape of the dish and its bain marie (hot water bath) can both affect cooking time, as well as all the usual variables that affect cooking times for anything you bake. (My ex the chef pointed out that any good pastry chef will tell you the temperature but not the time for baking anything, because you can never count on the time, no matter how much you try to control all the variables. Therefore, the correct time for any baking recipe is always "until it's done.")

The original recipe said to serve it warm, at room temperature, or cold a few hours after baking. I made it just before putting the turkey in to roast, so two hours later it wasn't very warm, and I think stuffing ought to be warm or even hot. So, while the turkey rested, I threw the yams in to bake (about 30 minutes), and I put the custard in for the last fifteen minutes or so, covered, just long enough to warm it through but not long enough to risk more cooking.

Serve with lots of gravy, just like a real stuffing.

That's the recipe, best I can recall. Please leave a comment or email a question if you think I've missed something important in there--I might have, and I don't want to be one of those people who publishes recipes that haven't been tested and don't work.

Our guests loved it. We did, too! I think it was a success. The cheeses were a great addition to Mom's stuffing's flavor profile, but I think it would have tasted good without the cheese, too, or with about half as much cheese. The catch is, I'm not sure what would happen with the custard if you changed the cheese factor in the recipe; I just don't have enough experience with custards to guess. If anyone experiments with that, please report your results in the comments!

Nano-opera: More on Flute and Butterfly

2007-11-08T09:29:00.000-08:00

Dad commented:

Great opera review. I had never thought of Lady of the Night as Cruella DeVille. Now I'll never be able to think of her as other than Cruella.

I'm not sure I would make the comparison normally, but in this production it was hard not to. Take a look at the "Inside The Magic Flute" video at San Francisco Opera's website and get a load of the costumes and sets! You can also get a taste of the Queen's phenomenal pipes--Erika Miklósa was unbelievably good in the role. I can die now.

He continued:

Re Butterfly, your version might make more sense but it would certainly detract from the tragic drama. I find it difficult to not break down in tears throughout the second and third acts because I know how it ends.

Knowing that the story ends in a slapstick brawl would ruin the effect, though springing an alternate ending as a surprise might certainly be a pleasant surprise--once.

Who said it would be slapstick? I think those women would be pretty serious in their passionate dispatch of the assholes who ruined their lives, don't you? And would it be any less tragic with the right characters dying?

Nano-opera: Magic Flute and Madame Butterfly

2007-11-07T15:04:00.001-08:00

Magic Flute

Another opera nano-synopsis, this time for Magic Flute, in particular San Francisco Opera's 2007 production, which seems to take place on a Batman set and features characters and costumes from a bunch of other movies: Big chested ladies with scary bras headed by Cruella de Ville from 101 Dalmatians, aka the Queen of the Night, battle with the Planet of the Apes headed by the knight from The Seventh Seal, aka Sarastro, for the hearts of Tamino, Birdman, and Birdmanina.

For benefit of those who didn't see it, Sarastro's gang gave "helmet hair" a whole new meaning, and Sarastro himself was a dead ringer for Max von Sydow's knight (the one who plays chess with Death) in The Seventh Seal. Nearly every character besides a few of the leads wore costumes that in some odd way or another drew attention to their breasts or man-breasts, particularly the Three Ladies and their über-Lady, Cruella de Ville. If the ladies and their queen had managed to triumph, we might have called it bra-us ex machina.

In any production, Magic Flute is yet another opera that has real problems when viewed from a feminist or vaguely enlightened perspective. The Queen of the Night is your typical mother spurned and scorned and bears a not unreasonable grudge against Sarastro, the man who stole her daughter from her after her husband died, but somehow the librettist finds a way to make everything her fault and cast Sarastro as the good guy. One wonders if Mozart perhaps saw a little more gray between the black-and-white lines of the libretto, though, given that the Queen and the other women have all the best arias and most powerful singing. Sarastro gets to make various heartfelt, sincere, warm-fuzzy "love makes the world go round" points, and sure enough he does seem to be a bit of a natural facilitator, but he always does so impotently--the arias are set in the basement of the bass range where even the best singers struggle to project. Even this production's costumer also seemed to give the ladies some benefit of the doubt--they got all the best costumes and hair!

Librettists seem to find heartbreak to be just and reasonable grounds for women to commit suicide. Perhaps this is wishful misogynist thinking, as many of opera's heroines would seem to me to be justified in killing off the men rather than offing themselves. I've already made the case for the Queen of the Night above, and it's not hard to extend this argument to the rest of opera's greatest hits.

Madame Butterfly

Take Madame Butterfly for example: impregnated and then abandoned by a lying ne'er-do-well Pinkerton, who's enabled by a regretful but spineless Sharpless, Cio-Cio San offs herself in despair, but wouldn't it be more satisfying and considerably more realistic for Cio-Cio San, Suzuki, and Kate to whack Pinkerton and Sharpless instead, and then continue on about their business of raising the brat together?

Wow

2007-09-21T19:34:00.000-07:00

That a Republican mayor is the one saying it is encouraging. What he has to say is great. How hard it is for him to say it has me puzzled a bit. I can make some guesses but can't convince myself that one is better than another. http://cbs5.com/video/?id=26888@kpix.dayport.com

Deutscher, Deutscherinnen überalles!

2007-09-16T14:11:00.000-07:00

Is this some massive German holiday I don't know about? Everywhere I go I'm surrounded by people speaking German. I catch only enough fragments to be curious. I startle some of them by expressing my pleasantries auf Deutsch; they all have me pegged for American, and then they notice that although I'm dressed in Gap, I look like them.

I'm on the weirdest sleep schedule--perhaps it's a good thing I ended up traveling here alone. The first day I slept until 4:30pm, then got to bed at a normal time and up at 7am Saturday. By 10:30 last night I was falling asleep, but I woke up at 2am and stayed awake until 4:30, drinking wine, eating cheddar, and reading; then I slept past 11.

By 1 I was heading out on my day, from my fleabag at Paddington by the Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines to Covent Garden (I thought I'd fill in the Tube coordinates, since anyone who's ever visited London will recognize them), where I grabbed a falafel for breakfast and ate that while wandering through the stalls of junk crafts. Everything available with your name on it, £2 extra. Do people have extra rooms in their houses for storing objects with their names? Have I erred by filling mine with musical instruments instead?

From there I proceeded to change my mind three times about whether I was headed to the Design Museum (further downriver from Tate Modern) or Museum of London. I thought I'd decided on London based on relative simplicity of train travel (Circle line from Embankment all the way to Barbican), but the Tube Diagram misled me on the length of that journey, and meanwhile I realized I was at the Tower Bridge stop for walking across and down the Thames to Design Museum, so that settled it. They had two main exhibitions, one of really out there but compellingly organic architecture by Zaha Habib and another of typography of dissent. Both were mixed bags--about half I'd stare at, fascinated, and the other half I'd glide past. (http://www.designmuseum.org/exhibitions).

Thus committed to a theme, I hiked back up- and across-river and got back on the Circle line to Embankment and Piccadilly to Charing Cross, then marched through St James Park to the Institute for Contemporary Art, which was showing a documentary film "Helvetica" (yes, about the typeface) that was surprisingly good. I continued my march (meine Füße tut mir weh) up Waterloo and Regent to Ran, the Korean restaurant near Liberty, where I had a subtle warm tofu dish, good kimchi, and an acceptable bowl of "gyoza and rice cake" soup. Why not dumpling and rice cake, or gyoza and mochi? Why not man du gook and whatever? After dinner, I caught Bakerloo from Oxford Circus (this time surrounded by Indians instead of Germans) back to Paddington, and here I sit on my wee balcony facing the fleabag across the street that has free wifi, my hot aching feet enjoying the cold, dirty asphalt, sipping an overly cold (just pulled it out of the refrigerator) bottle of Le Freak, an aptly named Shiraz with a touch of Viognier).

I wish Blogger's edit box weren't in Helvetica.

The pleasures of a Frankfurt connection

2007-09-13T15:30:00.000-07:00

The Lufthansa Senator Lounge (the first class lounge, open to Star Alliance Gold members) is a fairly ordinary lounge, except that they have outstanding food and drink. The arrival breakfast on my flight from San Francisco was the usual cup of grapes, cantaloupe, and watermelon along with something revolting: a croissant with 2 slices of indifferent ham, a slice of unnaturally orange American cheese, and (wait for it) strawberry cream cheese.

WTF?

I couldn't believe my eyes, and a tentative taste to determine what it was (Leberkäse, vielleicht?) was not enlightening, so finally I asked the flight attendant who was trying to offer me a beverage what the mystery food was. I did so with a conspiratorial grin, to make clear that I wasn't trying to be difficult, I was just puzzled. She answered, "It's a ham and cheese croissant." I pointed at the pink goo and asked more specifically what that was, and she said, "Oh, that's the stuff that shouldn't be there. It's strawberry cream cheese. They've been doing this for four weeks now, and I have no idea why. I keep calling it in." I asked what kind of drugs they're on and how I could help, and she encouraged me to complain to SkyNet. That I shall. I mean, really--I'm all in favor of experimental cuisine, but that's just weird, and it's a cruel thing to give someone whose stomach is already topsy-turvy from all the usual stresses of an overnight flight. Seasoned travelers know that the only way to handle massive time differences is to drink heavily and then try to sleep, and when you're lucky you nap for an hour or two and awaken groggy and queasy. This is when you want something warm, comforting, simple; preferably savory, but most importantly simple. This is NOT a time to eat a misguided attempt at creative breakfast cookery.

Fortunately, I was landing not in LAX, where I was supposed to connect, nor Heathrow, where there is no edible food to be found, but Frankfurt.

My Wednesday afternoon plane to LAX had had a mechanical problem, so after a 45 minute trip to the runway and back, we were informed the repair would take at least an hour and sent back into the SFO gate area to wait in line for customer service to figure out how we'd all get whither we were going. I got on the phone with the 1K desk and was given an option to leave really late, fly to Dulles, wait a long time, and then fly to Heathrow, arriving close to midnight Thursday. There's a slight mileage gain from that vs. a direct to London (this trip is, after all, all about racking up some elite qualifying miles), but not enough to be worth that kind of ordeal). I asked about the direct and was informed it was completely full and oversold with eight people on standby. I asked about connecting through Frankfurt and then getting a Lufthansa flight to London. She sounded puzzled but tapped away at her keyboard and told me I could take a 7pm United flight to Frankfurt, arriving 3pm, and then connect on a 4:20 Lufthansa to London arriving 5pm. This sounded a lot better than the Dulles option--faster, more miles, and a connection in Frankfurt!

Frankfurt is a huge, huge airport. I once had an hour and a half to connect from Vienna to SFO by way of Frankfurt, and to be on the safe side I decided not to pee until I got to my departure gate and had my walking behind me. I walked and walked and walked, as briskly as I could, which would be a fast trot to many people. And walked. And walked. I walked into my departure gate, onto my plane, and the door closed behind me. I peed in the plane's lavatory. It's that huge. But if you have a connection where you don't have to switch terminals, and you have time to visit a Lufthansa lounge, you're in luck. Fabulous food and drink await!

I've enjoyed a yummy, buttery carrot soup, a Frankfurter, a couple pretzels, and a glass of draft Beck's. I've found there's nothing quite like a good beer for settling a travel-jumpy stomach. I couldn't resist tasting the Viennese grüner Veltliner wine, too, but it's not sitting as well as the beer did, so I'm enjoying tiny sips with another pretzel. They have wifi here, but I'm too cheap to buy a T-Mobile Hotspot account (yet), so I'm just typing this into a file for now.

And now I see it's time to start ambling to my gate, but first I'll grab a few provisions for the rest of my day...

Benefits of carbophobia

2007-09-09T14:08:00.001-07:00

Among the benefits of avoiding carbs (yes, the dreaded Atkins) are such discoveries as this eggplant recipe from the New York Times last week. Victoria loves eggplant in all forms discovered to date, so I know it would be a winner.

Eggplant, La Tavernetta Style
August 29, 2007
Time: About 30 minutes
2 pounds eggplant of any variety, the smallest you can find
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
3 cloves garlic, slivered
12 good cherry tomatoes, halved, or a couple plum or medium-size regular tomatoes, cored and chopped
1 cup roughly chopped basil leaves.
Cut eggplant into pieces about an inch or two long and no more than a half-inch wide; each piece should have a bit of skin and a bit of flesh. (If eggplant are small, cut them first in long strips, then cut them crosswise. If large, you may end up discarding or reserving the fleshy, seedy center.)
Put 1/3 cup oil in a skillet over medium heat; a minute later add eggplant. Cook, stirring occasionally, and seasoning with salt and pepper until very soft, about 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, put remaining oil in a small saucepan over medium-low heat. Add garlic and cook until it colors slightly. Add tomatoes and about 2/3 of the basil, raise heat to medium, and cook, stirring occasionally, until mixture is saucy, about 15 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.
When both sauce and eggplant are done, combine them. Serve hot, warm or at room temperature, or over pasta, garnished with remaining basil.
Yield: 2 to 4 servings.

Victoria was happy to pick up eggplants when I suggested it; unfortunately, I'd forgotten the bit about "the smallest you can find," so she brought us several big ones.

As a precaution, I did the slice, salt, rest, rinse, wipe trick for reducing the bitter oils that can lead to tingling tongue syndrome. Otherwise, I pretty much did as I was told. It's been forever since I've simmered garlic in oil on low heat, and doing so for this recipe was a good reminder that there are good reasons to do it that way--it puts off an incredible aroma and extracts the garlickiest of garlicky flavors. Probably gilding the lily, but I couldn't resist a grating of parmesan on top.

Since I'm gluten-intolerant (besides doing Atkins), serving over pasta wasn't an option. Instead, we roasted a spaghetti squash (halve, scoop out guts, roast inside-down at 375 for about 40 minutes, scoop out and fluff flesh with a fork, toss with butter and kosher salt) and of course also roasted the seeds (scatter with butter, salt, rescue from oven after about 10-15 minutes when lightly browned) as an appetizer.

To complete the menu, a little caprese (slice tomatoes, drizzle with olive oil, grind fresh black telicherry pepper, place fresh basil leaf, place slice of buffalo mozzarella, grind kosher salt). This is a bit redundant when you're having a tomato-based pasta sauce, really, but we had gorgeous fresh heirloom tomatoes and it's a crime to let them rot in neglect.

Mojito madness, or Evolution of a recipe

2007-09-05T19:19:00.000-07:00

Seems like it must be time to post a recipe, so let's start with the it-drink of the day, the tall drink of water from Habana, the much-loved, often poorly-made Mojito.

I don't know if the claim is valid, but this one claims to be the ur-recipe, "the one Hemingway himself enjoyed at the Mojito's place of birth: La Bodeguita del Medio in Havana, Cuba" (copied from http://www.tasteofcuba.com/mojito.html):

1 teaspoon powdered sugar

Juice from 1 lime (2 ounces)

4 mint leaves

1 sprig of mint

Havana Club white Rum (2 ounces)

2 ounces club soda
Place the mint leaves into a long mojito glass (often called a "collins" glass) and squeeze the juice from a cut lime over it. You'll want about two ounces of lime juice, so it may not require all of the juice from a single lime. Add the powdered sugar, then gently smash the mint into the lime juice and sugar with a muddler (a long wooden device pictured below, though you can also use the back of a fork or spoon if one isn't available). Add ice (preferably crushed) then add the rum and stir, and top off with the club soda (you can also mix the club soda in as per your taste). Garnish with a mint sprig.

** Optional ** While the following isn't the authentic original Bodeguita del Medio Cuban recipe for a mojito, some people will take half of the juiced lime and cut into into four wedges to add to the glass. Another variation is to add Angostura bitters to cut the mojito's sweetness, which is a popular version in Havana hotels although not the true Bodeguita recipe. Some Cubans also use "guarapo" in place of the powdered sugar, which is a sugar cane syrup available in some supermarkets or online Latin grocery stores.

So there's nothing particularly wrong with this recipe, but it doesn't work all that well, and I think the proportions are off. As with most drinks, you really want about a four-to-one ratio of booze to whatever (someday I'll post on my grand unifying theory of cocktails), so make that a whole lime to 4oz rum and figure it's a recipe for two drinks. Another problem is that even powdered or superfine sugar isn't easy to dissolve in cold liquid, so you'd be better off using simple syrup. I've never had Havana Club white rum, but I have found that--contrary to my usual principle that better (and darker) rum makes a better (if uglier) cocktail, in the case of a mojito you really do want the cheap white stuff, so let's assume that part is fine. But the real problem here is in the muddling: muddling is only so effective at drawing out mint flavors, and unless you muddle maniacally, this recipe is going to produce an insufficiently-minty mojito in my opinion.

Cut to the next candidate: the recipe I surreptitiously copied down while waiting for my to-go order at an estimable local Mexican restaurant when I spied it on the back wall, just barely legible thanks to some damn fine work by my ophthamalogist. This one is all about practicality: how do you make a muddling-intensive drink consistently good, quickly, on demand at a busy restaurant? Well, clearly you work ahead and make a mint simple syrup, of course! Here we go, and this one is for a pitcher, not just a wimpy pair. Since I didn't exactly have permission to copy it and I'm about to criticize it, I'm not giving away which restaurant it was, but if you own that restaurant and would like to claim and/or defend your work, use that Comments link down there at the bottom of the article!

A certain restaurant's mojito
Mint syrup

4C water

2C suqar

half bunch mint

Mojito

9oz Bacardi

4.5oz mint syrup

4.5 oz sweet and sour mix

12 mint leaves

ice, soda

Let's deconstruct this one. First, I should probably explain the method, which wasn't printed at the back of the bar but which is not hard to infer: boil water, sugar, and half a bunch of mint until mixture is reduced by approximately half. Cool and store, refrigerated, in a meticulously clean glass jar. To make the pitcher of mojitos, pull that jar out and dump a healthy dollop in the pitcher. Add an equal dollop of sweet and sour mix. Add a dollop of Bacardi twice as big (and here I can endorse the rum choice--Bacardi white is far from my favorite rum, but it's just the thing for a refreshing mojito). Mix. Add decorate mint leaves. Now fill almost the rest of the way with crushed ice and top with soda. Get a runner to rush it out to the table and turn your attention to the next customer's margarita needs.

This recipe is marginally better than the first one. Why? Several reasons. First, because making a mint simple syrup isn't just efficient, it's effective--it really does force the mint flavor out of the recalcitrant leaves and into the drink. It also gives you some cushion against out-of-season mint that looks nice but has no flavor. Second, it makes a pitcher instead of a lousy pair of high balls. Third, the booze-to-lime ratio is moving in the right direction.

However, it's not perfect. First, it's too sweet by far--rum is already a sweet booze, and that simple syrup adds a lot of sugar. Second, rushed bartenders don't get it mixed very well--they're just dumping liquids into a pitcher and hoping the addition of ice does the work, but some shaking or at least vigorous stirring is needed when you're blending such unlike viscosities as rum, lime, and simple syrup. Third, and this is really important, what on earth are they doing with sweet and sour mix instead of lime juice??? Well, okay, fresh-squeezed lime juice isn't the easiest thing to crank out in volume in a busy restaurant, so obviously that's why they're using sweet and sour, but sweet and sour is (a) too sweet and (b) not sour. And (c) not lime juice. Not even close. To be refreshing and brisk, this drink needs to bite of real, fresh-squeezed lime juice. Do not accept substitutes.

Enter the third candidate, my recipe, which I will put up against anyone's, for a batch of four high balls:

Erin's mojito
several stems' worth of mint leaves, and then some

8oz Bacardi white rum

very little superfine sugar

juice of 2 limes

crushed hard ice

club soda
Vigorously muddle mint leaves in rum and sugar and let stand at least several hours if not overnight. Squeeze in lime juice using one of those brutally effective lime squeezers that are effectively a garlic press on steroids. Fill highballs almost full with crushed ice (not the warm, watery kind you get at a fast food joint, the colder, harder kind your refrigerator's ice-maker puts out). Add rum-sugar-lime mixture to the halfway point. Add decorative mint leaves, but tear them into little shreds with your hands while you're tossing them in. Top with club soda.

Why is this better? It's all in the details. First, when you muddle vigorously, I really mean it--vigorously. You might try adding a mortar-and-pestle round-the-sides swirling grind to your choreography. Mint leaves are thin and sturdy, so you really need to beat them up if you want them to release their flavor. Second, you leave it standing in the rum for a while, because the alcohol does the real work. Most flavors worth pursuing are fat- and alcohol-soluble, and you're taking advantage of that by letting the alcohol break down the mint and get its flavors into the liquid. I got this trick from an article (sorry, can't remember to cite) about mint julep recipes from all the bourbon distillers in Kentucky, and it's a great tip. Third, fresh lime in the right proportion. Fourth, tearing those decorative leaves before tossing them in ensures that you get that fresh, just-massacred mint oil hit, especially on the nose, which probably picks up the mint better than our palates do. Finally, cold, hard ice--wimpy wet stuff isn't cold enough, and it waters down your drink.

Finally, the lazy mixologist's Atkins-friendly variation. For this one, I credit my friend Sue's discovery that Fresca makes a good club soda alternative. I haven't actually tried that, because although I think its grapefruit flavor would probably be a pleasant addition, I'd rather not tamper with the genetics of the drink too much. However, her pointer inspired my experiment, which was a stunning success:

Erin's heretical diet mojito
several stems' worth of mint leaves, and then some

8oz Bacardi white rum

no sugar at all! none!

juice of 2 limes

crushed hard ice

Sprite Zero

Same method. The madness is using Sprite Zero at the end instead of club soda. And why not? It's a sugarless lemon-lime carbonated beverage! Unlike Diet Coke, Diet 7-Up, and so on, Coke Zero and Sprite Zero have managed to minimize that nasty artificial sweetener taste to the point that even I, a die-hard saccharine and aspartame hater, consider them pretty darned drinkable. I'd rather have the real thing, but these are actually an acceptable substitute. Since the Sprite Zero is going to be adding plenty of sweetness, I forego the sugar in the muddling step, and the balance ends up being just right.

More travel wearies

2007-09-05T18:00:00.001-07:00

About a year ago, I recounted a somewhat unusual version of my summer ritual: failing to fly out of the Southeast.

I call it a ritual because I fly in and out of RDU about once a month, year round, and during the summer months I've grown to expect that getting to RDU from SFO or OAK will be fraught with delays and headaches, and getting back home from RDU will be a hellish combination of delays, missed connections, exciting round-the-world trips for my baggage, and spontaneous weekends with my friends in the southeast. So often do I get stuck at IAD that I keep all the phone numbers I have for my friends Bruce and Kathy in Alexandria on speed dial on both my work and personal mobile phones (because you never know which one will have a dying battery). I also keep United, Avis, and Hilton's numbers on speed-dial, to help with all those emergency rearrangements. So a few weeks ago, when Kathy visited us out west, I warned her that at the end of my trip this week, I might be calling her.

The red-eye long haul out here on Sunday night was fine, the Monday-morning connection in Dulles was several hours late (gee, that's a surprise), it took forever for my bag to appear at RDU (gee that's a surprise), and Avis was a complete mess (gee, that's a surprise), so I had to spend over an hour queuing at the Preferred tend outside in the heat to get a decent car (while the hoi polloi were getting quick service in the short, air-conditioned indoor non-preferred building), but the real troubles began on Friday, when I tried to get back home to SFO.

I got up in the middle of the night for nothing. I'd had a feeling all along that I wouldn't get home on Friday, starting with my warning to Kathy a few weeks ago, and I wish there had been some way to take advantage of that insight to save myself all the trouble of pretending I'd be flying home on time.

My 6:20 flight was supposed to board at 6am, and sure enough at 6am they had us queue up for boarding. Twenty minutes go by and still no sign of an agent ready to scan us in, so I take a seat. Nothing happens for a long time, so I check the monitors to be sure we're still departing from gate 21A and then sit back down. They announce our flight is being delayed by paperwork (huh?) and start boarding the 7:20 Washington flight, and eventually tell us our flight is going to be another hour at least. It's 7am, and my connection to San Francisco is at 8:30, so I know I'm doomed, and sure enough they're announcing that we're unlikely to make our connections, and there's only two people working all of United, so we're better off calling the 800 number to take care of rebookings, etc. I call the 1K desk instead and find out I can be rebooked in the next IAD-SFO flight but definitely not upgraded, and meanwhile my RDU-IAD flight's delay of another hour is perhaps a bit of wishful thinking, because it's in fact more uncertain than that.

Meanwhile, connections out of IAD are also likely to be a big mess, because all the intense storms in the midwest mean that 500 flights yesterday were canceled out of O'Hare alone, and an awful lot of travelers are all screwed up, and basically the entire nation's air system is a total mess today because none of the metal is where it belongs for today's flights.

The prospect of waiting indefinitely for a flight that will probably miss my rebooked flight, and then I'll be stuck in Dulles for god knows how long waiting for the NEXT flight, which may or may not have a seat for me (let alone a decent one), and before you know it I'll have spent my entire day in airports and probably still won't be home. None of this seems fun. So I ask about better options, like say tomorrow. The 6:20am? No thanks, not again... I had her rebook me on an 2:48-15:57 RDU-IAD, 17:25-19:50 IAD-SFO itinerary tomorrow (Saturday), which does have room for me in first.

Still not free, though--because I've already checked in, I have to be "unchecked in," which requires speaking with an agent. I see that my gate agents are boarding two different flights and have a line of about 40 IAD passengers waiting to speak with them, so I slip to the head of the line to ask about that. When I'm told I have to go back out to the ticketing and bag-check desk to do that, I'm glad that I didn't wait politely in the big line with everybody else, and while I schlepp back to ticketing, I call Sue to make sure she can put up with me for another day. There I take my place at the head of the first/1K line but still have to wait about ten minutes, during which I call Avis to book another car. Finally one of the two beleaguered ticket counter agents approaches me. He "unchecks me in" (there has got to be a better way of expressing that thought, but apparently nobody at United has come up with it yet) and agrees to get my checked bag unchecked also. However, he looks pained as he tells me what I'd gathered already: that things are a total mess there right now and it will probably be a while before somebody can get it back to the terminal for me.

I head down to the bag claim area, take a seat, plug in my now-dead phone, and get comfortable. After about half an hour, Mr. Beleaguered appears and asks to see my bag claim ticket again, marches away, eventually returns, says something barely comprehensible about a radio not working and that he'll go back upstairs and use the phone to see what he can do. Another half hour passes and finally the "bags coming" alarm goes off, but only three bags (none mine) clunk onto the belt before it stops again. I finally decide to speak with someone at the baggage desk but find the desk unstaffed. After calling "excuse me!" out into the oblivion a few times, I notice that there are a few bags lurking behind the desk. One is mine. Seeing nobody to stop me and no reason not to help myself, I do so, and schlepp out to the Avis bus.

I get to Avis and am rewarded for my top-tier status with three blessings. I've gotten a ghastly American car (1), and it reaks of an ashtray (2). I decide to deal with it but am stopped at the exit gate. Because I don't have a contract. Because they hadn't bothered to put one in the car (3)! So now I have to U-turn back into the lot, return it to its parking spot, and get the contract. At this point I decide that since I have to go to the booth anyway, there's no reason to put up with an ashtray on wheels, so I haul my bags back out, schlepp to the booth, and am offered (oh, joy) the very same Pontiac G6 I had rejected on Monday morning for being a big-ass American car for knuckle-draggers (its seat puts my knees at my chin, my butt on the floor, and my eyes somewhere around the bottom of the windows, and there's just no way I'm going to drive anything like that). Next he tries to offer me an even bigger Pontiac, and I ask for a third time for "anything Asian--anything at all." He says he doesn't have anything in my reserved size or bigger, and I tell him something smaller would be just fine if it's Asian--say, a Hyundai Sonata, which is what I'd turned in three hours earlier, so I know he probably has one. He says his only Sonata has 33,000 miles on it. I have no idea why that could possibly matter to me, so I tell him I don't care, that will be just fine, thank you so very much for all your extra help, sir. With a look that seems to combine pity and confusion, he hands me keys and a contract.

I drive back to my friend Sue's house where I've been staying the week instead of spending yet another week in a hotel, retrieve the key from the dogfood bin, and here I am. I've been up over five hours, I've gone spectacularly nowhere, I'm still not napping in an airplane seat, so I decide to go back to bed, and later I put in some work time with the laptop while Sue's rat terriers bounce all over me. Besides being a software colleague, Sue's a dog trainer and breeder, and one spectacular benefit of staying with her has been getting all the fur fixes I can stand. Trust me, road-warrior-wannabes, you might think the hotel scene is glamorous and fun, but after you've been at it for ten years, you'll leap at kind offers from friends, and friends with sweet dogs are even better.

The troubles continue Saturday.

Both airports were relatively quiet, and things seemed to be going like clockwork until I boarded in Dulles. That's when thunderstorms hit, causing a cascading mess of ground stops, metered pushbacks, and ramp and pushback crews not being allowed to go out and play in the lightning. I'm sure glad I held out for an itinerary with room for me in Business, because I sat in that seat an extra three hours at Dulles, with a glass of wine of course.

For the first time in ages, I decided to listen to channel 9 (the cockpit radio), and it was fascinating to hear all the frustrated pilots and ground metering agents trying not to get testy with each other.

As a United bigot, I'm pleased to say that the United pilots were all comporting themselves with noticeably more class than the other airlines, perhaps because they know that they have some frequent-flyer-geek passengers listening in. Note to other airlines: you might not be putting your pilots' radio behavior on the air for your passengers to hear, but United is, and you might want to suggest that they display the same courtesy you expect your flight agents to display. (And for that matter, some of you airlines might want to talk to your flight attendants about courtesy...)

While I'm on the subject of United vs. other airlines, here's why I'm a United bigot. One big reason is that United Economy Plus seating means I can bring my kneecaps and both hips with me onboard when I travel. With those other airlines, coach seating means I need to check them. But the bigger reason is one that I've heard repeated many times by many others: stuff goes wrong in air travel--it just does--and what sets an airline apart is how they handle the problems. United has consistently demonstrated humanity and professionalism in this regard, and when I say this I'm referring not to some monolithic corporate values but rather the individual employees I've encountered, one after another. Many a United employee has knocked me out by going way beyond what I would have expected to take care of me. So take today's story in that context: yes, it was a pain, but it wasn't United's fault, and I'm pretty sure that on some other airline (a few in particular), my story would have been much more exasperating. Now, as a 1K (platinum butt) I undoubtedly get somewhat better service than any old passenger, but I've never seen any United employees treating any passengers or folks from competing airlines with less respect than they deserved, and I've usually seen them displaying considerably more. I wish I could say the same of other airlines.

The flight itself was humdrum, service was fine, there were a few good movies, and I got my bag promptly at the other end (another reason to like SFO). Unfortunately, I waited quite a while for the parking shuttle van, but fortunately I got the driver I'd had on the way in, a sweet Peruvian guy who's trying hard to learn conversational English, and doing pretty well--he's certainly way ahead of my Spanish and probably even my German and Norwegian. I bought my car back for the usual extortionary fee and then headed into messy traffic, finally arriving home around midnight, fourteen hours after I'd left Sue's house for the second time.

Grand total, 19 hours to go cross-country. Oy.

Iowa does good

2007-08-31T18:16:00.000-07:00

A while back I posted on the subject of so-called "gay marriage." Shortly after posting that, I got involved in an email conversation with fellow St. Olaf College alumni in which I expanded on my thoughts. Today upon receiving a news alert from a friend that Iowa has joined the ranks of sensible states who are choosing to protect economic and legal fairness for all its citizens, I am prompted to post my email here:

14 November 2006

I agree with almost everything said so far, in particular the fact that it's heartening to be reading this conversation [on a St. Olaf College LISTSERV]. I found it especially heartening for it to have been started by Pastor Benson. The public perception of this issue seems to be far too slanted in the direction of "religious leaders object to gay marriage." It doesn't seem necessary rehearse the various reasons for that here; instead I'll add my thanks to him and all who have replied.

I'm not sure whether to be optimistic or not. Sometimes I'm optimistic; I think the fact that so many people are talking about it--and so many people, so reasonably--is a sign of tremendous progress since, for example, when I was at St Olaf in the 1980s. The fledgling GLBT community's hottest topic then was whether it was safe to be "out," at St Olaf or elsewhere. This feels like progress.

Sometimes I view it historically in a different way: the institution of marriage has hardly been static for more than a few generations, let alone throughout history, and I'm not sure that its present definition is one that's going to last much longer anyway. More than a few progressive thinkers have suggested that nontraditional couples are in fact privileged by lack of access to traditional marriage, because they are both free and obligated to explore for themselves what they mean by committing to each other. I'm not sure it's a fair trade, but it seems like a valid point.

Sometimes I'm pessimistic and think we're weaving our handbaskets with so much damage already done by the misguided fights going on at the constitutional level.

Most of the time, I take a pragmatic view, or maybe it's denial: I think it's an issue that's getting way too much airtime relative to more serious problems in our country and world, and I resent the fact that conservative extremists (read "bigots") are so happy to exploit this as a wedge issue, but I just don't see it as being nearly as pressing as the lack of universal health care, decent education, and a zillion other things that our politicians SHOULD be spending their time on first.

I wrote at greater length on the subject recently in a blog post, which you can find here:
http://erinvang.blogspot.com/2006/08/im-sick-of-so-called-gay-marriage.html

The gist of that post was to propose that we separate marriage and civil union into two separate institutions. What I didn't address is this: what are we all supposed to do in the meantime?

I have the great happiness of being "engaged" (or whatever) to a wonderful woman, and we plan to be "married" (or whatever) in January 2008, but I'll be darned if I know how we're going to do it.

We set a distant date in part so that we have time to talk to lawyers and financial planners and whoever else about how to go about creating a partnership with as many of the dimensions currently available to "married" couples as possible, given the patchwork of simple and domestic partnership options available to us. And then there's all the questions around which laws will end up taking precedence over the others. Any legal experts out there want to help us? [Followup: we didn't get any offers from lawyers, but I did receive an astonishing number of thoughtful, supportive replies from friends and strangers alike.]

We also have a pile of questions about what kind of ceremony to create with what kind of officiant(s), since the traditional options aren't available to us, but none of that seems as important as figuring out how to protect each other and make ourselves accountable to each other financially and legally in all the myriad ways that straight couples get for the price of a marriage license.

MacArthur Maze fallout

2007-08-17T18:52:00.000-07:00

As threatened in earlier posts about the collapse of the MacArthur Maze, I did indeed get back into the motorcycling game, so here is an overdue picture of the new baby, a 2002 Honda VFR 800FIA. Candy was reluctant to pose with me, perhaps miffed that we can't seem to find her a helmet that fits.

In lay terms, it's an 800cc Interceptor sportbike with fuel injection and antilock brakes. It's by far the most modern bike I've ever ridden. No choke! A fuel gauge! A clock! ABS! VTEC! What do all these things mean in practical terms?

No choke means one less step while starting the bike. It means no hassles with having to fiddle with the choke level until you can coax the bike into starting. It means not having to remember to turn the choke back down after the bike has warmed up (about a mile from home). It means not having to fiddle with the choke during the first mile to get the mixture just rich enough but not too rich. It means a little lever isn't in the way of your left thumb when you're whacking the headlights' low/high beam switch.

A fuel guage means that you can keep track of how much fuel you have. Big deal? Well, in all the other bikes I've had, there was no fuel gauge. Instead, you had a two-part fuel intake from the tank. Most of the time, you operate the bike with the fuel dial in the main position, and fuel ran into a hose positioned too high to catch the bottom 1/8th of the tank. At some point, the fuel fell below this intake, the engine started to sputter, the rider started to panic (especially if executing traffic maneuvers), and the rider eventually recognized the behavior as a symptom of low fuel, took her left hand off the grip and clutch lever (after completing a shift, if applicable), grabbed for the dial under her left knee, tried to move it to the bottom "reserve" position while wearing gloves and continuing to maneuver in traffic, and then waited for fuel to make its way from the secondary intake at the lowest point of the tankbottom, down the hose, and into the engine, which would then give one last sputter and start running smoothly again. That's if all went well. If instead you were confused or clumsy too long, the engine killed, and you had to restart it (perhaps after pulling over, figuring out what just happened, and then waiting for gravity to draw fuel through the hose since the killed engine wasn't exerting any suck). You then knew you had about 15 miles (more or less, depending on the bike, the slope, etc.) to get to a gas station, fill the tank, and if you're smart, return the fuel dial to the regular position. If you forgot and left it on "reserve," you were at risk of running out of gas with no warning, no reserve, and no hope of getting to a gas station. Ask me how I know. Ask any rider how she knows. Having a fuel gauge is so much nicer! Now I just need to remember to glance at it now and again. Ask Mom how I forgot to do that in North Dakota in my rental car a few months ago and she had to drive five miles from her hotel with a red plastic tank of gas to get me going again. Ask me how embarrassing it is to have to ask your senior citizen mother to rescue you five miles from town. No, don't.

A clock means you actually know what time it is while you're riding, without having to pull over or else attempt to shove your zipped-tight leather jacket sleeve up, your long leather glove gauntlet down, and look at a wrist watch while riding. It's sort of a two-handed operation, and for the most part you only have half a hand available for ancillary tasks while riding. You can get little throttle clamps, which are a sort of lame substitute for cruise control, but the one I had didn't work very well, and it's not hard to think of why these devices aren't the safest things to be using. Suppose you have one, though. You can, in fact, ride no-handed, just like on a bicycle, but it doesn't feel good--at least not to this wimpy excuse for a motorcyclist.

ABS's benefits should be obvious to anyone who's ever used anti-lock brakes in any kind of vehicle. Basically, they're the difference between hitting something and stopping quickly enough to avoid hitting something, especially on wet, icy, or gravelly surfaces. In a car this means saving money by avoiding rear-end collisions. On a motorcycle, this means saving your ass by avoiding all kinds of collisions, spinouts, and lockups. The problem with braking (without ABS) on a motorcycle is that if you lock up a wheel, you have problems. If you lock up the rear wheel (easy to do, since the rear brake is operated by your right foot, and our legs are stronger than we usually realize), it fishtails behind you, and if you're skilled, you can ease up on it and recover; if you're not, you'll go down. If you lock up the front wheel, which is harder since you operate it with your right hand and because front brakes are ridiculously effective on bikes, then the rear part of the bike flips around or over the front part, the bike goes down, and you go flying. I've only done this once, on my old Hawk GT, while deciding to test full-effort braking at a stop sign, not realizing that it had started to mist, the pavement was wet, and I was approaching an oily spot. Everything was fine until the last inches (literally) of my stop, when the front wheel slipped, the brake locked it, and the bike ever so gently bucked me off. It wasn't a big deal of an accident at all--1 mph, no traffic around me, no damage to the bike--but I caught myself with my right hand, bent my fingers back HARD. I got back on, rode the rest of the way home, and then my hand started to throb. A lot of ice, vicodin, two doctors, an NP, and an X-ray later, I had a broken finger diagnosed. (The prescription? Use it as much as you can stand. Use ice and pain killers as needed.) Having ABS means this accident, minor though it was, wouldn't have happened. It shortens stopping distance by astonishing amounts (say 40%) on wet pavement. It can slightly lengthen stopping distance on ideal road conditions, but only if you're a much more skilled rider than I am. ABS is good. I'll never buy another vehicle of any kind without ABS, and I get annoyed when rental cars don't have it. It should be required by law, just like airbags and seatbelts.

VTEC's benefits are the most esoteric, but in the age of global warming, they're not trivial. (A motorcyclist getting green seems weird to you? C'mon--this bike gets 54 mpg, which is on average better than your Prius, took far less energy and resources to produce than your Prius, will last two or three times as long, will take far less energy and resources to destroy when it's dead, will consume far less parking space and the materials and energy it takes to create parking spaces, and will never need huge batteries replaced and the old ones destroyed like your Prius. And ALL of Honda's vehicles have the best fuel economy in their class, and they don't even make the most egregious monster vehicles. Your Prius might get great mileage, but when you buy a Toyota vehicle, you're underwriting all those massive SUVs and trucks that Toyota also sells. If you think I'm a Honda bigot, you're right.) VTEC means that of the four cylinders on this bike, only two of them are firing under light loads. When the load increases enough (around the speed limit or during wicked acceleration), the other two cylinders kick in. That's right--this is a four-cylinder bike, but most of the time it's acting like a two-cylinder bike. Pretty cool.

In addition to being an ecology nut, I'm a safety nut. That might seem weird, too, but as much as I like motorcycling, I like my life better. So here's my hi-viz puke-yellow Aerostich Roadcrafter suit. I suppose some people might like this color, but it's not my favorite, and it certainly doesn't coordinate all that well with my red bike. But did you know that red is almost invisible to people, especially at night? This color is wicked visible always. To make sure, I asked Victoria to take a few pictures of it at night.

In the first picture, I'm standing in the low light of a distant driveway light. In the next three, that light has gone off, and the flash is doing its best. Can you find the black lab in these three pictures? Probably not. But would you miss seeing me if we were out playing in traffic together? Not a chance.

More joys of working from home

2007-08-17T17:51:00.000-07:00

The kitty-bjorn takes a new form, and my newest boss gives me my marching orders.

Unlikely friends?

2007-08-16T18:16:00.000-07:00

Syltetøy, the young Siamese kitten we adopted in July, refuses to be intimidated by Candy, our ten-year-old black lab. In fact, they seem to be good friends. The other night, V and I were on the couch with Candy and Gjetost. Syltetøy wandered up, and I invited her to join us. She hopped up into the space in front of Candy and then settled down on her rear legs. Candy gave her a sniff, she sniffed back, and there they cuddled for the next ten minutes or so, until it was time for Syltetøy to get up and do some more of her important kitten work.

My favorite story, though, is from July, when we were staying with Jane. Syltetøy's first vet visit revealed a yeast infection in her right ear. Sound familiar? Perhaps because Candy gets aural yeast infections all the time. It's pretty routine for us to have to squirt Epi-Otic ear cleanser into Candy's ears, let her shake it out, and then swab out the goop with a cotton pad. She hates it, and she invariably splatters us with the "fresh green apple!"-scented stuff, so we hate it, too. Imagine my joy when I learned I'd have to be doing the same thing to the wee kitty! It quickly became a favorite activity, though. See, Candy is so familiar with this procedure that when she smells Epi-Otic, she has a reflexive licking reaction; her job is to get rid of the stuff, after all! So after I squirted the stuff into the squirt's ear, the squirt shook furiously to get it out, spattering me even more efficiently than Candy does, and then Candy kicked into action licking it off Syltetøy's head. At first, the kitty was too startled to defend herself; then, she realized it was kind of nice, and she relaxed in my arms and enjoyed the maternal ministrations of the enormous black mama-kitty. Over the next couple days, she bonded even more with Candy, and eventually made her her plaything. Now sometimes Candy's wagging tail is Syltetøy's favorite toy--she bats at it just like a cat-dancer (those floppy wire thingies with the wad of cardboard that twitches spasmodically when whapped).

Recently I drained the juice from a can of tuna into Candy's food dish, and Syltetøy was determined to get her share. This time I had a camera ready to capture the fun!

So you think you want hardwood?

2007-07-25T15:07:00.000-07:00

We made that mistake, too, and here's the first installment of pictures and a heap of words to document the drama.

We've been wanting to get rid of the beaten-to-crap, never-was-very-good-in-the-first-place carpeting in our house for a long time, and this summer we finally decided to do it. We got quotes for putting in more white oak hardwood flooring (to match what Jon put in the music room, to match what was already there in the dining room) in the living room, staircase, and upstairs hallway. After that we planned to replace the carpeting in the three bedrooms. As much as we like hardwood, we both liked the idea of carpeting in the bedroom, mainly because putting bare feet down on kitty litter crumbs in the middle of the night is nobody's idea of a good time.

About a month later, we decided to go with the bid from Victoria's friend's company, and we scheduled the job. It was to start Wednesday, 11 July 2007, and finish up sometime around the next weekend, 21-22Jul. We were pretty much going to have to move out of the house once the finishing work began, since we wouldn't be able to walk on anything between our bedroom and the front door. The first step was to take delivery of the wood on Monday, 9 July.

On Sunday, 8 July, we were reading the New York Times and drinking (apparently way too much) coffee when we realized we were being idiots. We're replacing carpeting that's less than ten years old not just because we like hardwood better (who doesn't?), but because our carpeting looked like hell. Eight years of hairballs, boy cat expressions of antisocial sentiment through the urethra, puppy incontinence, dog barf, wine spills, food spills, and all manner of whatever comes into the house on the undersides of paws, shoes, and boots had pretty much trashed our carpeting--which, again, had never looked too great to begin with.

Also, a few months ago, we'd begun sliding down that slippery slope known as Oriental Rugs. Our friends Jon and Kyla (yes, Jon the artist behind my kitchen) threw a "rug party," where a friend of his from Turkey was showing literally hundreds of Turkish rugs of all styles, eras, sizes, and prices. They live in the Russian River now, in the tiny village of Monte Rio, and Victoria and I went up for the weekend. It was a chance to catch up with friends over great wine and food, and the next day on the way back, we'd pick up a mess of oysters in Tomales Bay and fresh cider in Graton. Our black lab, Candy, would have a chance to cavort with their labradoodle, Sam. I'd play a kiddie concert with the Marin Symphony on the way home. We'd have big fun. We'd do everything but buy rugs.

Right.

We forgot that part.

We drove home with four new (to us) Turkish rugs. One huge one had particularly caught both our eyes as being a good candidate for the living room--it was the usually hodgepodge of a million colors, especially reddish ones, that you expect, but its background was sort of pistachioesque somehow. We also liked a slightly smaller one that came off as purplish, and similar purplish medium one. Then we noticed a runner of unusual design that would be good for the hallway to our office after we do that remodeling job (which will be a subject for a future blogging, once we get around to doing it). While we were taking a closer look at these, trying to decide whether we'd buy any, Candy plopped herself resolutely down on the mediumish purplish one and refused to budge, clearly expressing her wish that we purchase it for her. (She was to have a tumor surgically removed the following week, and Dad speculated that she was picking out her own get well present.)

We left with all four.

So, back to our coffee that fine Sunday morning... We were having to completely move out of our house anyway, and did we really want to move out of each of the bedrooms AGAIN to have carpeting put in? Our hardwood and tiled floors all look fine. Our carpeted floors all look horrible. Why, exactly, did we think that the prosective new carpeting in the bedrooms was going to fare any better? Wouldn't those nice, cleanable Turkish rugs be a better idea? Wouldn't it be better to do the whole darned house while we were at it?

Well, of course it would be!

So we call our friend Jane to announce that we're moving in for at least two weeks ("Is Tuesday good for you?"), we do what we can that day to finish moving out of the living room, boxing up all our books and CDs and so on. Monday, Erin welcomes the first big load of wood, which the guys load into the music room. Victoria calls Allison at The Floor Show to ask if she can deal with our sudden scope creep. After work, Erin goes off to play chamber music for four hours (octets featuring a clarinetist who's visiting from Italy). V hears back from Allison: the answer is "probably... I'll look at it first thing tomorrow... and can we start tomorrow instead of Wednesday?"

Yipes! V goes off to get another heap of boxes, including five wardrobe boxes for the three huge closets we suddenly might need to empty out. We meet back at the house to panic. Who wouldn't? It's Monday night. I prepare the stereo/TV cart for moving, which is to say I unplug about a thousand cables and jam them all into a box, and then I get Victoria to help me move the BATV (which stands for Big Ass TV, of course) down to the office where it will be least vulnerable to clumsy movers and floor workers. Except that when we get to the top of the little living room staircase, V trips on the hardwood that's stacked in the music room, falls, lands on her wrist, and (we learn Wednesday) breaks it. We leave the TV there at the top of the stairs for the movers to deal with tomorrow.

Now we're panicked and half crippled. Great. We have to move everything we own by tomorrow, maybe, we've barely started, and I've broken my girlfriend?! Not good.

V takes half a pound of ibuprofen, straps on an icepack, and soldiers on. We jam clothes into the wardrobe boxes. The nice guy at U-Haul has kindly sent closet rod thingies that are about half as wide as the boxes, so I improvise and use the dowels from our closets instead. We set out the stuff we think we need to take with us to Jane's house, and then we collapse in bed.

Tuesday dawns early, with Allison arriving at 9 to look over the new turf. Tim arrives shortly after that and starts demoing the living room, and our mover guys Manuel and Juan arrive a few minutes later and just barely get our furniture out of the living room before Tim starts wailing on the carpet. V and I are simultaneously directing the movers ("Your mission is to fit everything we own into the dining room, kitchen, two bathrooms, and maybe a deck or two. Go!"), answering Allison's questions, jamming more of our bedroom stuff into boxes, and continuing to panic. Allison sees that we're both wrecks and advises waiting with the bedrooms. I propose that we move everything we can fit into the space available, prioritizing the master bedroom, and if we have to, we'll have the rest done after we move back in. Allison shrugs and agrees, asks us to let her know how far we get, and flees to safety. We put the cats in the safety of their carriers, and we usher Candy into the office so she won't help quite so much.

About four hours later, V and I have somehow boxed everything in the entire upstairs, and Manuel and Juan have somehow crammed it all into the bathroms, the tiny deck off the master bathroom, the larger deck in front of the master bedroom, the hallway leading to the office, and the dining room. Well, heck! We didn't even start using the kitchen! We could have done the office, too! (But that's to be another story for the future.) We call Allison and declare victory, run out for burritos, and then move to Jane's in Sausalito. Since V's wrist is throbbing, she can't drive, so we have to cram two adults, four critters, and everything we need into my car.

As soon as we've unpacked for our two (or will it be three now?) weeks at Jane's, I need to put on pit black, grab my horn, and turn right back around for the night's opera. I drive to Oakland, buy self-adhesive wrapping tape for V's wrist, grab something to eat, and meet my carpool to Walnut Creek. After the opera, I drop off my carpool, drive up to the house, and get my office stuff. I work from home, and for the next few weeks I'll be working from Jane's home, which means I need to take everything I need to her house. Fortunately, I travel so much that packing for a few weeks of work from a remote location isn't much harder than unplugging my laptop and throwing it into a briefcase that already has everything else I need. I also take a few minutes to wander through the freakishly empty house and take pictures of all our worldly goods crammed into bathrooms.

The rest of that week is surreal. V can't drive, so she can't get to work in Berkeley, and she's pretty much at my mercy. Wednesday morning I worked in the morning, and that afternoon, we drove to Berkeley so V could go to the ER to get her wrist checked out, and I went to buy groceries and check on things at the house. She learns that she's broken it, and she emerges from the hospital with her arm splinted and in a sling. We stop by a medical supply place to get a wrist-shaped ice pack and drive "home." Thursday I have an all-day business trip to San Jose, returning home at 9pm to a very frustrated V--my poor extravert has been home all day with nothing but furry critters for company. Friday, we make a trip to an orthopedist, where she's put in a cast; happily, though, now she can drive, so we go to the house to look around and get her car, and she drives "home." I plug my laptop in at my home office and work for the afternoon, amidst the chaos of sawing and banging, and that night I play another opera. Somewhere in all that, we also measured our closets and got to work figuring out how we'd refit them after we move back in: the stupid planks that currently support the shelving and rods will need to be removed to put the hardwood in, and we see no point in putting them back.

We recover over the weekend. Jane has fled to Seattle for a family baby shower. We spend Saturday touring closet stores, settle on an Elfa system from The Container Store, and spend a bunch of the day designing it, and then our friend Rhett comes over for a dog walk and dinner. Sunday I run off to yet another opera while V holds down the home front.

Week 2 is a little less surreal. Able to drive again, V returns to her usual work schedule. I play the last of the operas on Tuesday night. Jane is home and we start hanging out together and getting into the rhythm of our temporary large family. Tranquility is disturbed Wednesday: Gjetost has some kind of horrible mouth infection and needs to see the vet; fortunately, she responds well to a ton of meds (if not to the twice-daily ritual of slurping down more meds).

Weeekend 2, I have a flurry of Saturday errands in the East Bay, including hauling a car full of Elfa closet stuff up into my office; back in Sausalito, Candy takes V on several walks between loads of laundry; Jane is off in Berkeley doing dancerly stuff. Sunday we're the picture of domesticity: the three of us go off to a farmer's market and trap all kinds of great stuff for dinner and come back to work the Sunday NYT crossword. At some point I start getting antsy and make Jane unpack her living room; working together, we managed to complete that job in about an hour, and now it's time to make dinner.

Here we are on Wednesday of Week 3. I'm on day 3 of a nasty cold and feel like crap, but that pales next to our having just resolved a tricky problem: we can't move back in until Saturday. Or maybe Friday. Jane has only one guestroom, and she has a houseguest coming Thursday night, who may or may not be able to deal with cats. Jon and Kyla have invited us to the Monte Rio, but Jon's deathly allergic to our cats. Jane thinks about sending her guest to a hotel, but everything in the area costs a fortune, so we look at moving ourselves into a hotel back in Berkeley. Those cost a fortune, too, of course, and only the really icky ones will take our four critters. Fortunately, Allison decides we can move back Friday, Jane's guest says she loves cats, and we have a Goldbergian itinerary of a solution: Candy and Victoria and I pack up, clean up, and move out to Jon and Kyla's on Thursday afternoon; we stay there Thursday night; Friday morning, we come back for the cats and the rest of our stuff; finally, the whole menagerie drives home to meet the movers Friday afternoon.

Meanwhile back in Oakland, things are looking pretty good! V took some pictures of the floors after their first two coats of polyurethane on Monday night, and they're gorgeous. Even though we have no baseboards and its becoming increasingly clear that we're going to need to paint soon, the house is immeasurably improved by the hardwood. The floor guys were to have put the fourth and final coat of finish on Tuesday, and today and tomorrow they're installing the baseboards, which they had been pre-finishing down on the driveway starting last Friday.

Once our furniture is back in place and all the boxes are sitting in the rooms where they'll need to be unpacked, I'll need to start demoing our closets and installing the Elfa system, so that Victoria can move our clothes back in. I hope we can manage most of this on Friday, because on Saturday I need to pack for a flight Sunday to Salt Lake City. With any luck, my one-armed V will unpack and put away some of our boxes while I'm gone. I'll get home late Thursday night, and Friday we'll welcome a house guest! Fortunately Kathy has been through some remodeling herself, so we think she'll be patient with the boxes and general disorder she's likely to confront.

When we move back in Friday afternoon, the polyurethane will have been curing for only three days and will still be somewhat fragile. This means we need to put down a bunch of rugs to keep gritty shoes from damaging it, and for about seven more days, we have to be really careful. Candy will need to wear dog-boots when she's in the house, or else her claws would make little dents and scratches in the finish, so we've gotten her a spiffy quad of red dog boots at REI and have been having her practice in them on her walks. We think she looks fabulous in her sexy little red shoes, and so do all the neighbors. She's being a good sport about it--almost as good a sport as Jane has been, putting up with our sudden and prolonged invasion--but she has her doubts. Whenever we first put them on her, she doesn't seem to remember how to walk and instead prances uncertainly until she gets distracted by a retrieving dummy or tennis ball. This, of course, had to be captured on video!

All in all, we've had a pretty good experience, and we can't wait to see the results and take a mess of After pictures to post here, but it's been a whirlwind of an adventure, and we're not done yet.

Be a patriot, don't buy fireworks!

2007-07-03T13:08:00.000-07:00

It makes me completely nuts to hear fireworks going off around here, living as we do in a neighborhood whose entrances are all prominently marked "CAUTION: FIRE DANGER ZONE. FIRE DANGER TODAY IS !"

What are people thinking?!?!

It was only 15 years ago that hundreds of houses burned and a bunch of people died from a wildfire in the neighborhood started by idiots playing with fire. Not just "those other people" but people we actually know lost their houses, their houses' contents, their lives as they knew them, everything.

It was only a few weeks ago that another big grass fire started in the exact same spot and bloomed into a three-alarm fire and 24 hours with helicopters hovering and fire crews monitoring.

Sure, in theory there are safe ways to play with firecrackers and all those other so-called "amateur" or "family fun" fireworks. I even know most of those safety tips, having misspent some of my youth in this sort of pursuit. I also know that even the safest people have accidents and make mistakes. I'm in that count, too. You have duds that land in the grass instead of going off in air, only to blow a shockingly long time later. You have those whistler things that for some reason crash into the trees or grasses while still lit instead of flying off into the sky. You have just about anything set to go off on a patch of pavement, only to see an unexpected puff of wind whisk it away into a patch of something flammable. Lots of things like this go wrong, and I'm talking about the people who are behaving prudently!

And then there are all the idiots who do stuff with fireworks that is just so darned stupid they deserve to get their fingers blown off or their eyeballs blown up, and unfortunately there are shockingly large numbers of people like that, too.

Regardless of how "safely" people play with them around here, they're not being safe--they're being stupid. In a fire danger zone, it's just plain stupid to seek entertainment with little combustible units.

Nano-opera: Rosenkavalier

2007-06-28T00:29:00.000-07:00

Just your basic girl meets girl, girl falls in love with girl, girl edges out guy, girl meets new girl, girl falls in love with girl, girl edges out guy, girl dumps girl, girl marries girl opera. With great music. For four hours.

Might have to rename the printer

2007-06-26T10:40:00.000-07:00

This printer has been going by the name "Norton's Napzone" for as long as I've owned it, but the new kitty seems to have claimed it as hers. I might have to rename it "Syltetøy's Bathzone."

The new kitty arrived on Thursday. She is a 10 month old sealpoint Siamese, and her full name is Sigrid Syltetøy Williams Vang. She's got a wee infection in one eye, but it's clearing up nicely. She spent her first several days hiding in the bedroom, but lately she's been prowling around the house and taking up her position in the household. Gudrun Gjetost hisses at her occasionally, but if Syltetøy has claim on a lap, Gjetost just piles right on.

Her kittyhood seems to be serving her well in regard to Candy: it hasn't occurred to her to worry about dogs. She was napping on my lap, and Candy was curled up on the couch next to me. Eventually my lap wasn't wide enough--she unfurled herself full length, depositing paws on Candy's flank. Candy sort of raised an eyebrow but stayed put, and before long Syltetøy was kneading Candy's thigh.

About the name, Syltetøy, pronounced SILT-uh-toy, more or less. Way back in 1999 I spent a few weeks vacationing in Norway with my friend, Lucy, who couldn't get her anglophonic mouth around the sweet brown cheese often eaten for breakfast, gjetost, pronounced YIE-toost, and it became a bit of a joke among us. Later when I was traveling with another friend, Sarah, who'd majored in Norwegian and was now doing graduate work in Oslo, we got to talking about my plan to get a pair of kittens. I'd just lost my two step cats--Barty had died, and Norton had gone with his mom when we broke up. I've always loved sealpoint Siamese, so the plan was to try to find a couple Siamese or Siamese mutts at the SPCA.

What to name them?

"Gjetost!" shouted Sarah.

Mirthful giggles followed. But what to name the other one?

"Well, everybody eats gjetost with jam, so why not Gjetost and Syltetøy?"

A few months later, back at home, Norton came back to me. His mom was opening a new restaurant and working all hours, so she decided he'd be better off in his old house where his stepmom was a lot more available. The courage and generosity of her decision has always impressed me. So, with Norton back in the family, I didn't think there'd be room for two kitties. That spring I met Gjetost at one of the SPCA's mobile adoption clinics and adopted her on the spot. I opted to give her the first name, Gudrun, after my grandmother, so that there would be a name that people in my vet's office could handle, and Gjetost is her middle and daily-use name.

Gjetost will be ten in September. Now, finally, she has her sister, Syltetøy, and during the drive home from her foster home in Vacaville, I realized that her first name had to be Sigrid, after Sigrid Johnson the noted singer and choral conductor at my alma mater, St. Olaf College. Yes, the little dear was rather vocal during the drive, but it's more that she seemed Sigridian.

Gjetost is mostly called Gjetost, or Miss Thing or Cheese Kitty, and Gudrun is pretty much just her medical alias. Syltetøy so far is mostly Syltetøy, but Sigrid, Jam Kitty, and The Little Tyke seem to come into play fairly often, too.

The MacArthur Maze is back in business: Lessons for project managers

2007-06-04T12:03:00.000-07:00

Here's something that never happens: the California Dept of Transportation has been working faster than Google! ;-) Traffic has been flowing through the rebuilt sections of the MacArthur Maze for a couple weeks now, but Google Traffic still shows traffic from the Bay Bridge to the East Bay detouring through West Grand Ave:

Google Traffic

Speaking of amazing, the Maze was put back together in less than a month, when most people in the Bay Area including me thought it would take several months to a year. How was this possible? The story teaches several lessons for project managers.

1. Smart chartering. The Governator declared a state of emergency and chartered a rebuilding project the same day as the Maze Meltdown (as we locals have been referring to the disaster). By declaring a state of emergency, the State of California was able to waive literally years worth of red tape in procurement regulations, environmental impact reports, equal opportunity hiring requirements, design requirements, and on and on. They had bids submitted, a winner chosen, and a contract signed the very next day.

2. Smart contracting. California built significant incentives for early completion into the contract: $200K/day. The winning contract was a below-cost bid of $867K. The state estimated it would cost $5.2MM and take 50 days. By completing it over a month ahead of schedule, C.C. Myers' firm earned the maximum bonus of $5MM—a handsome $2.5MM profit over the builder's actual costs—not to mention immeasurable positive publicity.

2. Smart resourcing. Before submitting its bid, the winning firm had made a deal with a steel supplier that included sharing 25% of the profits if the steel could be delivered to spec, on time, for early completion.

3. Smart scheduling. C.C. Myers had workers on the job site 15 minutes before the contracts were signed, and he had crews working 12-hour shifts around the clock.

Another scheduling trick: while the massive steel girders were being manufactured in Arizona, construction work was already underway in Oakland. Normally girders and construction would be in a finish-start relationship, but they did it in parallel, literally in a finish-finish relationship: the last of the concrete was poured right after the last girder arrived.

And another: normally a full batch of girders would be completed and then all shipped together, but to save time on this project, they sent each girder up to Oakland as it was finished, with two drivers in each truck so that they could take turns and drive nonstop.

4. Smart compensation. The firm shares a percentage of profits with all its workers, so the workers all had an incentive to take on the hard work it would take to finish the project quickly.

5. What about risk management? Remember the old project manager's triangle: time, cost, quality. Push one side, another suffers. California prioritized time by allowing higher costs, but did this affect quality? The typical problem with fast-tracking construction projects like this is that often corners get cut and safety suffers. On this point, time will tell. C.C. Myers has an unusually good track record with these kinds of emergency projects, but it's not spotless.

So obviously there's a big risk. According to the Project Manager's Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), a project managers' choices for responding to risk are to avoid, transfer, mitigate, or accept it. Let's consider these options for the Maze:

Avoid. The risk is obviously unavoidable; even without time and cost constraints, there is no such thing as perfect, risk-free, overhead highway construction, especially in the land of earthquakes. I don't think avoid was ever an option here.

Transfer. I haven't seen the contract between California and C.C. Myers, but I would be surprised if it didn't have a whole bunch of clauses spelling out C.C. Myers responsibility to repair and redo any defects shown to be its fault. This transfers the cost and responsibility for responding to quality problems from California to C.C. Myers, but is cost really the issue here? No. Lives are the issue: if this highway is unsafe, people could be injured or killed, and the real risk is borne by the citizens of California. So much for transfer.

Mitigate. Again, I imagine there were some contractual provisions to mitigate the State's risk. I imagine they also mitigated some risk by opting to rebuild to the original design, which had stood the test of time and already survived several major earthquakes (this section of the Maze had been undamaged by Loma Prieta in 1989).

Accept. Under the circumstances, probably the only real choice was to accept the risk. Avoiding was impossible, transferring was a limited possibility, and mitigating would have broken the schedule requirements. That leaves accept.

How did they do?

I drove through the rebuilt section twice last week, and I couldn't tell where the repairs had been made. Yesterday I drove through a neighboring stretch of the Maze and could finally recognize the section by its scaffolding and the progress of painting.

More reading for extra credit

Here are some links if you want to read more:

NYTimes article, 2 June 2007

SFChronicle's article mid-construction about C.C. Myers

SFChronicle's Maze Meltdown article roundup

I'm jealous of my suitcase

2007-05-29T16:07:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy month for travel. I was on the east coast at my employer's headquarters for a week, then in North Dakota for a friend's graduation from medical school for a long weekend, then home for five whole days, then back east for another week at headquarters last week. I'm home again for two weeks before going back for another week, and this sort of schedule is how I've come to have platinum-butt status with my favorite airline.

I was bummed out not to get home for the long weekend before midnight Friday, but my bag has had an even more exhausting journey. For some reason it went from Raleigh to Dulles to Taipei to Tokyo to Chicago. My guess is that the unusually harried gate agents at RDU got my bag tag and somebody else's mixed up. It was supposed to come to Oakland Sunday night by way of Kansas City and Denver to be delivered 9:30am Monday, and then it was supposed to do that yesterday to be delivered 9:30am today, and now it's supposedly landed from Chicago in Oakland and is going to be delivered late afternoon today. All I can figure is that my bag has been doing its best to enjoy its stays in Taipei, Narita, and Chicago. I know that two of those can be fun places, and I'd sure like to find out about the third.

I really don't think it's fair that my bag gets to go more places than I do. For crying out loud, it's just a stupid Costco wheelie-dealie whose greatest accomplishment to date has been not falling apart. I'm a well-educated and some would even say personable high-tech professional who can offer greetings, thanks, inquiries after the price of an iron chair, and toasts in least a dozen languages! I asked the airlines platinum-butt service rep guy who was updating me on its itinerary whether they would consider compensating me by letting me go on the same itinerary my bag got to go on, since I'm platinum butt and all. He chuckled and said it was not a request he'd ever heard before. Unfortunately, he wouldn't go for it, but he did call back a little while later to say that he'd gotten me a couple 500-mile upgrade certificates. I wonder if he would've gone for Victoria's idea, which is that I should at least earn butt miles for the segments my suitcase has flown without me.

I wonder if they've at least had the decency to supply it with meal vouchers while it was languishing in all those airports.

The really irksome thing about all this is that the only reason I didn't bring it home carry-on was that I'd bought a bottle of mouthwash that was bigger than the one mouthful's worth that I would have been allowed to carry on. Because of course anybody who's ever watched a thriller on TV knows that you can take down a jet with a bottle of mouthwash, a knitting needle, two AA batteries, and a few feet of violin string. Add a laptop and a pair of canvas sneakers, and you can take out a skyscraper, right?

I'm so tired of the "look busy!" mission of the Travel Illusion-of-Safety Administration. Let's get Hillary into the Oval and then ask her to disband the whole charade. If she put together an advisory council of smart six year olds, they could probably design something more effective and sensible than what we have now.

A possibility showing more optimism

2007-04-30T17:42:00.000-07:00

So far the evening commute has also been decent; apparently many people took advantage of free mass transit today. However, the news outlets are all predicting that by the end of the week, many drivers will have resumed commuting by nearly-empty car.

Earlier I posted an anxious musing on the situation. A more optimistic possibility about the impact of the freeway collapse also occurs to me: perhaps more commuters will realize they have mass-transit options and will continue using them long after the MacArthur Maze has been repaired. Perhaps our local governments will take this opportunity to expand our mass-transit options. Perhaps the Bay Area will reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Bay Area freeway collapse

2007-04-30T14:23:00.000-07:00

You've all probably read or heard by now about the Bay Area freeway collapse--early Sunday morning, a gasoline tanker speeding through the MacArthur Maze in the East Bay flipped over and exploded into flames. The driver escaped with 2nd degree burns, but heat from the fireball melted steel girders and collapsed a double-decker section of freeway in Oakland near the base of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

I'm already getting a lot of questions from people around the US about how this is affecting us, so I decided to take the time to paint a picture of the situation for my colleagues around the world. The short answer is that everybody is fine so far, but it's going to be a huge mess. The long answer is more difficult.

The MacArthur Maze is so called because it's an immensely complicated system where three major freeways (80, 880, and 580) converge en route to the single Bay Bridge to San Francisco. All the exit and entrance ramps tangle in a spaghetti heap of concrete reminiscent of those Bugs Bunny cartoons from the 1950s that lampooned the Interstate highway system being built in LA at the time--remember the loop-de-loops, the swirls, and the ramps that led to oblivion? Even lifelong residents sometimes make a mistake and get lost in the Maze.

The section of freeway whose dramatic wreckage you see pictured here in the NYTimes is the segment shown in blue on this Google map. The larger context of the entire MacArthur Maze can be seen on my custom map here.

The upper deck is how traffic on I-80 from the bridge connects with I-580 heading east to Oakland, Hayward, Livermore, etc. The lower deck is how traffic from the east and north on I-80 (Sacramento and Berkeley) connect with I-880S to Oakland and San Jose. What this means is that for months, at least, there will be no direct connections between I-80W/I-880S and I-80E/I-580E. So, for example, my commute to the office would be delayed but possible, but on the way home I would have to detour south from the bridge onto W Grand Ave and take locals back to I-980E, completely bypassing the stretch of 580 between 80 and 980. (Zoom out four clicks on the first Google map to see this.) If nothing were amiss and I were the only one doing this, it would cost me 10-15 minutes, but with half the traffic coming off the bridge needing to do this, I can't even begin to guess how many hours of backup we'll see.

The governor has declared a state of emergency, which waives a lot of red tape so that reconstruction can be finished in months (we hope) instead of the ten years it took to rebuild a section of the Cypress freeway that collapsed in the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. (The rebuilt section is the stretch of 880 just south of the current wreckage.)

We're lucky that this happened early on a Sunday morning, when no other drivers were around to be injured. We're lucky that this happened in the spring, so that repairs will happen during the usually lighter traffic of summer. We're lucky that it happened away from residential neighborhoods. We're lucky that nobody has any excuse to leap to panicky conclusions about terrorism.

Authorities are encouraging everybody who can possibly telecommute or stay home to do so, and today mass transit is free. So far the morning traffic reports have been saying that the disaster has actually improved traffic on the Bay Bridge, which means that lots of people have heeded the warnings. We won't see the real impact until this evening when the people who did drive in are trying to drive home, because it's the outbound directions that are most affected. And this is just day one. In coming weeks, fewer people will heed the warnings, and traffic will probably get uglier and uglier.

I'm working from home today and plan to continue doing so as much as possible. Nobody can completely avoid driving in and out of the city, though, and when I do have to go in, I won't have good mass transit options to most of my destinations. My office would be easy, except that I will have to compete with everybody else for parking at the train station, where lots are usually full by 7am. I'm giving serious thought to replacing the motorcycle I sold a few years ago--it's probably the only option that would enable me to get around with only, say, half-hour delays.

Frankly, I'm a lot more worried about the social impact this could have than I am about traffic.

I'm a white-collar tech worker, and like many citizens around here I can telecommute and solve most of my other new transportation problems by throwing money at them. What about all the blue-collar and no-collar workers who commute through the Maze or on the newly-flooded, already inadequate mass-transit system? What are they supposed to do?

Another thing you have to realize is that most people who commute home on this section of freeway don't know the first thing about finding their way around the local streets of Oakland. I've lived here for eight years, and even I get turned around sometimes, because in the 1950s the freeways were jammed through with little or no regard to the neighborhoods and the local arteries they disrupted. They got away with that because those neighborhoods were mostly poor, minority enclaves; wealthier Berkeley to the north could force the interstates to divert around the city along the coastline. In addition, local topography has forced neighborhoods to be built at funny angles to others. You can see all this on the satellite imagery of the google map. What it means in practical terms is that if you're traveling to an East Bay neighborhood you don't know well, you had better have maps and directions both to and from your destination.

Now, imagine all those commuters who don't have the first clue about Oakland geography, trying to find their way on locals from Interstate 80 to Interstates 880, 580, or 980. Those locals are mostly two- and four-lane streets with stop lights every few blocks, and the lights are poorly timed if at all. If you get off these roads to try to detour around traffic jams, you will end up on streets that "don't go through," you will have no signage directing you back to the freeway, and you will eventually have to find your way back to the traffic jams you tried to escape.

Now realize that most of these commuters are white suburbanites in fancy cars, they're driving through rough neighborhoods where some of the cars are clunkers up on blocks, they're lost, and the people they see who are just trying to go about their normal modest lives don't look like them, don't dress like them, and certainly don't throw money around like them. Do you suppose some of these people might decide they need to have a gun in their car to feel safe? It's not too hard to imagine we could be one frustrated commuter away from a Rodney King situation. The record number of homicides in Oakland this year remove any doubt that the gangs proliferating in its worst neighborhoods already have guns. I hope those commuters decide to detour north and jam up Berkeley streets instead, because they won't find those neighborhoods quite as unnerving. The maps seen on pages 10-13 of the 2006 Oakland Homicide Report by the Urban Strategies Council provide cold comfort about pretty much all the detour possibilities, though.

The San Francisco Bay Area has a reputation for being a liberal bastion, and I hope that the compassion, tolerance, and patient embrace of diversity we're famous for is the face that we again show the nation in coming months. But I worry that we could see a far different face emerge out of the frustrations, fears, and the racism that lurks here as everywhere.

There is much reason for hope. We survived the collapse of the Cypress freeway and ten years of detours, and even the much-briefer period when the Bay Bridge was out of commission from a piece of the upper deck falling on the lower deck. The difference is that in 1989 the entire Bay Area was rocked by an astonishing force of nature that ripped across all strata of society, and as we saw again after Hurricane Katrina, humankind can display enormous strength and unity in the face of natural disaster. (I should mention that I didn't move here until 1994.)

That's not the situation we have today. This is just an immensely complicated mess created by a truck flipping over; an already-fragile transportation system crippled by a mundane human accident. The LA riots of 1992 were caused by an already-fragile equilibrium of racial and economic tensions turning disastrously to violence when one more incident of police brutality was caught on videotape. I hope I'm being alarmist rather than prescient in seeing this connection.

May we rise to the challenge and handle this mess with patience and grace.

The body, the blood, and the peanut butter

2007-04-02T17:46:00.000-07:00

Victoria gets credit for today's title--her reply to my response to this scientific proof that science has been lying to us about the source of life. The logic is so convoluted, I can't even follow how exactly he thinks he's making a point. See for yourself: http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/50013/.

Given that the science is too difficult for me to understand--it's right up there with the theory of relativity--I'm going to have to just stop eating peanut butter as a precaution. I'm afraid one of these days I might not notice the new life in my jar, and it'll turn out that I ate Jesus.

I can't be responsible for eating the Second Coming.

Can you take the risk?

Never let a UTI get you down!

2007-04-02T17:06:00.000-07:00

Candy's got a urinary tract infection, but after just two days on antibiotics she's already looking pretty darned chipper. Here she is trying to get me to hurry up and play.

When you don't have a kitty bjorn

2007-02-18T22:44:00.000-08:00

This can happen.

Next best thing to the kitty bjorn

2007-02-09T12:21:00.001-08:00

Gjetost likes to cuddle on my lap so much that sometimes she becomes a pain while I'm trying to use my laptop. This morning I decided to do a Kalia (our friend Kalia keeps her huge orange cat Sam in a Baby Bjorn while she's working at her computer) and try zipping her into my fleece vest, for better kitty volume/positioning control. She seems to like it!

I want her day job.

2007-02-09T09:07:00.000-08:00

Step 13: Guest recipe from Magdalena

2007-02-06T19:28:00.000-08:00

Magdalena brought an Apfelstrudel that was out of this world--gorgeous, with an amazing aroma, and unbelievably delicate. I do believe it might have been the most popular item served (after the lutefisk, of course). Magdalena graciously agreed to share her family recipe with us. So here it is, in her words.

I don't know how this is possible, but somehow I don't have any pictures of Magdalena. Sorry!

This Apfelstrudel is a family recipe handed down from my grandmother to my mother and now to me. The original is in German and it is a bit different from the recipes you will find on the web.

Ingredients for 3 rolls of strudel.
For the apple filling:

4 pounds of apples (Granny Smith, Fuji or similar)

about 4-5 tbls. of sugar (lately I have taken brown or more unprocessed sugar)

1 lemon (peel + juice)

1/2-1cup of rum

2 tsps. of liquid vanilla

1/2 tsps. of nutmeg

2-3 tbls. of cinnamon

2 tsps. of creamed wheat

None of the quantities above are cut in stone, they depend on your taste.
For the dough and the finishing:

1 box of Fillo dough (sheets)

1/2 pound of whipped, unsalted butter

1/2 pound of margarine

2 tbls. of powder sugar in which you have kept a vanilla stick for at least 3 days for vanilla flavoring

If you prefer, you can only use butter for the dough, but I use it whipped and mixed with the healthiest margarine I can find for health reasons.
Cooking the apples:

Wash and core the apples, no need to peel them.

Grind the apples (the grinder of the Cuisinart is wonderful for that, it takes just minutes).

Place the apples in a pan at fairly high temperature and add the sugar. The idea is to get all the juice out of the apples as fast as possible.

You need to stir often, otherwise they will stick to the pan and become unedible.

Add the ground lemon peel, the juice of a lemon, and, when there is almost no more juice, the rum and the vanilla.

Do not forget to stir and make sure that all these ingredients are well distributed in the apple mass.

Do not hesitate to taste and see if you like it. Add sugar, or lemon juice or more spices, as needed.

When all the liquid has evaporated, turn off the heat, but leave the pan on the stove and add the nutmeg, the cinnamon, and then the creamed wheat, mixing vigorously in the process.

Take your pan to a cool place to let it cool a while.

Rolling the strudel:

The Fillo dough needs to be completely defrosted before you open the box.

Take the sheets out, count them, and divide them into 3 parts (one third for each strudel).

Cover the sheets you are not working onat least with a paper towel, so they do not dry out.

Liquify 1/3 of the butter + 1/3 of the margarine (the microwave is well suited for the operation). Repeat this operation before you start on each of the strudels or when you are out of liquid.

Placeone dough sheet on a clean and flat surface and use a soft and wide kitchen brush to brush a thin layer of the liquid butter-margarine mixture on the sheet. Then place the next sheet over it and repeat the operation until1/3 of the sheets are piled up. Do NOT put any butter or margarine on the last sheet.

Place1/3 of the apple mixture in a rollat the endof the longer side of the sheet, but leave about 0.5-1 inch free at both ends.

Loosely roll the sheets around the apples and then close the ends by crimping them together. Place the strudel in a baking pan (teflon is ideal).

Generously brush the strudel with the butter-margarine mixture.

After you have finished all 3 strudels, punch them densely with a toothpick, so the hot air has some way out and does not break the strudels.

Baking the strudel and getting it ready to serve:

Preheat the oven to 325-350 degrees.

Place the strudel pan in the preheated oven and let it bake for about 30 min. or until the strudels turn light brown.

Take the strudel pan out of the oven, otherwisethe strudels might get brown and taste burned.

Cut the strudel with a very sharp knife. It is easier to cut and better to eat while it is warm.

Let it cool just a bit andput the vanilla-flavored powder sugar in a small tea sieve and stir it with a teaspoon, while moving the sieve over the strudel.

Continue until all 3 strudels are covered with a layer of powder sugar.

The warm strudel can also be served with vanilla ice cream or with whipped cream (Schlagobers, as the Austrians would say), for me it is a bit too rich.

Guten Appetit (also mostly Austrian)!

Step 12: Guest recipe from Katja

2007-02-06T19:12:00.000-08:00

Getting back to the Smørgåsbord blogging, at long last! We're no longer working in chronological order, here, but I want to get these guest recipes (this post and the next, lucky step 13) up soon.

This recipe, graciously provided by the aforementioned Katja, is a beautiful, beige salad. You wouldn't think it would be attractive, but it's all shades of beige, and it's all julienned, and the effect is stunning. I wish I had a picture of it, but by the time Katja, Paul, and the salad arrived, I was up to my elbows in goose fat and taking pictures was beyond me. Just trust me, it was beautiful, and here instead is a picture of its maker.

I'll post the recipe in Katja's own words:

Below you will find the (easy) recipe for the salad I made for your party. It is basically a Wurstsalat but in my family, it has always (or let's say as long as I can think) been called "Lieblingssalat" (=the favorite salad). Of course, you can make this salad and time of the year but in the Zuske family, there are only two times a year when it comes onto the table: Christmas and my brother's birthday. I guess that is why we kids liked it so much - create interest by rarity ;-)

Julienne:

Hard-boiled eggs

Berlin- or Spreewald-style pickles

Apples (Cox Orange Pippin, Braeburn or similar)

Fleischwurst (or Virginia- or Blackforest-style ham)

For the sauce:

Mayonnaise, Miracle Whip, and/or yoghurt

Lemon

Liquid from the pickle jar

Salt and freshly cracked black pepper

Basically, you use 1 egg per 1 pickle per 1 apple but in the end, the ratio changes with the size of your ingredients and also your taste, of course.

On Sunday, I used something like 5 eggs, 4 apples, 6 Spreewald pickles and about a half inch slab of Virginia-Style ham, mixed with 3 table spoons of mayonnaise, the juice of half a lemon, and almost half of the liquid in the pickle jar. Again, try and see what you like.

The salad is best the day it's made (although it lasts about a week - well, not in my family...), however, it needs to rest a couple of hours before serving. Right before serving, have a taste, usually, it is good to add some more pepper at that time.

All ingredients are easy to find here. I collected them in my yard and at the Farmer's Market, Trader Joe's and Lunardis. Dittmer's would have been a good source too.

Voila. Easy!

And yummy!

Indoor summer

2007-01-20T14:17:00.002-08:00

We had our furnace installed and working by about 5pm last night, and when we left for my Oakland East Bay Symphony concert at 7:20, it was still cranking away on full blast. (This fancy-schmancy furnace has a big burner and a little one, and two fan speeds, so that it can do little fires with slow speeds to maintain a temperature, a big fire with big speed to bring a cold house up to temperature, and everything full blast to handle really cold houses.) When we got home, it was off, and we had a toasty, comfortable house--every last room was toasty and comfy! Mind you, this may not be exciting news for most of you, but this house has always had warm rooms and cold rooms, mostly the latter.

I didn't think it was possible to heat this house properly! All these years I've known I had a crappy old furnace, but I thought the real problem was all the glass, the high ceilings, the fireplace without glass doors, blah blah blah. Turns out this house heats up just fine when it has a decent furnace!

We didn't even hear the furnace kick on this morning, but when I woke up around 8am and it was programmed to be 60 still for overnight, it was reasonably comfortable to get up and pee. When I woke back up around 10:30, and it was supposed to be 68 according to our weekend program, I lay in bed scratching Gjetost's ears and thinking, "Gosh. It feels TOO warm in here. It's nice and comfy under the covers, but the air on my face is too warm!" Now it's in the 62˚ phase of the program, and it still feels toasty and comfy inside--too warm, even--but the furnace isn't even noticeable. I don't think it's even kicked on since we got up.

All these years I've had the thermostat set to 68˚ for active times, 62˚ during the day while we're away, and 60˚ overnight. Turns out I've never actually felt 68˚!

I grew up in a house that was 72˚ for most of winter (right, Mom? or 70˚?). We're astonished to find that we both agree 68˚ is too warm, and we've already reprogrammed the thermostat for 66˚ during our active hours. All these years I've thought I'd lost my winter fat and exchanged it for plain old fat fat, but I guess it really is winter fat.

Amazing. I'm thinking we will see our gas bills go down! I should have done this years ago.

Okay, all you people who, like me, have been too cheap to replace your POS cheap old 60% AFUE furnaces that came with your house: stop dithering! Replace it now. You won't regret it.

Ductwork gets redone on Tuesday. After that, we'll probably have to get out our summer clothes and put away all the fleece throw blankets. I've already put my long johns, ragg socks, and turtlenecks in the laundry basket.

Indoor weather continues

2007-01-20T14:17:00.001-08:00

For those who missed earlier episodes of "Fun with V and E: The Great Indoor Winter of 2007," our furnace started gasping its last breaths late last week, just in time for a week of record low temperatures. (You've probably heard that the California citrus and avocado industry is expecting a $1B loss, and the Governator declared a state of emergency in a bunch of counties.) As a result, most of this week it's been high 30s/low 40s outside and mid 40s inside. We've been shivering under even an astonishingly large heap of bedding by night, and by day I've rediscovered the value of long johns, fleece, flannel, and many layers, even in my office with the space heater on. V has been going around in her stocking cap. This morning I washed a bunch of pots and pans just for the pleasure of having my hands in hot water. (They did need washing.)

It turns out that it was probably a relatively easy fix costing a few hundred dollars to get the old POS working again, but on its best day that old thing still sucks, and I've known for a long time that I should probably replace it. It never gets below about 30 around here, yet my utility bill soars from $50-75/mo in the summer to $200-350 in the winter, which is pretty ridiculous. It's partly due to the maybe 60% efficiency of the old furnace, which appears to be at least 25 years old and too small for the house besides (75K btu, where 90-100K btu is a better idea). It's also partly due to the debacle of energy deregulation in California, in particular how PG&E's rates are capped on electricity (which is expensive to produce and inefficient to distribute) but not natural gas (which is abundant, if problematic for other reasons in recent years). If you figure that a lot of our electricity is produced by burning natural gas and then pumping electricity down the lines, and line loss is way more expensive than gas-pumping, it's really stupid not to go straight to the source and burn your own gas, but in California you pay more to do the smarter thing. Go figure. It's ridiculous, but I'm still going to do the right thing, and there are some signs that California has finally figured out that reregulating the energy industry is needed, so maybe someday my PG&E bills will reward my good behavior.

So, I had appointments with four different estimators plus two others who never made it (one called to cancel, one didn't), and a seventh from Sears blew me off twice--scheduled me, then called the morning of to cancel, both times. After my water heater experience from hell with Sears, I didn't find that too surprising.

Everybody had the same advice about the basic question, once I stipulated that I wanted a PG&E-rebate-qualified high-efficiency furnace; namely, we should get a variable-speed, two-stage, high-efficiency furnace of the same capacity. They extolled, variously, four brands, American Standard & Trane, which are the same company and basically the same furnace, Ruud, and Amana. All are rated well by Consumer Reports. They differed on whether additional things were needed. I ended up with bids ranging from $3334 for furnace only to $12070 for furnace, fancy filter, redoing all the ductwork under the house, splitting the house into two zones, and gold-plating a bottle of snake oil.

The first guy was the gold-plated snake oil guy, and the other three were basically sensible geeks. Snake Oil guy was clearly all about sales and pushing a dubious rebate scheme that looked like a big marketing scam to me. One of the geeks took great pains to freak me out about all kinds of code issues, and I ended up concluding that this was a sales-by-fear tactic intended to make me accept a price $2K higher for exactly the same furnace installation. All of them guaranteed to do whatever it takes to pass the inspection at no additional cost, and Code Freak guy was the only one who thought that my ductwork (which is clearly also some PsOS) was fine.

Third was Family Business guy, who actually seemed to know what he was talking about and who wasn't freaky or dogmatic about anything at all, including brand of furnace (Trane or Amana), and who presented all the options at competitive prices, explained the pros and cons, and said it was really up to me. I liked him and had decided it was his bid to lose when the fourth guy arrived. This guy basically said the same thing as everybody else and gave the 2nd lowest price but didn't bother breaking out much detail. At some point I asked him about his accent, and he answered cautiously that he's Iraqi. I replied that I have never voted for this president and never would, and he immediately relaxed, and there followed an interesting exchange about the war and how he's had to move his extended family to Syria. It was an interesting conversation. His heating proposal was reasonable, and he ended up second place in my thinking.

After a long, shivering talk Wednesday night, we decided on Family Business guy and the Amana, whose efficiency has a 96% AFUE rating, vs. 92.x% for all the others. That's a trivial difference except that it qualifies you for a $200 Federal tax credit, plus the Amana costs $700 less than the equivalent models from other brands (at least in the estimates I got) and has a better warranty. Since we have two people with allergies and asthma, three furry critters, and a bunch of friends/family with allergies, we also opted to add the $800 superduper HEPA filter (a Trane CleanEffects, which was $1695 from the snake oil guy).

And then we come to the tricky decisions: ductwork and zoning. First, ductwork:

California requires that you test all ducts and seal leaks any time you do a furnace replacement. In some zones including Oakland, buying a 92%+ furnace exempts you. However, it's still true that leaky, poorly insulated ducts are a bad thing, because they let heat out and pollutants (like mold, and my crawlspace's rat-shitty-dust) in.

Snake Oil guy said this is bad, bad, bad, we need to redo all the duct work; you wouldn't have to, you're exempt, but we really ought to, especially if we're zoning and messing around with all this stuff anyway.

Code Freak guy looked at all the dust and crud that appears in stripes on my old ductwork and said, "That's normal--leaks suck in air, so the insulation filters out the dust and you see dirty areas. It's not big deal, because the insulation filters the stuff. You see this all the time." But he said they could test and fix up leaks for another $600.

Family Business guy said they looked basically okay, but that if we redid them we'd probably get a performance gain about equal to that of the new furnace vs. old, and that doing so would also give us the opportunity to resize and rebalance things so that the house is more evenly heated (we've found that the living room and master bedroom are much colder than the small rooms, which is not surprising given that they're bigger, glassier, and fed by vents exactly the same size as all the other rooms).

Iraqi guy said they're basically okay "but they need some care. We'll check them over and do some re-sealing."

As for zoning, Snake Oil guy of course extolled its virtues and built it right into his price. Code Freak guy said not to bother, it wasn't worth it. Family Business guy said it's nice but not necessary, but then said that he himself has a crappy old furnace like mine in his house, and after he zoned the house, he's been able to put up with it for another 20 years. He didn't think there was a strong case for or against zoning in our house, but said we'd like it if we did it. Iraqi guy said not to bother, because it only really works when the house is divided into distinct areas like a two-flat; with my open-plan, all the heat's going to move everywhere on its own anyway, so it's kind of pointless.

We ended up deciding yes on the ductwork and no on the zoning. All this is costing us $6134, minus a $300 PG&E rebate, a $200 tax credit, and supposedly up to $1K/yr savings in energy use, but we'll see about that. If that savings actually comes through, we'll also get a PG&E discount for reducing our average monthly consumption by whatever percent it is they set as the goal--I think it's 12%, but don't quote me.

Fortunately, Family Business guy had a cancellation for today which meant we're getting our furnace before rather than after the weekend. His guy Jeff is banging away downstairs putting in the furnace now, which he said would take him pretty much all day, and a crew is coming on Tuesday to redo all the ducts. On Monday night I plan to crank the house up to 70-something so we'll make it through another furnace-less day on Tuesday.

Finally, now that the cows are safely outside in the neighbors' pasture, we're looking into a lock for the barn door: I priced out wood-burning stove inserts for our crappy sheet metal fireplace that looks nice but sucks heat out of the house, and we're giving strong consideration to spending just shy of $3K to install one that can heat up 1200-2000 sq ft, or possibly even one size larger. I also looked at gas fireplaces and wood pellet stoves, but it seems to me that with this spiffy new furnace, the heating power of greatest emergency use to us is a backup system works no matter how many utilities have gone out of service. So, gas is out. As for wood pellets, those stoves use motors and electricity. And if I don't have something that takes logs, what am I supposed to do with the huge oak tree that is now a stack of logs under my stairs? Or the big fallen branches on the hill behind my house that look like kindling waiting to happen?

Anyone got opinions on this puppy? http://www.lopistoves.com/product.asp?dept_id=5&sku=34

Indoor weather report

2007-01-16T17:01:00.000-08:00

Last week our furnace began to bite the dust. By the time we got back from a weekend away, it had bitten the dust.

So it's 48 in our house today and 41 in our driveway. I'm frozen despite being dressed in winter fleece pants over long johns, ragg wool socks, winter boots, a turtleneck, and my GoreTex-lined Norwegian sweater.

Our furnace comes on and makes half-hearted attempts to do things for 5-10 minutes every so often, but clearly it's not helping much. I have two guys coming to give estimates today and two more tomorrow, and I hope some obvious conclusion about our options jumps out at us soon. I have a feeling "how soon can you do it?" will end up being a pivotal point when we compare their bids. I'm also hoping that the guy who's now 15 minutes late for the first estimate appointment will see something simple and obvious to fix and get us back in heat for the time being.

I also looked into fireplace inserts, and it sounds like what we need would start around $2500, all told. Probably money well spent, but not necessarily at the same time we're paying to install a new furnace and address god knows how many other problems in the process.

Even Candy seems to appreciate having a blanket over her--V tucked her in with a doubled blanket last night, and she stayed put under it until morning. I retucked her this morning at 8:30, and she hasn't budged since. The cats are snuggling under the comforter.

And here's proof that it's too darned cold in this house: we have flannel sheets, a flannel duvet, and the doubled down comforter on the bed, but even Victoria agreed that we needed the afghan on top, too. Last night I just about went to get my neoprene face mask for skiing, too, except that I would've gotten too cold getting out of bed to go look for it. I even slept through the night without getting up to pee despite having wanted to pee since about 2am. I've heard that it's a bad idea to get in the habit of peeing in the night, because it's a problem that will only get worse over time if you give in to it, so maybe this will be good bladder and sleep training for me.

A break from smørgåsbord news

2007-01-16T14:00:00.000-08:00

Our furnace is kaputt. We can either spend a few hundred on a quick fix or else several to many thousand on a replacement that's probably long overdue. Since it's 40 degrees indoors, both of them seem appealing. Fortunately it's supposed to warm up to 60 outside by Sunday, so we can probably tough it out while we wait for one or the other to happen.

But in the meantime, one of the companies who gave us an estimate has sort of an amusing name, which prompted Victoria (the Mandarin scholar) to comment that it sounded Chinese, and in a quick few exchanges we merged in all our favorites from the Chinese business name hit parade and came up with the ultimate name for a new business, especially if it caters to a Chinese clientele: Lucky Golden Rising Star Dragon Snake Happy Wind Joy Luck Fortune Fish Club. Luckily for anyone wants to start a new business, we're not entrepreneurial types, so we won't be needing a name and I'm not going to run out and trademark it. I'm too busy freezing to death here in my office. Help yourself!

For those who are eager to read the next (overdue) smørgåsbord installment, here's a tidbit: the word "smørgåsbord" effectively means "buffet of lots of yummy little things," but its literal translation is a triple compound that I guess the Chinese would also appreciate: butter-goose-table.

Step 11: Mach Rotkohl!

2007-01-06T00:38:00.000-08:00

We'll be serving that roasted goose on a bed of Rotkohl, which is the red, sweet, spicy version of Sauerkraut that many people have never had the pleasure of tasting--yet. Rotkohl is fabulous stuff. We're making a double version of Frl. Nadia's recipe:

1 red cabbage. cored and shredded fine
1 T honey
1 C red wine vinegar
2 T butter
2 shallots, peeled and minced
3 medium tart apples, cored, peeled, chunked (or a glob of applesauce
1 bay leaf
pepper, salt
1 medium yellow onion, peeled, and studded with 6 whole cloves
2 T red currant jelly

Mix the honey, vinegar, salt, and toss with cabbage. Let sit for an hour while the salt draws the juices out of the cabbage.
Melt the butter and saute shallots until translucent. Add apples and cook until softened, or skip that and substitute the half jar of applesauce you still have leftover from Hannukah latkes. Add cabbage, bay leaf, pepper, and 1 C cold water. Cooking tip: when recipes call for a can or jar of something and later call for a bunch of liquid, use that liquid to rinse the can or jar. Place the clove-studded onion in the middle of things, turn down to the lowest flame, cover, and allow to simmer for an hour until the cabbage is soft and yummy. Stir in jelly, remove onion and bay leaves, and remove to the refrigerator until the big day. Warm and serve as a bed under goose.

Save the clove-studded onion to stuff into the goose along with everything else.

Step 10: Start "Erin's Professor Sylte Gløgg"

2007-01-05T23:59:00.000-08:00

Gløgg is a Norwegian mulled wine. We make a gigantic 5 gallon cauldron of it, and we invite people to bring cheap red wine to dump into the cauldron. No, really--cheap. Two Buck Chuck is too good. You want the box of Franzia or Almaden. This is your opportunity to get rid of the weird odds and ends that you have acquired in the red wine corner of your closet that you're afraid to drink.

What makes it good, despite the dreadful plonk that is its base, is that you start by whacking up a whole fresh pineapple, zesting and juicing 2 oranges, and dumping this into a huge pot with several cups of mixed raisins and slivered or food-processored almonds. Also grate 2-4" inches of fresh ginger, crush 20 whole cardamom pods, 12 whole cloves, 4 cinnamon sticks. For raisins this year, we're using probably 3C of dead old white raisins and 3C more of basic raisins, another C or two of craisins (dried cranberries), and whatever other crap you might feel like adding. Cover with cheap red wine (the classic recipe calls for burgundy), bring to a boil, cover, turn off heat, and let sit around until the day of the party.

On the day of the party, you'll dump in slugs of the following along with a lot more wine into the largest pot you have--we use a 5 gallon Revereware brewpot. It's a bit of a juggling act, really; you want to kind of pace yourself on the extra ingredients to make them come out even with the wine that gets added. We usually get the pot up to about the 2/3 full point with our own wine and the following, and then we add the wine that arrives with guests and selected additional slugs of the following as we go. Ultimately it all adds up to about: 10 liters or more of red wine, 1-1/2 C akevit, 1-1/2 C sugar, 2 bottles of port, 2 bottles of sweet vermouth. All of these should be the cheapest plonk you can find.

This recipe is named for three people: the legendary but anonymous "professor" of classic Norse gløgg recipes, Ruth Sylte who gave me a version of it/, and I, who multiplied it a bazillion times to soak 50+ guests.

Bring to the meekest of boils, then turn down the flame to the lowest possible setting to keep the gløgg warm but not burn off the alcohol. Put your entire mug collection out on the counter and invite your guests to choose a mug that they will remember is theirs. Provide a ladle and encourage people to get some chunky bits, too. Gløgg is first a drink and then a marinated-fruity-almondy snack.

Step 9: bake pretzels

2007-01-05T23:11:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday we baked pretzels. I've made homemade pretzels before, so you wouldn't think this would be particularly challenging, but I managed to make it really complicated somehow.

First, a disclaimer. In the real world, you should make pretzels approximately 20 seconds before you plan to serve them. Within a few days, they're excellent, but warm right out of the oven, they're frigging awesome. However, smørgåsbord day is always a frenzied chaotic storm of last-minute preparations--putting out decorations, arranging foods on the table, and preparing the foods that must be served absolutely fresh. Notably the Norwegian meatballs are a reliable source of at least 90 minutes of tension; if they don't set off the smoke alarm and alert the ADT monitoring office, they at least make a giant mess, and after that you have to gather your wits somehow to gather the drippings, make beef broth, make roux, not scald yourself, and get a gravy together, all while last-minute RSVPers are calling to say they're coming or not and bringing someone else or not.

Another comment on RSVPing: yes, it's good to RSVP, especially when asked, and more especially when nagged about it in a blog like mine, but what's the point of RSVPing the day of? No extra shopping, cooking, cleaning, or dish-purchasing will be done on the day of. Just show up and give your hosts an extra-enthusiastic kiss, please. When you call the day of, you're likely to get frenzied freakazoids who are worried that if the conversation lasts one more sentence, meatball burning, roux scalding, or gløgg boiling will occur. Or whatever it is that your hosts are doing (we realize that although smørgåsbords are the best possible party, many people throw parties that lack a smørgåsbord theme). At any rate, the company of your pleasure is very much desired, and please come even if you haven't RSVPed (unless it's a dinner party and there's a chance of exactly the wrong number of something-or-others being prepared), but don't call. We're busy. They're busy. All hosts are busy the day of, or else they have a lot of hired help and professional caterers and the party won't be any fun anyway.

Okay, I guess that wasn't a comment, it was a rant. What do you expect? This is a blog!

Now let's discuss those pretzels. The wonderful German cuisine for Americans cookbook that V got me for Christmas, Spoonfuls of Germany by Nadia Hassani, Hippocrene: New York, 2004 (which can be purchased here) is a nice collection of recipes, and the commentary and diagrams are nice, but it has some problems. First, the index lists only the translated names of foods, so if you want to make Knödel, you'll have to figure out whether that's filed under potatoes, dumplings, globs, blobs, starchy units, or whatever. Good luck. We haven't actually found them yet. Another problem is that it wasn't proofread very well, so for example, their recipe for spätzle calls for "soda water," without specifying whether that means seltzer water/club soda or water with baking soda dissolved in it. She also is weak on the principles of baking, so if you've never baked and have her cookbook, just go ahead and follow her directions and you'll probably get lucky, but if you are an experienced baker, please substitute your own knowledge where needed and consider her recipes to be serving suggestions.

About those spätzle: we were planning to make a double batch of them tonight, but we ran into our wonderful friends Noel and Ayse at our other wonderful friends' David and Arlene's befana tonight, and Noel promised to make Rotkohl and Spätzle. I explained that I'd already made a massive batch of Rotkohl (see later post), so he's making a quadruple batch of Spätzle and we're not, so it doesn't matter that we don't know whether to use baking soda or seltzer. (Vielen Dank, Noel!)

So anyway, Frl. Nadia's pretzel recipe is hella confusing. She calls for 1 oz of fresh (cake) yeast, or 2 (1/4 oz) envelopes of active dry yeast. We have the little jar of Fleischmann's, which says 2-1/4 tsp equals one package active, or RapidRise Yeast (1/4 oz) = 1 cake fresh yeast. So how the hell much of this shit are we supposed to use?! Well, whatever--but be sure to dissolve it in water that's around 110 degrees F, and don't trust V's senses of this. Add salt. She calls for 1 tsp, which seems wrong, and I'm sextupling, see below, so it's a healthy slug of salt in my version.

Moreover, her recipe makes 10 pretzels, which is almost enough for one person. We have invited almost 200 people, and probably 60-80 will show up. So we needed a sextuple recipe, and if we cut the pretzels, we might run out before half the guests have arrived. So if you don't know how much yeast to use in the first place, and you need to make a sextuple recipe, and you sextuple the liquid but for some reason after immensely complicated algebra you only triple the yeast, and in metric at that (don't ask), it all gets rather confusing. Meanwhile, if you've ever known Jane, you are likely to substitute whole wheat flour for at least half of the white flour in the recipe. This, however, changes the moisture requirements of a recipe. Note that in managing your moisture supplies, which are a sextuple batch of warm water and a I-don't-know-uple of yeast.

Fire up Kitchen-Aid mixer! Put the yeasty mess in the bowl. Gradually add flours--to each 1-1/3 cup of yeasty mess, add about 3 C of whole wheat flour and 2 C unbleached white flour. Mix until it comes off the sides of the bowl yada yada yada. Knead. Cover with a moist towel and let rise 2 hours.

Go off and catch up on blogging step 6. Come back and dissolve 6 tsp baking soda in a big ass pot of hot water, bring to a boil. Get your oven preheating to 425 F. Briefly knead a whunk of the dough, roll into snakes about 1/2" in diameter, and pull off 12" snakes to make each pretzel. Make a loop, twist twice, flip upside-down, and fold the ends over, pinch, and plop onto a greased cookie sheet. Get a dozen or so ready on the sheet, cover with the moistened cloth, and move on to the next sheet. At some point, get V involved in the snakerating, and start this process, which should be familiar to those who have made bagels: drop the pretzels several at a time into the water to boil for 20-30 seconds or until they float, then fish out with a leaky ladle (Barbara Tropp's name for the Chinese net spoon; Nadia calls for a slotted spoon--once again, whatever). Plop back on the greased sheet. When you finish up a sheet, sprinkle the pretzels with kosher salt.

If you've been ranted at about cooking by me before, you know that I believe kosher salt is a necessity in any kitchen. Uniodized sea salts are optional, kosher is mandatory, and iodized table salt gets the Barbara Tropp skull-and-crossbones treatment.

Slide into the oven and bake 25 minutes or until brown and crisp. Serve at once. Or store in Tupperware and serve on Sunday. If you do serve at once, butter's a nice touch.

Step 8: Start baking!!

2007-01-03T22:00:00.000-08:00

The baking began at Jane's place in Sausalito. On Monday night Jane prepared
the pepparkakor dough, recipe courtesy of our friend Nilos:

GAMMALDAGS PEPPARKAKOR

sifted flour 3 1/2 c.
ginger 1 1/2 t.
cinnamon 1 1/2 t.
cloves 1 t.
cardamom* 1/4 t.
butter 1/2 c.
sugar 3/4 c.
egg 1
molasses 3/4 c.
orange zest 2 t.

Sift together flour and spices and set aside. Cream butter till fluffy, adding sugar gradually. Beat in egg, molasses and orange zest. Add dry ingredients and mix well. Chill covered overnight (will hold more than a week of wrapped airtight). Roll out 1/8" thick on well-floured board, cut out and bake on greased cookie sheets at 375°F for 8 - 10 minutes. Store airtight. They get better as they age.

Great recipe - tasty and easy to make. The dough does not contain too much butter (relatively speaking), and so does not stick to the floured cloth rolling-out urface. Enjoyable to make these.

Tuesday night, Jane baked the pepparkakor and made the Zimsterne, recipe courtesy of Beate:

ZIMSTERNE (Cinnamon Stars)

4 egg whites
2 tsp lemon juice
300 g caster sugar (powdered sugar)
1 tbsp cinnamon
375-400 g ground almonds

Preheat oven to 130°C.Beat egg whites with lemon juice until very stiff. Gradually add sugar and beat until firm (so that it could be cut with a knife) and glossy.Take away and set aside a little more than half a cup of this mixture for the topping. Mix cinnamon and almonds into the rest of the egg white mixture. Make sure it is not too sticky and not too dry. Add more almonds if too sticky.Sprinkle the worktop with flour, some sugar and some ground almonds. Spread a small amount of the mixture on the work surface and roll out to a thickness of about ¼ inch. Cut little stars with a cookie cutter and place on a baking tray.
Spread the egg white mixture set aside earlier on top of the stars.Bake stars for about 45 minutes, leaving the oven door slightly open (the icing
has to stay white).

Conversions:
http://www.onlineconversion.com/temperature.htm130 degree Celsius = 266 degree Fahrenheit
http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/cookingconversions.asp?Action=find300 grams = 2.5 cups unsifted powdered sugar375 - 400 grams = 2.6 to 2.75 cups whole almonds

This was a baking experience!! Not your average cookie dough! This recipe is not for the baking novice . . . . but what a tasty result! The cookies is very much like one recipe for the traditional Scandinavian "kransekake" - ground almonds, powdered sugar and egg white - no butter or flour. (Stay tuned for the kransekake blog this weekend.) For the Zimsterne, be sure to set aside enough of the egg white/lemon mixture for spreading on the cookies later! I didn't set aside quite enough, so there are a few "naked" zimsterne in my cookie tin. :-)

Also be sure you have plenty of extra ground almonds on hand to add if the dough is too sticky. These cookies bake longer than your average American cookie, and at a lower heat, so as to keep the white meringue topping white. And a word to the wise, or to the temper-tantrum-prone, keep a tasty cocktail handy to keep your mood mellow when the dough sticks too much or when frosting the cookies with meringue or when things don't turn out exactly as you'd thought they would . . . . ;-) Because this was the first time I'd made this cookie, I used my good friend "google" to look up some other recipes for the same cookie and found the following words of warning to begin one of the other recipes, "These are extremely difficult to make, but if you make them, they are heavenly." Took a sip of my cocktail and ploughed ahead!

Wednesday was the easy baking day - just one batch of Spritz cookies. Though you find a recipe for spritz in any Scandinavian cookbook, I found a recipe for "German Spritz," so chose to make that one. It's virtually identical to the Scandinavian recipes.

GERMAN SPRITZ

1 c. butter
2/3 c. sugar
3 egg yolks
1 tsp. vanilla or almond extract (I used vanilla)
2 1/2 c. flour (actually, 2 c. was plenty)

Cream butter and sugar. Add egg yolks and vanilla. Mix well. Stir in flour.
Fill spritz cookie press, press, decorate. Bake at 400°F for 7 minutes.

Baking blogs to follow in next few days - krumkake, kransekake, pumpernickel
bread, and braided cardamom bread. :-) Yum!

Step 7: Start graved laks

2007-01-03T17:48:00.000-08:00

Graved laks (aka gravlaks) is ridiculously easy, but few people seem to realize this, so it always gets big oohs and ahhs at the smørgåsbord. The keys are to buy really good salmon (wild, of course) and start at least 5 days in advance. We make a two-fillet batch for the smørgåsbord. Fresh salmon (like any fish) should be firm and not smell fishy. Farmed salmon is evil, both nutritionally and environmentally, so even though it's a lot more expensive, always hold out for wild salmon.

To start, roast a bunch of anise seeds in a pan, then add 4 parts salt to 3 parts sugar and stir. You need enough of this stuff to cover both sides of both fillets. For two fillets, I used about 2 C of stuff.

Rinse and pat dry the fillets. Feel along the bone-line to find any pin bones needing to be removed, grab hold with a small, sprung needle-nosed pliers, and yank out. This is the way the pros do it, and it's much easier and tidier than any other method. Be sure to wash, dry, and oil the pliers when you're done.

Next, cover the fleshy sides of both fillets with the stuff, then cover again with chopped fresh dill. The idea of graved laks is that the stuff is going to suck out the water from the fish as a way of preserving it. Stick the fleshy sides together and then use whatever you have left to cover the skin sides. Use the discarded dill stems to make a rack in the bottom of a pan, plop the fishes on top, cover with plastic wrap, and put them in the fridge. Weight the salmon down by piling whatever stuff you had to move out of the way in the refrigerator on top of the fish; this helps press out the juices.

For the next several days, every 12 hours you need to drain off the juice, turn the pair of fillets over, and put back in the refrigerator. The pictures (above) are after the first 24 hours; notice all the salmon juice in the pan!

Step 6: Shop more!

2007-01-03T17:30:00.000-08:00

Next we drove back to Oakland and visited Nordic House, where we picked up a frozen lutefisk, several kinds of gjetost, our house cheese and cat's namesake, some rullepolse, several varieties of syld (herring), and whatnot.

Gjetost is a sweet brown cheese made from cow and/or goat milk and whey that is simmered for hours to carmelize out the sugars, and then it is made into cheese; the carmelized sugars stay sweet rather than getting digested and made tart by the little microbial friend. The cat is a sweet brown Snowshoe Siamese with beautiful, Nordic blue eyes. Here are the cheese and the cat. They chose not to pose together.

Finally, a trip to Andronico's for less exotic groceries. Many hundred dollars later, we returned home and got to work. Well, actually V went to Dunsmuir (Scottish dance) practice, and I got to work much later on.

Step 5: Shop!

2007-01-03T17:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Victoria and I took a roadtrip to Dittmer's, the fabulous German butcher that Katja recommended down in Mountain View. Katja was right--this is the place to stock up on German meats and miscellany. After cruising the shelves for kraut, almond paste, and so on, we bellied up to the meat bar and started discussing our plans with Mark, Dittmer's son. Dittmer is seventy-something and on his vacation cruising somewhere.

Mark could not have been kinder nor more helpful. We asked for a goose, and he asked how we planned to roast it. Stuffed with onions and apples, of course! He suggested that no matter what, you start by lining your whole oven with foil. I think that's a good idea, because as anyone who's ever roasted a goose knows, they throw off more oil than you can possibly imagine. From a 12 lb. goose like we bought, you will typically get 15-16 lbs of oil, it seems. Okay, maybe 5 lbs. Or better yet, he suggested, we could roast it on the Weber grill. Great idea! We're doing it! He also suggested using dried apples, because they'd soak up more of the oil, and later when we were picking out Würste, he suggested grating a bit of the paprika wurst into the stuffing, just to bring out that smokey flavor a bit more.

We then got several pounds of Nürnberger Bratwurst, their specialty, and several more pounds of cocktail-sized Frankfurters. (Later in our visit, he brought us a couple tastes right out of the smoker, and they're outstanding. Probably twenty pounds of them wouldn't have been enough.) These we'll boil (probably in beer) and serve on a bed of Sauerkraut. For party purposes, we'll probably chop them into generous-bite-sized hunks. We also got a hard, twice-smoked Paprikawurst, which is more of a thin-slices from the cheese and crackers area kind of sausage.

We asked his recommendations for a couple patés, and he proceeded to make us generous tastes of the Paté au canard (which also has lots of pork in it). It was yummy, so we got a hunk of that, and for contrast he recommended the coarser Paté Maison, which is also pork but with a completely different kind of spicing. While he was wrapping those, he suggested that for a party it can be fun to get a whole Braunschweig Leberwurst, cut it into three chunks, big, medium, and small, roll each in a ball, and make a little snowman. For a hat, he suggested a hunk of the Paprikawurst and a few slices of a broader salami, which he then sawed off for us.

Since our smørgåsbord features Norwegian and German food, he also mentioned that he has the standing rib pork roast in the traditional Norwegian cut, so we also bought one of those and several more pounds of various Bratwürste for our own use later on. (There's only so much meat our guests will want to eat, or at least that's what we're telling ourselves.)

We've invited Mark to the party and hope that he can make it, because I'm sure people will have questions about the amazing meats that I won't be able to answer.

Step 4: plan shopping and time-line

2006-12-31T13:56:00.000-08:00

Once the menu is sketched (it can and likely will change somewhat over the coming week), we figure out the shoping list. We always get lots of stuff at Nordic House as well as Costco and your basic grocery store (Albertson's or Andronico's), but this year we had to figure out where to get our German stuff. Victoria used The Google (as our only President calls it) to figure out some options, but we didn't get any clear-cut answers, so we decided to take it to a higher authority: Katja, my German-born friend and colleague in the localization industry, who lives in San Jose.

Saturday around dinner time, I rang her up and asked, "Who's that German butcher you were telling me about?"

She chuckled and replied with certainty: "Dittmer's!" She also provided sage advice about the menu, and we had a lovely chat, and then she wished us a good "slide" into the new year: "Einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr!"

So a trip to Dittmer's and Nordic House is in the plans for Tuesday. (I think it should be Nordic Huset, but I suppose that might confuse their neighbors. We'll try to get to Costco today, though, so we can get the giant hunks of salmon marinating for the graved laks. You only need three days for a good graved laks (aka gravlax), but I think a week is better.

At left is the shopping list so far. This year's list is deceptively brief and manageable-looking, but that's only because Jane is taking care of about a third of the stuff herself and has her own lists (which perhaps she'll publish here shortly), and because we're getting good at throwing smørgåsbords and have already been stocking up on a bunch of the basics. We also have probably forgotten a couple dozen things and will be making many a last-minute trip for forgotten items. Traditionally we end up borrowing obscure ingredients on Saturday from our next-door neighbors Jaryn and Pete, too. (Jaryn is the maker of the beloved deviled eggs; I have yet to try one because they're always demolished early on. This year she hinted she might dress them up in little dirndl skirts.)

Next we figure out the schedule of events. Lots of the items need to marinate, stew, soak, or otherwise get started well in advance, so first we fill in the must-start-soons. Then we fill in the other menu items, saving Friday and Saturday for the most perishable and/or most complicated or hard to store items. At lower left is the time-line thus far. This is subject to a lot of change, and by the end of the week it's unlikely to look anything like this. Perhaps we'll post before and after photos of the timeline about a week from now.

Our final act of planning was to taste the German schnapps items. It's become a tradition to serve one Norwegian akevit plus an akevit from the guest country. We asked Katja's advice about what would be the German answer to akevit. She in turn asked some friends, and on their advice, we tracked down some Doornkaat (a German gin) and Gilka Kaiser Kümmel (a German caraway liquor bearing vague resemblance to Scandinavia's akevit) at the Mountain View BevMo. We all thought the Doornkat gin was pretty harsh (Jane compared it to isopropyl alcohol and made ready to rub some on her arm in case any injections were imminent), but the Kümmel was interestingly sweet. A second sip of gin after tasting the Kümmel was quite pleasant, though, proving once again that taste is greatly dependent on context. We decided they'll do! They'll also both be better at the usual serving temperature, which is right out of the freezer.

Step 3: plan menu

2006-12-31T13:30:00.000-08:00

&tLast night, Jane came over and we held our planning session. Naturally this requires cocktails (gin gimlets, in this case). While we're at it, here's a recipe for a better gimlet: pour a generous shot of Tanqueray or Bombay Dry gin per person into a shaker filled with crushed ice, squeeze in half a lime per person, and add a dashlet of Rose's lime juice per person. Strain into martini glasses and serve. No pictures, sorry.

The goal is to plan a menu with a reasonable distribution of the four food groups: sweet, starchy, savory, and alcoholic. We also try to balance offerings from the "host" and "guest" countries. Norway has always been the host country, and after the first year we cycled through the other Scandinavian countries as guest countries. Having completed the cycle, we decided to make a brief excursion to Germany. We're developing quite a collection of cookbooks, flags, and so on. After listing the obvious items (lutefisk, lefse, gløgg, gravedlaks, and flat breads), we start flipping through the cookbooks and picking out the rest of the menu.

If you want to be surprised by the offerings when you arrive, stop reading right now!

This is what we came up with:

The E's and J's indicate which household is taking primary responsibility for making the item, shopping for the ingredients, and so on, not in that order. It's a little misleading, though, because many of the things marked "E" are prepared not by Victoria and me but by all three of us here at our house. Jane will be moving in for the weekend on Friday evening, and we'll be doing a lot of cooking together.

How to throw a smørgåsbord in 10,000 easy steps

2006-12-31T13:02:00.000-08:00

Next Sunday, Jane and Victoria and I are throwing the sixth annual-but-for-one-year smørgåsbord, this time featuring Germany as the guest country. We've decided to document the whole process here on the blog, complete with photos and recipes.

Step 1: send out invitations

We always email the invitations, modern women that we are. This year I made my second attempt to use evite for the process and once again gave up in frustration: the evite system for designing custom invitations was (a) too confining, (b) too buggy, and (c) too frustrating. I don't think I got as far as the part where you basically share the contact information for everyone you know with a company whose business is advertising. Of course they're required by law not to share contact info without permission blah blah blah, but if I recall correctly, theirs is an opt-out system where all your invitees are automatically subscribed to their spam unless they notice on their invitation an opportunity to opt-out. I've been on and off evite's spam list many times from getting invited to other people's events, and I don't want to do that to our friends, so email it is.

We pretty much invite everybody we know, so if we know you and you haven't gotten your invitation, you're invited, too, and we're sorry that we either screwed up your email address, don't have it, or somehow failed to include it.

This year's invitation began:

Jane, Erin, and Victoria
request the company of your pleasure for the sixth
traditional Norwegian post-Christmas open house, or
Jultide Smørgåsbord VI,
Sunday, 7 January 2007, 3-9pm
at [Erin's house]

Having Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and finally the dreaded Sweden as "guest countries" for Scandinavian variety worked out well in previous years. But since we can't find windsocks for the Faroe Islands or Samiland, we're declaring the first Scandinavian cycle complete. To mark this accomplishment, we're taking the bold step of inviting GERMANY to join Norway on the culinary stage. (I know, it's shocking, but Victoria is Swedish and German, Jane is German and Norwegian, and I'm Norwegian and German, and there are some really fabulous foods associated with Weinachtszeit.)

In keeping with tradition, we'll be featuring lutefisk (that truly revolting Norwegian fish concoction, the piece of cod that passes understanding) and lots of other traditional Norwegian and German Christmas favorites that are actually good---yummy, in fact. Most are beige. If you'd like to bring something, I'd suggest your favorite Norwegian or German delicacy, if you have such a thing or enjoy culinary research. Easier still, you're welcome to bring some cheap red wine to dump into the gløgg cauldron, or decent drinkable white wine or German beer, Norwegian akevit, or perhaps a good German gin, which our good friend Katja and her parents decided would best represent Germany's answer to akevit. Or just drop by.

Spouses, etc., are also invited. The house is not kid-proofed, and there will be lots of adult beverages, but if you're not worried about that, I'm sure the younger set will have a good time harrassing the two cats and slipping treats to the black lab. We're not sure how she feels about lutefisk, though, so nobody should count on her help there.

Suggested attire is good Lutheran dressy casual. (Norwegian sweaters and so on. Lederhosen and Loden are also acceptable.)

The only Norwegian you'll need to know is "Nei, takk!" (rhymes with "rye rock"): "No thanks! No lutefisk for me! Please no!!!" The German for that is, "Nein, danke!"

*** PLEASE REPLY so we know how much lutefisk not to make. ***

Step 2: Collect RSVPs

Since we don't use evite or a similar service, we have to request that people RSVP by reply email.

Now, I don't want to offend my/our readership here, but I have to say, our community is shockingly bad at this. In past years we've had only about a 50% reply rate. Most of the people who reply do so accurately--that is to say, they really do or do not show up in accordance with their promises, and they do let us know about others they're bringing along (the spouses, etc.--we only attempt to send one invitation per household, because even that's hard enough). And then there's the other 50%. Some come, some don't, some reply weeks after the event. Granted, if the invitation arrives while you're out of town and you're not one of those who checks email from away, this is very understandable, but 50% non-reply? Come on!

Note to the good 50%: well done. Thank you. We look forward to seeing you. Many of you write charming, witty replies, and these we especially enjoy, although we usually get too bogged down to reply to your replies.

Note to the other 50%: We're still glad to see you, but what's up with this?

Anyway, our system is to keep a spreadsheet with columns for who, yes, no, and maybe. Names go under who, a number goes under Yes, No, or Maybe, and sometimes a number goes under Yes and another number under No for tag-alongs whose availability is as-yet undetermined. Given the 50% non-reply rate, we usually take the number of yeses, plus half the number of maybes, and add about a dozen to estimate how many people's worth of paper bowls and non-biodegradable cups, forks, and so on that we need. Although our invitation pleads for a reply so that we can estimate the amount of lutefisk not needed, in fact it's about the disposable dishware and flatware.

As for the lutefisk, we always make exactly one hunk of it (we buy ours frozen at Nordic House in Oakland), and we always have about a third left over, cold and soupy looking in the bowl. This year we'll find out for the first time whether cold leftover lutefisk is too disgusting even for a black labrador retriever to eat. (The cats have never been interested. Lutefisk is nominally a fish product. Go figure.)

Never try to show off in the kitchen

2006-12-29T18:35:00.000-08:00

Every so often I get a little too big for my britches and try to make something basic into something fancy, just to show off. Case in point, last summer I needed to make something to take to a potluck picnic. Everybody loves meatloaf, but few of my generation seem to know how to make it, which is in itself a bit of weirdness that would qualify for its own blog post someday, so I decided I would make a meatloaf. I didn't want them all to think I was a lame cook, though, so I decided to make a tri-colored spiral meatloaf. I got ground turkey, ground pork, and ground lamb, and I seasoned each differently. The lamb was Greekish, with lemon zest and oregano. The turkey was Middle Eastern, with cumin, garlic, and so on. I can't remember what the pork one was supposed to be. All of them had salt and pepper, of course. I spread first the pork, then the turkey, then the lamb in a big rectangle, jelly roll style, then rolled then up into a spiral, whacked off hunks the size of my loaf pans, and baked.

What a lame meatloaf. The color differences were too indistinct for the spiral to be noticeable, unless you were really looking for it, and the flavorings sort of blurred together too, so the result was a weird dark-beige-on-light-beige spiral with a horrible muddle of herbs and spices. Only the lamb had a respectable amount of fat in it, so the overall loaf was dry, too.

(Note to food stylists: if you're going to put an artichoke on the plate before photographing, use a raw one. Cooked artichokes are delicious but ugly.)

Next time I made meatloaf, I used the recipe God gave us: fatty hamburger, salt and pepper, a bit of oregano. Since I'm gluten intolerant, I used minced shiitakes instead of milk-moistened breadcrumbs, but I hardly think that qualifies as a massive departure from the sacred meatloaf recipe passed down through generations. I mooshed it all together with my bare hands, globbed it into a loaf pan, baked, and served with ketchup. It was way better.

New-fashioneds

2006-12-29T18:24:00.000-08:00

It's time to update the old-fashioned. An old-fashioned is, of course, a marriage of bourbon, bitters, water, sugar, and some fruit--usually a slice of orange and a maraschino cherry. Updating the recipe to take advantage of kumquat season, we get a new-fashioned: bourbon, a few dashes of bitters, several squeezed kumquats, and a kumquat garnish. Shake it with lots of crushed ice, strain into a sugar-rimmed martini glass, and you get a cold drink with just enough water from the melting of the ice. Garnish with an artistically carved bit of kumquat.

Doggie downers and puppy uppers

2006-11-28T19:16:00.000-08:00

Dogs get depressed, too, and they're a lot like we are when it happens.

Last night, Candy seemed kind of sad. Not quite herself. Mopey. I don't think it's because our parents left Sunday morning, because she had seemed fine all day Sunday and most of Monday. But when it was time to take her out for one last pee, give her a bedtime snack, and tuck her in, she seemed detached. Usually she's cuddly, licks my face a lot (which seems to have cured my rosacea, by the way), and butts her forehead up against me just like cats do when they're being cuddly. Last night she just sort of lay there and looked at me. I cuddled, scritched, and kissed, and she just waited for it to be over.

It was weird, and it got to me. I had a hard time getting to sleep last night. I felt randomly guilty about something, but I didn't know what. Victoria swore up and down that I hadn't done anything to upset her or our impromptu dinner guests. The cats seemed normal. I felt like I'd accomplished a lot during my long workday, so it certainly wasn't work guilt. I tossed and turned for a while, harrassed V and the cats for a while, turned the light back on and read for a while, tossed and turned some more, and finally got to sleep a while later when Candy came upstairs and flopped down on her bedroom pillow.

This morning she still seemed listless, so I took an extra morning break from work (I work from home most of the time) to play with her. Even though I was trying to engage her with her favorite toys, she stood with her tail between her legs and looked like she was afraid I was going to clean and medicate her ears again (a weekly ritual that we all hate, related to her grass allergies; even her weekly allergy shots are easier for her).

So my theories at this point are:

The Prednisone she's been taking for a week to treat a swollen ear flap (probably due to allergies) is a doggie downer.
She's missing Mom and Dad and her kid sister, Flicka.
She's missing her work.

Although it sounds the weirdest, I decided the last one was most likely.

Victoria and I have both taken Prednisone at one time or another, and neither of us remembered getting bummed out by it. Our cat Gjetost has taken it for months at a stretch (to treat a weird seasonal lumpy tongue thing that we guess is being caused by allergies) and it hasn't ever bummed her out; in fact, it makes her friskier and burlier. So we decided it probably wasn't the drugs.

What about her family? Well, you'd think their departure might bother her a bit, but after a week of having a puppy romp all over her and steal her toys, I think she was ready for a break, and sure enough, she seemed better rested and happier on Sunday than she had for several days. She probably agrees with our Grampa Vang, who repeated the maxim, "Guests and fish start to smell after three days."

So that left her work, and here's my theory. She needed to stop taking her daily arthritis medication (Rimadyl) while she's taking the Prednisone, so I haven't been throwing her retrieving dummies for her, because I don't want her to mess up her knee when she can't take her usual pain pills (she has two ruptured anterior cruciate ligaments, which is quite similar to my own ruptured posterior cruciate ligament, only one of which has been repaired). (Are you getting the feeling yet that this dog runs up some expensive veterinary bills? She does. She's like me that way. Unlike me, she's worth every penny.) Also, during my folks visit, we kept getting busy during the daytime and taking her for her walks after dark, when we pretty much have to wear reflective clothing and keep her on a leash, which means she gets less exercise. (Also like me, Candy wears a lot of black, which we musicians sometimes call "our safety colors," especially when we're leaving concert halls late at night and have to dodge one patron's car after another in a desperate attempt to get to our own cars before being run over by tired, elderly people with failing vision.)

Temple Grandin writes in her fascinating book Animals In Translation that dogs of working breeds have their jobs to do, and they want to do them. If they don't get to do their normal jobs, they'll either invent new jobs of their own (like when sheepdogs start herding their people and cars around) or they'll get neurotic. Makes sense.

Candy's job is to retrieve, and boy does she love that job. Labrador retrievers were bred to dive into the icy waters off Newfoundland after fish and to flush and retrieve game birds from fields, lakes, and so on. Candy spent her working years (before the knee injuries) hunting and fishing with Dad, and to hear him talk, nothing made her happier. I'll take his word for it. Since retiring from hunting, she has kept up an active career retrieving training dummies, tennis balls, socks, sticks, pine cones, and anything else she can find and talk me into throwing. When we step out the front door for any reason, she stares excitedly up at the training dummy in the eaves, where we store her toys between play sessions. She jumps at them, barks at them and us, and generally does everything she can to persuade us to get down a toy and play with her. Then she scrambles down the stairs faster than any other time, and she literally can't wait for me to throw the darned thing for her. Once I finally do, she tears after it faster than I can believe and catches it, often before it's bounced a second time.

Sometimes she has braking problems or the dummy takes a funny bounce and she has to do a sudden swerve, and this is both amazing to watch and hazardous for her messed up knee. Hence my caution in not taking her retrieving since she's started the Prednisone and in turn the Rimadyl-ban.

Today her depression had me so depressed that I finally decided we would both be better off with a little knee pain than staying depressed, so we went out, I took down a dummy, and she was instantly back to her old self. She jumped around with such great excitement that she was a foot off the ground. She bounced down the stairs so fast I thought she might ski part of the way. She retrieved like a champ, and although I tried to keep my throws mellow enough to reduce the odds of injury, she still did her astounding braking and swerving maneuvers, and tomorrow she's probably going to be a bit sore. But she also perked right up, was back to herself all afternoon, and when we went out for our late afternoon walk, she once again would not hear of my going down those stairs without one of her toys in my hand.

She's persuasive. I grabbed a toy, and we did our entire walk (the backwards short loop, for those of you who know) as a retrieving and freedogging session. It was 4:30 when we left, so there was just enough traffic to make it a bit stressful for me, but Candy was delighted. She's been hanging out with me ever since, helping with dinner (catching bits of dropped ham and cleaning out my egg-mixing bowl) and dishes (cleaning up a bacon grease mess I made on the floor) and now blogging (she's lying in her office chair and giving moral support). Norton and Gjetost have also been helping me write.

So there you have it. Doggie downers: not working. Puppy uppers: working. Just like us.

No good deed goes unpunished--especially when it's a screw-up

2006-11-20T14:55:00.000-08:00

Or, How not to be a multiculturalist

In my work in software localization, I frequently exchange emails with colleagues around in the world in which we announce to each other that we'll be "OOTO" (out of the office) for various public holidays. Since lots of holidays here are unfamiliar there and vice versa, some of us have adopted a custom of not only announcing our upcoming absences but also giving a brief description of the holiday.

For example, my colleague and good friend Kyoko in Japan recently explained:

Our office will be closed next Monday, 9th October.
Taiiku-no-hi(Health-Sports Day)
October 10 is Taiiku-no-hi. It is to commemorate the opening of the Tokyo Olympics on October 10, 1964, and since 1966 it has been a national holiday. Its purpose is to familiarize with sports and nurture physical and mental health. Sports flourish in autumn because the weather is good, but, especially on taiiku-no-hi, numerous school and regional athletic meets and sports tourneys are held.

Another time she wrote:

Our office will be closed tomorrow, 3rd November.

Culture Day

Day for celebrating love of freedom and equality, and promoting culture. (Commemorates the promulgation, on November3, 1946, of the Constitution. Prior to 1945, this day was celebrated as the birth day of the Emperor Meiji.)

On Culture Day we do not have special food and drink. these days are just national holidays, so people go to sight seeing trip on these days.

Those who know me well will not be surprised to learn that when I send these kinds of notes, I attempt to make them amusing as well as informative. Here are a few of the descriptions I've sent in the past:

I just wanted to let you know that Monday is a holiday for us in the US. It's Labor Day. I've never really understood what it's for. I think it's something about labor unions, but what it means mostly is barbecues, picnics, little trips to the lake, and "white sales" where the department stores have big sales on bedsheets, pillowcases, towels, and so on. (I have no idea what linens have to do with labor unions!)

Labor Day is of course a celebration of the oft-punished fights that labor unions have made to give us, among other things, the eight-hour work day and the five-day work week—no minor accomplishment. Most people recognize that today's labor unions are far from perfect, but as a member of both management (in the corporate world) and labor (as a two-card-carrying member of two musicians' locals), I think I can agree with my dad's analysis: there is plenty of blame to go around. Usually corporations bring their labor problems on themselves by showing too little human regard for the employees who keep them in business, and labor unions in turn bring problems on themselves through excess and corruption. These are typically exacerbated by a failure on each side to communicate reasonably and openly with the other. Someday I'll write here about some interesting examples of this kind of thing that I've observed during my career.

The next year I offered a slightly improved description:

Labor Day is ostensibly about honoring labor unions, but it is really about barbecuing and buying discounted bed linens. It is also the official end of the season in which white shoes are considered acceptable—-between Memorial Day and Labor Day is the rule. I don't know anybody who has white shoes anymore—-except for athletic shoes, which don't count. All the same, I'm happy to take a day off to barbecue.

Apparently this holiday is of some interest to me, because the next year I got still more explicit:

The holiday is Labor Day. Originally Labor Day was intended to celebrate the sacrifices and achievements made by labor unions and labor organizers. American productivity and prosperity have been due to plain hard work, of course, but it is perhaps more notable now to celebrate the ways organized labor changed working conditions, especially for blue-collar labor. Thanks to labor unions, we now take a five-day work week, vacation, minimum wage, overtime pay, basic benefits, and an expectation of safe working conditions for granted.

But in truth, most people rarely give a second thought to the origin of this holiday and instead treat it as any other three-day weekend— a chance to have a barbecue, visit distant relatives, or catch up on household chores. Department stores traditionally have a Labor Day White Sale, in which bed and bath linens are discounted, but nobody knows why. Labor Day also marks the end of the season in which polite ladies and gentlemen are allowed to wear white shoes: tradition dictates that white shoes are worn between Memorial Day and Labor Day only. (I believe exceptions are made for tennis, croquet, and other activities for which white attire is expected.)

Speaking of barbecues, here was one year's take on the 4th of July:

next Friday, the 4th of July, is a holiday for the US team. If you're interested, here are my thoughts on the holiday:

We usually call it "the 4th of July," but its official name is Independence Day. This holiday celebrates the North American colonists' signing of a Declaration of Independence from England in 1776. The Declaration was an uppity letter to the King of England that said, in effect, "You aren't being fair, so we're not playing anymore." Their key complaint was about "taxation without representation": having to pay huge taxes but not having voting rights. They argued that this was so unfair that, having been snubbed in every effort to change the situation, the colonies had a right to secede from England. It was a novel argument that if your government oppresses you, you have a human right to overthrow it. Naturally, it took a big war to settle the matter, and the United States of America as we know it today didn't actually get underway until 1788, when our Constitution was ratified. An interesting point, though, is that even after seceding from England over a disagreement about basic human rights, the writers of the Constitution forgot to include provisions for basic human rights! So, right away, they had to make ten amendments to their document, which are called the Bill of Rights. This makes me feel better about how often we have to amend our [software localization] documents! :-)

For no particular reason that I know of, it is traditional to celebrate the 4th of July with fireworks and barbecues.

On re-reading that today, I'm wondering why it is that the US doesn't see anything wrong with perpetuating taxation without representation in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and so on.

Anyway, this year I went all out and decided to summarize all the upcoming US holidays:

Thanksgiving is the North American holiday where we celebrate and give thanks for the harvest by eating outrageous amounts of roast turkey, gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, yams or sweet potatoes, pumpkin pies, and all sorts of other fattening but delicious fall vegetables on Thursday. On Friday we either lie around feeling fat or else march to the shopping malls in search of big discounts in the "black Friday" Christmas shopping frenzy. My father insists that (American) football is also a big part of the Thanksgiving tradition, but I have no idea what he's talking about.

The history behind the holiday is even more controversial than the question of football, and Wikipedia gives a decent summary of the issues.

In Canada, Thanksgiving is celebrated a month earlier, closer to the actual harvest but with less emphasis on extreme consumption of its bounties and more emphasis on doing something over the long weekend.

Our offices are closed from 25dec-1jan for the winter holidays, which include Christmas, Kwanzaa, Solstice, Childermas, Hanukkah, Rosh Chodesh, Asara B'Tevet, and New Year's Day (some of which fall outside these dates).

What many of these holidays have in common are special foods, the fast Asara b'Tevet being a notable exception. Solstice and New Year are about the sun, and Rosh Chodesh is about the moon. Christmas is both a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus and subsuming many ancient indigenous seasonal rites, and a secular holiday prompting the year's biggest consumer spending. (As of this moment, Wikipedia's entry for Christmas displays a curious segment declaiming, "SANTA IS THE MAN.") Childermas is a minor related holiday. Hanukkah is a lesser Jewish holiday that commemorates Maccabees resisting Greek assimilation (or as they say, "it's another one of those 'they tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat' holidays;" in this case, potato pancakes). Kwanzaa is a modern secular celebration of African-American heritage marking its 40th anniversary this year.

So we reach the denouement of our story, where my attempted good deed turns out to be a total screw-up.

In my fervor to describe all these holidays in an equally-tongue-in-cheek fashion, where no religion's holiday gets preferential descriptive treatment, I managed to come off as disdainful to all of them. One of my colleagues kindly pointed this out, to which I replied, "Disdain? I don't disdain any of them—just football!"

He then mentioned that others might consider "reconnecting with family" to be important.

Well, of course! Duh! And particularly among the more conservative in my audience, my failure to mention this, coupled with my failure to make overt mention of the importance of any of these holidays to me and mine, had to be offensive or at least annoying, particularly to my colleagues in the American South. The South is a region of the United States that has its own cultural identity and celebrates it to a much greater degree than any other part of the country (to wit, the Culture Shock international book series has a title devoted to the South, with special chapters on how Atlanta is still different). Among its values are a strong devotion to family, church, and local community (and the many overlaps among these). So, my casual disregard of the above would be an especially good example of me putting my "damn Yankee" foot right in my mouth and halfway down my throat.

I hastened to send a postscript:

Leave it to me to forget the most obvious point! All of these holidays are REALLY about reconnecting with family and friends. I get a little fixated on the food aspect of that, because in MY family the planning, preparing, and eating of special seasonal and cultural foods are the glue that pulls us all together.

Which is of course quite true, and it's also true that I happen to love the holidays that apply to me—especially because of the food traditions—and I've been inclined to adopt a few more that don't, again because of the food. I don't know a lot of goyim who celebrate Hanukkah and Passover, but I do, due in no small part to my love of latkes, charoset, matzoh (and -kugel and -brie), gefilte fish, and of course horseradish. I just didn't want to write any of that, because I didn't think my own religious affiliation was appropriate workplace comment.

The beautiful irony here is that I, the earnest multiculturalist who labored to describe a whole bunch of holidays in an ecumenical and egalitarian way so as not to offend anyone, managed to offend just about everyone. So my attempted good deed was actually a screw-up, and I got the punishment I deserved.

For what it's worth, three West Coast colleagues who value home and family no less than I do all thought it was amusing and took no offense to the general tone, and the Southern colleague could not have been kinder in his pointing out my gaffe. He's pretty used to me and my foibles.

Another Southern colleague who's actually a transplant shared this:

I recently saw a magazine page with a mother holding a big platter of turkey etc. On her head was a crown of thorns a la Christ.

Certainly an apt feminist response to the reality of many of these holidays, where mothers have traditionally been expected to spend a hot and tiring day in the kitchen while their menfolk relax and watch football on TV.

Indeed, for many oppressed classes, there are no real holidays. In the UK, they call them "bank holidays," which I think is an interesting reflection of the fact that they are a break from commerce—not necessarily a break for all in the public. It's also not lost on me that the word "holiday" derives from "holy day." Although our so-called public holidays are supposedly secular, in fact not even our language is.

The darker side of gigging

2006-11-19T02:47:00.000-08:00

Dementors are the guards of the wizard prison of Azkaban. Their origin is unknown, and it is also unclear how anyone reached agreement with them to carry out this role, as they are speechless, sightless and psychopathic. They feed on positive human emotions – happiness, hope, excitement. Their mere presence sucks every happy feeling or memory from any human present, leaving only cold dark despair in its place. The worst experiences of the victim’s life will flood through them as everything positive is stripped away. This effect causes the vast majority of Azkaban inmates to go insane in a very short length of time. Any wizard exposed to a Dementor for long enough is also likely to lose their powers. --Dementors were created by J.K. Rowling in The Prisoner of Azkaban, but I don't remember whence I lifted this description (sorry)

I met a dementor on a carpool—someone who was so negative, unhappy, nothing-is-my-fault, self-absorbed, and whining that it sucked my own good mood right out of me. I had to take desperate measures to withdraw from further carpooling.

I waited a very, very long time before posting this, so that the Dementor of the gig wouldn't recognize him- or herself if s/he chanced upon this blog around the time of the gig.

Montclairberry Slurpee

2006-11-19T02:29:00.000-08:00

Here's a shot of the family product, a Montclairberry-vodka infusion. We also make a rum variety. The backstory on this fabulous stuff, which we freeze and serve slushy, is in a post from long, long ago.

Another brush with fame (among well-read news junkies, at least)

2006-11-16T21:15:00.000-08:00

David Brooks was on my shuttle from Dulles to Raleigh on Monday morning, a few rows ahead of me. I saw him stand up to escape down the aisle and that's about it. I attempted to catch up to him in the airport to say that, although I often disagree with much of his thinking, I respect it and appreciate his writing, and ever since he would seem to have turned on Bush, I have more respect for his thinking. Not that it would have meant much to him, of course.

He was wearing a pink oxford and his glasses (and other things), and it looked like he had shaven recently. Respectable, in other words.

I was wearing microfiber camping pants, a t-shirt, a denim shirt, sneakers, and my leather jacket, and I looked like I hadn't shaven, eaten, slept, or had water nor a coherent thought for at least ten hours (because, of course, I hadn't, having flown red-eye from SF). Like hell, in other words.

While trotting from baggage to the rental car bus, I pondered the cost of fame. If David Brooks had looked as beaten up and downtrodden as I did on that shuttle, at least a few people would have recognized and thought ill of him, and it probably would have made gossip columns or at least a few blogs. If I'd caught up to him and spoken to him and he'd received my comments with any kind of grace, despite my appearance and probable incoherence, it would have been to his great credit.

I looked like hell, and nobody cared.

My politics are better and I'm sure I make way less money, but his life might be harder, and I'm not sure I'd trade with him. Anonymity has its privileges.

David Brooks, if you should google yourself and land here: I enjoy your columns. I often disagree with you, but you don't make it easy. Further quibbling with your recent writing is less interesting than the preceding points.

And you look better in pink than I ever will. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Montana update from Dad

2006-11-08T16:07:00.000-08:00

Dad replies with a note on voter initiatives in Montana:

We had several initiatives on our ballot, also. There were several more but the Montana Supreme Court threw out the ones that had been foisted on us by some whacko neo-cons, because of widespread fraud in the signature-gathering process. One of the initiatives that happily passed was an increase in the Montana minimum wage--a buck higher than the current Federal minimum. That won by about 80-20. A sticking point in that one was that it calls for annual adjustments in the minimum wage based on the Consumer Price Index. The Republicans who managed to kill a minimum wage increase in the last legislative session will have lots of time to contemplate the sins of killing good legislation, because they could have gotten it pushed through without the CPI thing and bragged about how they helped working class Montanans. Now all they have is egg on their face and if the restaurant industry, who really fought the wage increase, thinks about it, they should remember who they got to this point.

Glad to hear you're going to stay in the U.S.

My post-election day screed

2006-11-08T15:57:00.000-08:00

Victoria and I had taken yesterday off to volunteer for the local Dems to get out the vote. Sadly, the local Dems were too poorly organized to take us up on our offer, so our big effort consisted of getting out our own votes. Candy walked us (about a mile downhill) to the polling place to turn in our absentee ballots yesterday afternoon. You'd think we could have filled them out and mailed them weeks ago, but as I've written many times before, it's hard work being a good citizen in California.

First, we've got these bizarre relics of misguided populism called voter initiatives, aka propositions, meant to give the power back to the people but actually used either to catch hot potatoes thrown wimpy politicians or to ram crackpot lunacy down our throats, because who wants to buy politicians when you can buy your very own laws? My original policy was to vote No on all propositions, because it's the wrong way to make law, but because there are the two kinds--actual decent laws that politicians won't pass, usually because they involve taxes, and awful laws that are cleverly written to confuse the dickens out of even the smartest and best-educated voters--I've shifted to a new policy of researching which ones are which.

This year we had about a dozen of them, and it took me about four hours to figure it all out. I'm not sure if I got the right answer on two of them, but I did manage to be on the losing side of the most egregious one, basically exiling sex offenders from urban areas, so that those rural law enforcement agencies will have something to do with all their abundant resources. Never mind that sex offenders are such a trivially small part of the population that it would be cheaper and probably more effective to build them a nice resort in Oahu. We also resisted the urges to make cigarettes and gas more expensive, because although we love regressive taxes, we apparently don't buy what economists have been saying for years, that if cigarettes and gas were more expensive, a few more people would decide that emphysema and SUVs aren't worth it. (I don't get it. An ugly rumor must have gotten out that economists are French or something.)

On the other hand, we did win six of our seven possible new taxes, told the parental notification zealots to start weaving their handbaskets, and told a New York real estate magnate where to shove his eminent domain ploy.

Second, there's the judicial elections. I still don't have a method for these. Our ballots list dozens of sitting judges on whose retention we get to vote yes or no. An hour of googling plus conversations with three progressive-minded lawyers left me no better informed on the matter. Many of us therefore adopt a "First do no harm" strategy of skipping most of them. There has got to be a better way to staff the courts.

Anyway, back to our walk to the polling place, we were pleased to run into three neighbors, all of whom made subtle indications that it was time to have Dubya taken out and fed to the hogs. We tried to get a ballot for Candy (an Oakland citizen, with tags to prove it) but were turned down. Her spirits picked up on the long schlepp back uphill, though, when she found not one but two tennis balls. About an hour later we were home, drenched in sweat and well spattered with dog slobber. Democracy is aerobic when you live in Montclair.

At the end of Oakland East Bay Symphony rehearsal last night, the conductor's parting words were, "Well, let's go home and see if we need to move out of the country tomorrow." With the House regained and the Senate close, I'm happy to report that I no longer feel the need to spend today researching Canadian immigration law.

I don't even mind that we reelected our Governator. Sadly, it was probably the right outcome--the alternative was an uninspired crook, and the actor was never as bad as we'd feared. Lately he's actually been good. Let's hope it wasn't a cynical ploy to get reelected so he'd get four more years to scurry back to the right. For the first time in my life I cast a protest vote for the Green guy, joining a proud 2.3% minority, since I knew there wasn't the least chance of my vote actually making a difference in the outcome.

In goofier moments for Left Coast pride, both Berkeley and San Francisco resoundingly passed measures to impeach Bush and Cheney, and our own Jerry Brown has added another title to his resume, making him Governor Mayor Attorney General Moonbeam.

I'm starting to believe in our republic again. I think I'll go buy a flagpole, so I can hoist the stars and stripes for the first time in many years.

Evidence that I don't deserve my beautiful kitchen

2006-10-02T13:39:00.000-07:00

I like cooking and do a lot more of it than most people in my generation or the several generations before and after mine. However, at lunch time or when I've got nanoseconds before I need to run out the door to a gig, I cut corners.

Unfortunately, I've been cutting corners more than usual lately. In the last week, I played a set with Symphony Silicon Valley, the fledgling reconstitution of the late San Jose Symphony currently comprised of more people than services, and I had suppers comprised of more Coke Zero than food.

For lunch today, I proved to myself that seven-year-old just-add-water instant chili packets taste like cardboard. If you add a dash of green Tabasco, it tastes like cardboard with a dash of green Tabasco. Anybody who's surprised by this has been eating better than I have lately.

Let's learn law with the DTWOF!

2006-09-29T17:31:00.000-07:00

Alison Bechdel brilliantly defines habeas corpus in terms a grade-schooler could understand. If only Dubya were as smart as grade-schoolers.

DTWOF #458: Below the Law

And speaking of Alison Bechdel, her new graphic memoir is one of the most brilliant pieces of new literature I have ever read. Run, don't walk, to your nearest bookstore and buy Fun Home. Listen to NPR's story about it (and her) here.