Porterhouse Steaks

Partly because of my high cholesterol and partly for environmental reasons, I don't eat a lot of beef these days. Since it is a rare part of my diet, I only want to eat excellent beef. A porterhouse steak from Peter Luger's Steak House in Brooklyn, for example. The NY Times has a short article today about Peter Luger's, accompanied by this multimedia feature. Be sure to click on the full screen link.

Buy Lance Snacks

It can be hard to believe, but every once in a while a corporation does the right thing.

According to CNN, in the middle of December, the Archway bakery in Ashland, Ohio was suddenly closed by the private equity firm that owned it. 300 workers lost their jobs just a few weeks before Christmas. That's the unsurprising bad news.

The good news is that Lance Snacks, which makes vending machine snacks like peanut butter crackers and Cream Cheese and Chives on Captain's Wafers (all too often my lunch in college consisted of various Lance crackers, especially the CC&CoCW) bought the bakery at an auction and have already reopened it. They hired back 60 of the workers, and hope to hire the rest by the end of 2009.

Not only did they reopen the bakery and rehire some of the workers, they also gave all 300 of the former employees a $1,500 gift card.

David Singer, CEO of Lance, says the gift cards were a way of letting Ashland know the new owners are different. "We wouldn't do it willy-nilly," Singer says. "We do want to make money. But this is the pool of folks that we intend to hire. We just wanted to let them know who we were."

The 60 workers rehired so far are earning their previous salary and retained their seniority. They also were provided health insurance from day one.

It seems it is possible to treat workers with respect.

Hat tip to Don Lindich

Lime-cello

2 friends.
3 microplane graters.
20 pounds of limes.

The day after Thanksgiving, I followed up my limoncello experiment (the limoncello was good, a bit too sweet, but still good) by starting a batch of lime-cello.

The only recipe I could find online was at LimoncelloQuest, a blog describing itself as "a personal pilgrimage to create the perfect Limoncello." Ben made a half batch with only 10 limes and vodka, and although he reported that he was pleased with the distinctly lime flavor, the color of the finished liquor was almost indistinguishable from the limoncello.

I took Ben's basic technique for limoncello of filtering the Everclear multiple times but greatly increased the amount of lime zest. In fact, the zest produced by 20 pounds of limes could not be covered by 750 ml of Everclear, so I had to add a bottle of vodka to the initial infusion. With that much zest (and using grain alcohol) I don't think there will be any issue with the color of the limecello being pale. As you can see, right now it is an extremely dark green, almost black.

Big thanks to Suzanne and Kristy for helping with the major task of zesting all of those limes! Oh yeah, if anyone needs some frozen lime juice, I'm your man.

My poor, neglected blog

It's been over a month without any activity on my blog. Sigh.

In the past month...

1. I felt proud to be an American. I think part of the reason I have not been writing much (or even reading other blogs) is that after the election I felt a huge sense of relief. Before the election, I felt like I had to know everything I could about the world of politics on a daily basis because some new horrible thing might be happening. Beginning on January 20, adults will be back in the White House.
   
   Four years ago, when we re-elected a president who we knew authorized torture, I think I was depressed for weeks. I could not believe what we had done. It only took a couple of years for the American public to really understand what kind of president Bush has been, but the reasons his approval ratings have been at record lows were all evident four years ago. Obama has a lot of crap to undo.
   
   
2. The National Bureau of Economic Research officially announced that we have been in a recession.
   
   
3. I have tried to buy a house. At the moment, it looks like I need to start over.
   
   
4. I bought a new camera. My old one ended up getting something stuck inside the lens, so there was a mark on the right side of every picture. You can see an example below.
   
   I looked into getting the camera repaired, but it would have cost about $200 just for the shop to open it up and clean it. Not only would there be no guarantee that the $200 would actually fix the problem, but it could take up to 8 weeks for me to get the camera back. That would be cutting it too close to my trip to Hong Kong, so I bit the bullet and got a SLR. I hope to have lots of practice with it before my trip. Here's an action shot of the puppy from my first practice session.
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. I've been making dinner every Sunday night at my church this fall. It's been a great experience. I'll be writing more about these dinners in the future.
   
   
6. It's Advent! My favorite time of year music-wise has arrived. I rarely listen to classical music, but that changes in December. Today we did Lessons & Carols at church, which included some pretty tough pieces. I have not participated in Christmas Eve services at my church before, but based on the music we are preparing, it should be amazing.
   

I'm a sap

While my ex would never imagine using a word to describe me that implies being overly sentimental, there are times when it fits. Tears sometimes come to my eyes during TV shows (The Wire, or Smash's last episode on Friday Night Lights for example) She would call me a political junkie, so it might not be as surprising to know that there have been events during the Presidential campaign that have put me in a sentimental mood.

There was this story from a medical student in Evansville, Indiana about her experience with early voting.

For me the most moving moment came when the family in front of me, comprising probably 4 generations of voters (including an 18 year old girl voting for her first time and a 90-something hunched-over grandmother), got their turn to vote. When the old woman left the voting booth she made it about halfway to the door before collapsing in a nearby chair, where she began weeping uncontrollably. When we rushed over to help we realized that she wasn't in trouble at all but she had not truly believed, until she left the booth, that she would ever live long enough to cast a vote for an African-American for president.

Or this story, about a 109 year old Amanda Jones in Texas who cast her absentee ballot for Obama last week. What's amazing about her story, besides the fact that she 109 years old, is that her father was a slave. This woman, who just voted for an African American for President, is the daughter of a slave. That's unbelievable.

Jones' father herded sheep as a slave until he was 12, according to the family, and once he was freed, he was a farmer who raised cows, hogs and turkeys on land he owned. Her mother was born right after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Joyce Jones said. The family owned more than 100 acres of land in Cedar Creek at one point, she said.

Amanda Jones' father urged her to exercise her right to vote, despite discriminatory practices at the polls and poll taxes meant to keep black and poor people from voting. Those practices were outlawed for federal elections with the 24th Amendment in 1964, but not for state and local races in Texas until 1966.

Amanda Jones says she cast her first presidential vote for Franklin Roosevelt, but she doesn't recall which of his four terms that was. When she did vote, she paid a poll tax, her daughters said. That she is able, for the first time, to vote for a black presidential nominee for free fills her with joy, Jones said.

It's almost a cliche to say that America's original sin was slavery. For all of our history we have struggled with either the fact of slavery or the aftermath of slavery. We still have a few people with us who only have to look one branch up their family tree to find either a slave or a slave owner. My parents were born into an America without a Voting Rights Act, and one in which Obama's parents' marriage would have been illegal in some states.

While that might seem like ancient history, and we have made a lot of progress during my parents' lifetime, we are far from moving past our original sin. An Obama presidency will not mean that we have put our racial troubles behind us, but it will be a step in the direction. I hope that it will mean race becomes a topic of conversation for white America.

Obama's race is not the reason I became a supporter (I originally was most intriuged by his approach to foreign policy) but it a significant part of his appeal. Unfortunately, the historic nature of his campaign is not the only thing during this election that brought a tear to my eye.

I heard this afternoon that Obama's grandmother had died late Sunday night. It seems unfair that this woman who spent much of Obama's teen years raising him would not quite live to see tomorrow night, when I'm sure that Obama will wish to hear her voice. I'll quote Andrew Sullivan's reaction to this news.

Obama was so right to make sure he spent time with her before she passed on. But what an emotional blow on election eve for the candidate from Illinois. He has survived this campaign with remarkable emotional maturity and self-control. I just wish this didn't have to add to it. None of his parents will witness tomorrow. But somewhere my faith teaches me: they know already. Maybe Toot couldn't wait for the actual results. Maybe she's now a few steps ahead even of Chuck Todd. May she rest in peace. She did good.

Take a look at this picture of Obama taken as he spoke with a North Carolina crowd about his grandmother this afternoon.

"Senator Biden is now my homeboy"

My intention is not to turn my blog into a list of YouTube videos, but I couldn't resist this.



Hat tip to Ezra Klein.

Down to The Wire

Lester! Marlo! Kima! Chris! Carver! Cutty!

Voting

I arrived at one of the early voting locations 30 minutes before the polls opened.

The voting location was at the far right.

The line went around the corner and stretched 1/3 of the way down the length of the mall.

Go Obama!

Dogs are Great!

This video is titled " My Dogs greeting me after returning from 14 months in Iraq."



Hat Tip to Andrew Sullivan

How I Met Your Mother

The fall TV season began a few weeks ago. I've been enjoying a bunch of returning shows like "Dexter," "Pushing Daisies," "Chuck," and "The Office." A show that I just started watching last year is "How I Met Your Mother."

HIMYM is one of those shows ("Lost" is another one) that would have been completely different had it been written prior to TIVO, TV shows on DVD, and the ability to stream shows online. The writers of HIMYM are focused on continuity to an extent that would be superfluous if the audience did not have an easy way to watch multiple episodes back to back or to easily rewatch an episode from earlier in the season or from a prior season. Jokes are set up in one episode, with the payoff not coming for months.

I like the way this demonstrates writers' respect for the audience. I also simply like the characters. I just don't watch TV shows unless I enjoy spending time with the characters. Jason Segal (previously seen in several of Judd Apatow TV shows, such as the brilliant "Freaks and Geeks, and movies) plays Marshall, who is the focus of last week's episode. The clip below is Marshall's ode to the perfect hamburger (which, as I've previously written, can be found at Tessaro's in Pittsburgh.)

The Economic Mess

The current meltdown, as far as I understand, has several causes. One of those causes, with which I have personal knowledge, is the way that financial institutions securitized debts. This basically means that they combined a whole bunch of different loans into one package and turn it into a bond. People, like me, can buy the bond and earn interest on it as the debt is paid back. My financial advisor got me into some of these mortgage backed securities earlier this decade. (I ended up selling them before the housing market bubble burst, so I didn't lose anything)

The problem is that there is no way to tell how much of the debt that has been securitized is "good debt" and how much is "bad debt." If 75% of the mortgages that were in the mortgage backed security that I owned were "good," (meaning the mortgages were taken out my people who were qualified and able to pay it off) but 25% were "bad" (subprime mortgages or mortgages taken out by people who would be unable to pay if their adjustable rate spiked), then it's likely that I would have lost a big chunk of my investment if I had not sold when I did. (BTW, I did not sell because I realized that I was in an unwise investment. The timing of that decision had more to do with dumb luck.)

Bob Kuttner has the best overview that I found of our current situation, and several proposed regulations that would prevent a repeat of this meltdown in the future. Check it out.

Obama's Accomplishments, US Senate Edition

Now I'll move to Obama's time in US Senate. His most significant accomplishment is without a doubt his work with Dick Lugar (R) on securing nuclear weapons in the former USSR.

During the 2004 campaign, although neither candidate emphasized their plans related to the issue, both Bush and Kerry agreed that nuclear proliferation was the most pressing national security risk the US faced. I don't think anything has changed regarding its importance.

Obama caught Lugar's eye because he was talking about loose nukes during his Senate campaign, even though it is hardly a traditional campaign issue. Obama didn't care that Lugar was a Republican, he understood that Lugar was the foremost expert in the Senate on this issue, so he decided to learn as much as possible from Lugar. He ended up taking former Senator Sam Nunn's role in cosponsoring legislation with Lugar. It was just this past June, despite being in the middle of the presidential campaign, that the Lugar-Obama nonproliferation initiative secured funding from the Appropriations Committee.

Obama also worked with Lugar on a different kind of national security issue, avian flu.

He also taken the lead in ethics legislation, which when it was passed in early 2007, was described as "the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet." When it comes to dealing with the abuse of earmarks, Obama was instrumental in the passage of The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, allowing citizens to easily find out what their legislators are doing. (Maybe now that he has selected Palin, McCain will come to understand that earmarks are not all bad. Most of our aid to Israel comes in the form of earmarks, and surely McCain does not want to cut those) It is worth noting that Obama teamed up with Sen Coburn (R) on the transparency bill, and just a few months ago they introducing a new bill strengthening the 2006 law.

This new bill gives a great example of the kind of bipartisanship Obama practices. Obama and Coburn has been working on this bill for a while. McCain had nothing to do with the crafting of this bill, and Coburn admits that it was his fault for not inviting McCain's participation. When they were ready to introduce the bill, McCain's people started scrambling to get his name added as a sponsor of the bill. They thought it would be a political liability if McCain's name was nowhere to be found on the bill since ethics reform is central to his campaign. Rather than take partisan advantage of the situation in the middle of the Presidential election, Obama welcomed McCain's co-sponsorship. It was a good bill, so Obama did not let electoral concerns get in the way of passing the bill.

You can find Obama's response to Katrina here. He has authored a number of bills to support veterans.

It is important to note that during Obama's first two years in the Senate, the D's were the minority party. The last two years, the R's have set records when it comes to the use of the filibuster. (The previous record was 61 filibusters in a two year Senate term. The Republicans only needed one year to break that) Under any circumstances, Obama has taken the lead on passage of a lot of legislation for a first term Senator, but it is an even more impressive record when you consider the obstructions he faced.

Looking over the legislation he is responsible for, it is striking how much of it is not the kind that gets lots of press. They are important bills, sometimes they are quite wonkish, but not at all the kind of legislation that a politician seeking "celebrity" would pursue. This is especially true of the bills Obama has proposed, but have not passed yet. His technology proposals, further ethics reform, regulating genetic testing, reducing medical malpractice the right way, etc. all fit the wonky, non-sexy pattern.

Hilzoy, who blogs both at The Washington Monthly and at Obsidian Wings, has been compiling a list of legislation sponsored by either Obama or McCain during the 109th and 110the Congress (the two when both of them have been in the Senate) Here is the list of legislation that they sponsored. Here is the list of bills and amendments they each cosponsored in the 109th Congress. Here is the list of bills and amendments they each cosponsored in the 110th Congress. I have not looked through all of these lists in detail yet, but they would be helpful to anyone wanting to compare their legislative accomplishments from the past 4 years. They would probably work great as a sleep aid, as well.

I am impressed with Obama's accomplishments but more excited by his forward looking policy proposals. His record of bipartisanship, and the manner in which he is conducting his campaign, makes me optimistic that he would have success in implementing those ideas.

Obama's Accomplishments, Pre-US Senate edition

Continuing with posts adapted from the politics forum at artsandfaith.com, here is my response to those who wonder what Obama has ever accomplished.

First, I would point to his presidency of the Harvard Law Review and teaching Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago. While those two accomplishment are not directly related to governing, they do demonstrate both intellectual curiosity and a deep, sophisticated understanding of the constitution. Many of the problems with the Bush presidency stem directly from a lack of intellectual curiosity and a dismissal of the constitution.

While he has a number of legislative accomplishments during his time in Illinois, the one that I think is the most significant is the bill requiring the police to videotape interrogations and confessions. It was not only the passage of the bill that was important, but the way he got it passed.

First, he believed that too many confessions were being coerced out of suspects and sometimes the coercion ventured into violence. His solution was rather simple; videotape both the interrogations and the confessions. Then there would be no question about what happens to suspects.

The biggest problem he faced was that the bill was initially opposed by the police. Normally that would make such a bill dead in the water. Democrats are scared to death of being tarred as soft on crime, so they have no motivation to support something that the police oppose. Republicans often are automatically "tough on crime" and also have no desire to cross the police.

So he did what I think Obama does best. He listened. He spent a lot of time with police officers and worked to understand their concerns. He supported some other bills that they wanted to pass. He helped them understand that videotaping both interrogations and confessions would protect suspects AND the police officers involved in questioning (good cops would not get lumped in with crooked cops, the video would protect them from false accusations of brutality, etc.)

He won over the police, won over the Republicans, and got the measure passed overwhelmingly (the vote in the Senate was 35-0) While being a state issue, carefully thinking through issues dealing with confessions and false confessions and abusing suspects certainly pertains to the national stage these days, doesn't it?

Here is a fuller description of how Obama's leadership led to the passage of the videotaping bill.

Another accomplishment while in the Illinois legislature was the passage of what the Washington Post called "the most ambitious campaign reform in nearly 25 years, making Illinois one of the best in the nation on campaign finance disclosure." Each party selected one member to represent their party. He was new in the state Senate, and the Democrats were in the minority then, but he was the D's point person.

There are more things he did in Illinois (and the criticism of Obama for voting "present" demonstrates a lack of understanding how the state legislature works in Illinois) but this is long enough and there is a lot more to talk about from the past four years in the US Senate.

Why I Like Obama

I am very active in an online politics discussion forum at artsandfaith.com Some of the time that I use to spend blogging, I've been spending there talking about the upcoming election. I decided to ought to adapt some of what I've posted there for my blog. I wrote the following in February of 2007, well before he began running for President. I pretty much still agree with everything that I wrote back then.

Like most of the country, I first became aware of Obama when he gave the speech at the Democratic convention. The things that everybody talks about impressed me; his comfort talking about his faith, his eloquence, that he comes across as "authentic." After he was elected, I watched a handful of Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on CSPAN. Almost without exception, he asked the best, most intelligent, most relevant questions. (Maybe his questions seemed that way to me because they were the questions I was wondering about) What made them stand out was that they came across as genuine questions that were asked to help him and the committee better understand the issue - not to score a political point.

At that point I subscribed to his weekly podcast, in which he spends about 8-10 minutes talking about a particular issue the Senate is dealing with that week or a piece of legislation that he will be sponsoring. It will occasionally include recordings of speeches he gives. One that I remember was given at the Council on Foreign Relations about Iraq, probably in the middle of 2005. Although he made it clear that he had been against the invasion in the first place, he talked about American responsibility to the Iraqis now that we were there. He talked about the need for a counter insurgency strategy (like the one that Gen. Petraeus is now trying to implement) back before the civil war became entrenched and when such a strategy had a chance of success. He's been right on the most important issue facing the US over the past several years and the reasons he's been right are just as important to me.


He has surrounded himself with experts like Samantha Powers and he learns from them. I've read interviews with his staff who say that when someone like Powers comes in to give him a briefing on Darfur, within 10 minutes he's digested all that they've said and has asked a half dozen questions that get right to the heart of the matter. Often one or two of the questions will cause the expert to have to consider an issue in a new light and necessitate them going back to do further research. They feel inspired and invigorated by the questions, instead of belittled like Rumsfeld's briefers.


I also respect the story he tells about a letter he received from pro-life doctor during his Senate campaign. The doctor told him that some of the language his campaign was using to describe people who are pro-life was dismissive and offensive. Obama looked at the language and agreed with the letter. He apologized to the writer and changed the language. He did not change his position on abortion, but when he recognized that he was doing something disrespectful towards those he disagreed with, he changed.

He attended Rick Warren's conference on AIDS despite opposition from those on the far right and the far left. Despite disagreeing with most of those attending the conference on the issue of abortion, he did not let that stop him from working together on an issue they did agree upon. He worked with John McCain on ethics reform and Tom Coburn (!) on legislation to bring more transparency to the Federal budget. Even though Obama is most definitely a political liberal, he does not let partisan power games be an obstacle to good policy.

I like his positions on the economy, health care, Iraq, al Qaeda, homeland security, energy, guns, network neutrality, and immigration. It is easy enough to find more info about those things.

I think that restoring America's soft power in the world will be one of the most important tasks of our next president, and Obama would be uniquely suited for that. I agree with President Palmer in 24, Muslim citizens of the US and moderate Muslims throughout the world are our most important allies in the GWOT. Restoring the idea that America stands for freedom, democracy, fairness, and opportunity, and against things like torture, privilege, and bullying might not win over any of the radicals, but it will help to keep Muslims from becoming radicalized and support the moderates in the struggle within Islam. A president with a funny name, brown skin, who has lived in the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, is treated like a rock star in Africa, and opposes torture should have more soft power than most. Of course, none of the those things about his background are in and of themselves qualifications to be President, but are more like the icing on the cake.

Notes From An Escalator

Not only is my sister an accomplished chef, she's also a great writer. So subscribe to the RSS feed of her new blog about life in Hong Kong!

John McCain Gets BarackRoll'd

For anyone who is less of a nerd than I am, and needs an explanation of the concept of "Rickrolling," read this.

Slacktivist

Fred Clark is the author of a great blog called Slacktivist. It is best known for Fred's weekly analysis of the Left Behind books, sometimes only covering a couple of pages. He describes both the poor theology and the terrible writing of LaHaye and Jenkins.

Today, he looked into the future to share with us a news story that is sure to be written next week featuring McCain campaign manager Rick Davis.

... Davis, visibly shaken and with tears in his eyes, reiterated the McCain campaign's demand for an apology.

"Thousands of older Americans suffer from this same condition," Davis said. "So when Mr. Obama says, 'Don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining' this is a vicious slur not only on Sen. McCain, but also on tens of millions of older Americans."

Obama, for his part, insisted his comment had not been intended as a personal attack on his Republican rival.

"I don't see how that can be taken as ageist," Obama said. "It's a colloquialism, something my grandmother used to say back in Kansas. And anyway I didn't even know until today that Sen. McCain suffered from this condition."

"John McCain was a POW," Davis reminded reporters. "Leave John McCain aloooooooooone!"

Asked if he would have chosen his words more carefully had he known about his opponent's condition, Obama shrugged. "Depends," he said.

This prompted further demands for an apology ...

Lipstick

It is a shame that Obama needs to take time to say this, but he says what needs to be said.

Obama on the Constitution

I like how Obama has the appropriate attitude towards today's Republican party. It is a mix of amusement and dismissal. That's different than being dismissive of every Republican. But the party, which cheered Bush casually throwing out what Obama correctly describes as "the foundation of Anglo-American law," deserves scorn. And Palin's jeering at Obama's support for habeas corpus (to applause, I might add) during the Republican Convention, also deserves scorn.

"The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism. It's because that's who we are. That's what we're protecting. Don't mock the Constitution. Don't make fun of it. Don't suggest that it's not American to abide by what the founding fathers set up. It's worked pretty well for over 200 years."

Spelling

Some of you know about my spelling "ability," or lack thereof. One of the reasons I use Firefox is the built-in spell checker. So I loved this video.

Hat tip to Matthew Yglesis.

RNC

Here is some more good commentary on the RNC.

The Conventions & The Election

My sister asked me to write about my thoughts on the Republican National Convention last week. Tom Toles did a better job summarizing the message from the RNC than I could. Take a look at his editorial cartoon from this week.

It sounds to me like McCain's campaign has decided to forget about their attempt to draw in undecided, independent, and conservative Democratic voters. It's all about the base of the Republican party now. The choice of Sarah Palin for VP has excited religious conservatives and NRA members, but you cannot call yourself a Maverick while kowtowing to the conservative base of your party. A convention that mocked community organizers and featured repeated chanting of "Drill, Baby, Drill!" seems happy to write off voters younger than 40.

With the two convention completed, in some ways the real election has started. Casual voters will start to pay attention now. The first debate is on September 30. Polls still don't mean very much and are not worth paying attention to until October. The fundamentals, like the state of the economy and the fact of Republican incumbency, still point to an Obama victory.

I think the biggest wildcard is Iraq. If there continues to be relative stability (and by relative, I mean something less than total civil war) then it might not be too much of a factor. But if things change, either towards more open civil war or towards actual political reconciliation, then who knows? If it gets obviously worse, will undecided and weakly committed voters blame the Republicans or will they decide that McCain's "experience" makes him the best person to deal with the problem? If it gets obviously better, will those same voters give McCain credit for advocating the surge, or will they decide Iraq does not matter and focus just on the economy?

Obama has been saying, most recently in his speech at the Democratic National Convention, that he welcomes a debate with McCain on foreign policy. This is great news for lots of reasons, but from an electoral standpoint, it will show the public that he is better on Iraq whether things there take a turn for the better or the worse.

The Decembrists

The years that I lived in Washington were a dark period for me as it relates to music. With one notable exception, I did not discover any new artists (I knew of Alejandro when I moved to WA but only became a fan when a friend gave me tickets to see him live in Seattle) and I rarely listened to the music that I already owned. One of the Northwest's bands that I missed out on is The Decembrists.

Last weekend, when I was watching Mad Men (the best show on TV right now - if you haven't seen it, go rent season 1. There are some uneven moments and times when the novelties of life in the late 1950's pulls you out of the story, but they have really hit their stride in season 2) the opening sequence was set to The Decembrist's song "The Infanta." The song is captivating.

Since then, I've been trying to familiarize myself with this interesting band. Like one of my favorite musicians from college, Bill Mallonee, the songwriter is a bit of a history buff. "The Infanta" is about the birth of a Spanish princess in 1824. Another new favorite of mine is "When the War Came." Here is what frontman Colin Meloy said about the song.

The last great book I read was Hunger by Elise Blackwell. It’s about the siege of Leningrad in World War II, and there was a botanical institute. During the siege, which lasted a long time, the entire population were starving, but all of the botanists in the institute swore themselves to protect the catalog of seeds and plants and things, from not only a starving population, but also from themselves. It’s pretty amazing.

The Infanta





When The War Came

Restaurants

I wish I had the time (and money!) to do restaurant reviews. What a great job, although if a newspaper or magazine is paying you to review places, you have to make multiples trips to restaurants you don't like. I think I could live with that, though. Since I don't write restaurant reviews, I'll just write a note about a couple of places I went in the past week.

Over Labor Day weekend I was at Blue Grotto, a new pizza place in Brookside. It was the best pizza I've had since moving back to KC, although that's not saying much. These are artisan, wood fired pizzas with a light, slightly crackly crust. My favorite was a prosciutto with red onions and asiago cheese. The salsiccia was great, too. The only problem was slow service, but I was with a group that gave off we're-going-to-hang-out-here-all-night vibes.

On Tuesday, I met a friend at a little Italian restaurant also in Brookside, La Cucina Di Mamma. This place is a part of Bella Napoli, the Italian market and deli. I had a special, pasta alla puttanesca. It was not as spicy as puttansecas that I've made or had elsewhere. The anchovy was the dominate flavor, but it was not too much. I'd order it again. I don't know very much about Italian wines, so I can't really judge the wine list. We got one of the least expensive bottles, and it was a good weeknight-type red that worked just fine with our meals. The price was great, too. Our two entrees, the wine, and the tip came to about $50.

Both places are worth checking out. I'm sure I'll be back at both of them in the future.

The Olympics

I ended up watching much more of the Olympics than I ever expected (part of it might be because I got an HDTV in the middle of the Games) I can't remember the last time I ever watched consecutive days of the Olympics, much less several hours a night.

That said, I come away quite ambivalent about the event. James Fallows, a journalist for The Atlantic Monthly that I highly respect who in the midst of a several years long stint in China, said on The News Hour that they were good for China and the world because they made China feel good. He believes that a confident China is a good neighbor and world citizen, and the times when China has caused the most problems for the rest of the world has been when they feel they have lost face.

One of the sports columnist from The Washington Post, Thomas Boswell, has a less historical perspective that still resonates with me. His wrap-up column on the Olympics ends this way.

In decades at The Post, this is the first event I've covered at which I was certain that the main point of the exercise was to co-opt the Western media, including NBC, with a splendidly pretty, sparsely attended, completely controlled sports event inside a quasi-military compound. We had little alternative but to be a conduit for happy-Olympics, progressive-China propaganda. I suspect it worked.

Everything that met my eye at every venue was perfect. Everybody smiled. Everybody pretended to speak English. Until you got past "hello." Everyone was helpful until you went one inch past where you were supposed to go. Then, arms sprang out to stop you. Everywhere you went, even alone at 2 a.m., you felt completely safe. Because every hundred feet there were a pair of guards -- at attention in the middle of the night.

As sports spectacles go, I've never seen one more efficiently or soullessly executed than this one. I have no idea where they put the real people for 17 days, but I felt like Jim Carrey in "The Truman Show." Where's Ed Harris saying: "Truman is going to turn left on Main Street: Cue the smiling girl and the hearty hot dog vendor."

The family that's always perfect in public is the one you worry about. What's going on under the surface? The complete lack of dissent here -- not one person could get a permit to use the designated Olympic "protest area," though some were detained for trying -- has an eloquence of its own.

As for the Chinese people, I like them a lot. But they've been through so many purges and plagues, cultural revolutions and great leaps forward, followed by the whipsaw from socialism to "rich is good," that I think they're happy to toe the societal line. This decade, it's entrepreneurial capitalism -- hyper-boom phase. We'll see how they like the bust part. It's probably coming.

China has, by every account, made incredible material progress in the last 25 years. This city, merely one of several in China that now rivals New York and Los Angeles for size and wealth, isn't going to do anything but continue to grow. The 21st century will, no doubt, be a vast improvement on the last few awful ones here.

Nonetheless, I'll leave here more concerned about China's future, and its impact on those around it, than the future of the United States. Part of that is probably xenophobia, though I've spent a lifetime repeating, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

Some of it, however, is my suspicion that the cycles of capitalism and the inflexibility of authoritarian regimes make for a spectacularly happy marriage in the virtuous-cycle good times, but perhaps an ugly partnership in the inevitable bad periods.

China got aboard the free-market love train at roughly the time -- in the early 1980s -- that worldwide capitalism hit one of its long secular hot streaks that frequently last 15 to 20 years. Money couldn't wait to invest itself here. Let's see how the Party enjoys its first secular bear market.

Politics

With the political conventions beginning this week, the Presidential campaign is entering the phase when the general public starts to pay attention. I have not written about politics nearly as much as I've been thinking about it, but I image as we get closer to November I'll be writing more of those thoughts here.

The New York Times Magazine published a great article about Obama's economic policy today. It's long, but worth reading. My short summary will do no justice to Obama's approach, but here it goes anyway.

“The market is the best mechanism ever invented for efficiently allocating resources to maximize production,” Obama told me. “And I also think that there is a connection between the freedom of the marketplace and freedom more generally.” But, he continued, “there are certain things the market doesn’t automatically do.”

When an Obama presidency would interfere in the market, the above quote will provide guidance. Where does he think the market fails? The fact that over the past couple of decades workers have not benefited from the great gains in efficiency and wealth. The fact that the market is fundamentally incapable to dealing with a non-commodity like health care. The fact that the big business, like the oil industry or banking or big pharma, rely on huge government susbsidies and knowledge that the government will bail them out if they screw up. The fact that the market does not reflect the true costs, both economic and environmental, of a carbon-based energy policy.

This article mention that Tax Policy Center's analysis and comparison of Obama's and McCain's tax plans. I don't know why Obama has not been focused on this, but I hope it is a major part of his campaign following the convention for purely political reasons. Much of the country believes that McCain is a tax cutter and Obama is a tax raiser. They think that their tax bill will be smaller under McCain than under Obama. This only true for the top 20% of the country. For the vast majority of us, McCain's proposal will leave up with a higher tax burden than Obama. For 80% of the country, Obama is the tax cutter.

Be Okay

At the kitchen where I work, we listen to satellite radio. There is AAA station that we all like, and it actually plays many of the artists that are in my iTunes playlists, but they so make some weird choices. They play Bruce Cockburn, but most of the time the Cockburn song they play is from 1984, "If I Had A Rocket Launcher." Either they are trying to make a political statement or they never listened to his 9 more recent albums. And even though one of the benefits from satellite radio is suppose to be their much broader playlist than traditional radio, this station occasionally gets stuck in a rut.

A couple of weeks ago it was a John Mellencamp rut. They played two straight weeks of Melloncamp. That's right, 14 days, from the John Cougar days, then the John Cougar Mellencamp days, and finally the John Mellencamp days. They did a Sheryl Crow week earlier in the year, but at least that week was largely Crow acting as the DJ and choosing other artist's music to play. I could tolerate Crow the DJ, but two weeks of Mellencamp is two weeks too many.

This past week, the rut they fell into was with one song. I heard the same song, "Be Okay," three times in the same day. It was catchy and I could not get the chorus ("I just want to be okay, be okay, be okay, I just want to be okay...) out of my head. That night I tried to find out more about the song and discovered that it was recorded by Ingrid Michaelson.

Michaelson is one of those indie artist who is experimenting with new ways to make a living in the music world. Early on, she relied on her myspace page as well as lots of performance in coffeeshops. Her first big break was when three of her songs were used on "Grey's Anatomy" (a guilty pleasure of mine) The producers of "Grey's Anatomy" asked her to write a song specifically for the show, and it was prominently played during closing moments of the 2007 season finale. Last fall, Old Navy used one of her songs ("The Way I Am") in a commercial.

It used to be that music fans worries about their favorite arists, like Bob Dylan or The Who, "selling out." Today, in part to avoid the artistic compromises that come from signing with a music label, even indie artists are using TV shows and commercials as a way to spread their music. It has worked for Michaelson.

All of this post is mostly an excuse to post this video of Michaelson displaying her knowledge of pop culture from the year 1990. I bet her concerts are fun.

Polls

From now until election day in November, we will be inundated with polling data. The unfortunate thing is that much of that data tells us very little of significance. One of the reasons for this is that the media rarely reports the intensity of the opinion being expressed by those being polled. Remember how prior to the Iraqi invasion, there were media reports that a majority of Americans were in favor of going to war. David Moore, a former Vice President of the Gallup Organization and Managing Editor of the Gallup Poll, explains why it is not that simple while he is guest blogging at The Washington Monthly.

In a February 2003 poll, Gallup asked a standard version of the question that all the other pollsters asked, and like the other polls, found a substantial majority in favor of the war — 59 percent to 38 percent, a 21-point margin. Only 3 percent said they did not have an opinion. However, as part of a special experiment which I helped design (as a senior editor of the Gallup Poll), the standard question was followed up with another, which essentially asked if people really cared that their opinions might prevail. And the results here revealed a very different public from the one that has come to dominate conventional wisdom.

To people who said they favored the war, we asked if they would be upset if the government did not send troops to Iraq. And to people who opposed the war, we asked if they would be upset if the government did send troops. Just over half of the supposed supporters and a fifth of the opponents said they would not be upset if their opinions were ignored.

The net result: Only 29 percent of Americans supported the war and said they would be upset if it didn't come about, while 30 percent were opposed to the war and said they would be upset if it did occur. Another 38 percent, who had just expressed an opinion either for or against the proposed invasion, said they would not be upset if the government did the opposite of what they had just opined. Add to this number the 3 percent who initially expressed no opinion, and that makes 41 percent who didn't care one way or the other.

What this experiment revealed was that instead of a war-hungry public, Americans were evenly divided over whether to go to war — three in ten in favor, three in ten opposed, with a plurality willing to do whatever the political leaders thought best.

There is a similar phenomenon is the polls that are so widely reported about the election. Moore explains that almost every poll about the 2008 presidential election asks who the respondent would vote for if the election were held today. Of course, the election is not going to be held today. Many people know today who they will vote for in November, but many simply have not thought about the election very closely. They answer the pollster's question, but they don't considered themselves committed to any particular candidate. Moore talks about what the latest CBS News Poll tells us about the size of this group of voters.

The CBS poll also asks the standard polling industry's forced-choice question, who would you vote for it the election were held today, and it found 13 percent undecided. But the poll followed up the standard question by asking whether voters who had selected a candidate had made up their minds, "or is it still too early to say for sure?" The results of that question show 39 percent of voters still uncommitted, three times the original number CBS found, and almost eight times what the Gallup tracking poll reports.

If 39% of voters are still undecided, it sheds a different light on the fact that Obama has maintained about a 5% lead over McCain ever since Clinton conceded the primary.

Running Update

My running update is that I have not been running much. I did not exercise much while Monte was in town, and since then I have been riding my bike. Last week I rode with Greg and Peggie one night, by myself another (after which I figured out how to patch an inner tube) and then yesterday Greg and I went on a long ride. This afternoon I rode for about 2 hours.

I do want to keep up with the running. I think that doing a couple of runs and a couple of bike rides a week would be a nice balance.

Tattoo

As I mentioned a few days ago, I was recently looking for pictures of food related tattoos. I have thought about getting a tattoo for years, but last summer decided that it was time. I was in the midst of some major life changes and thought that a tattoo might be one way to mark, literally, both what was new in my life and what was consistent.

I wanted an image that would tie my previous church-based career with the new food-based direction I was taking. The connection is closer than it might appear at first glance. Food images are all over the Bible. Focusing just on the New Testament, there is Jesus' first miracle of turning water into wine at a wedding feast, feeding the crowds with the fish and the loaves, the Last Supper, and Jesus' post-resurrection appearance on the road to Emmaus when the disciples don't recognize him until he breaks bread. One of the most consistent images of heaven throughout the Bible is that of a great feast.

These images pop up so often for a reason. Eating with another person is incredibly important. It is hard to imagine the most important occasions in life, like weddings and funerals, without food being present. Kids whose families eat dinner together on a regular basis are socially and emotionally healthier than kids whose families do not eat together. In my time doing youth ministry, I experienced how important eating together is for teenagers to form a sense of community. Eating together, somehow, opens us up to what God wants to happen in our relationships.

For me, the move to feeding people physically is not far removed from putting them into a position to be fed spiritually. But coming up with the right image to capture all that was tough. I was going to have this tattoo for the rest of my life, so I wanted to be sure about it.

I played around with images of bread and wine, but was never really happy with what I came up with. Something about that just did not seem right. At the Easter Vigil this spring, the stating of the cultural mandate (for more about what this "cultural mandate" is all about, check this out) from the Genesis reading jumped out to me. "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it..." The idea that part of the reason for our existence on earth is to be fruitful (obviously this is not limited to having lots of children) has long been an important part of what it means to me to be a Christian.

There are all kinds of things that we encounter in our lives that are full of potential (artistic talent, tomato seeds, ideas about how to build a house) but need to be cultivated by our active involvement. One of the things I love about cooking is finding an incredible ingredient, like a Copper River Salmon, and figuring out how to bring forth every bit of its potential to be an amazing meal. That's one way to put the cultural mandate into action.

So back to the tattoo. The command to "be fruitful" got me thinking about images again. I couldn't exactly figure how a tattoo of a seed would look any different from a freckle, and when I searched for images of a tattoo of an apple, most of what I found was people who had tattooed themselves with the Apple Computer logo. I'm writing this on my MacBook and I own 2 iPods, but there was no way I was going to put something that looks like the logo of a company, even one that I like as much as Apple, on my body.

Then I returned to the idea of bread and wine, the most significant food images in Christendom. The processes of turning wheat into bread and grapes into wine are both incredibly simple, yet in the hands of great artists they end up with incredibly complex flavors and textures. Master bakers and winemakers reflect God's creativity when they are fruitful with their talent and with the fruit of the fields.

I knew I had my image after discussing this with my sister and brother-in-law. Monte pointed out that the grain of wheat must be cracked and the grape must be crushed for them to reach their potential. Cracked and crushed are not bad descriptions of the past two years of my life. One image that refers to my old life, my new life, and hints at the journey from the old to the new. Perfect.

I found some pictures online, took them to several tattoo parlors until I found an artist that felt "right," had him combine the pictures into one unified image, and walked away with this on my left calf.

91% Male

All the cool blogs today have been linking to this nifty tool that uses your web browsing history and makes a prediction as to your gender. Since I want to be one of the cool blogs, too, I just had to join in. According to my history (I have Firefox set to keep 90 days of history), there is a 91% likelihood that I am male.

What the author of this little javascript script did was have your browser to find out which of the Quantcast top 10,000 sites you have visited and examined the male to female ratio of the users of those sites. Basically, the websites I visit are mostly read by men (news, politics, sports were the one with the highest ratio) The places I visited that are mostly read by women were shopping sites (amazon, various airline sites, etc)

Food Blog

I've been reading Chef Matt's blog, Deglazed, since the end of last year. I stumbled across it when I was looking for pictures of food related tattoos (this is what I found at his blog). Matt had always been an amateur cook with a career as a web designer when he decided to take the plunge of attending cooking school and working towards becoming a professional chef. He also happens to be a good writer.

The reason for this post is that Chef Matt commented on my Dr. Horrible post (if you didn't watch Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog, you can still download it on iTunes) I wanted to thank him publicly for my new favorite Margarita Recipe. His margarita is definitely hardcore - I don't think I've ever had a drink that was as tart as this one. I sometimes make some modification; instead of TripleSec, I've substituted a few drops of orange oil and a shot of my limoncello. Next time you are in the mood for a margarita, give Chef Matt's recipe a try. If you don't think you will like an extremely tart margarita, just add a bit of a simple syrup.

It's Been a Long Time

Once you stop posting to your blog on a daily basis, it's tough to start up again. I hope to get back to posting on a regular basis.


It was great to have Monte, Matt, and Finn in town for about a week. We unloaded a moving truck's worth of their stuff into my parent's basement, ate a lot of good food, watched the Finn channel, and hung out. Of course, we needed to take some family pictures before they started their great adventure.

They landed in Hong Kong over the weekend, and apparently Finn quite content on the flight. We talked over Skype after they got to their hotel. The Skype connection was amazing, even better than when I've used Skype to talk to friends in the US. The video and audio were totally in sync. The only problem we had was when Matt's computer went to sleep.

Dr. Horrible

My sister, brother-in-law, and nephew arrived in town today, so there won't be much blog activity for the next week or so. To tide you over (since I know there are maybe one of two of you that actually read this thing on a regular basis) I must link to Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, which started on Tuesday. My understanding of its origin is that during the writer's strike, Joss Whedon was playing around with ideas on how to distribute content online. The resulting three part, 40 minute musical comedy is off to a good start. It features Neil Patrick Harris (if you only know of him from Doogie Howser, then you don't know him. He is a legitimate Broadway star and has an Emmy nomination for his current show How I Met Your Mother), Nathan Fillion (who worked with Whedon on Firefly and Serenity) and Felicia Day (who worked with Whedon on Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Go check out Dr. Horrible, and be sure to stick with it past the opening bit where he's reading emails. Once the music starts, it gets much better.

Missing The Office?

New webisodes for The Office have started at the NBC website. It looks like they will focus on Kevin's gambling debt. The first episode is below.

Your Food Footprint

There are lots of reasons to eat locally produced food but in my mind the most important one is the taste. Another important factor is the potential for locally produced food to have less of an environmental impact than food that has been shipped across the country or over the ocean. Unfortunately, it's not always easy to tell how much carbon has been released by the production of the food we eat. From the fertilizers (which are often petroleum based) to tractors and combines, to the trucks and trains and ships that transport the food, a lot of carbon based fuel is burned to get that loaf of bread or fresh salad on your table.

One of the worst offenders is beef, especially grain-fed beef. Two researchers from CMU's Engineering school's Public Policy department published research this spring that suggested that changing only one day per week's meat and dairy-based calories to chicken, fish, or vegetables would have about the same impact on greenhouse gases as shifting to an entirely locally produced diet. That's how bad beef is for the environment. Here is an excerpt from an article about their research:

Weber and colleague Scott Matthews, also of Carnegie Mellon, conducted a life-cycle assessment of greenhouse gases emitted during all stages of growing and transporting food consumed in the U.S. They found that transportation creates only 11% of the 8.1 metric tons (t) of greenhouse gases (in CO₂ equivalents) that an average U.S. household generates annually as a result of food consumption. The agricultural and industrial practices that go into growing and harvesting food are responsible for most (83%) of its greenhouse gas emissions.

For perspective, food accounts for 13% of every U.S. household's 60 t share of total U.S. emissions; this includes industrial and other emissions outside the home. By comparison, driving a car that gets 25 miles per gallon of gasoline for 12,000 miles per year (the U.S. average) produces about 4.4 t of CO₂. Switching to a totally local diet is equivalent to driving about 1000 miles less per year, Weber says.

Driving less and using more fuel efficient vehicles are obviously important parts of dealing with climate change, but eating less beef is more important by several orders of magnitude. A nice side benefit is the healthier heart you end up with if you replace beef with more vegetables and whole grains in your diet.

From a public policy perspective, I think that a carbon tax is probably the best way to encourage more intelligent choices by the public. Eating beef has a large cost to the environment associated with it that is largely hidden to the public. A carbon tax would capture the cost to the environment from growing the grain (fertilizers, transportation, etc.) that feeds the cattle as well as the environment costs of transporting the beef. Grass-fed beef would become less expensive relative to grain-fed beef.

When choosing what to eat, the items that do more damage to the environment ought to cost more. Often the relative price difference of our food reflects the power of different lobbies (the corn lobby is why high fructose corn syrup is so cheap, and therefore why it is in so much of our food) as much as anything else. If the price of food included the cost to the environment, then consumers could make more informed choices.

July Recipe

(Each month, I include a recipe in the monthly newsletter for the kitchen where I work. These recipes need to complement the entrees on our menu that particular month, and are targeted towards our average customer. That means it needs to be simple, require little active prep work, and use only the most basic ingredients. Here is what we published in July.)

The zucchini plants in my backyard are full of blossoms, so soon I will be able to eat squash for breakfast, lunch, and dinner 7 days a week! My favorite way to prepare zucchini is on the grill. As in roasting, grilling vegetables requires little fat, making it heart-healthy, and brings out the vegetable's inherent sweetness.

Whether you are using summer squash, sweet potatoes, onions, corn, eggplant, peppers, or new potatoes, there are a few rules of thumb:

1. Cut the vegetable so that it can be placed along the grates of your grill without falling into the fire. For skinny vegetables like zucchini or sweet potatoes, cut them into long spears. For round vegetables like onions or eggplant, use thick discs. (A skewer through the side of the onion slices will help keep it from falling through the grates) Whatever shape you use, make sure the pieces are thick, ½ to ¾ of an inch.


2. Lightly brush the cut side of the vegetable with olive oil. You can season the oil with salt and pepper, garlic, rosemary, or any dried herb, but plain olive oil works great on its own.


3. For corn, peel all but the innermost, transparent layer of the husk off. Trim the silk off the end of the corn. There is no need to oil the husk or wrap it in foil (which will steam the corn instead of cooking it with direct heat)


4. Use a medium-hot fire. The density of the vegetable will determine the length of time they will need to cook. Potatoes and onions will take the longest (10-12 minutes, turning once) while zucchini or peppers are a bit quicker (8-10 minutes, turning once). Corn also takes 10-12 minutes, but it needs to be turned every 1-2 minutes.

So the next time you are firing up the grill for some Carne Asada, Grilled Blackened Salmon, or Raspberry BBQ chicken, fix your sides at the same time, on the same grill!

The Wayback Machine

On Wednesday, the girl with whom I attended my senior prom stopped by the kitchen where I work. Kathy was in town visiting her parents. Her sister-in-law, Sarah (who also was a member of our graduating class) works with me at the kitchen and suggested that Kathy should come in to say "hello." She reminded me that this cooking thing with me goes way back. For our prom, I cooked as elegant a dinner as is possible for an 18 year old boy to make.

It was fun to hear about Kathy and her husband. She had pictures of their kids (all 4 of them!) with her. Kathy and I got to know each other through music (she played bass in the orchestra while I played tuba - the bass instruments always stuck together!) She somehow finds time to teach a couple of strings classes a week at her kids' school.

Then today, my best friend from childhood showed up in the comments on my post about the Colorado trip. I guess it shows how out of touch I am, but I thought KC was still living in Asia. It turns out that he's back in Overland Park. It will be great to see him, and his family, again.

I wonder who from my past will show up next!

Colorado

The hiking was great, at least when I wasn't worried about lightening. There were a few times when it was closer than I would have liked. The set of pictures can be found here.

On the road

Yesterday afternoon, after stopping for a Local Burger (this time I went with Elk), I drove about 2/3's of the way to Colorado. The bugs sounded like rain against my windshield in Western Kansas near dusk. I think I need a paint scraper to clean the front of my truck.

After a quick stop at the REI in Denver this morning (they are having a sale this week) it will be on the mountains. My goal is to bring back pictures of wildflowers.

10 Most Recently Played in my iTunes

1. Swallows of San Juan - Alejandro Escovedo - Real Animal
2. Chip N' Tony - Alejandro Escovedo - Real Animal
3. Chelsea Hotel '78 - Alejandro Escovedo - Real Animal
4. Sister Lost Soul - Alejandro Escovedo - Real Animal
5. Smoke - Alejandro Escovedo - Real Animal
6. Sensitive Boys - Alejandro Escovedo - Real Animal
7. Golden Bear - Alejandro Escovedo - Real Animal
8. Hollywood Hills - Alejandro Escovedo - Real Animal
9. Slow Down - Alejandro Escovedo - Real Animal
10. Nuns Song - Alejandro Escovedo - Real Animal

No surprise that I've been listening to Real Animal a lot recently. The ballads on this album (Swallows of San Juan, Hollywood Hills, Golden Bear, Sensitive Boys, Slow Down) are some of my favorites. Occasionally the backing vocals are a bit smaltzy for my taste, which is kind of funny to have on an album that is nostalgic for Alejandro's punk days. I can't wait to hear these songs performed live.

Wizards v Real Salt Lake

Last night I attended my first Wizards' game at their temporary home in a minor league baseball park. While not ideal, it was a much better venue for soccer than Arrowhead Stadium. The weather was ideal, the result (1-0) was long overdue for the Wizards who had not won in 8 games, and the soccer was rather attractive. Both teams attacked agressively, if not effectively. The goal came off a Davey Arnuad free kick in the 90th minute and was deflected in off a Real Salt Lake defender's head. It still counts, though.

Davey Arnaud sets up the game winning free kick.

KC's Claudio Lopez, who played for Argentina's World Cup team in both 1998 and 2002, follows RSL's Kyle Beckerman, who has played for the US national team.

The rest of the pictures I took at the game can be found on flickr.

Cocktails

I'm not much a mixed drinks kind of guy. I like wine, I like Scotch, I like cider. My opinion usually is that if I am going to drink alcohol, I want it to be good enough alcohol that it doesn't need added sugar or juice or soda, etc.

The Dining & Wine section of the New York Times has a "Special Drinks Issue" today that looks at cocktails and includes quite a few recipes. Given my lack of interest in cocktails, I have not read any of them. I did, however, read Mark Bittman's column about the cocktail.

Bittman write The Minimalist column for the Times, and the name of his column describes his approach to mixed drinks.

Look at the pattern — you might call it the basic recipe — of these drinks, many of which might be grouped as “sours”: they combine liquor with water (usually in the form of ice), a sour flavoring (usually citrus juice) and a sweetener (simple syrup, or something more expensive and flavorful, like Cointreau). You might add a splash of soda or, if you like, fruit juice, which gets you into beachcomber or cosmo territory.

Master this pattern and you can mix hundreds of cocktails at home without a book or recipe. For me, most cocktails look like this: A stiff pour of alcohol, say a quarter cup, over ice; very little sweetener, a teaspoon or at the most two; a tablespoon or more of lime juice (which I find more refreshing than lemon juice); and, if suitable, a garnish like mint (which I chop), or an orange slice. Not only can the proportions change to your taste, they should.

The parallels with cooking are clear. You can start with good ingredients, or not. You can start with someone else’s recipe (on which there are usually a score or more variations) or make the cocktail your own. The point — and this clearly comes from the perspective of cook, not bartender — is this: Why not make cocktails from scratch, ignoring the names and acknowledging your preferences? Why not treat the margarita like a dish of pasta with tomatoes, assuming a few given ingredients but varying them according to your taste?

That's the kind of approach to a cocktail that I could get behind. Sometimes ingredients that are great on their own, also taste wonderful or even better in combination with other great ingredients. Certainly the same could be true with different alcohols. The mixed-drinks = pasta-with-a-sauce analogy makes a lot sense to me.

Real Animal...

...is here. I picked up (actually I downloaded) Alejandro Escovedo's latest, which was released today. I've listen through 1.5 times. It's good. The Alejandro albums with which I am most familiar are from the late 90's through today, so this one shows a bit of a new side of Alejandro to me. I dig his alt-country stuff from the past decade, but this one goes back to his punk and rock roots.

My first impression is that the things about Alejandro's music that I love are definitely present. Melody might not be his strong suit, but his arrangements (particularly the use of strings) are wonderful. I think I will need to listen a few more times before having anything more insightful to say.

The video below is of Alejandro talking about Real Animal.

Boot Camp

The weekend before last, I took Leo to the Stoll Park dog park. It took him about 30 minutes to find the 8-inch deep mudpit in the wooded area of the park. This was mud that was full of decaying organic matter. He was a disgusting mess.

Yesterday, it took him about 5 minutes to find the same mudpit. Since he loves to include any person he can find in the best game in the entire world (throwing a tennis ball for Leo to fetch) I needed to put him on the leash immediately or every person at the park would have also been covered in mud. I was meeting a friend there so that our dogs could play together. While all the other dogs got to frolic and sniff each other to their hearts content, Leo had to stay within the 20 feet radius of me afforded by his retractable leash.

This picture was taken a few years ago in Washington, but it gives you an idea of what Leo looked like each of the past two weekends!

This morning I took him to the dog park at Shawnee Mission Park so that he could swim in the lake. He did not get muddy, but his behavior was disappointing. After only throwing the ball into the water twice, he decided to swim along the shore, picking up other dogs' tennis balls until he ended up about 20 yards beyond the dog park boundary. He was standing on the shore, surrounded by about 5 tennis balls, wagging his tail, wondering why I didn't climb over the brush (or go for a swim myself) to get to him and continue our game.

He finally came back over to me (only bringing 3 of the tennis balls - fortunately dog parks are full of stray tennis balls. The victims of his theft had plenty of other balls with which to play) I let him swim for a couple more minutes, but the next time he made a move to swim away from me, I decided it was time to go home.

I picked up some training size dog treats this afternoon, so doggie boot camp will begin tonight. Leo does enjoy working on his commands (come, down, heel, stay, go to bed, etc.) He has trouble staying in the "sit" position for more than 4 or 5 seconds because of the arthritis in his knees, but when he is "down" he can "stay" just fine. I hope that a couple of weeks of two-a-days will get him back to more polite behavior when we visit the dog parks.

I know that this is my fault. I ought to have him practice his commands a few times a week to keep them fresh in his mind. After boot camp is over, I'll need to be sure that we don't slack off again.

Random tidbits

I've been in a blogging slump recently. Here are a few things I should have written about more extensively.

1. It turns out that I like bikes. My friends Greg and Peggie are into mountain biking. They have told me on several occasions that they think I also would like mountain biking. While Greg was out of town this past weekend, I borrowed his bike. Because of the recent rain, the mountain biking trails at Shawnee Mission Park were closed, so we rode on paved trails. I liked it. Now I'm checking out craigslist to see if I can find a decent, cheap mountain bike of my own. I wish I had done this while I still lived in Washington. The logging roads near my house would have a perfect place for a beginner to ride.
2. Obama is still great. There is a reason why this politician with center-left policy proposals is attractive to conservatives. Here is what he had to say about Father's Day.
   
3. George Bush loses his third Supreme Court ruling in a row over his detainee policy in Boumediene v. Bush. While I do have some questions about how the Constitution should apply to non-US citizens, most of the criticism of this decision has been of the "now the bad guys are going to eat our children" variety. What the Supreme Court actually decided was the Bush Administration does have to show some just cause for holding the detainees. What those critics of this decision miss is how Guantanamo Bay not only is an example of extreme immorality on behalf of the US, but it also weakens our national security. The traditional conservative George Will wrote today about how the right to petition for a writ of habeas corpus, which the Supreme Court upheld in its decision, is so fundamental to our entire system of government. I frequently disagree with Will, but other than his crack about McCain-Feingold, I wholeheartedly agree with every word in his column.
   

   ...No state power is more fearsome than the power to imprison. Hence the habeas right has been at the heart of the centuries-long struggle to constrain governments, a struggle in which the greatest event was the writing of America's Constitution, which limits Congress's power to revoke habeas corpus to periods of rebellion or invasion. Is it, as McCain suggests, indefensible to conclude that Congress exceeded its authority when, with the Military Commissions Act (2006), it withdrew any federal court jurisdiction over the detainees' habeas claims?

   As the conservative and libertarian Cato Institute argued in its amicus brief in support of the petitioning detainees, habeas, in the context of U.S. constitutional law, "is a separation of powers principle" involving the judicial and executive branches. The latter cannot be the only judge of its own judgment...

4. The McClatchy newspapers, whose reporters have consistently provided the most thorough investigation of the Bush Adminstation's foreign policy since 9/11, is in the midst of a series about Guantanamo Bay.

   An eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad.

   It is depressing to read, but explains why the Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush is actually a step towards improving US national security. It is almost impossible to successfully wage a counter-insurgency operation in Afghanistan against the Taliban and al Qaead while we continue to hold and torture innocent Afghanis. If Bush has to respond to a writ of habeas corpus, then perhaps we would finally begin (after years!!) the process of sorting between the innocent and those who truly are terrorists and would be a continued threat if they were released.
   
   

BBQ, Beer, and the Blues

During the last weekend in May, some friends from Washington came to town for a visit. Peggie and Greg moved to Kansas City just after I did last fall, while Chuck and Sheila live in Olympia. We all played volleyball together for a couple of years.

Me, Chuck, Sheila, Peggie, Greg

Chuck was wise enough to know that a trip to Kansas City just wouldn't be complete with having some BBQ and listening to some blues. Sunday night we decided to do both at BB's Lawnside BBQ. The BBQ was just okay (ever since I started doing my own burnt ends about 6 or 7 years ago, I haven't been happy with any that I've had in a restaurant) but they served Boulevard Beer and the music was fun. I think that Peggie, Greg and I will probably make more trips to BB's Lawnside.

I don't have many pictures of the weekend because I either forgot to bring my camera along, or when I did remember the batteries were dead. The few that I do have can be see here.

Is a Cylon Running for President?

Found at metamerist.

Alejandro

The Pitch (KC's weekly alternative paper) previewed Alejandro's show this afternoon at the Wakarusa festival in Lawrence. He played early enough in the afternoon that I could not make due to work.

When you watch Alejandro Escovedo live, you can be pretty sure you're watching the best band in America that night. His usual lineup often includes violin and cello in addition to a typical five-piece band. Escovedo's musicians move from the desperate, quiet spaces between lovers in the wee hours to dark urban soundscapes, incorporating strings from Lou Reed's Street Hassle and often climaxing the show with the Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog." Escovedo manages to take the musical and lyrical guts of the greatest Mott the Hoople song (or that of any other band that makes rock sound like it just might save your life) and cross them with his own unabashedly intimate and defiant vision. The Boxing Mirror was his first release after the illness that almost took his life a few years back, but his new one, Real Animal (due June 24, co-written with Chuck Prophet), is the album of an artist reborn. (D.A.)

Just a few weeks until I can get my hands on Real Animal. I can't wait. Here's video of Alejandro performing the Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog" that was mention above.


This video, while it's quality is lacking even by YouTube standards, gives you a feel of the softer side of a live Alejandro experience.