In praise of neti pots

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?

1. If you're not convinced yet, read why this is such a good idea at WebMD or the New York Times.
2. Buy, borrow, or steal a large stainless steel neti pot.
3. 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!
4. 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.)
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Read and watch how to do it.
9. Give it a try. You will not die. It's not even uncomfortable.
10. 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

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

1. Fill a cocktail shaker halfway with crushed ice.
2. 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.
3. Add a dash each of Angostura bitters and West Indian Orange Bitters.
4. Garnish martini glasses with three sour cherries soaked in half the syrup and half rye.
5. Splash a little of the rye/syrup from the cherries into the cocktail shaker.
6. 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

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

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

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

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

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

[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:

• http://www.emdat.be
• http://data.un.org/CountryProfile.aspx
• http://www.weather.com/newscenter/topstories/060829katrinastats.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP_per_capita_(nominal)
• http://www.statemaster.com/
• http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2010/haiti.quake/

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

Wagnertuben available for rentals, with or without players

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

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.