Holidays

Tonights' family dinner will be Fondue Chinoise, featuring a broth from the turkey stock I made from our Thanksgiving bird. A fitting bookend to the holidays.

archive photo: evidence of fondue-chinoise dating back to January 2003

The holidays have been very relaxing. And why shouldn't they be? About ten years ago we decided we were going to do precisely nothing for the holidays except stay at home and relax. We never seem to have houseguests, although we certainly wouldn't mind them. But removing ourselves from the mad scramble to Spend Time With Family has turned out to be an incredibly gratifying and wise decision. Many parents complain a bit about the holidays, but if they're not something relaxing to look forward to, change the routine. Cancel the road trips and stay at home and kick back a bit. The kids love it, we're not stressed, it's all in all a wonderful break.

Confit-ver

I've got it. Four goose legs [or is that "geese legs", since more than one goose contributed legs to the endeavor?] done. Now the hardest part is not eating them right away. They will last for many months longer than my willpower. The house smells of bay leaf. And I've got a full litre of clear, golden goose fat in addition to that covering the legs. Will be hard not to duck into the butcher to see what's on offer to put that to use.

Boxing Day: Coffee on the Cheap

Two of my favorite and most cost-effective ways to make coffee:

1. cafetiere (aka "french press")
2. Italian stove-top maker
   

The cafetiere could not be simpler, and makes really good coffee, especially a big pot to share in the morning. The press is much cheaper than an automatic drip machine, and makes better coffee.

The Italian stove-top maker does not really make espresso, but makes really good similar coffee -- thick and syrupy, similar to Greek/Turkish coffee. It's a little bit like the old percolator coffee pots that my grandparents used to have. Very quick, easy, and cheap. I find it a perfectly good substitute for espresso, and you save hundreds of dollars on the hardware.

The only problem with having both is that you should use different grinds for each -- finer for the stovetop and coarser for the press. A quality grinder + these two things is a much better allocation of coffee-themed resources than an all-in-one machine.

I can't think of a boxing day tie-in yet. Need more coffee.

Beeb Xmas Programming

BBC1: a nifty Doctor Who special, a cute new Wallace & Gromit, and some East Enders.
BBC2: replay of the infamous Florida-->New Orleans TopGear special. Kind of an odd choice for feel-good cheer, but hopefully it will become an annual and much-cherished family holiday classic.

How To Get Good Food In London

Here we go, both Krugman and Freakonomics blogging about how bad London food is. Lazy. Let's agree upfront that there are many awful restaurants in London. I think it's simply due to low standards. High standards are why the odds of finding good food in any random restaurant are so high in, say, New Orleans. But London suffers from low standards, as often as not on the part of the tourists themselves. Sheesh. Try dropping one of those godawful "Aberdeen Steakhouse" monstrousities into a non-touristy neighborhood and see how quickly it will go out of business.

Getting good restaurant food in London is pretty easy if you're not a complete dumbass. If you don't know any locals with a taste for decent food, at least pickup the Timeout London Eating & Drinking Guide. Will be available at many newsagents. You should also, and this is true of any city, get out of the touristy areas and see how people live a little. The decent non-posh restaurants will be scattered throughout neighborhoods where people actually live. Finally, visit the markets and enjoy a little street food, too. London is not one of the great restaurant cities of the world, but still, if you can't find good food in London, you're really not trying.

Fridgeful of Goose

Picked up my pair of geese from the butcher today. Christmas cooking close to commencing. And I'm even already looking forward to traditional springtime brit-mex goose tacos.

Year In Review

I hate the year-in-review crap we're subjected to by lazy media this time of year. Maybe it seemed like less of waste of time when I was 20 and the preceding year was a full 5% of my life, but now it's just tedious and dull. We're already subjected to an overload of analysis and a dearth of hard reporting during the normal course of the year. Now it just gets worse. Too bad Chris Farley's not still with us. I'd watch his 2008 retrospective. "Remember that thing that happened? Back in, uh, april? Yeah. That was awesome."

Slicing Roasts

My rule of thumb: hot meat should be sliced thickly, cold meat thinly. Carving a roast in thick slices keeps it from cooling too quickly and keeps it from drying out. Carving cold meats thinly maximizes flavor by exposing more surface area and creates tenderness.

Think thick-sliced roast pork tenderloin vs. shaved ham. It's also possible, for some cuts, to have the best of both worlds. The best cuts of beef do well under quick, high-heat roasting, but some cuts (e.g. silverside) do better cooked longer at a much lower temperature. I bake silverside roasts pretty slowly, on a bed of sliced onions, leave it to cool completely after cooked, even to the point of fridging it after it cools to room temperature, then slicing it thinly once chilled. It's easier to cut then, too. It's good cold at this point but I prefer to mix the slices with the onions and reheat. Take it out of the oven when it's extra-rare to allow the slices to be reheated without overcooking them, or less rare to use the thing as cold lunchmeat.

I Love Cities: London e.g.1

There's a decent value-for-money Chinese restaurant in Dalston on Kingsland road called Shanghai. What's really special about the place is that it occupies what was, 140+ years ago, a pie & mash shop. The interior of the front is a beautifully eel-themed tile and wood affair that seems perfectly appropriate repurposed as a Shanghai diner. Our boys' wonderful babysitter, now a pink-haired, bicycle-riding grandmother, is a life-long east-ender and remembers when that shop used to still have live(!) eels.

I love that about cities: things built to last, with a bit of panache, and density and interest enough to keep reusing and reinventing what you already have to work with.

Same Shirt?

At lunch at a slightly posh restaurant yesterday, I passed a gent wearing a shirt identical to mine. This inexplicably delighted both of us. Must be a guy thing. We stopped short of high-fiving each other.

The Worst Kitchen Gift

Surely this must be a joke: artisanal rapeseed oil! There must be enough rubes out there to fall for this, I guess, someone stupid enough to believe that rapeseed is grown for the awesome flavor. I saw some for sale, on a shelf, in a store, so it's not a web hoax. I'm struggling to come up with a worse candidate for the artisanal treatment. Hm....

frosted flakes? "hand-lacquered with late-harvest high fructose corn syrup glaze...."
hand-crafted baking powder? extra-virgin marmite? Free-range metamucil? nope, can't do it

Cookbooks

As long as we're talking gifts for the kitchen....

A pleasure to read for anyone who enjoys cooking, but an especially good choice for anyone eager but inexperienced, someone needing only a bit of help to just get on with it: Nigel Slater's Appetite. Gets right to the heart of it, encouraging improvisation, constructing simple dishes around a few quality ingredients, and puts to rest the idea of cooking as joyless-following-of-recipes. Nigel's a fantastic writer. Disastrously boring on TV, he should never have been allowed to step away from the keyboard. This is his best work.

For meat-eaters: The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fairly LongName, and Fergus Henderson's much-revered Nose-To-Tail Eating. Hugh's Meat Book is an engrossing read, from the philosophy of meat to the introductions to different animals and cuts to treatments of different cooking methods. I often forget it also includes some recipes, which are superfluous if you've absorbed the, ahem, meat of the book. Fergus's meat book is a much shorter book that is a delight even if you never cook anything from it. Although you should! I had the pleasure of eating at his restaurant in 2002 and the roast bone marrow starter is still an all-time dining highlight for me.

For reference: normally I don't like books of recipes, but The Joy of Cooking should be obligatory, at least in American kitchens. The recent revisions are mostly unfortunate, what with horribly misguided and ill-informed attempts to inject psuedo-healthiness into the enterprise. But no matter, still very handy to have at hand. Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques by, unsurprisingly, Jacques Pepin, is a compiled reissue of two of his earliest books from the 70s, documenting basic methods and techniques. Despite the black & white photos, an excellent reference for anyone who cooks a lot, or wants to.

Christmas Gifts for Kitchens

Two of the what I've found to be worthwhile and heavily used in my kitchen.

I got a thermapen a few years ago, after years of never using a thermometer while cooking, and now I use it constantly. Sometimes just for fun. I've not yet poked it into my own thigh, but it's kind of tempting.

I've gone through a lot of parmesan graters over the years but the microplane is by far my favorite.

Hey You Kids, Get Offa My Salmon!

Who's thinking of the children?? Amazon is! [Note the age limit.]

Klaatu Remaka Nikto

I know it's going to be awful, but I'm ashamed to admit I feel compelled to see it anyway.

Speaking of Life on Mars....

In order to close the city mouse/country mouse, modern cop/retro cop circle, the followup to the original series should have put Gene and Sam into Sam's world (Gene going straight there, bypassing the quattro phase and all steps in between). A complete cycle would then require both of them to inexplicably jump 30+ years into the future, a scenario which would likely be executed in appalling fashion but could be fascinating if done with a bit of panache and speculative brilliance.

The Ukulele Craze

Ukulele fever is sweeping my kids' school. Last night my oldest escalated by going to a concert by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, and brought home a concert DVD. A little bit of this goes a very long way with me, but I did find their rendition of Life on Mars sweet. And yes, we do have ukuleles in the house now.

Mice vs. Me

Have killed 3 mice in the last few days. Just saw two more in the kitchen. I've gone on killing sprees before. The mice come and go. This recent infestation is bugging me, though. Right now I've got glue traps, a multiple-mouse live trap, and a couple of spring traps all set. I've had varying success with all 3 types in the past, but have not yet used them all at once. Baiting with various combinations of cashews, nutella, and tuna, so we'll see.

The SciFi Effect

Whereby any book that is considered "literature" (e.g. The Road) or is popular (e.g. Jurassic Park) is not considered to be science fiction.

This applies to "comic books" as well. In Ebert's best films of 2008 roundup, Roger says The Dark Knight "leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy". I don't think so. Christopher Nolan seemed to finally get the franchise to the point of reflecting the best of its origins (to my surprise and delight, starting with Batman Begins) rather than eclipsing them.

Ebert also calls Wall-E "[t]he best science-fiction movie in years", despite having awarded 2007's Children of Men 4-stars vs. 3.5 for the gentle Pixar flick. Either he likes Wall-E better or does not consider Children of Men to be scifi. I'm guessing the latter, what with no robots or spacetravel.

Thanksgiving Notes

Thanksgiving cooking was a big success. We had total of 6 adults, 6 children, although only some of the children actually ate food. I got some requests for details, so here are my after-the-fact notes. "Recipes" are from memory so may not be perfectly accurate.


chestnut dressing
4x 350g fresh chestnuts, roasted -- good yield, about 75%
bread cubes: good sandwich bread, de-crusted, cubed, dried in oven
1 lb. sausage
approx. 130g butter
1 sm. bunch green celery
2 onions
6 cloves garlic or so
1 lg. bramley apple
fresh sage
homemade chicken stock

Verdict: excellent, one of my favorites to date. Good chestnuts this year. Did not use any mushrooms this time but they weren't missed. Due to my forgetting to check if I had any stock in the freezer until I needed it, stock was hastily made from uncooked chicken backs (backs, onions, carrots, celery, bay leaves) so not as luxurious as usual roast chicken stock, but worked fine.


turkey
6.5kg, fresh free range bronze, from the Ginger Pig
cut out the the backbone and flattened the whole thing a bit
successfully avoided pushing sharp rib ends through palm of hand
quick-roasted backbone, split into sections, wingtips, and gizzardy bits then made gravy out of them while turkey roasted
rubbed butter under and on top of skin and salted it
cut deep slashes across legs and thighs to encourage them to overcook (I like undercooked white meat, overcooked dark meat)
roasted at high heat on rack on broiler pan (oven too small to fit turkey in any other way) -- 220C for 30 minutes, breast-side down, then flipped over; ultimately finished last 20 minutes or so at 200C but with the convection fan on
don't remember how long it took in oven, 90 minutes maybe, maybe less
(next time try leaving back up for first 45 minutes at 220C before flipping)
pulled out when coolest part was at least 65C
rested a full 30 minutes, loosely under foil, before cutting
pulled breasts off and cut thick slices vertically (so everyone gets skin, middle, and inner sections in every slice)

Verdict: fantastic. Legs were overcooked just like I like them, breast meat was tender and really juicy (much remarked-upon). The size was plenty for everyone, and there was plenty leftover, too.

green bean casserole
600g green beans, cut, blanched(+) until just starting to get tender, then steeped in ice-water to
250g chestnut mushrooms (no particular reason for this choice, any should work), sauteed, but not overly so, in plenty of butter
thickish bechamel using about an imperial pint of milk
medium aged english cheddar

cold green beans into casserole dish (I used 8"x8"x2.25" glass baking dish), bechamel over top and stirred in, shredded cheese over top
cooked 180C with convection fan on, then finished briefly under the broiler to put a nice crispy attitude onto the cheese

Verdict: exceeded expecations! Was really good, a hit, and a bit of a triumph for the US midwest. Definitely put it on the menu next year.


brownies
Brownies Cockaigne (1931 recipe from Joy of Cooking)


All in one small oven:

• made the gravy from the back, wingtips, and gizzards while the turkey was roasting
• made the green bean casserole and the [non-]stuffing the night before
• cooked the stuffing the night before (no need for casserole), then reheated before serving
  
• if fridged, the casserole and stuffing need to come out early to go into the oven close to room temperature rather than cold
• casserole (uncovered) and stuffing (covered with foil) were popped into the oven at 180C, with convection fan on, right after taking turkey out -- 30 minutes of resting was perfect for getting them hot; casserole was bubbly on the bottom shelf, but popped it on top under the broiler just briefly after taking the stuffing out to serve
• garlic mash, fresh cranberry sauce, gravy all done on stovetop

Leftovers:

• turkey meat went into black bean & turkey soup
• turkey carcass made excellent turkey stock
• almost no leftover stuffing or casserole, will need to make more for larger groups
  

Late To The Party: The Wire

Great show. Just started getting it on DVD. Heartily recommended.

Nice Little Ford? Not in the US

Even the least efficient version of the new fiesta would be better than most small domestic cars in the US. Is this going to be introduced in the US?

Turkey Sizing

from my butcher in London:

SMALL 4.5 - 5.5 kg Serves 6 - 10 people
MEDIUM 5.5 - 6.5 kg Serves 11 - 15 people
LARGE 6.5 - 7.5 kg Serves 16 - 20 people
EX LARGE 7.5 - 9.0 kg Serves 21 - 24 people

So 20 lbs is the ceiling. That would be what, an appetizer-sized turkey in the US?

How was your turkey?

A lot of trash-talking of the turkey out there in the blogosphoid. Matt Yglesias piled on, going so far as to suggest (maybe) braising. Egads! Hopefully no one braised their poor bird. I can't remember the last time I had a bad turkey. Still looking forward to ours since we moved the feast to Saturday. Picking it up fresh (free range, yorkshirefowl, bronze etc.) from the butcher tomorrow morning. Can't wait.

Holiday Cooking

I've sure been slack this month. But now with short days and cold weather and the holiday vibes buzzing about, Global Financial Meltdown notwithstanding, it's time to cook more. Because I don't have enough sugar-induced nausea in my life, I made a caramel sauce yesterday. It was good served warm over ice cream.

Hot chocolate
This is easy to make from cocoa, milk, and sugar. Mix cocoa powder with equal parts cold whole milk. Very weird as they don't seem to combine for a while and it's like stirring liquid powder. Eventually it makes a satiny emulsion that is irresistable. After you get over the bitterness and vow not to eat any more straight up like that, you can make hot chocolate by whisking it into near boiling milk. Add sugar to taste. Make a bunch of the cold cocoa/milk paste and keep it in the fridge. Some people get excited about adding cinnamon to cocoa. Do it if it makes you happy. I like adding dried ground chili, enough to really clear the sinuses, but I'm in the minority on that.

Chestnut dressing
Get too many chestnuts, score them with an 'X' with a sharp knife, roast in oven until they split open. Peel while hot, as hot as you can stand. I recommend buying a ton, and chucking any that don't peel quickly and easily. Roughly chop them and use liberally in stuffing. Stuffing should have some dried bready stuff, onions, celery, apple, sausage, and butter. Use homemade stock if possible. There are lots of other things you can put in there, too, but as long as you have chestnuts and butter it will turn out ok.

Turkey stock
Roast turkey stock is liquid gold. Every year I consider not letting anyone eat any turkey so I'll get a higher yield on that night's stock. Carcass, onions, carrots, celery, bay leaves, water, simmer. If dementia caused you to forget to use the pan drippings for gravy, scrape those in, too.

Goose leg confit
I like goose for Christmas rather than doing turkey again. It's beefy, much more forgiving in the oven than turkey, and basically fries itself in its own fat. I get a couple geese, cut the legs off and confit them (in the fat from the goose), wrap one of the carcasses carefully and freeze it, then use the other for Christmas roast. In theory the confited legs will last for many months, but I usually don't make it out of January without devouring them.

Mashed potatoes
Before my oldest grew out of his milk allergy, I'd devised rich mash using mayo instead of milk and butter. Usually with garlic: finely chop garlic, then steep it in generous amount of warm olive oil (heat garlic and oil in microwave, very carefully, stop when it's bubbling nicely but before it explodes). Mix garlic/oil into room-temperature mayonaise, then mash that and some sea salt into cooked and very-well-drained potatoes. I like the hand masher but some people use a machine to get things whippier. I've now got a taste for mash this way so have not gone back to the dairy style.

Geeking out on Maps

My new favorite online diversion: engrossing world maps. I bet you can't click on just one.

YAGAAWS

Yet Another Good Article About Wall Street -- worth a read if you're not already too depressed and oversaturated.

Adverbs: Comedy Gold

In the annual Parts of Speech Awards, I think adverb would win "Funniest" almost every year. Maybe a year with an enormous amount of noun verbing would be an exception. In that case, would it go to noun or verb? It if leads to a backstage fight, we can rest assured adverb would be there to separate them.

A Day Well Spent

Watching the returns pour in. Truly awesome, in the most literal sense.

Business Travel

• beepy bbc news riff oddly comforting
• $7 minibar snickers bar? more than reasonable, a great dinner!
  
• unhealthy attachment to international news readers (e.g. anjali rao)
• inability to get past obsessive hatred of LHR

International Sentiment

This pretty much sums it up.

Anathems

I've not yet started Anathem. I'm dreading it. I fear I'll read it and go into a 5000-word diatribe on the criticality of resurrecting professional editing. Please tell me I should start reading it and that I won't go mad.

Anthems

Today's Saints-Chargers game at Wembley featured live solo performances of both The Star-Spangled Banner and God Save The Queen. The US anthem works fine as a solo but is pretty lousy as a singalong (crowd cheering, rather than singing, is the perfect accompaniment), whereas the UK anthem is a fantastic crowd song but really weird as a solo.

Bojo Backs Barack

London's Tory Mayor has endorsed Obama. Yes, he's a blue-blood conservative, but the thinking kind that seems to have disappeared from the US.

uhoh... radical bunny agenda

I'm not sure how a "human culling program" will help with the rabbit problem, but kudos to South African officials for thinking outside the box! SA public, on the other hand, might want to start worrying in earnest, and keep indoors until this is all over.

Calibrating the Beef Curve

I'm calling it: 50 days is too much. I've followed the dry-aging curve right up to 45 days with great success. Just had 50. Not good. We've fallen off the backside of the curve. 28-45 days: great. That's plenty, we'll stop there from now on.

Too Late To Appear Reasonable, John

Well after the McCain/Palin campaign has shifted into overdrive down the "rile the angry mobs" road, McCain half-heartedly (or perhaps stagedly) attempts to appear reasonable. Campaign tactics, which he ostensibly controls, don't seem to have changed.

Bad News For Fish

One of the comets in our cold-water tank has disappeared. Vanished into thin air. No trace, no evidence, nothing left behind. Lacking any better explanation, I must conclude that the Fish Rapture has occurred and he was the only one pure enough of heart and deed to qualify. The remaining fish are really in for it, I guess. Maybe the shiny one is the anti-carp.

First Since Ford

Did Gerald Ford have a combover? This election might be of historic significance in that we could have the first president (Obama) since Gerald Ford who wasn't a dick, or the first president (McCain) since Gerald Ford to have a combover.

Pancakes

I make pancakes nearly every Sunday. I'm not much of a baker, and pancakes seem a bit bakerish in that they use dry, powdery ingredients and recipes expect you to be fussy about measurements. Fortunately, they are more cookish and forgiving than I expected.

I started with the basic recipe from Joy and tweaked it. I added another egg, a bit more baking powder, apples, soaked oats. Sometimes corn meal. Often whole wheat flour. I'm not strict about measuring. We're now in prime apple season, so definitely time to head back to the market and stock up, but over the summer I'd reverted to the much thinner & quicker plain, whole wheat pancakes:

mix together dry ingredients
1 1/2 C wholewheat flour
2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
3 T Sugar

mix together wet ingredients
3 eggs, beaten
1 1/2 C milk (warmed is best, you don't want the butter solidfying; and I just use my yellow mug to measure and heat the milk -- I have no idea how much milk it is, 1.5 C is close enough I think)
3 T butter, melted (just guess, don't bother measuring, or use at least 45g if you've got a kitchen scale)
1 t vanilla

fold the egg mix into the dry ingredients, don't overmix (although hard to avoid if kids are "helping")

cook pancakes on hot buttered skillet
yes, add more butter before each round of batter goes into the pan, this is no time to get shy (it's ok, we all love butter)

The recipe can be adjusted to make them as thin & eggy or thick and fluffy as you like. To the above, throw some dry rolled rolled oats into the dry ingredients before folding in the egg mixture, or add ground pecans or other nuts.


Now, for the full Apple Pancakes treatment, I have dialed in the following

mix together dry ingredients
1 1/2 C plain white, unbleached flour
2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
3 T Sugar

mix together wet ingredients
3 eggs, beaten
1 1/2 C milk, warmed
3 T/45g butter, melted
1 t vanilla

soak oats
put 1 C dry rolled oats into large, heatproof bowl, and
add a litre or so of boiling (or close enough) water
let stand 3-4 minutes (too short is better than too long)
drain/strain and rinse in cold water
make sure thoroughly drained and not hot -- oats should still
be have some texture to them

grate or shred + finely chop apples
Bramleys are by far the best. I use 2 ginormous ones or 3 merely very large ones. If Bramleys aren't available, go with something really flavorful rather than sweet. Use more than seems reasonable. I think I regularly put well over a pound of apple into this. I shred them on the big metal grater then chop the shredded mound of autumn goodness much more finely with the big knife on the big cutting board.

add egg mix to dry ingredients and combine gently
(don't overmix)

fold in soaked oats and grated apples
(both at same time) -- it will be a very thick mix now

cook on hot buttered skillet or griddle
seriously, go crazy with the butter, anyone who drops pancake batter onto a dry skillet deserves what they get

serve with maple syrup & butter
I prefer the darker grade B syrup but that's impossible to get in the UK. There's good canadian pure maple syrup available at just about every major grocery store here though. Alternatively: honey, sugar+cinammon, and/or jam.

As the Gap Widens, the Gap Narrows

As Obama's lead over McCain grows, the separation between McCain/Palin official campaign rhetoric and those unofficial attack-spam missives ("Obama is a crypto-muslim terrorist") will shrink. In other words, the close Obama is to the white house, the lower McCain will sink.

Now I Need A Better-Calibrated Oven

Succesfully cooked some eggs inspired by Herve This's experiments. My oven is not calibrated well enough to simply bake at 65C or 70C, so I had to put the eggs in a pot of water, put that in the oven, leave the temp up higher, and check frequently with a thermometer. So my eggs were in the upper 60s. Cooked, but not at all like hard-boiled. Custardy whites, yolks firm but not at all dry. Fun stuff.

Credit goes to Muse magazine for carrying a good article on Herve This.

Pls Give Palin The Playbook

Seriously, Palin should not have been tripped up by "what newspapers do you read?" The standard answer to this is to slam the "liberal media" and "the filter" and claim that you prefer your news from more "objective sources". It's already in the republican playbook, just recite the lines.

Can You Be Any More Specific?

I don't think we need Tina Fey any more. Sarah Palin has embraced self-parody with such gusto that it might be a full-time job just to try to stay a comedic step ahead of her. The latest gem is that she can't name a single newspaper. I would pay good money to get a Frances McDormand reaction shot, eyes wide, eyebrows raised, when Sarah says she reads "all of them". Ya? Can you be any more specific?

House Republicans Have Got Your Bailout Right Here

Is this a joke?? Seriously, they are taking the piss, aren't they? I admit I'm no expert, and I clearly must not be as smart as House Republicans, because I fail to see how any of this will help recapitalize the finance industry, nor do I see how this addresses so-called "main street" concerns, with the exception of the hand-waving over executive pay. A raft of corporate tax cuts?? Cap gains tax cuts?? Re-privatizing fannie mae?? (Part of the problem was that fannie and freddie were ever privatized in the first place -- i.e. they were only de-privatized recently, and we could have avoided at least a little bit of the current mess if they'd never been privatized at all.) And "stabilize the dollar"?? Really, I have no idea what they're getting at there.

Beware, I Live!

"[A]s Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America [....]" -- Sarah Palin

I know I'm a bit late to this one, but just saw it and cannot get rid of the image of a giant putin-head floating into alaskan airspace. All I can think of is [turn your volume up]: this, and this, and this.

"He recused himself...."

Really, really painful to watch Palin taking even the first questions from legendarily hard-hitting Katie Kouric. If you turn the sound all the way up during the long pause after the very first followup question, you can hear Palin thinking, "I said what they told me to say, and it's not working! It's not working! What do I do?!?? .... I'll just repeat it again."

Secret Republican Brass Meeting

"Ok, screw it. We don't like McCain and never have. He's turning out to be even worse as a candidate than we feared. The last thing we need after Bush is more embarrassment. So let's call it an election and start working on getting Obama out of office in 2012."

eBailout

I have some more great ideas about how to use public funds to bolster the economy.

1. Treasury promises to meet the reserve on every item listed on ebay. The inability to move undervalued secondhand goods is crippling our economy. Once private owners get these items off of our books, our balance sheets will look much better.
2. Treasury will buy up soup overstock. Everybody loves soup. Lack of turnover impacts (ahem) liquidity in the soup offerings. Guaranteed soup repurchase will encourage restaurant creativity and menu changes, stimulating custom and getting the "stay at home and eat catfood" crowd back on the path of helpful consumer spending.
3. Treasury will fund professional sports stadiums. Too many sports stadiums are funded by cities and states. It is excellent that these privately-owned, profitable franchises are receiving direct public benefit, but why at only the local level? Federal public monies should do their fair share to help the sports industry, too.
4. Hank Paulson will reglaze my windows. They're getting a bit shabby. I'll paint them, but I expect the feds to repurchase if I buy too much paint.
5. Treasury will buyout distressed 401k investment choices. My retirement balance sheet is looking better already.
6. Houses for Polar Bears. When fed helicopters are not busy dropping money onto wall street, they will be used to airlift foreclosed homes to the arctic circle.
   

Quite A Week For Financials

High drama.

• The Lehman building in midtown is a tourist stop now. Lots of people stopping to take photos of it, even after all the TV crews finally lost interest. I personally don't see the attraction of having a snapshot of it proudly displayed in your home albums, but I guess people want documentary evidence that they were there, or something.
  
• Also noteworthy is how crappy the NYT coverage was. As a general NYT fan and an IHT subscriber, I was appalled.
  
• I kind of felt bad for McCain. He was trying to keep up, sort of, but was obvious he had no idea wtf he was talking about, especially as he struggled to read aloud various scripted proposals his people had telepromptered in front of him. I was hoping someone would ask him to describe what the SEC, the Fed, and the Treasury actually do. Especially seems like a fair question after he called for Cox to resign. I wouldn't bet that he knows.
  

Accurate Campaign Description

On news this morning, a reporter from thestreet.com was asked about McCain's blaming "wall street fat cats", and she noted that this was how you might, incorrectly, explain it when "talking to a 5-yr-old".

Panic on the streets of midtown.... (a singalong)

Hang the blessed banker
because the instruments they constantly trade
add nothing of value to society
hang investment bankers
and the instruments they constantly trade

hang the banker hang the banker hang the banker....

Lie About Everything

There's growing dismay over the McCain campaign's increasingly blatant strategy to lie about anything and everything, no matter how provably false any given claim is. DailyKos suggests this is a test for the press. It's not. It's a test for the public. The NYT could cover nothing but McCain campaign sleaze between now and November, and for the depressingly large segment of the public that is informed solely by talk radio and a bit of tv news, it won't matter. So we'll see.

New Wii Games

One of my many next careers will be game designer. The boys and I already have 2 in the product development pipeline:

1. Pleasant Evil -- a world with lots of zombies, but instead of shooting them in the head, you train them to do housework and such.
   
2. Dr. Shinbone's Annoyathon -- we admit we haven't gotten past the title and the high concept that no mothers will like this game.

Proximity Effect

I'm still intrigued by the notion that proximity = experience in the realm of international affairs. The Kremlin is actually closer to the capital of Maine than it is to the capital of Alaska. Which state fosters the most international experience by virtue of proximity? Do borders count or just distance? Do we use the least squares method to calculate international exposure for a given place? So, for example, would Kansas rank higher than either North Dakota or Texas? Does water count differently than land? Would Hawaii be at an advantage or disadvantage? If "seeing" counts, do states with higher viewership of BBC shows or other international content get bonus points?

Football Injuries

With Tom Brady out for the year after a few minutes in the first game of the season, there's renewed talk about injuries in football and how to prevent them. The unintended consequence of more and better "protective" equipment in the sport was a corresponding rise in injuries. The only rule that will ultimately reduce injuries is one that bars the use of protective equipment. No helmets, no pads.

Can't Wait For Debate

Have calmed down now. Palin is a distraction. Lord help us if the general election turns into a referendum on whether Americans "like" Sarah Palin or not.

Where Are The Ron Paul Supporters?

Why aren't more Ron Paul supporters backing Obama? I admit I haven't studied his positions, so I could be way off the mark, but I assumed he was mostly libertarian. On the question of "small government", I don't think they'll get what they want from either McCain or Obama in terms of federal spend. On the question of civil liberties, Obama clearly wins. On the question of constitutionality, Obama clearly wins. So why are they faking smiles for McCain?

and back to the stupid

Noticed on DailyKos a link to some trite political analysis by Charlie Cook, that concludes:

But resistance to Obama is making it close--just as a stool with only three of its legs can stand but is shaky. Whether the fourth leg is defined as whites over 50, working-class whites, or whites over 65, McCain's challenge this week is to firm up his grip and keep Obama from adding the final leg to the stool.

Never mind that 3-legged stools can be really stable, what concerns me most is the thought of McCain wanting Obama to have loose stool.

Sportsetizer

Thank goodness the football season has started again! Nice break from politics, although I have to point out that NFL pre-season coverage, including fantasy football league draft analysis, has been galactically more thorough, robust, fact-based, even-handed, and higher-quality than election coverage. Oh well. That said, there's so much coverage of sports that it's still easy to find some really bad bits, too. Funniest example: an article predicting Notre Dame will do well because they have 16 returning starters. 16! That sounds good, except that those 16 starters laster year won only 3 games. So at least someone out there is excited that the same incompetent people will be getting yet another stab at screwing things up. Wait a minute-- I think I've gone back to talking about Republicans again....

Depressing

I intended to watch the RNC speeches but ended up not being able to stomach much. As Glenn Greenwald accurately put it, they were "mocking, scornful, derisive, demonizing and deeply personal". The Democrats had taken a few stabs, but the theme was that McCain was a good American who is out of touch and outright wrong on the issues. Republicans can't win on the issues, again, so they portray Obama as worthy of contempt. Who are these people? Why does this work? Again, the DNC was castigated by armchair strategists for not doing the same, but, really, I'd prefer they didn't. Even mild, cornball, non-political jabs such as "McSame" are hard to say without a cringe. I mean, we're all adults, right? I guess not. And that's depressing.

P.S. Was Huckabee's big worry about "European ideas" a coded shout-out to the anti-semites in the audience, or simply a deep fear that the US will get all fancy-pants and civilized?

Not Sold In The US

Nice review of the new Seat hatchback, gets 74 mpg per British figures (better than prius, and lower emissions than prius). Converting to non-imperial gallons, that's about 61 mpg in the US, although the US EPA estimates don't use the same "combined" algorithm that the UK ones do I'm sure. Still, it's cheap, very low emisions, and astoundingly fuel efficient. US availability: never.

More Loathing

As a followup from previous post, please enjoy this editorial from 9 years ago. Given McCain's angry grudge-mongering, and given Palin's similar approach to dissent -- first impulse: you're fired (even without the trooper issue, she has a real track record here, from firing the town librarian in Wasilla for not banning books, to firing the police chief for political reasons, to firing Alaska's entire Board of Agriculture and Conservation in order to overturn the decision to close the Matanuska Maid Dairy, which was subsequently closed anyway) -- if McCain wins, this could be the most vendettarific whitehouse ever! And given the Bush and Nixon track records, this would be an impressive achievement for his party.

Loathing in AZ

Since McCain is getting such a free pass from the gullible, the credulous, and the press when he claims to be a "maverick" and vows to "clean up washington" [cough, cough], I found this article very interesting.

governing

Mocking is easy. Governing well is hard.

Republicans have proven astonishingly good at mockery, and crap at governing. The body of evidence is clear on both counts.

Northern Decider

Evidence against the decline of the US as a superpower: Americans' ability to say anything with a straight face. Yes, Russia and China are good at this, too, but do not yet have the top to bottom mastery on display in the US -- from the craftiest high-level political operative to the common American dumbass. Rarely a better example than the support of Palin. What I've learned from both spinners and credulous corkheads:

• being a governor is just like being president... a mini-president!
• alaska doesn't have a lot of people, but it has a lot of land, and that counts for... something; and besides, small populations do not matter, unless the state is Vermont
  
• a governor is COMMANDER IN CHIEF of the state's national guard, which counts for both military and commandery-in-chief experience
• a governor is an expert on international affairs if the governor's state borders on a separate country, such as Canada, unless the state is Vermont
• because it's so executivey, governorship is better experience than senatorship, but only up to a point... it counts more than double senate experience, but then senate experience also works in reverse once you get much past a couple dozen years, so, 4 yrs senate: worthless! 20 months governor: awesome! 21 years senate: even awesomer! 35 years senate: too much, omg, wtf, lol!
• a state pondering secession is engaging in admirable old-timey patriotic thought, just like our founding fathers did every day after reciting the pledge of allegiance, unless the state is Vermont
• family values.... actually, there's too much for me to learn here, as I have no clue what this is supposed to mean! I will have to do some more research and get back to this one.
• anyway, when McCain gets mini-raptured straight to heaven moments after delivering his visionary inaugural address, Sarah Palin is going to be the Best President Ever!

The New Decider's Corrector

Does this mean Palin has to be the one to whisper corrections to McCain when he starts making stuff up, or will Lieberman be kept on staff to keep fulfilling that role?

question this

So the McCain campaign is getting vindictive over CNN doing a bit of actual pushback when an operative doesn't answer the question. This bit of questioning is fairly tame by British standards, but no matter, it's shockingly horrific affrontery! Let the umbrage begin....

Alaska, Not Connecticut

I guess this means there's no more Joementum.

Political Reporting

I heartily endorse Rick's New Rule. The problem, I think, stems for a lack of substantive reporting on politics. There's this grand Analysis of Nothing. I don't know where the reporters went, but mostly we just get commentary and "insight". There's almost no good comparative detailing of tax plans, health care plans, or other planks in the popular press. Instead we get letter grades of speeches and breathless treatments of ad tactics.

I've long wished that US newspapers would do political reporting even half as well as they do sports reporting. Sports fans in the US get the highest quality reporting of any subject anywhere in the world. It's not just analysis and commentary, but thorough and well-researched establishment of facts, plus excellent summaries of current and past state through statistics, tables, illustrations, and photos. Apply that thoroughness, passion, craftsmanship, and work ethic to political reporting, and the results would be shocking in contrast to the crap we're offered now.

FUD & FOTUGI

It must be really easy to be a right-wing political operative. There's an uncritical laziness of thought that must be a relief after you allow yourself to wallow in it. You get to talk big and sit at the tough-guy table. You have pre-defined templates for attack and defense: FUD your primary offense, and for the fallback defense is FOTUGI (Feign Outrage, Take Umbrage, Get Indignant).

Why this works, rather than being laughably incoherent, is an enduring and depressing mystery. That the same guys who castigate those facing economic hardship as "whiners" can get away with developing delicate sensibilities when they are called on their presumptive leader asking his staff how many houses he has is farcical, but not enough people are laughing.

Obesity Madness

I can't describe how unsettling it is to check back in on the US to find such drastic measures as diet pills that make you shit your pants and gastric band surgery treated as completely normal. Not only is gastric band surgery advertised on billboards now, no one seems especially surprised by this. I'd say public health officials have totally screwed up, for decades now.

Sunshine

Very nearly a sci-fi classic. What a pretty film. Stabs itself in the foot at the end when it turns into Event Horizon. Completely unnecessary. Still worth viewing, though.

My Olympic Dream

I'm gearing up for the 2012 all-drug olympics. 1500m is too short of a swim for me to fully display my awesome tolerance for performance-enhancing drugs. We'll have to get at least a 10k freestyle event added. I'm going to inject so much EPO my blood will be the consistency of a slurpee!

After Mark Spitz recovers from exhaustion due to pretending to be a decent human being for two weeks in a row, he'll be moving to London to train with my team. We've got unlimited testosterone patches, epo, steroids, asthma medicine, cialis, metamucil, ursine growth hormone, caulk, retin-A, and froot loops on tap, all for less than Darra Torres's annual budget for 2 coaches, 2 "stretchers", 2 masseuses, and 1 chiropractor. We'll be self-coached but are looking for a full-time dermatologist to deal with the acne, rashes, and needle marks.

fire-breathing phelps

I can't stop laughing at this.

Must Be Good To Be The Mayor

While senators, governors, and the like usually try to maintain some level of diplomacy, I've noticed that mayors get away with saying what's on their minds much more readily. Case in point: Bojo recently discovered that baggage-handling at major london airports sucks, calling the Gatwick handlers "chimpanzee-like" [Gatwick motto: We're not as bad as heathrow!] and continuing with,

To call this service 'Third World' is an insult to the many gleaming and efficient airports of developing nations.

Perils of Oil Dependence

Self-reliance and independence are supposedly all-American virtues. So why are we still so dependent on foreign oil? And why are we doing so little to become energy-independent?

The Carter Doctrine boils down to the idea that a threat to US oil supply is a threat to US national security. But for decades now we've spent billions heaped upon billions trying to protect ourselves against this threat -- killing our own and others, and tying our hands in terms of resources and diplomacy all over the world -- instead of eliminating the threat itself by getting to a state in which an oil supply is no longer necessary to be secure. When are we going to get serious?

Olympic Improvements

Really, there's almost no aspect of life on earth that wouldn't be improved simply by asking my advice. For the olympics:

• cycling: make this a stage race, put the time trial as the first stage, and thus offer 4 medals in total: individual time trial, individual overall, team overall, individual sprint (sprint points accrued as with other tours)
• fencing: the twitchy, single-point-at-at-time blur must go, to be replaced by timed rounds (boxing-style), scoring by touches accrued
• biathlon: add a good summer version, either mountain biking or running, with full carry of the rifle as with winter biathlon
• modern quadrathlon: add a more relevant version of the snooty pentathlon, with 4 events: kayak (flatwater), cross-country running, archery, and shotgun (trap)
  

chicago on film

Damn that is one photogenic city.

Olympic Movement

The Olympics are fun, but the pompous windbags running the IOC tend to blather on about the "Olympic Movement". I have no idea what this means. To me, an olympic movement is something that happens about 36 hours after fondue night.

bike actually works

I finished the project! sort of....

bike revamp aug 2008

My Typical Bike Project

I recently started rehabilitating my 15-yr-old city bike. It's going the same way all my home maintenance or any other such projects go. I first bought a new rear derailleur and new cassette & chain. Of course, new cables also required. I discovered I couldn't get the cassette off because I only had a campy removal tool (for my other bike) and not a shimano one. So I had to order that. At some point, later than it should, it occurred to me I was replacing an integrated shift & brake lever with just a new shifter. So I ordered a brake lever. Which arrived in time for me to realize I also needed brake cables. I cheerfully bought the wrong kind of cables. Why the world needs more than one kind of brake cable, I still don't know.

By now the cassette removal tool arrived, which allowed me to discover I was attempting to put a new 9-spd cassette onto a 15-yr-old hub that's too short as it was designed for 7-spd cassettes. Fine, this is the perfect opportunity for me to learn the craft of wheel-building. Fortunately, I thought better of this approach, and just ordered a new wheel. Later, I thought to order a new tube and tire. Later still, I thought to get rim tape. Getting the new wheel completed was disproportionately satisfying.

I put the derailleur on, put the brake lever and shift lever on, put the wheel and chain on, and started routing the shift cable. Turns out I have no tool in the house capable of cutting shifting cable housing. By now I am a platinum customer on wiggle.co.uk (not making that up). They were happy to sell me cable & housing cutters. I also got new brake pads. There was quite a bit of wear on the original pads, to understate a bit. They are yellow. I'm going to put yellow handlebar tape on as well. I will be a trendsetter -- no one else wraps mountainbike handles with cork tape. There's probably a very good reason for this that I no doubt will discover disastrously.

Anyway, it's all getting very close to complete now. But the front wheel is looking a bit shabby... as is the frame. Hm.

FUDmasters

The Republican machine is really good at generating FUD. Somehow Kerry's military service was used as evidence of his lack of patriotism. Now the doubt machine (along with typical democrat hand-wringing) is in full swing for Obama, at moment the meme being "he's not far enough ahead!"

"Bike Friendly"

is a social attribute of a city, not a physical one.

P.S. Bike lanes suck.

The Bourne UltraShakyCam

Finally saw the 3rd Bourne movie. I don't get how pointing a camera at a stationary car bumper and waggling it back and forth is supposed to depict an exciting motorcycle chase. It's pretty amazing that in 3 movies the car chases went from thrilling to tiring to nauseating.

And he should've died at the end. Talk about pulling your punches. Waste of time.

Doctor Who & Captain Slow

The next Dr. Who assistant should be James May.  And I want an entire episode in which James lays out his dissatisfaction with the sonic screwdriver.

Good Riddance Day

Happy 4th

I Surrender to the Smart Car Hype

I give up. Farhad Manjoo in today's Salon enthusiastically exclaims, "the Smart is perhaps the first modern, street-legal car small enough to completely upend your relationship with the city." It's not the first (it's not even new), it's one of many to the rest of the world (Londoners have been driving cute little urban teacups-on-wheels for over 40 years). But I can't keep ranting about small cars in big cities and the US repeatedly missing the boat. I predict that in 2011, Manhattan will discover scooters.

"That's Interesting"

common meanings in conversational use

1. that's interesting
2. that's not interesting
3. you're full of shit

RealPlayer Sucks

Unuseably bad. Fails at its core function, miserably. Just tried to watch a Gary Taubes lecture at Berkeley last year. I let the entire 1hr48min lecture load up before starting because I did not want to be interrupted by buffering. I'd downloaded the latest RealPlayer for OSX. Lots of artifacts from the get go. Audio occasionally dropped out. Before it had gone even 30 minutes, long sections of audio were dropping out completely. The video turned into almost all-artifact viewing, then dropped to maybe 1 frame per minute. There was no network traffic -- this was all entirely cached on my machine, a speedy laptop with gobs of memory. CPU was not loaded, memory was not overused, no network activity. Unbelievable. RealPlayer is shit.

Aperture vs. Depth of Field

For a fun demonstration with the boys, I took some photos showing the relationship between aperture and depth of field. They also show I badly need a tripod. I arranged some books on a table, staggered near left to far right, focused on the middle one and snapped at 1.4, 2.8, and 4.0.

More George (& Bill)

Thanks to Joe for the tip about George Carlin very recently talking about human rights. For selfish reasons, I wish Bill "The Prophet" Hicks would've stuck around to age 71 ("As long as we're making shit up, go hog wild"). Regarding heckler management, George and Bill certainly had a similar approach.

Stig + Ferrari

Vicarious thrills masterpiece on BBC's topgear site:  behind the wheel for a lap. You'll want the sound all the way up for this one.

Fun With Color and ICC Profiles

The latest firefox has added color mgmt. Load this in your browser and see what it looks like. Unfortunately, mozilla has color management turned off by default, and it's not settable via preferences. To set it, type about:config in the address bar, and then toggle gfx.color_management.enabled.

I tested Safari and, naturally, it already works out of the box.

The Key To Happiness

Low expectations.

Features: The Bane Of Good Software

Remember when PDF used to be a really great thing for read-only documents that would be viewable anywhere?  Since those days, Abode (still one of the very best software makers) keeps compulsively feature-bloating. Is this a virus originally spread from microsoft? Do you want more features on your car, or do you want it to perform better? Do you want your kitchen to be well laid-out and highly functional, or are you making it "better" by filling it with goofy appliances you'll never use? Adobe keeps adding salad-shooters to Acrobat. 

More Recent George Carlin

Shame that so few people in the UK had heard of George Carlin. Especially odd since Bill Hicks is so well known here (better than in the US I think). Sure, every obit focused on the "7 words", but when I think of Carlin, I think not only of the Class Clown era ("...but then it crosses the international date line!!"), not only the funny-because-true observations ("Everyone who drives slower than me is an idiot, everyone who drives faster than me is a maniac"), but also the guy who remained crotchety (in a smart way, not a get-off-my-lawn way) right to the end, such as George talking about bullshit, and the American Dream. 

Captain Helpful: rechargeable batteries

Last year I got serious about using rechargeable batteries at home and it's working out really well. The key is a good charger, one that won't cook your batteries. I'm using a charger from Ansmann (one with a fan to cool the batteries for fast charging, and has a switch to handle either NiCd or NiMH), and Ansmann NiMH batteries as well (2700 mAh AAs and 1000 mAh AAAs). For all our remotes, game controllers, etc, we go through these quite a lot. I'm working my way up now to replace flashlight batteries with rechargeables, trying to get to 100%.

There Will Be Blo--hey, whatever happened to Daniel Day Lewis?

I can't bring myself to watch There Will Be Blood, even though I might like it. On a recent flight, it was described in the in-flight magazine as "Daniel Day Lewis puts on an acting masterclass [....]" Which is exactly why I don't want to see it. An acting masterclass? Really? To me that means he's demonstrating rather than acting. In the trailers, he certainly seems to be thespianizing like there's no tomorrow, spewing out mannerisms and stylized flourishes like the most precocious freshman on the speech team. I'm not sure I want to see someone ACTING so damn hard for two hours. Is he playing a character or a caricature? Is he the only actor that started out great and slides a little with every performance? I hope I'm wrong. If this movie is worth seeing, let me know and I'll give it a shot.

Big Earl

Irrational exuberance in the household today since I discovered the old Sega game, Toejam & Earl, is available as a virtual console game on the Wii. Funky! I should go warn the boys about Earl being especially susceptible to the hula peril.

T5 Arrival

Terminal 5 isn't bad... for Heathrow. The one thing that did work really well, at least this once, was baggage reclaim. But overall, I think the people who designed it must not really use airports. Arrival seemed designed to create as many bottlenecks as possible. Get off plane, go down 3 escalators, take train to main building (can I walk?  even Atlanta, the Dumbest Airport Ever, lets you walk if you really want to instead of using their train), take a few escalators back up, and queue up in long passport lines. (Speaking of passport lines, the Iris retina-scanners they've introduced are too damn slow. Takes about 30 seconds per person. In Hong Kong, they use fingerprint scanner + entered code, takes less than 10 seconds per person and takes up less space. On the other hand, the Iris machines often fail to correctly detect height, which creates the comical site of adults having the stoop way down, as if peering into a bucket of tadpoles, to get their eyes scanned.)

The British Steak Problem

The British know how to raise beef, hang it, and butcher it. Fantastic stuff. So why does it all go wrong in so many kitchens? British restaurants are, as a rule, incapable of cooking steaks. Almost any restaurant in France can do a reasonable job of pan-frying a steak with inferior quality meat. Why restaurants in Britain can't is a mystery. Places such as the Hawksmoor that have tried grilling haven't gotten it right, either. It's now big news that there is one restaurant in London, the newest shouty jumped-up Gordon offering, that has an american-style proper commerical broiler. We'll see. It's a shame, because the best steaks I've ever had have been British beef. Anyone who's only eaten British beef in British restaurants thinks I'm nuts when I say that. Cooks, get with it, you're letting down the side! Farmers and butchers, have a quiet word with 'em and sort it, please.

Solving the World's Problems

Today apparently 30 Nobel Prize winners are meeting in Jordan to try to solve some of the world's big problems (energy, food, that sort of thing). Many years ago, Steve laid out this fundamental rule for IT which is also applicable here: you can't solve management problems with technology. I'm not sure what the brainiacs are going to come up with, but the problems of the world are fairly simple. Simple doesn't mean tractable, unfortunately. It's almost entirely management problems.

Comets, Catfish, and Carp

Speaking of hobbies, we've setup 3 fishtanks this year. Started with a small coldwater tank and a larger freshwater tropical tank. Had to upgrade the "goldfish" [does not contain any actual goldfish] tank, and the little tank now has a plant and a small pleco in it. Each tank has a resident pleco. I love the prehistoric look of them. The one in the warm tank is almost big enough to eat now. The surprise for me was how much I enjoy the coldwater fish. The warmwater fish are nice to look at, and I especially like the cherry barbs, but they lack the personality of the comets and carp. They are really entertaining -- active, congenial, comical. A lot of fun. They seem smarter than the other fish, too. Maybe I'm imagining that.

(Although for sheer surprise, the snail in the warm tank takes the cake. He is more active than many of the fish. He moves really, really quickly when no one is looking. I sometimes catch him perched on top of a reedy plant. Imagine a bison hunched atop a tall sapling.)

Hobby Hobbyist

I've realized that I might be a meta hobbyist. I enjoy collecting hobbies, developing a working knowledge of a subject then adopting another one rather than focusing on single-subject expertise.

Heathrow Terminal 5

Flew out of it for the first time. Underwhelming. Lots of self-congratulatory copy about it in pamphlets and magazines and posters. A major theme is how BIG it is. Why do I care how big the building is? I think they could have done a much better job. Disappointing. They built it from scratch, after other successful airport renovations have taken place recently. So why couldn't they try to do better? It falls far short of Hong Kong, for example.

Some specific things that annoyed me:

• I hate the default polished-concrete tile floor or whatever that stuff is. Why not wood? Bamboo? Something warm and inviting and calming.
• Lifts. Elevators. I like being able to take stairs or escalators as a viable option. Here, I didn't see a good way to get from train to departures without using the lifts.
• Upon entering departures, presented with a confusing array of check-in kiosks. Signage wasn't clear (maybe I'm dim, but I had a hard time seeing where first check-in, business check-in, security queues, etc. all were). I noticed people queuing up for "fast" bag drop desks on one side of the building, while other attended bag drop desks farther away went unused.
• Exiting security (security was actually pretty efficient), I was looking into the BA lounge. To get there, I had to go down an escalator, backtrack under where I just was, and go up another escalator. The guy at the desk when I checked in was actually laughing when he gave me directions on how to find the lounge, because he knew it sounded ridiculous.
• Oh, hey, terminal 5 is more than one building. Seems like a lot of flights leave from the "B" and "C" gates, which are in a different building -- the building with almost no restaurants or shops. To get there, you have to go underground, take a little train, and pop back up. Not only that, there are dire warnings about not attempting this journey unless you are certain your gate is a B/C gate, as "the return trip will take 40 minutes" if you need to come back to the main building 40 minutes! Worst case, they should've put some funky moving walkways as with United terminal at ORD. Best case, they should've come up with a better design. Seems really inefficient, expensive, and inelegant.
• Sound. Why can't they get sound right? See, if they'd put in wood floors, some nice rugs here and there, calm, incandescentish-lamps, maybe some plants, I bet the sound would've been easier to get right.

Oh well.

Ireland Says No to EU, Yes to Irony

To be fair, all attempted EU constitutions have been terrible documents. Overly complex, convoluted, inelegant. After an earlier attempted constitution was voted down in France and the Netherlands, an eloquently chagrined EU-backing Tony Blair said,

"We locked ourselves in a room at the top of the tower and debated things no ordinary citizen could understand. And yet I remind you the Constitution was launched under the title of 'Bringing Europe closer to its citizens'."

That said, I thought the Irish had a better sense of irony. They forget, in their gleeful rejection, that Ireland has been one of the biggest economic beneficiaries of the EU. More hilariously, some analysts suggested part of the "No" coalition was driven by the Irish being tired of immigrant labor!

Lush Hackney

Hackney can be surprisingly beautiful, especially on the rare summer day. Terraces in London often hide dense pockets of trees, shrubs, and various wildlife. Here's the view from my back window. I love that mock orange.

Veto This

It's a cheap laugh, but still funny when McCain promises to "veto every beer" . Vetoing beer is a dangerous strategy. The only time I remember the Indiana populice ever getting riled up about anything involving politics and government was in the late 80s when there was a proposed change to the beer distribution laws. A shocking display of educated non-apathy from the voting public put the kibosh on it. So McCain should tread carefully.

And it's a nice touch to wield the veto pen at the end. Who pulled that before? Reagan? Dole? Looks familiar. Is McCain running against Bush now?

Angry Bill

Just when he seemed to be transitioning into awesomeness as a true Elder Statesman, former POTUS Clinton started freebasing testosterone or something and went apeshit on the campaign trail. Why is he so angry? Seriously, what is his problem? Hard to figure, really. I think, and I really believe this, that no matter what he says or wants to believe about himself, the root cause was that he just didn't want Hillary to be president.

Monetizing the Rapture

Thanks to Rick for tipping me off to this gem of Christian niche marketing. After browsing the long-winded sample "documents", what really caught my eye was this bit from the why section: 

In the encrypted portion of your account you can give them access to your banking, brokerage, hidden valuables, and powers of attorneys' (you won't be needing them any more, and the gift will drive home the message of love). There won't be any bodies, so probate court will take 7 years to clear your assets to your next of Kin. 7 years of course is all the time that will be left. So, basically the Government of the AntiChrist gets your stuff, unless you make it available in another way. 

Is this a nice bit of social engineering to collect identities and financials from credulous rapture hobbyists? Even if it's on the up and up, there might be an untapped market for financial services here. I'm thinking something along the lines of reverse mortgages to start. Ready for the rapture? Sign over everything to me (including clothes!) and I'll let you continue to use it for a limited time. Next up, derivates: rapture futures and options, maybe a rapture index and apocalypse-linked notes.

Delusional House Pricing

A couple in my neighborhood bought a house 16 months ago for 585. They put about 130 into renovating it and just recently put it on the market for... 975! After a few weeks they lowered this to 925 (looking for bargain hunters I guess). I wonder if they'll find anyone stupid enough to pay anywhere near their asking price. If so, I'll likely put my place on the market to see if there's more than one sucker out there. I suspect they'd struggle to sell it at 715.  It's a row house on a nice block.  The previous high-water mark for the entire block was, yes, when they paid 585 for their house less than a year and a half ago. There really are no buyers out there. Market's still trending downward and likely is not at bottom. Anyway, folks, good luck with that!

Voting For McCain

Would be like taking a third bite of a shit sandwich.

Sequel I'd Like To See

A Ricky Bobby followup in which Ricky and Cal Naughton, Jr. move to Europe to race F1, on a new team managed by Jean Girard. It doesn't even have to be full length. I would pay just to watch Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly find out that in F1 they will have to turn right. And who doesn't want to see Gary Cole in Monaco?

Eurovision 2008

UK came in a well-deserved last place in the finals. My favorite, an awesomely 80s toe-tapper from Bosnia&Herzegovina, came in a disappointing tenth.

Small Cars, continued....

A couple more for the list of nice, fun, small, practical, efficient, well-built cars that are not available in the US:  the comically cute new Fiat 500 and the Seat Ibiza Ecomotive.  I saw an article about people in the US buying 12-year old Geo Metros on eBay (good god no!) because they wanted small, fuel-efficient cars. Given that level of insanity, it's hard to imagine the Fiat 500 wouldn't do well. Tell me the ladies wouldn't just love it.

Zombie Movies

I Am Legend -- Fine entertainment as a low-expectations remake of 28 Days Later. Doesn't have much to do with the excellent book.  Big letdown in IAL once things get explodey near the end. Compare the zombies-attack-the-compound scenes at the ends of each movie.  Here's the rule that 28 Days Later knows but for some maddening reason most film-makers don't:  humans are scarier than CGI.

Resident Evil: Extinction -- OK as a crap movie. Not as good as the RE games themselves. Wanders off the rails at the end due to mandatory tentacle monster boss fight. The RE movies seem to be getting slightly better with each iteration. According to my calculations, RE 17 will be a pretty good movie.

update, 22-may:  just watched I Am Legend on DVD, including the alternate ending, which was the original ending. The ending in the theatrical release was hastily shot after the morons at the studio had their say. The original ending is much, much better, and at least nudges it a tiny bit closer to the spirit of the book.

"For Pleasureable Eating"

How could I have made it this far in life without owning a titanium spork?

I'd question it, too

Great out-of-context headline:  "Republican Senator Questions Specter's Probe"

Cars

Lots of talk about oil and cars and fuel efficiency and even some news items today about Smart Fortwo US safety testing.  It's a shame the range of cars in the US is so limited.  All of these cars are available in europe and are cheaper than a Prius (which I personally can't stand) and get about the same (or better) mileage as a Prius or the little Smart car.  All of them have more room than a smart car but are still small and cute.  Just about all of them are more fun to drive, too.

• citroen C2 1.6HDi (diesel) -- 120 mph hatchback
• citroen C1 1.0i (petrol)
• peugeot 107 (petrol)
• toyota aygo (petrol)
• toyota yaris TR 1.4 D-4D (diesel) -- yaris is available in the US, but not the diesel
• vw polo 1.4 TDI (diesel)
• vw golf bluemotion S 1.9 TDI (diesel)
• ford focus econetic 1.6TDCI (diesel) -- focus is popular in the US, but this model with the excellent citroen engine is not available

And by far the nicest one:

• Mini Cooper D -- this diesel version is sadly not available in the US despite getting better mileage than the Prius or Smart ForTwo, being cheaper than the Prius, equalling the Prius in low CO2 emissions, and being, by all accounts, a blast to drive:  over 120 mph and sub-10 seconds 0-62 mph and good bmw handling

Sports & Primaries, cont.

N.B. It's not a tie if one team is ahead of another. It's not a "tie-breaker" of the non-tie if the team that's ahead pulls further ahead. Nor is it a "game changer" if the game doesn't change.

Understanding Primaries Through Sports Analogies

Holy sneezing buddha, she didn't really say this, did she??

We’re going to hit some of those balls out of this stadium and out of our country’s stadium because we’re going to go to bat and fix America together.  We’re going to go fight for America, we’re going to round the bases, we’re going to score a lot of runs, and we’re going to feel really good about the home team, namely the American team, the team we’re all a part of! --Clinton, campaigning recently in Indiana

The BoJo Era Begins

Hard to get my head around the London mayoral election. Quite refreshing, in many ways, compared to US politics. It's a shock that a conservative won the election at all. Also surprising is that he's so pro-bicycle. Biggest contrast to US elections in recent years is that, despite being a conservative, he seems to be very much policy focused, rather than politics focused. Anyway, Ken was his own worst enemy, undone by hubris. We'll see how Boris does.

US Primaries

For many years, conventional wisdom was that the US primary season was far too short, that too much was decided too early and that voters weren't getting a chance to properly assess candidates. Now that the country is faced with the terrifying prospect of Indiana having a say in who gets to be president, we're all in complete agreement that the primaries are far too long.

Understanding Finance Through Sports Analogies

Whoops. Twenty days ago, Morgan Stanley thought the credit crisis was in the "final innings", but now it's reverted to only the "third inning". I haven't been to a baseball game in a while, but I don't think innings progress from high to low. Maybe they do now.

If we really want to understand the credit crisis, we have to understand that it's really in a 3rd down situation, but not short enough yardage to warrant double tight ends. In fact, it's really more like a 1st down, or perhaps a 4th down, with the recession having a power play and a corner kick, just prior to a jump ball due to too many men on the field. If we have any hope of scoring a triple-double hat trick within 6 overs, the Fed will have to stay within the peleton and let the banks get the possession guy into the slot. Liquidity is running a 3-4, or perhaps a 4-3, or perhaps a box and one. It's all about moving the chains and it's a game of inches. Please remain seated for the national anthem.

e

Understatement Trading At All-Time Highs

From a Bloomberg article today:

``There've been some disappointments,'' Paul Scanlon, team leader for U.S. high yield and bank debt at Putnam Investments....

Heathrow: How Could It Be Worse?

I am astonished that billions have been spent on expansion and renovation of Heathrow for the Terminal 5 project and the net result is that everything about the Heathrow experience has gotten worse! Astonished in the first place because I didn't think it was possible for the Heathrow experience to get worse. Astonished in the second place that so much could be spent with such a negative outcome. Normally the worst expected case is that lots of money gets moved around but nothing actually changes -- quite a few people walk away wealthy but nothing gets improved. But this is something different entirely: big terminal, new infrastructure, roads, train tracks all were actually built. Nothing would have been an improvement.

I'm not even talking about the much-publicized terminal 5 problems. I'm talking about the entire Heathrow experience, starting with getting there. The Heathrow Express, which is owned and run by BAA (the airport company, nothing to do with BA the airline), has gotten worse. It was always vastly overpriced and not as quick as suggested, due largely to the 10-20 minute walk required to get to checkin from the train stop. Now it no longer goes to Terminal 4, it stops at Heathrow "central", as always, for terminals 1, 2, & 3, then goes on to Terminal 5. To get to Terminal 4, you have to switch trains. When I flew out yesterday, the schedule was such that the first train to Terminal 4 was a 21-minute wait. So Heathrow express is expensive, takes as long or longer than a cab, and is inconvenient. And there is simply no good way to get to Terminal 4 now. There's still no good way to get between terminals at Heathrow, and it's even worse now. I feel really sorry for anyone who transfers at Heathrow and has to switch terminals. Billions were spent without adding sensible rail extensions or making any other intermodal transport improvements.

Anyone with a choice and some sense will probably try to avoid Heathrow. Personally I don't think I'll be using the train anymore to get there. How is that a good result for anyone? This was bungling on a corporate scale, not governmental. Anyone describing privatization as an unqualified good should be forced to fly only from Heathrow the rest of their days. The public has a huge vested interest in the efficiency and utility of transport links, and the government should be ensuring intelligent and useful intermodal design and investment. This was a poor design implemented expensively and benefitting no one, and the private sector is to blame.

I can't help comparing it to other airport projects in recent years. This would never have happened in Munich, or Hong Kong, or Singapore. It's outrageous and sad that this was allowed to happen in London.

Closer to the Meat

Fergus (6) wanted us to sell our house and move into a flat for rent above a restaurant next to the Ginger Pig, just to be that much closer to the butcher. It was one of my proudest moments as a father.

Agreed

Gorillas are not helpful in completing the task. --Laurence Gonzales

The Problem With Offshoring

Corporations can move capital relatively freely but the labor pool has no such luxury. Thus corporations can outsource offshore with impugnity, relocating wages, but the labor being replaced does not have the choice to freely relocate. E.g. a software developer in the US might very much like to relocate to India to retain a job, with commensurate reductions in both salary and cost of living to maintain a fairly consistent quality of life, but that's not an option. There's an imbalance of power, with the corporations having more options than the workforce.

End The Bend

More proof I'm going native: tonight's London mayoral debate featured a heated argument over bendy buses. This should be a ridiculous debate topic, and it was, but I was really into it because I have an abiding hatred of those things. Shame I can't vote.

Victoria Park

Neighborhood news:  the ginger pig has finally opened here! Better late than never. And the tapas place that used to be an organic gastropub (good pub, lousy food) has closed and the space is now reopening as a pub.  I think most tapas places are doomed to failure. It's taking something that works in kind of a pub crawl model and trying to turn it into a dinner. Tapas menus are so long that unless the place has huge daily turnover, I'm leery of anything I order being fresh enough to be good. And it's not much fun unless you're in a large group.  Although I gave it the benefit of the doubt and went a few time when it first opened (inconsistent food), I'm not sorry to see it go.  

Back In The Region

The Calumet region is the little-known northwest corner of Indiana, abutting Chicago, Lake Michigan, and a hybrid rural/suburban DMZ that gives way to the yokeldom, culturally and geographically, for which Indiana is much better known. It's tempting to call The Region disowned or disavowed, but it's mostly more benignly a simple blindspot to Chicagoans and Hoosiers alike. A land of slag and ditches, oil tanks and rail tracks, industrial candles of flame-topped stacks, it presents both great ugliness and great beauty (either in turn shocking, forlorn, melancholy, bemusing) if you care to look.

The current economic crisis in the US is accurately being described as [probably] "the worst since the Great Depression", but for the Region already had its worst.  One hundred years ago it was a pulling in boatloads of ore, coal, and industrious immigrants,  extruding steel, tidy little neighborhoods, and a burgeoning middle class. Decades ago, irreversible oxidation claimed much of the miniature metropolitan infrastructure and the middle class that had built it. True tales of Gary of old are now most likely to be dismissed as myth.

But the Region is still here, and I am back for my grandmother's funeral. Granny lived in Miller when I was born. Her obituary and funeral brought out names from the extended family and friends that would sound like home to a Region expat:  Molik, Zemelko, Krejci, Kolachovsky, Miklos, Kantowski, Lobodzinski, as would tales both mundane and mythical: near-crippling injury shrugged off as minor nuisance, cars driven with 200,000 miles but no brakes, Uncle Lud offering a standing reward of $1000 to anyone who names their baby "Ludwig".... Fortunately for my boys, Uncle Lud is long gone. But they will be passed on the history, as the Region offers lessons not only of avoidance, but also of aspiration.

Arb My Auto Rental

I booked a car at Budget for a few days, in the US. Via their US website, paying with a US credit card, I was quoted 338 USD. Seemed awfully expensive. I tried from their UK site, using a UK credit card, and for the exact same car, same times, same location, was quoted 66 GBP. I opted for the latter.