Where'd That Lake Go?

I don't know what's going on with Michigan and Wisconsin here, but I find it disturbing:
We may have to airlift a research team to the U.P. to find out what the hell they're up to. Graphic courtesy of google analytics. Maybe no one at goog has ever seen a real lake.

Science Reporting, Butchery, and Michael Eades

The world needs more Ben Goldacres. There's a lack of both good science reporting and a lack of science meta-reporting. Although I'm a fan, I can get a bit frustrated with Dr. Goldacre's writing. His tone is sometimes off. He can be circumspect or almost coy at times instead of being direct. Other times he comes off as worked into a lather. And this has me thinking of butchery.

Commonly used as a metaphor, "to butcher" is intended to imply a crude, violent, hackery of a given task at hand. Having watched good butchers at work, this could not be less apt. Skilled butchery is strenuous but also precise, efficient, and elegant. Cuts are not wasted. The butcher knows exactly where and when to use the saw, the cleaver, or the surgically-sharp knife. I am reasonably competent at cutting whole chickens into pieces, but was transfixed watching my butcher do so for a customer the other day: so few cuts, so quickly and neatly done, so tidy the results. It's time to reclaim this metaphor.

Goldacre knows when he's got a carcass to work on, but he doesn't always know how to butcher it. Which brings me to Michael Eades. His essay here is a great example of fine butchery. If you reading nothing else on his blog, read that one. If you enjoyed that, here's a more recent study that's well-butchered by Dr. Eades.

Low-Carb

I'm now a zealot.

I've got a blood test coming up on Monday (standard lipid profile), looking forward to the results. Been on it 6+ weeks, will post progress and comparative stats next week.

I've noticed that in addition to weight loss, decreased hunger, and increased energy levels, there's also a side effect of dramatically increased urge to proselytize. I'll try to be calm.

Infrastructure!

Great PBS project on infrastructure: Blueprint America. It includes video segments, radio pieces, and written articles. I recommend you start with these. And yes, I am totally envious wrt the underground trip to the tunnel-boring machine.

Field Report from The Credit War

I was at the aquarium shop today buying some more plants for my fish to destroy. I love the place -- they are friendly, enthusiastic, and genuinely like fish. I once witnessed the proprietor refuse to sell a goldfish to a girl once she let on she doesn't have a tank and was just going to put it in a bowl. He explained it's not good for the fish, and the fish would just die a very early death. She didn't care. But he did, and took the fish out of her hands and gave her her money back.

Anyway, today we were talking credit, banking, and small businesses. Like many small businesses, he uses an overdraft facility to deal with (very) short-term funding issues -- i.e. managing asynchronous cash flows. Most of the year he runs with a £3000 overdraft, but at year-end he extends this to £8000 to stock up during a busy part of the season, reducing it later. This year his bank, one of the ones bailed out by the UK government, would not increase his overdraft. He's never missed a payment and had been doing this with them for eighteen years. He was in very good humor about the whole thing but clearly his bank's letting him down.

Lermoos

This exact time last year we were in Lermoos, Austria, as we had been each year this time for five years running. It's a small village near the Zugspitze, a couple hours south of Munich into Tirol. I learned to snowboard there. Last year I learned to ski there. Both boys have learned to ski there. We couldn't go this year for a few reasons, which is fine, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss it.
My ski instructor last year was a man who also runs a mountain hut/restaurant (an "alm", although technically this just means the mountain pasture) in the summer and has a small herd of cows. He was just into yogurt and cheese making in addition to milk. Every morning in our hotel we ate the yogurt he'd made by hand from his small herd of cows on the mountain. The girlfriend of the gent who taught me to snowboard a couple of years earlier works, in the summer, as a waitress in my ski instructor's alm. I met my instructor's father, who is (still) an instructor himself, and at the time was instructing a woman in her 70s, who'd been coming for decades, and had outlived her husband by a few years, but was still spry on the skis.
I've always found the Tiroleans friendly, hearty, and filled with rosy-cheeked good humor. It is a seductive place. And the mountains.... I'm a city guy through and through, but there's something about the snowy Alps in the winter sunshine....

Food Warning

I've got a bunch of posts on food, diet, and nutrition on the way. Possibly endless. More rants than posts. I may lose all semblance of coherence and/or civility. Feel free to give them a miss.

Griddle Skills

Who knows how to fry an egg? No one in the service industry, apparently. Appalling. I've even seen eggs poached in veg oil. Disgusting. Eggs should only ever be cooked in one of two things: butter or water. Maybe olive oil, on occasion, if you've got a savory omelette going (but really, you should be using butter).

Snowstorm Fixed Our Plumbing

For a couple months we'd had a weird kind of back-pressure phenomenon in our plumbing that manifested as slow-draining toilets and gurgling noises when you'd, say, run a tap in the bathroom. It wasn't blockage in the in-house lines, and nothing ever backed up. In short, it was annoying but not debilitating. Then came the snowstorm, and our plumbing's been fine ever since. Glad we never got around to calling someone to fix it.

2 Vastly Underviewed "Kid" Movies

Would have loved to see these on the big screen:

Babe: Pig In The City
Of course, Roger gets it. Funny, wondrous sets, and a bit of wisdom. Yes, this is exactly what it should look like when you're done directing Mad Max pics and want to make one for the kids.

Peter Pan (2003)
I don't think anyone's actually seen this film. As far as I can tell, it's the only version ever to get the story right. No cavorting androgynes: the boys are boys, the girl's becoming a woman, and there's a touch of melancholy and heartbreak drizzling around the edges of the excitement and adventure.

Gaiman

I was disappointed to see the burtonesque stop-motion treatment was to be used for the Coraline adaption. There's a smoothness to the whole thing I don't like. It's not the matte accessibility of Wallace & Gromit, but rather a glossy standoffishness. To me this means the movie won't pull you into its own world (as the book very effectively and creepily does), but instead presents you something to be looked at and admired. Ooh-ed and aah-ed over. ("Hey, look how hard we worked at this!") Thus it fails to deliver the true engrossing pleasure of an old-school fairy tale. Just as I suspected, I've started to see reviews praising how beautiful and inventive it is. I am rolling my eyes. But maybe I'm wrong. The book I do recommend.

Even better is The Graveyard Book, probably Gaiman's best. (Although if you haven't read the Sandman series in total, you're missing an essential part of the canon and should go get it, immediately, and pick up some Alan Moore while you're at it if you've been slacking on that front, too.) It's a quick and very satisfying read -- tightly crafted story expertly told.

Other Gaiman books:

• Neverwhere: book adapted from his teleplay of same. If you like London, it's a very fun read, otherwise missable. Clearly still getting his prose legs under him at this point.
• Stardust: I love this book. Very much an affectionate homage of sorts to Lord Dunsany. (The movie was good, too, but I had low expectations going in. Except for the big stupid showdown fight at the end, it was fairly true to the spirit of the book, dumbed down less than I expected.)
• American Gods: Neil impressively hitting his stride here. Not one I'll cherish and re-read, but definitely recommended.
• Anansi Boys: Pants. Give it a miss. Weak effort.
• Good Omens: getting some early prose chops in with Terry Pratchett as your co-author? nice! If you haven't read it, this is one of the all-time greats of impulsive airport bookstore purchases for a long flight.

London Snow

I was going to write about the blanket of snow that covered London yesterday, but Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian says it better than I could.

Cigars

I now get cigars. Previous experience was pretty much limited to buying a convenience-store cigar in the middle of a bender, smoking it like a cigarette to simultaneously coat my respiratory tract with asphalt and carpet-bomb my brain with a megadose of mil-spec nicotine. In addition to a temporary boost of peppiness, this also generated an order-of-magnitude hangover multiplier, which was a naturally limiting factor.

But not long ago I went to a cigar bar with some good friends and enjoyed a good cigar (Macanudo Gold Label Shakespeare, a starter). Took about an hour to smoke it. Conversation and regular, but not hurried, puffs. It was relaxing, indulgent, surprisingly pleasant and social, and very civilized. I recommend it.

None More Salty

I'm not sure which is more egregiously salty: bacon or halloumi. As an experiment, I just fried some halloumi slices in bacon grease. I will be thirsty for approx 27 more hours.