He-She

The early-80s film Valley Girl had the laughable ad/poem:

She's cool.
He's hot.
She's from the valley.
He's not.

Fortunately, this flavor of tagline genius went out of style for a quarter century, but this morning I saw a bus ad for Duplicity that said something along the lines of:

She's ex-CIA.
He's ex-MI6.
Together they are [doing something that doesn't rhyme at all]

The He-She guy is back!! I was elated. [I admit I am easily amused during my commutes. Also in general.] I have become convinced it's the same guy who wrote the poster copy for Valley Girl. He'd been living as a recluse in Idaho... until they brought him back. Out of pity or respect for the elderly, no one asked if it maybe should rhyme a little, and they just went with the non-catchy, abbreviated limerick of a bus ad.

...and the ribs

Similar method for the ribs. Heavy on the rub because there's no smoke to give them flavor. I put them loosely in a pan and covered the whole thing with foil. Added a small amount of water to the bottom of the pan halfway through. Took about half the time as the brisket. Very good results.

You don't see ribs much here in the UK. Seems the meat is mostly used for sausage. Freshly made sausage from the butcher is expected here, which is a good thing. People aren't quite sure what to do with ribs. The upside is that when you do see them here, they're cheap, even from the highest quality pigs. I got the latest from the butcher for only £2 per rack!

Dialing in the Brisket

Finally got an oven-cooked brisket I'm happy with. I've got high-heat roasts down, and high-low roasts (e.g. silverside, topside) down, but an earlier attempt at low & slow with a rolled brisket was shoddy. This time I was willing to leave it in the oven until it was ready, or possibly forever. It got a dry rub, heavy on the smoked paprika, then laid it on top of a few roughly chopped onions and double-wrapped the whole thing in foil. Put it on a rack in a pan in an oven at 110-120C. 16 hours later it is tender, not disintegrating but falls apart with only a little provocation, yet still flavorful. Onions are good, too.

Still, it's only a kind of near-braising. It's a far cry from bbq brisket. Next project: turning my grill into a low&slow smoker.

Praise Thor & Pass The Lutefisk!

Things I learned this week from recent health news:

• eating meat makes you die more if you're American
  
• eating meat makes you die the same if you're British (although apparently the key to longevity for Brits is to be involved in an Oxford study)
• eating meat makes you die less if you're Scandinavian (and a good-natured Nordic "fuck you!" to those damn Mediterraneans!)

For true comedy, check out the US popular press coverage of that first study. If there's one thing even more entertaining than observational studies, it's the reporting on them.

Mechanetiquette

Lifts: I know it's exciting. You are ready to stride decisively into a metal box, to be whisked up or down to the office floor of your choosing. I get excited, too. Using a modern lift is quite thrilling. CONTAIN YOUR EXCITEMENT! When the doors open, please pause, for only the briefest of moments, to let me out before you march eagerly on to your elevation adventure.

Trains: As thrilling as lifts may be, they can't hold a candle to the giddy delight of travel on the Tube. Hold me back! I, too, simply cannot wait to spend as much time as possible inside an underground car. But again, if I could ask but the slightest imposition, that you allow me to get off the train when the doors first open, delaying your gratification the merest tick of the clock before you joyously bolt into the luxurious and welcoming interior.

Escalators: Stand on the right, walk on the left -- it can be hard to remember. And the signs can be so distracting! That's ok, I am happy to politely remind you. And I completely understand that the best place to stop, look around, and re-orient yourself is immediately after stepping off the escalator. But I hope you will likewise understand that I'm behind you on a moving piece of metal and I, too, might imminently need to occupy that same space. As unreasonable and inconvenient as it may be, if you could keep moving even after exiting the escalator, we could all simply put this regrettable situation behind us.

Revolving doors: The area immediately outside the circumference of a revolving door is even more inviting! The chance to pause, get your bearings, feel the soothing breeze of the twirling bulk at your back... ah, it was a fine fellow who dreamt up a spin on the ol' door. I know I'm being a bit of a bother again, but if you could step aside to allow me to de-revolve, I would be forever in your debt.

Unlucky

One of the charming things about British sports appreciation is the concept of luck. Or should I say "luck". No where else, certainly not in the states, have I heard so much attributed to bad luck. Your child kicks the ball gently into waiting arms of the goalkeeper? Unlucky. Your favorite pro misses the goal by a mile? Unlucky. (This goes well with the discussion, more prevalent in soccer than in any other sport, of which team "deserved" to win, regardless of score.)

This would make a good global export for broad usage. Wrong side of that credit default swap? Unlucky! Didn't get elected? Unlucky! Ran out of gas? Unlucky!

Age of Reductio

Are we in the reductio ad absurdum era? Sarah Palin, congressional hearings, Twitter....

And in the diet and health corner, we've got more and more great examples, from fat-blocking diet pills that make you shit your pants, to gastric bypass surgery (advertised on billboards in the US!), to "heart-healthy" potato chips. I'm optimistic about this in that if you take flawed hypotheses and treat them as true, the quicker you get to the end game that exposes the flaws, the better.

Watch Yer Graphs

It's pretty easy to get up to mischief with excel. Here's a wonderful post from the hyperlipid blog that recharts one of the results from Framingham in a more honest way. This seems like such a fundamental task of any science reporting: when presented with a graph, check the axes! Are they clear? Do you know what they mean? What's the scale? Good lord, what the hell is going on with the X axis? I guess the saving grace for mainstream reporting is that even the first graph would likely never make it to print (just the ostensible conclusion).

Apple Good, DSL Bad

I owe Apple an apology. I got prompt service from online chat support for mobileme. We didn't fix the problem, but went through a variety of logical steps beyond the obvious, and left it looking like a problem with my network or ISP. Which it turned out to be. Had to turn down the MTU setting to get it all to work. Which is either a Zen or a BT problem.

MobileMyAss

Apple's debaculous MobileMe offering has now completely hosed my mail. No sequence or combination or repetition of account deletion, creation, modification, or syncing has coaxed mail.app to grab any of my mac mail for non-web consumption. My latest attempt: mail's made nearly 1.4 million mach sys calls and consumed almost 8 minutes of CPU time (WTF is it doing?) and is displaying exactly 1 header, sans body, and nothing else. That's progress.

Week In Austria

Just spent a week skiing. Badly. But lots of fun. There are some things I only enjoy if I can do them well, and others I enjoy regardless of how unskilled I am. Skiing falls into the latter category. I think I may be trending to the latter category for almost any activity as I age, but we'll see.

I was entirely offline all week and watched virtually no news. Some of the guys I was with watched the news daily. Nothing they mentioned as being Big News was of any consequence or relevance to any of us. That's a tip-off that watching TV news, especially non-local news, is pretty much a huge waste of time (and angst-inducing, as Gavin De Becker has pointed out).

Now that I'm back, my mac email has stopped working. Apple's turned a [mostly useless, but nonetheless] functional but massively overpriced .mac service into a non-functioning yet still massively overpriced debacle that is "mobile me". Progress of the microsoftian strain. Apple is supposed to reduce the amount of mediocrity in the realm of technology, not increase it. What a joke.

Gary Taubes

I used to dismiss Atkins as a crank and assume it was all nonsense, despite those around me who actualy tried it doing well on it. Then Gary Taubes started writing about obesity (and salt, and cholesterol, and fat, and carbohydrates) and I perked right up. Back in the early 90s, Taubes had written a great book on the cold fusion debacle, so with me he already had a ton of credibility as a science journalist.

Meanwhile, it was getting harder and harder to ignore the increasing numbers of people I knew who had gone low-carb and shed fat like they were slimming down for the rapture. I'd gone through weight-loss cycles before, always focusing on exercise. It never lasted. Once the exercise stopped, for whatever reason, I'd find myself eating more ice cream, say (or beer). Last year I was incapacitated for a while after foot surgery, and tried cutting back on carbs. Even without being able to walk around, I lost weight. I forgot about it at the time and focused on trying to get back to running.

I still like exercise for the sake of exercise, and have fitness goals that (now) have nothing to do with weight, but I recently decided to go whole hog with the low-carb thing. After eight weeks, I've lost twenty pounds. And I feel really good. And it's all the fault of Gary Taubes.

I heartily recommend Good Calories, Bad Calories (in the UK it's got the better title, The Diet Delusion). It's not a diet book or a weight loss book. It's a fantastic piece of science journalism, and works as both a fascinating history and a study of the subject. It might be a daunting read (I admit it took me a while to get through the whole thing.) You can start with one of his lectures. He did one at Berkeley, which is sadly only available on RealPlayer, which blows goats, but here's one at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Well worth watching.