"Into The Wild" revisited (more favourably)

Back in February, I gave a rather negative review to Sean Penn's "Into The Wild" and compared it to the more constructive "The Motorcycle Diaries".

I watched "Into The Wild" again today, and appreciated it a lot more the second time around. I went back to read my prior review, though, thinking that I should not have been so negative, but upon reading it I found myself agreeing with what I wrote back then. Strange that I didn't see the same thing this time around and thought more highly of it, but still agree with my past criticisms.

I think that a couple of things have changed since then. First of all, I recognize it as a tragic story in the true sense of the word -- a person that succumbs to flaws in his character. Second of all, I no longer see it as a case of wasted life. He died at age 24. That is not necessarily a bad thing in itself because there's no gold standard that requires us to live into our seventies. If we are going to construct a society that removes so many obstacles such that we live to an average age of 78 through no fault of our own, we should give people the option of declining such an unnatural existence. To die at age 24 is probably not what he would have wanted, but if my analysis is correct then he would have preferred to live the way he did and only live until age 24 than to live the life he was about to be shoehorned into to the extent of 77.5 years old.

Another thing that's changed is that I find the idea of what he chose to do more appealing and more feasible than I used to, now that I've given it some thought. My mind has been working overtime on issues of self-sufficiency over the last 6 months more than it had when I first saw it. My recent trip also influenced my opinion -- the ability to get by with so little, and that everything you need can be carried on your back. It is a relief to know that, if necessary, I could walk away from all this rubbish and not suffer much at all from having done it, although winter still needs to be addressed.

But, again, I still agree with what I wrote in my prior review now that I'm reminded of it. From the account in the movie, Christopher McCandless seems to have been quite selfish, and the path that he chose was only possible because the society that he hated conspired to allow it to him. But now I seem much more able to separate the character flaws from the movie itself, and I think the movie itself deserves a higher rating than I originally gave it. I have adjusted my IMDB rating accordingly, upgrading it from a 6 to a 9/10. It's an excellent and sensitively-made film.

Technorati: Into The Wild, Christopher McCandless

Back from my Carnivale Lune Bleue trip

More soon. I have been away for a few days. I went to Carnivale Lune Bleue on Thursday night and did some camping in the area, carrying my camping gear on my back like a snail (I took pretty much everything I needed to go camping for 3 days on the train to Ottawa, walked about 3km to a car rental place with the 35 lb. cache on my back and then drove it all to the campsite.... and then the same in reverse). My train just got back and I'm tired! I am probably going to do a 2-part post: one about the trip and one about just the carnival.

I enjoyed the carnival, and it was a good trip, although I may have some disparaging things to say about university students from London when I get around to it!

[ update: I've created a Flickr photo set ]

Liberal movie ideas: Cardinal Sin, Anastaser, Caring for the Dead

I have three liberal movie ideas. If you decide to make them -- and I grant you full permission to do so without compensation to myself -- you will warm the hearts of liberals worldwide and find new friends in places like Canada and Sweden.


Cardinal Sin

• a childrens' cartoon based around two male cardinals like the two you see on Christmas cards sometimes. Christmas is banned in the movie, but that's beside the point. The cardinals are actually gay. A sinister Catholic connection exists because, of course, Catholics have cardinals, too, and that'd be witty. That's as far as the story goes because, once gay characters are established and a religious villain is involved, there is no need to develop a further story since the sexuality and oppression is enough fodder for a 90 minute cartoon.

Anastaser

• in a futuristic world (where everything you know is wrong, of course), Taser deaths are the chief cause of death of males aged 18-55. Through progressive social policy and studies at Canada's top universities, it was demonstrated that most women and certain effeminate male types were superior police officers due to their overwhelming capacity for compassion. Traditional men gradually disappeared from the force, having been determined to be generally unsuitable for the job. Since criminal suspects were no longer intimidated by the police, Taser use increased rapidly as most suspects decide that, rather than surrender, they can flee or fight off an officer if a confrontation seems likely. In the dramatic conclusion, police are eliminated from society because of the newfound problems with Tasers and the erstwhile criminals give up their lives of crime as a result of their freedom from oppression, thereby making everyone realize that the police were actually the cause of crime all along.

Caring for the Dead

• when zombies started leaving their graves about 35 years ago, we decided not to worry about it because, due to human rights legislation, we couldn't justify to ourselves why we should treat zombies differently from anyone else in society ("once a human, always a human" was a popular line from the NDP). Much time was spent on talk shows discussing the issue and many career promotions were gained from the displays of compassion. The zombie lobby was effective at shutting down any life-ist debate that would try to have them bear any blame for their own situation or attempt rehabilitation. Liberals let it go because they lived in rather nice communities that were rarely visited by members of the zombie community and their careers were being fed by the existence of a perennial problem. But after years of neglect and decay (haha!) in the zombie community, one of their prominent leaders gained massive support in his campaign for community reform, including such imperatives as zero tolerance for antisocial behaviour, modest dress codes, a ban on illicit drugs, and church involvement in community life. Shortly thereafter, positive results ensued and the hard left begins a war on the zombie community to end all wars, threatening to throw the world into nuclear holocaust and unwittingly increase the zombie population exponentially.

Technorati: liberal movies

Carnivàle mood

I wish I could get a framed print of something like this...

To complete the mood, here are samples of four different versions of "Manha de Carnaval":

• Robert Michaels
• Claudine Longet
• The Toreros
• Tori Amos

And one more -- why not?

• "The Forgotten Carnival" by Nightnoise

Technorati: Manha de Carnaval, Carnivale, carnival

Some great scenes from the original UK Office series

Gareth explains how to tell whether someone's really disabled or not:



Misplaced dildo:



Gareth gives health & safety training:



Tim & Gareth try to solve one of those silly brainstorming puzzles that they do at training seminars:

Tell-tale signs of grocery overspending

You may not realize that you've just overspent on your groceries until you get to the checkout and they hand you your groceries in one of these:

A boutique bag for your groceries? (the bag is probably smaller in real life than it looks in the photo -- it is about 2/3 the size of a plastic grocery bag).

Whole Foods has become something quite detached from its intent, I think. It's not simply because of the bag above, and it's probably not their fault, but it has clearly become an image thing above all else, at least at the Oakville store. Probably a quarter of the people I saw coming out of Whole Foods this weekend had only a coffee and/or muffin in their hands. Going to the supermarket to get a cup of coffee? I don't understand.

Anyway, don't worry... I didn't spend that much. I did buy some tea leaves that cost $87/kg, but a little bit of tea goes a long way (I think I spent $3 for the tea that I bought -- and this was still way too much, but it's a gunpowder tea that I don't see anywhere else). Now that I think about it, though, it was way too much. They did have some nice local apples of the Sunrise variety that were cheap and definitely very fresh.

Oh well, I don't go there that often anymore. I've found most of the things I used to get from there closer to home, and the other things were just novelties that wore off after a couple of trips.

Technorati: Whole Foods, Oakville

A peace offering: my first large garden tomato of the year

Today, I picked my first large red garden tomato of the year! Here is a picture of me offering it to the wall as a peace offering (after all, walls can hurt you if they fall!).

Technorati: gardening, tomatoes

Oven-roasted chicken drumsticks and potatoes

Today, I realized that chicken drumsticks and potatoes both benefit from roughly the same time in the oven at the same temperatures, so I put them together with success. In the process, I began to feel a bit less Northern.

Here's what's required for this particular incantation:

• 4 medium-sized potatoes: these were from the Whole Circle Farm CSA. They look like white new potatoes to me. Don't peel them, if you know what's good for you!
• 2 chicken drumsticks: leave the skin on, of course!
• olive oil
• rosemary
• 4 garlic cloves
• salt, salt, and more salt
• pepper
• lemon juice

About 4 hours prior, I put the rosemary into a mortar and bashed it up a bit, then added some salt and bashed a bit more. Then some olive oil and mashed everything together, and then added some pepper and a few squirts of lemon juice. This mixture went in a Ziploc bag with the drumsticks, was rubbed all over the drumsticks, and put in the fridge for 4 hours.

When ready, I pre-heated the oven to 425F with a cast iron skillet inside and boiled enough water for about 4 medium-sized potatoes at the same time. I cut the potatoes into wedges that were roughly 3/4" thick at the thickest part of the wedge. I put these in the boiling water for about 10 minutes. While this was doing, I peeled 4 whole garlic cloves (leave them whole).

Once the potatoes were boiled, I drained them. I took the skillet out of the oven, added about 3 tbsp. olive oil, and put the potato wedges into the skillet. Then, I threw in the garlic cloves and tossed everything in the skillet, seasoned the wedges with ground pepper, and then tossed again.

Next, I pushed the potatoes to the edges of the skillet to make a space in the middle for the chicken. I put the two drumsticks with at least a small gap in between them in this space in the middle (try to put as much as you can in direct contact with the skillet, but the potatoes may stack a little bit due to space limitations) and put the skillet back in the oven.

These should cook for 25 minutes in total. After 15 of the 25 minutes was up, I took the skillet out and turned the drumsticks and disturbed the potatoes.

After the whole 25 minutes was up, I removed what you see in the above picture from the oven and ground some salt over the potatoes.

You might want to take the salt cellar with you when you eat -- the potatoes will need a bit more salt now and again. Otherwise, this seemed to turn out really well from my perspective, and because the cooking times are similar, it doesn't really take that much attention once it's in the oven.

Technorati: chicken drumsticks, potatoes, recipe

Lehman senior executive bailout: throwing change at the bums in nice suits

I couldn't believe I was reading this: Lehman Brothers payout for top staff.

Lehman Brothers is looking for ways to compensate their senior executives for the decline in value of their stock options.

Stock options were meant to give employees a stake in the success of the company: you are granted the option of buying stock in the company at a certain time at a fixed price. If the share price at that time is lower than the price given in the option, your option is not worth anything (you would suffer a loss if you took it). So, you are meant to have an interest in the success of the company in order to preserve the future value of your stock options.

So, now that the Lehman stock price is in the toilet, the company is looking for ways to compensate the senior executives for their anticipated loss -- because the lacklustre performance of these executives has led to a tanking of the company's share price and their options are no longer valuable. Yes, you read that correctly: the company is trying to find a way to reward their incompetence now that the old measure that would have punished them for it has done its intended work and they've realized a loss.

Of course, there is a reason that the company would do this -- to keep the senior executives' wings clipped and retain their knowledge within the organization while they try to arrange a buyout of the company. But, hopefully it wouldn't come to this. You'd hope that the executives would suffer their fate, go down with the ship, and take a personal loss due to their incompetence. And then you'd hope that they'd at least try to make the best of their incompetence by seeing the company through a buyout out of a sense of personal responsibility.

But that is the passé and pejoratively old-fashioned morality of a different time. And what they're doing is not illegal, anyway.

Technorati: Lehman Brothers, stock options, bailout

The biggest waste of land I've ever seen: Winston Churchill & 401

I stopped off at the shopping centre at Winston Churchill & 401 today, on the way back from Oakville. What a waste of land!

This is a gigantic single-storey shopping centre of free-standing buildings with more parking than shopping (and much of the parking was empty). Not only did it take me about as much time as it takes me to walk from my house to downtown Georgetown to walk from Walmart to Rona in this shopping centre, but I couldn't find a single thing I was looking for! When I first arrived, since the signs at the entrance showed some of the shops I wanted to look at, I thought they'd be close by to where I ended up parking. They were not: I ended up driving from one part to the other because it would have taken me 10 minutes to walk -- across uninterrupted asphalt on a 29C day. This was not the downtown-equivalent walk above... this one would have been longer!

I had the rather-poor camera in the RAZR V3 phone with me, so I documented this massive waste of space:

Technorati: suburban wasteland, peak oil

Our body role models

Vitor sent me this one. I'd like to add that we now build our houses like TVs, too: in addition to looking pretty much the same and having content chosen from a narrow band of channels regardless of the brand, they only look good from the front.

Fake books, lamps, and a partial ban on compact fluorescent lightbulbs

Today, I was wandering around amongst and about 2 feet above the grandads and grandmas (and aisles of merchandise) at HomeSense today and saw something that I didn't quite "get" the appeal of: fake books! These were books that looked like books but were actually just shelf ornaments. They were made of either wood or plastic. They were also more expensive than books!

Who's the audience? People that can't read and want to have books on their shelf but don't know where to buy them from? Any second-hand bookshop would have some old hardcover books that would look more authentic than these home decor pieces. Or, are the potential customers meant to be those that don't know that almost any hardcover book can look suitably decor-mysterious if you remove the dust jacket?

Anyway, I left with a lamp, and am now reminded of how much I dislike compact fluorescent lightbulbs. I know they're "green" and everything, but I don't understand why there isn't more of a pushback against these things. No matter the marketing about improved colour tone, they are uniformly harsh lights that are uncomfortable to be around. Used in outdoor lighting, you can pick them out from a mile away because their cold light is just so strenuous on the eyes. I am not joking when I say that I am going to stockpile a lot of incandescent lightbulbs before they are banned in 2012.

They are not a tradeoff that's worth the consequences, in my opinion. In kitchens, they are fine. But anywhere you want to be comfortable -- living rooms, bedrooms, the room that you have your desk -- they are a couple of notches short of vile.

Technorati: fake books, home decor

Conrad Black: offensive for having standards and making overly true observations

An article on Conrad Black's time in prison appeared in today's Star, including a third-party account of something he'd said:

"Conrad remains very snobbish, despite having the same daily routine as all the other prisoners," a source told the newspaper. "He said he was shocked by how uneducated most of his fellow inmates were."

Of course, many Canadians would be offended by that. He's suggesting some kind of order or hierarchy to things, and that some things are better than others and that it's not all relative. In a way, he's suggesting that it's better to educate yourself and do something with your life than to keep yourself basic and below your potential. We don't like that, do we? We don't like to be told that someone might be better than someone else in terms of their contribution to society. We don't like to be told that well-written literature, thoughtful prose, ballet and opera, and the ability to be grammatically correct are better than tattoos, piercings, rap music, stylish wardrobe malfunctions that artistically reveal the underwear or backside, and subjectivley appeeling grammer (all of which are artifacts of prison culture).

So, of course, someone left a comment:

For the record, I am the 1 person that Disagreed. So, I thought I'd reply with truth -- that he is a talented writer, and that he created a national newspaper -- the National Post -- that added some much-needed diversity to the national discussion. But truth has no value here:

8 Disagreed, and 4 found me Offensive!

Though I make no comparison at all between myself and Theodore Dalrymple -- my respect for his talent doesn't allow it -- if they find me offensive, I wonder what they'd say have to say about this wonderful writer:

The correspondent asked me: what was wrong with tattooing, if that was how people wanted to adorn themselves?

I asked him whether he would have himself tattooed—whether he would be happy if his teenaged children had themselves tattooed—and if not, why not? After all, if he would not like it, he must have some inner objection to tattooing.

True, he said, but tattooing was not illegal. And since even I, who deprecated it, did not think that it should be illegal, there was nothing further to say about it. If tattooing was legal, it was thus of no social, moral, or cultural significance.

I tried to point out some of the cultural meanings of the vogue for tattooing. First, it was aesthetically worse than worthless. Tattoos were always kitsch, implying not only the absence of taste but the presence of dishonest emotion.

Second, the vogue represented a desperate (and rather sad) attempt on a mass scale to achieve individuality and character by means of mere adornment, which implied both intellectual vacuity and unhealthy self-absorption.

And third, it represented mass downward cultural and social aspiration, since everyone understood that tattooing had a traditional association with low social class and, above all, with aggression and criminality. It was, in effect, a visible symbol of the greatest, though totally ersatz, virtue of our time: an inclusive unwillingness to make judgments of morality or value.

Technorati: offensive, Conrad Black, uneducated, butler, tattoos

A dog made of corn: the right kind of dog for me

It's a dog made a corn, but it's not a corn dog. Actually, I think the hair is made of wheat, and the fur is made of moss. I thought this was a great piece of art.

It actually looks a bit like Rik Mayall.

I saw it on Microsoft's new PhotoSynth site, which is an interesting way of combining multiple photos of the same scene.

Technorati: dog made of corn, corn dog, Photosynth

The best offensive post ever seen on the Toronto Star website

The issue: outback Australian mining town has a 5:1 male:female ratio, making it hard for men to find partners. Mayor proposes to lure ugly women looking for husband to outback Australian mining town:

Mayor John Molony found himself under attack yesterday over comments he made to a local newspaper that read: "May I suggest if there are five blokes to every girl, we should find out where there are beauty-disadvantaged women and ask them to proceed to Mount Isa."

The winning response:

Technorati: Toronto+Star, comments, offensive

In choosing someone to be better than, you should not choose an alleged criminal

I seem to learn something new every day.

Today, I learned that Detroit's city mayor wears an ankle bracelet installed by the penal system. He has 14 charges against him, including perjury, obstruction of justice, and assault on police officers trying to serve him with a subpoena. He has been in jail this month.

Yet he continues to serve his city.

Unfortunately, one journalist thinks these problems can be used to minimize the problems at his own city's council. This is what I like to think of as the "Hummer effect": the bigger things get, the more reasonable yesterday's unreasonable stuff starts to look. Next to a Hummer, a Ford Explorer looks quite civilized.

It's a race to the bottom. Why do we say, "the fact that I did X isn't that bad because person A over there did Y"? Why can't we say, "the fact that person A did Y is detestable. In the face of this, we should fight to maintain our standards so that more of us don't one day find Y acceptable. We can start by dealing with X". Because, under the former approach, as soon as someone does Z, and Z is worse than Y, Y becomes more reasonable. In a society where a sure way for the talentless to get attention is to do Z, it is only a matter of time.

Technorati: Detroit mayor, society

If I was a farmer, but not an apple farmer, and this was a non-apple farmer's diary, I'd write...

August 18
Felt autumn this morning. Apple harvest coming soon. Wish I grew apples. Time to make hay. Off for a cup of tea.

Modern instrumental music: Tim Janis and Laura Sullivan

A few words about a couple of my favourite modern composers.

Tim Janis

Tim Janis has a small ensemble whose standout features are the penny whistle, a sweeping string section, and piano. Although many composers try to make a connection between their music and natural features, I don't always feel the connection. But, the one between Tim Janis's music and the East coast of America and its lighthouses, cliffs, and sand dunes, is very real to me.

One of my favourite features of his repertoire is that he often issues solo piano versions of the melodies he does with the ensemble. Here's an example: the ensemble version of "Star Island" from my favourite album of his ("Water's Edge"), and the piano reprise (from "A Thousand Summers").

Laura Sullivan

Laura Sullivan is a solo pianist (although there is usually a backfill in the music). She is another composer whose imagery clicks with me. "Bighorn Medicine Wheel", for example, draws exactly the types of mystical images that it intends in linking itself to the real landmark.

My piano assignment this week is "Greensleeves". To help myself with the transitions, I normally pick out the chords and just start playing anything that has them in it. Interestingly, once or twice, I have found myself playing hints of some of the melodies on her "Mystical America" CD.

Technorati: Tim Janis, Laura Sullivan

Marriage vs. slavery vs. abortion: apples and oranges comparisons, but just some thoughts...

When marriage was deemed to be so diluted as to be relatively meaningless in our current society, we decided that it would probably be OK to confer the privilege to gay people. In doing so, we effectively had a fire sale on marriage but received some "everyone gets a prize" political capital as collateral for the diminished value.

I'm starting to wonder whether we did the same thing with slavery. With the rise of the oil industry and the incredibly cheap labour-equivalent that it provided, did we decide that maybe we could score a few moral points by getting rid of slavery, and that we wouldn't miss it much, anyway, because oil would provide a cheaper replacement? If so, the demons still exist within us but have been pacified temporarily. We don't deal with them honestly today.

I'll dump a few relevant points captured from William Gairdner's book, "Oh, Oh, Canada!". First of all, that today we have trouble understanding how we would have ever abided slavery. But slaves were seen as non-persons, and even slaves aspired to have their own slaves one day. We don't do ourselves any favours by dealing with these issues dishonestly. It's horrible and sometimes leads to reverse polarity when you lead people to believe one thing and then have them find out 20 years later that they were lied to.

Gairdner's book reminds me of why I have so many problems with people like Michael Moore. In the latter's "Bowling for Columbine" infotainment feature, he has an animated segment that depicts a bunch of gun-hugging southern white folk hopping on a dinghy to Africa; ensnaring a bunch of African slaves with a fishing net; and returning in the dinghy to put them to work on the plantation. He then depicts slaves as having later been freed, the slaves migrating to the cities, and the white folks fleeing to the suburbs for refuge.

This is wrong or dishonest on so many counts. First of all, black African slaves were held by black Africans in Africa. They were sold to white people by black Africans. They were also sold to black people in America. Africa is not one big harmonious place of people getting along, and a cursory scan of the news will tell you this. It is one of the most disorganized and conflicted places on the planet. Admittedly, though, one of the worst things done to Africa was for outsiders -- colonizers -- to try and force a top-down hierarchical government onto a tribal society. The result is a government that pleases us because it looks just like ours, but that operates very differently on the inside: supreme accountability to the family or tribe is quite different from supreme accountability to all of the people underneath you, regardless of how you dress it up. When you're only interested in milking the country of its resources, to have that country run by an iron-fisted ruler who will agree with you as long as he gets to keep his relatively small and inconsequential (to the business deal) circle of friends happy is preferable, I suppose.

And on the whole issue of "white flight" to the suburbs... well, you would have done the same thing. It wasn't just an issue of race, but that the inner city schools had just become violent, abusive, and unpleasant places to send your children. The flight to the suburbs was necessary for many if their children were to have a chance at a decent education and future. In fact, if you're white and middle-class today, you may well have been a beneficiary.

In relation to the slavery issue, and also one of Gairdner's points, today, we wonder how we could ever have allowed slavery to take place. Well, we defined slaves as "non-persons" and determined that they had fewer rights than everyone else. Today, we carry out abortions against the unborn as a surgical removal of unwanted tissue because the latter are also seen as non-persons (particularly so in Canada, which is the only civilized country to have no abortion law whatsoever -- abort at 9 months, if you like, though you may have trouble finding a doctor to do it). Would we ever look upon this as a mistake in retrospect, as we have done with slavery? Once a detestable and horrible thought, we have now institutionalized and normalized the practice. Ironically, it's the same people that browbeat us with hindsight about the slavery issue most severely that also browbeat us most severely for any opposition to abortion.

My position on abortion, by the way, is not concrete: I just appreciate the arguments. I don't feel strongly about whether it's right or wrong as an act in itself. I have concerns that some women use pregnancy to manipulate men -- to have a child and then leave with an assured child support revenue. And, so, I wonder whether, in the interest of equality, a man should also have his right to choose -- that if the woman has the choice to abort his child, that he should perhaps have the right to sign away his obligation -- once and only once, and only up-front.

Of course, in the end I'd rather that abortion was never an issue and that a woman's risk in the matter meant that she would be chaste, thereby enforcing the same on men, who have lower risk. Children would be born into a marriage of their parents and raised by their mother and father. Old fashioned, I know. Take away the risk, and look what happens: moral hazard. We knew this would happen: it always happens.

I hope that we will have the opportunity to wonder, from the pedestal of a better future, how the current situation could ever have been allowed to take place.

Technorati: slavery, marriage, abortion

Local beef stew in the Schlemmertopf

Hmmm... what could be inside the Schlemmertopf? Well, I already gave away the secret.



The Schlemmertopf is an interesting cooking method, though. It has two halves: a internally-glazed bottom half, and a porous top half. You soak the top half in water for about 20 minutes (which is about the same as the ingredient prep time), throw in your ingredients, and cook it in an unpreheated hot oven, where the lid releases steam inside the pot as it heats up. Clay holds heat very well, so it gets very hot in there. A beef stew cooks in about 80 minutes. The bottom glaze makes cleaning much easier (or probably possible at all). After coming out of the oven, it takes about an hour for the clay pot to cool down so that you can touch it without gloves.

So, here's what went into this beef stew, from a local perspective:

• 1 lb. stewing beef: from the supermarket, and fresh, so I assume it was at least Ontario beef
• 3 tomatoes: the yellow and red tomatoes that I picked yesterday from my garden, plus one more that I went out and picked this morning.
• 3 green bell peppers: from the supermarket; Ontario-grown.
• 2 small onions: these were my Whole Circle Farm CSA onions from this week and last week, so they were grown in Acton (20km away).
• 6 new potatoes: also from Whole Circle Farm CSA
• 5 small/medium carrots: from Whole Circle Farm CSA
• 5 sprigs of thyme: a combination of regular thyme and lemon thyme from my garden
• 1 tsp. curry powder: imported from India, sadly
• 2 tbsp. salt: unrefined grey sea salt from France
• pepper: don't know where it's from, but it's not local
• 2 dried bay leaves: don't know where these are from

So, I think that's pretty good when judged from a local perspective! Except for the seasoning and spices, it is completely local. Seasoning and spices are so light and small that I don't think foreign sourcing is a problem.

This isn't a recipe post, so I won't bore you with the preparation details.

Here's the result below. Note that no liquid or oil was added to the above ingredients. The juices and liquids were released from the foods within during cooking.

Technorati: local food, beef stew, Schlemmertopf

Vegetable garden update, mid-August 2008

Pole beans. These are all being grown in half whiskey barrels filled with regular garden soil and a bit of my own compost. The last picture in the bean set is an in-ground experiment that hasn't produced any beans yet. The soil used there was some soil I had delivered this year. I think it needs more organic matter added to it, so I'll add a fair amount of my compost to all of these beds next year.

Various tomato varieties. We've had a lot of rain this year, and enough sun (although we could probably have done with a bit more). For these tomatoes, I dug a trench following a trellised suntrap and filled it with garden soil, manure, my own compost, and peat moss. I mulched it with cedar mulch. I haven't used any fertilizers. I've had to water it about 5 times this year because we've had rain almost every other day.

Today's harvest: a yellow tomato variety, a couple of medium-sized red tomatoes, and a couple of handfuls of a small tomato variety.


Technorati: gardening, beans, tomatoes

The 27-floor personal skyscraper: but where will the nanny sleep?

India's richest man is outdoing Oakville's Lakeshore community by far: he is building a 27-floor, 567-foot skyscraper as his family home.

I think this will seem instantly wrong to almost everyone, so I won't bother going in that. But the most disingenuous part about it -- though a sign of our times -- is that he claims it's a "green" project:

The new building is said to be a "green project," complete with hanging gardens and large garden rooftop spaces. But it also features gymnasiums, rooftop helipads, six floors of parking, and an ice room where Ambani and his family – his wife, mother and three children – can cool off.

I suppose that's OK, then: if we start building more 567-foot skyscrapers for single families to live in, the health of the planet will only get better.

As an aside, I wonder if we factored into our calculations of future resource consumption the possibility that other cultures -- ones with over a billion members -- may be prone to become even more materialistic than ours.

Technorati: single family, skyscraper

Toronto Star comments: dog loyalty

Dog articles are always fun to comment on because, along with the comments in response to gas price articles, the lines are usually clearly divided and moderate opinion is deemed threatening because it may cause partial agreement with the other side.

The article was about a dog who had stood by and allegedly protected the body of its owner, who had committed suicide in a remote area, for days after the fact. So, my initial thought was simple:

See... dogs can suffer from Stockholm syndrome, too.

Surprisingly, nobody took offense at this: 4 agree, 3 disagree, 0 offensive. I have a theory about this. I think that a lot of the dog lovers didn't know what Stockholm syndrome was. Or, being a "syndrome", they thought it was a sympathetic victim status for dogs. My post did not include the link to the definition I included above.

It wasn't until I countered the following post with truth that people got offended. This post was made by an inconclusively-named poster, "magicthighs":

The dog would have given his life defending the corpse of his beloved master. The man was dead; he couldn't speak, pet, feed or give the dog any form of affection- yet it stayed loyal and true. The dog didn't give into its primal instincts and scavenge the corpse or run away. We praise and admire such animals, yet we eat animals like pigs that are equally as intelligent and affectionate. That is the real inconvenient truth

Pigs are affectionate? Of course not. So, I responded quite reasonably:

magicthighs, are you joking? Pigs may well eat you alive if you become incapacitated in their enclosure.

The verdict from the worthy Toronto Star readership? 5 agree, 2 disagree, 2 offensive!

Toronto Star comments: oil pricing

I was posting over at the Toronto Star's website yesterday in response to an article on oil and have compiled some of the responses, of course starting with the most offensive one (in readership -- not real -- terms).

My response to the article in general, and most offensive (1 agree, 0 disagee, 2 offensive)

The Canadian dollar has declined about 5% against the US dollar since July, and oil is priced in US dollars. That has some impact, but doesn't explain the complete oil:gasoline price disconnect. Obviously, gasoline also has production and supply/demand that is separate from oil and can fluctuate separately. The fact that you have oil out of the ground does not imply that you have gasoline at the gas station waiting to be pumped into your car.

---

Galoca's post

In evil countries, such as Iran and Venezuela, gasoline costs under 10 cents a litre (and their oil companies still make a decent profit). In more "democratic" countries, however, oil must be sold at $2 a litre to protect human rights. American mothers absolutely must allow their sons to die for the right to sell gasoline for $6 a gallon. It's the most fundamental privilige that our human rights based society is all about. Yes, we must fight for $2 a liter gasoline because it's essential for democracy.

My response (2 agree, 0 disagree, 0 offensive)

Galoca, in the countries you mentioned, the government subsidizes the price of gasoline, meaning that the oil companies get the difference between their price and the sale price from government funds, and that's why they still make a profit. It's particularly silly in those two countries because it promotes domestic consumption and those two governments rely on oil export revenue -- revenue that is being reduced by the domestic consumption increase -- for a large portion of the revenue they use to run their countries.

---

canadianstud's post

There is no shortage of oil , every one I know now drive less, more people I know walk or take bus. This shortage of oil etc is all a scam. How can they justify 11.4 billion profit for 4 months? If they were buying expensive oil from Saudi's , they would be spending more too to purchase it raw, THEY are not. This is why they have MEGA billion profit. Think about it if I buy a apple for 1 dollar I sell it for 2 dollar, these guys are selling the same apple for 2 dollar and now selling it for 50 dollars theifs

My response (2 agree, 0 disagree, 0 offensive)

canadianstud, look at oil income as a percentage of revenue and you will see the their profit is nowhere near as big as you might imagine. Big billion dollar figures make good headlines, but profit margin is what's important. Some oil fields are going to be cheaper to produce from than others, and some oil companies may be in a better position than others because of that, but the trend will be for oil to become more and more expensive to produce. Also, the price needs to be reasonably high in order to keep things like the oil sands profitable.... otherwise they will shut down and we'll see consequences from that type of thing, too.

Technorati: peak oil, gas prices, GTA

Roch Voisine: Americana

I'm not entirely sure what Roch is getting at with his new album cover, but I have an idea and I like it.

Strangely (because I'm tired of saying "ironically"), this album by our crystal-voiced French Canadian friend, and entitled "Americana", is being released in Europe with no North American release date provided.

I'd love to hear this album, but the equivalent of $27 to import it is a bit too much, so I'll hope for a North American release.

Technorati: Roch Voisine, Americana

Using CAPTCHA to help scan old documents

I am very impressed by this idea.

In order to get older documents into computer databases so that they can be searched and indexed, they must be converted from scanned images of the original documents into editable text documents. There are computer programs that can do this with good accuracy, but they're not perfect -- especially with poor quality documents that don't have clearly defined characters. The computer can often see individual words by the whitespace between them, but it can't conclusively recognize some words that have illegible letters such that they could be one of a number of different letters.

So, what someone has done is found a way to plug the words that the computers can't recognize into the CAPTCHA systems that some websites require to deter spammers from posting comments on large numbers of blogs with automated computer programs, or to stop ticket scalpers from writing computer programs to buy large blocks of tickets from sites like Ticketmaster.

These CAPTCHA tools show distorted images of words that humans can quite easily read, but which fool computers. An example of Google's CAPTCHA words is shown below. The person types in what they believe the word to be so that they can prove they're not a spammer's computer program. The article writes about a system that feeds the unrecognizable words from attempts to scan old documents into these CAPTCHA systems, which millions of people use daily.
Since this is already a commonly-accepted practice that people are used to and serves a useful purpose, it is a brilliant solution, in my opinion. If the computer can't recognize the words, neither can the spammers' tools. And you get to put millions of people's five seconds of time that it takes to enter the word together to accomplish a worthwhile goal -- 1 million people spending 5 seconds of their time is equivalent to 1,388 person-hours of labour, yet nobody even noticed they were working!

Great!

Technorati: CAPTCHA, OCR

Calorie counting (and questioning my existence)

I thought it'd be interesting to see what all this calorie counting was about. I'm not on a diet or trying to lose weight (although a little bit wouldn't hurt and I don't want to gain any, either). So, there are the calories I counted today:

chick peas	109
lettuce	10
mayo	90
banana bread	328 [estimate: 80 (oil) + 100 (flour) + 50 (banana) + 48 (sugar) + 50 (misc)]
oatmeal + raisins	80
3 x tea	90 [ sugar and milk ]

707 calories. That's about all I've eaten today, and I'm not hungry (though I'm not all that energetic, either).

But, one counter says I need 2539 calories per day for my height, weight, and activity level.

I'm not sure how I'm supposed to get there from here, and I don't think I ever do.

I went for about a 2km walk at lunch at a fast pace, which, by this calculator should have burned about 215 calories. I'll probably go for another one tonight to get some groceries, for another 215 calories. And, apparently, you burn 582 calories sleeping for 7.5 hours, and 776 calories doing computer work for 6 hours, which is roughly what I did today.

That's 1788 calories I intend to burn today, not counting the ones just doing miscellaneous things and walking around that fill in the missing 8 or 9 hours (which I assume would be at least another 659 calories equivalent to sleep for that period).

That means I'm supposed to take in 2447 calories to pay for all the energy I'm supposed to use. Since I've eaten 707 calories, I have 1740 to go if I'm to follow the guidelines. And I'm on-call tonight, so I won't be getting 7.5 hours sleep.

How am I alive? The above is pretty typical up to this point in the day, although I usually have about 3 more pieces of fruit. I'll probably throw some more calories on for dinner, but I'd be surprised if I made it past 1300 calories altogether for the day.

The lightest I've ever been in the past 2 years has when I've been eating more, with less activity, but with high woman-related stress. Woman-related stress is probably the greatest weight loss aid on the planet (at least my planet).

[ update: as an experiment, I piled on about 800 calories in terms of food I wouldn't normally eat but which has as a high calorie count I could find without chewing off chunks of butter -- Juicy Jumbo hot dogs. So, with all the fixings, now I'm up to 1507 calories and apparently need about 1000 more to get my total. How do people do this?! Surely it must be a target driven by the food industry ]

Technorati: calories, recommended daily intake

Greenwashed at MEC: don't ask me the question if I only have one option

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a logical outcome of trendy mainstream environmental consciousness. At a shop -- I can't remember which one -- the shop so wanted to show off its new biodegradable plastic bags that it tried to push two on me ("they're biodegradable!"), even though I clearly only needed one at most, and could possibly have carried what I had bought with the bag on my back (which I ultimately decided to do). Still, as with the tendency to think yourself environmentally-conscious by recycling more and more paper each year even though the amount going to the garbage remains the same, it's wrong-headed to think that you can do better by doing more and more of a solution that is meant to be a lesser-evil alternative to something we already do too much of, like using disposable plastic bags.

Today, though, at Mountain Equipment Co-op, I was given the opposite treatment, and I think it's worse.

Stood at the checkout with a large bike saddle, a bottle of biodegradable camping soap, a small compression sack, and a small multi-tool in large packaging similar to that which a calculator comes in, the young woman asked me if I wanted a bag. I said yes. Judgment passed, she started looking for reasons that I didn't need one. She noticed the compression sack -- a thin-skinned nylon pack for compressing large but compressible items so that they fit into your backpack more easily -- and said that I could probably use it to carry my stuff.

Having never bought a compression sack before, I trusted her judgment. This was a very bad idea, because compression sacks have no handles and have lots of dangling pieces that are meant to be secured. First in went the bike saddle, and then the soap. The multitool wouldn't fit very well, so without asking she started to try and take apart the packaging to see if she could throw it away and just put the tool inside (nevermind if it might have been a gift, though it wasn't). She then tried to secure the large dangling parts over the top so that I wouldn't trip over them while I was walking. In the end, she gave up and simply said "I'll let you figure that out". Of course, I couldn't, because it's not meant to be used in this way.

I carried this weird looking contraption with no handles and dangling straps by its edges about 1 km back to the office. I hope it will still perform its intended function, and that no pieces fell off on the walk back. Coming back to work, I entered Royal Bank Plaza carrying what must have looked to a layman like a makeshift bomb transport, which, judging from the second looks I received, had a similar appearance to at least two other people on the way in.

All for the sake of a biodegradable plastic bag. Better to have the stuff delivered to my door from Vancouver in an oversized cardboard box for free, as is one of their other options.

I don't think this is representative of the MEC experience in general, although the yuppie lot with working class fashion sensibilities that work there do generally seem to silently browbeat you for choosing a plastic bag, based on my experience with about 4 different cashiers over the past few months. My suggestion is to charge for bags if it's such a problem. Currently, they do the opposite: they donate money to environmental causes if you decline a plastic bag. Charge and donate at the same time, if you like, but I'm a bit tired of going there on my lunch break, having no suitable bags because I carry my lunch in reusable containers, and having my imaginary green credentials silently judged just because I asked for a biodegradable plastic bag.

MEC is an otherwise excellent business. The one occasion I had to use their service department, it was the best experience I've had dealing with a company. Their products nearly always seem to be of high quality to the extent that I can go there and be sure what I buy will work well and last for a long time. Their web-based shopping service is always accurate and timely.

But how about some democracy? They asked me if I wanted a bag, and I said yes. In Canada, we are allowed to use our own judgment and make our own decisions. We do not live in a socialist dictatorship (yet) where everyone is forced indiscriminately along the so-called right path in all but the most trivial matters in the interest of positive liberty. A co-op such as MEC -- where every customer is a partial owner who has the opportunity to vote in members of the board of directors and implictly has an interest in ethically-sourced business -- should realize this before most other businesses and trust their customers to make a reasonable decision.

Technorati: MEC, environmentally friendly, plastic bags

Acey's art

I was very impressed by acey's painting of a Geisha girl, and you know I don't say things like that very often about art. I think it's because too many people, art-wise, are interested in being different rather than being good:

I hope she doesn't mind me stealing the image. I couldn't link to it directly, for some reason.

I don't like bravado

One of the things I like least in someone is bravado. I understand that it's a common and disappointing male trait: that forceful statement of a point, salted and peppered with swear words and issued in a style that's a variegated combination of assertiveness and bewilderment.

Assertiveness is a funny thing. With some of these people, you can almost see Daddy sitting on their shoulder whispering "must be assertive" in their ear. It doesn't matter if they have any reason to be assertive: people are raised in this culture to have a demeanour that is assertive irrespective of intelligence or knowledge. Confidence is a virtue; no reason required. It's almost funny these days that you can seemingly measure someone's intelligence with an inverse relationship to their assertiveness. To be polite, we don't look at track records because it'd be as embarrassing as trying to pretend that you could immaterially pull a tablecloth from underneath a house of cards. We don't point out that you contradicted what you said yesterday because you'd heard something different on the radio that morning. Social harmony requires that we don't challenge one's integrity.

It's even worse now that so many people have picked up a new verbal accent from either having watched too much useless television content or from overassociating with those that have: that constant undercurrent of outrage at the most meaningless things. Incensed at traffic? Outraged at gas prices? Just shut up before you hurt yourself, and especially stop using the word "incensed". Save the increased probability of having a stroke for things that are important. Some people can work themselves up into a theatrical sweat over having to feed their dog 10 minutes earlier these days. I'm tempted to blame Barney the Dinosaur, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Hannah Montana for this possessed form of expression, but I know that many of these overemphasized styles of communication have spread well beyond the realm of childrens' shows.

It's not surprising, is it? Everyone shouts at you these days. The radio; the TV; modern pop music that has forgotten the concept of dynamics; the neighbours that aren't even conversing with you but have taken on the dynamic range of said pop music. The first three mostly want to sell you things, and the latter remind you of the loud personalities that you just turned off on the radio. And that's before these same neighbours went and named their pets after Sesame Street characters (port) or Simpsons characters (starboard). In calling after these creatures as if they are never found, this loud neighbourhood chatter is transformed into marketing material that you can't help but link to commercial images.

William Gibson's book, "Pattern Recognition", whose main character was almost allergic to logos and brand association, seemed silly to me at the time, but I am starting to feel some companionship with that character. As loathe as I am to feel offended by anything at all, I find this kind of mental contamination to be very offensive indeed.

Technorati: dynamic range, conversation, bravado

Wondering about the important things in life

It seems obvious that, as men get older, their ears and noses get bigger. In some cases, their backsides get bigger, too.

I am trying to figure out which parts get bigger and which parts get smaller. I could do with a bigger nose, but not with bigger ears.

I don't think their brains get bigger.

I wonder if that "old people's house" smell -- that combination that once seemed to be a mild combination of wet dog, bacon fat, and aging citrus fruit -- is actually a byproduct of the alchemy that turns brain cells into nose and ear cells.

Technorati: ears, noses, bigger, aging

My imaginary friends

I've got one or two imaginary friends.

They have their own personalities and they talk from time to time. Sometimes, it's a two-way conversation and we chat.

I know what they look like. If you asked me to, I could draw you a picture of them.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that I won't eat unless they eat along with me, as some people require of their imaginary friends. And I don't require them to have a permanent place at the table.

Although I said we have conversations, they only talk when I want them to talk and when I'm not aware of them they are out of sight and out of mind. When I'm engrossed in something, they barely even exist.

These aren't the type of friends that require medication because society is accepting of them.

I bet you have one or two Facebook friends, too.

Technorati: Facebook friends

Two surprises: stone crock and Miley Cyrus's new album

In St. Jacobs, I found a 3-gallon stone crock in an antique shop and it wasn't that unreasonably priced, which surprised me. It should be great for flour, once I get a lid for it.

58+ mosquito bites from the associated camping trip didn't surprise me, though: there seem to be a lot of them this year. It has been a wet year.

The other surprise was that there are few very good pop songs on Miley Cyrus's new album "Breakout". "The Driveway" is interesting in its occasional use of teenage half-speak to get a point across, and for its sonic variety. "Goodbye" is a very good ballad, done in a country crossover style but better than most in that category. If she really did have a significant hand in writing these songs, as claimed, it is impressive.

Miley Cyrus isn't a great singer. There's a lot of evident tonal correction in the vocal tracks, and she sustains talks with a few vocal flourishes more than she sings. Far better than all rap music out there, though.

There are a few other tracks of note: she covers Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" which is a bit strange because Cyndi Lauper wasn't safe, whereas Ms. Cyrus is very safe. "Fly on the Wall" is also quite fun and interesting sonically and sounds a bit like it could be a Halloween song and we need more of those.

They could have tried a bit harder with the instrumentation, since I bet this was a big budget album. While I liked the song, "Goodbye" uses what sounds like an arpeggiated synthesizer guitar for accompaniment; "Fly on the Wall" doesn't even use real hand claps as far as I can tell because they also sound synthesized.

This isn't Morrissey or Tori, but, at the very least, the two songs mentioned above are good pop music.

Two other music-related things: my CD most listened to ever is Morrissey's "Vauxhall & I". My CD most listened to this year is Royal Wood's "A Good Enough Day".

Technorati: Miley Cyrus, St. Jacobs

The 100-mile roast chicken salad

Maintaining the theme of my previous post about the possibility of a 100-mile pizza, this roast chicken salad is much closer to being 100-mile:


So, what's in this? Let's look at the main ingredients:

• 7-8 leaves lettuce: from the Georgetown Farmers' Market, and it was from a local farmer
• 6 small tomatoes: from my garden -- the ultimate in local
• 3 chicken drumsticks: also local

The rest of the ingredients are minor but still very important:

• 2 sprigs rosemary: this is local
• 1 clove garlic: this is local, from the Whole Circle Farm CSA
• flax seeds: not local, but it is Canadian
• salt: French unrefined grey sea salt, so this isn't local. Obviously, regular salt could be used
• pepper: pepper won't grow in local climates, so this isn't local
• olive oil: of course it's not local
• Parmesan cheese: from Italy, so not local
• white wine vinegar: I think it is Italian, but there's no reason why it needs to be

So, this is much more local than the pizza was This one turned out well, so I'll post the recipe in case I ever need to find it again.

Marinate the chicken

Pick the leaves off the sprigs of rosemary and put them in a mortar and bash them a bit with a pestle to bruise them. Then, add about 3 tbsp. olive oil and about 1 1/2 tsp. salt and a similar amount of pepper. Bash and grind everything together with the pestle until a greenish paste results (the rosemary leaves won't disintegrate and may stay whole).

Pour the marinade into a Ziploc bag and put the chicken drumsticks in the bag. Seal the bag and rub everything together from the outside to make sure the chicken is properly and well coated.

Put the bag in the fridge and wait at least 4 hours (I marinated for about 24 hours, for no particular reason other than convenience).

Cook the chicken

Pre-heat the oven to 425F with a cast iron frying pan inside. When the frying pan is very hot, tip the drumsticks into the frying pan and put it back in the oven. Let cook for about 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes is up, turn the drumsticks and cook for another 10 minutes.

After the 10 minutes are up, put the drumsticks onto a paper towel and wrap them up to soak up some of the fat and allow them to cool a bit. Meanwhile, prepare the salad.

Prepare the salad

Wash and spin the lettuce leaves, tear them up with your hands, and put them into a bowl. Cut the tomatoes into pieces and add them to the lettuce. Mince a small garlic clove and add it to the salad.

Drizzle about 1 1/2 tbsp. olive oil over the salad and then about 1 1/2 tsp. white wine vinegar. Salt and pepper to taste and then use your fingertips to gently mix everything together.

Next, remove the chicken drumsticks from their paper towel and use a knife to separate the meat from the bone. Chop up the meat into bite-sized pieces and add it to the salad.

Again with your fingertips, gently mix the chicken with the salad.

Grate some Parmesan on top of the salad, to taste.

That's all!

Technorati: roast chicken salad, 100-mile diet, recipe

Toward the 100-mile pizza

Since I'm on holiday this week and can afford to spend more than an hour making lunch, I made pizza with as many local ingredients as I could.

Obviously, I named this post after the "100-mile diet" idea. This pizza isn't all that near being made from entirely local ingredients, but it's going in that direction:

• bread flour: 400g Bob's Red Mill bread flour, which is probably from the US
• semolina flour: 100g semolina flour, and I don't know where this came from
• other dough ingredients: yeast, salt, olive oil, water. The yeast may be made locally and the water came from my tap, but the rest aren't local
• Balderson cheddar cheese: I think this is made in Winchester, Ontario, which is 450km away
• fresh mozzarella cheese: this is made in Toronto, so can be considered "local"

Not doing too well so far, but it gets better after this:

• tomato sauce: the olive oil obviously isn't from here, but the basil is from my backyard and the tomatoes I used to make it are a combination of Whole Circle Farm CSA tomatoes (20km away) and tomatoes from my own garden. The garlic was also from the CSA, but the salt and pepper were likely not even from North America.
• mushrooms: Ontario mushrooms, so probably local since you grow them indoors
• zucchini: local (from the Whole Circle Farm CSA)
• swiss chard: also from the CSA
• tomatoes: from my garden

So, could this be a locally-made pizza? Mostly, I think it could. The parts that couldn't be are the pepper and olive oil. Cheese can be made anywhere; salt could probably be produced locally; wheat is grown in Ontario, although I'm not sure about semolina flour (but this is an optional ingredient and could be replaced with wheat flour).

Technorati: pizza, local ingredients, 100-mile diet, cooking

Organic cigarettes: for when you want your carcinogens to be 100% natural

Apparently, you can now buy organic cigarettes. They are manufactured by the Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company:

Although they have higher levels of nicotine and tar than conventional
smokes, the all-natural cigarettes contain none of the many substances that major tobacco companies have disclosed are added to their products.

The CEO wouldn't smoke them himself, however:

Sommers stops short of claiming his American Spirit cigarettes are healthy, but disingenuously notes that no studies have been done on them. A health-conscious runner, he doesn’t smoke.

Would you believe that I saw the ad for this in Mother Earth News, of all places? Their tagline is "The Original Guide to Living Wisely".

Technorati: organic cigarettes

On what it means to be educated

In about a year or so, I'll have finished my Masters degree. The thought of that doesn't cause much of a stir. When I was forced to participate in my grade 8 graduation, I thought it was silly (and it was) because nothing had been accomplished and I was embarrassed by it; I'd simply earned the privilege of being able to go to school for another 5 years and to dress up like I knew what I was talking about. When I graduated high school, I was unimpressed: it's wasn't a university degree, after all, and what can you really do with it? And when I got my university degree, I didn't really mind all that much. It was just a Bachelor's degree, and not anything that I should feel too proud about. I was merely one of millions. Far fewer go on to get Masters and Ph.Ds.

So, when I get my Masters degree, I will probably feel about the same. There are far more accomplished people out there, and I'm not even close to being able to consider myself within reach of being close to what any of them have accomplished. I'm not playing in some kind of special olympics, so what's to feel majestic about?

But, then again, I'm not someone that looks for an excuse to have a party. I'm not sure what I would want to have a party about. I'll probably let you know when I figure it out.

That's the problem with a plan, and I can see why people may sometimes set out to precipitate personal crises in their own lives in order to shake things up a bit; or make mischief on the road to live dangerously for once. I'd never cause such harm to myself and I look down on people that do, but I understand where it comes from. I planned to buy a house, for example. After some years of preparation, mission accomplished. It felt like buying a big ice cream. The pieces fall into place so predictably and so methodically that, by the time the goal is reached... well, of course it was reached.

Beside that, though, I genuinely feel that education isn't what it used to be. My 4-year Bachelor's degree that I earned in 2001 isn't of equivalent value to the same degree earned by someone in 1971. 30 years ago, education was harder and even if you got a grade of C, such a grade represented a significant transformation in your character and capacity. Today, a C means that you paid your tuition and an A doesn't even guarantee what a C used to.

I'm a bit embarrassed by the fact that I'll be handed a Masters degree -- probably with a 4.0 GPA -- for doing what I've been doing over the past 6 years (I've been doing it part-time while working). I wasn't impressed by my peers in the classes that I've been to -- many were "bare minimum" types that took without giving back -- and I wasn't impressed by the professors that failed to maintain high standards.

This wasn't a degree mill, either: it was an accredited state school in the US. Worse, it wasn't cheap. My various employers contributed to the final bill, but in the end I'll have paid more than half of it myself, which is no less than $13,000. In the home stretch -- the past 2 years -- I have paid everything, which is about $5,200 a year. Plus a mortgage. On a relatively average salary. If I had had to take on debt to get this degree, I wouldn't do it. But, then, if the money isn't going toward my mortgage then aren't I effectively paying my mortgage's interest rate on that tuition money in foregoing the opportunity to pay the mortgage down? Of course I am, as I am with everything else I choose to buy instead of paying off the mortgage. That's the correct and only way to look at it.

An older friend of mine convinced me to continue my education. He thought that, with the globalization of IT, it would become more and more important that people in Western countries have higher levels of education in order to be assigned jobs that were more abstract and couldn't be done so easily in an offshore outsourcing arrangement. He was right, of course, but I still have doubts whether it'll be useful for the majority of my working life. Things move so slowly that outsourcing hasn't touched me to the extent that it should have by now. I still don't need to be all that educated to do my current job.

That friend of mine will have his Ph.D soon. He thinks I should do the same. I'm not so sure, It's tedious, and I'm afraid of going further because, the further you go, the more you are tempted to feel entitled to something because of your credentials; and the more tempted you are to feel disappointed when you don't get it (or, in my case, don't want it). And that's another thing: I keep snorting this education stuff as if I have some kind of irrational addiction, because I really don't have a career plan and I'm happy just to be occupied. The work environment and its silly behaviour of politics is what I get tired of, and not the work I'm doing.

My field of study -- Information Technology -- is not the kind of thing you study for the sake of personal enrichment irrespective of economic value. You do it to increase your knowledge in order to further your career by proving that you know something to those that don't know you. It's not like arts or philosophy, which have an intrinsic usefulness and benefit to the person (and to society, when more people possess a cultural education), whether or not its used for economic production. This doesn't mean that I value arts students that go in that direction because they don't know what else they'd do.

Because of what I said at the top of the post, I'm not sure I'd ever feel a sense of entitlement, but I have seen it in some people as they become more educated. There's a strange thing that happens somewhere along the way, and they start to believe that they have a higher ability to know things without understanding simply because they have a credential. They lose the capacity for self-doubt -- the quality that makes you question what you believe and go back two or three more times to make sure that you understood something correctly. They start to believe that, because they are an expert in one narrow subfield of a field, that this means their opinions on almost everything are somehow more valid because someone's given them an expensive piece of paper that says they "know stuff". They'll tell you things that you know aren't true and that you know they grasped from reading something once and making up the parts that didn't make sense by drawing from their so-called special powers and imaginary track record of success in one-way conversation, and they react as if you're stupid if you refute them.

It's absolutely true that an educated person's opinions are more likely to be more accurate and nuanced than those of someone who is uneducated, but your arguments have to stand on their own: "I'm educated" isn't enough to win the argument, and the use of credentials to justify conformance to an ideology or prior-held belief which has nothing to do with the education is particularly sinister. Look for a Ph.D that denies the holocaust, and you will find one. Likewise, you will find plenty of welfare state advocates that use the credentials confirming their education in unrelated matters to show you with a fist that they're right.

As soon as you use education and only education to bolster your opinion in the limelight, you have lost faith in democracy. Because what is the value of a vote that holds lesser value than your own? Indeed, many of these types would rather live under a dictatorship that puts forth their own view of the world. Dig and ask the right questions and you'll find it to be true.

At the same time, though, educated people with credentials have proven themselves to be able to think within a structure and apply some degree of logic to their thought. At one time in their life, they were capable of this; and the older their degree, the higher the standard against which they were measured. There's value in that, I think. But if you have a society like ours that doesn't demand it of them consistently and they don't expose themselves to contrary opinion and have honest and moderate inner dialogue set against their belief structure, this quality fades with time. If you don't use it, you lose it: that they could at one time do this doesn't mean that they can do it today. If they haven't exercised the muscle, they may be indistinguishable from someone less educated.

In corroboration, I'm not sure academia is what it once was. It's unquestioningly morally liberal at times, in ways that contradict the image of a university as being full of people that are intelligently challenging the status quo and always want to be proven wrong. These days, you have professors that are childish in their infighting and that become outraged when their ideas are challenged. Some portions of universities are like asylums full of people that have lost their capacity for self-doubt, as I described above.

And education is a near-perfect racket where the victims rarely complain: people who have invested four years of their lives and who have spent large sums of money that may hobble them with debt for years in obtaining a credential, and who receive some level of respect simply for having the stripes, are not likely to speak out against its value. Those that do have the requisite courage and independence are likely to be deemed people that couldn't cut it, and perhaps quite rightly so, on average.

So, do I want to be a part of that? I don't think I ever would be. Do I want to implicated by association? Not really. Do I see any value in further education in my field? Not really; I'd rather learn more about the world we live in than the one we've created with silicon.

When I'm finished, I think I'll try going it alone with books. The most interesting writers I've read are those that have to communicate effectively because they don't assume you'll be impressed simply by their credentials. Those with useful controversial opinion aren't shackled by a good reputation that does not vary according to an independent measure of the quality of their ideas and writing. And, you can buy a lot of books for $13,000 -- particularly ones not written by academics.

Technorati: education

P.S. I'm not going to put double quotes around "education". I'm so tired of double quotes. Some people might as well put double quotes around the whole of their existence. Not me, if I can help it.

I wouldn't normally do this kind of thing

I wouldn't normally post this kind of thing, but I saw a quote in one place, combined with a picture in another, and I just thought the whole thing was so funny.

Apparently, Natalie Portman and Devendra Banhart are in the midst of a romance of at least a 4-month vintage that may well end in marriage. This quote explains:

The 27-year-old star met Banhart in March and the couple has been virtually inseparable ever since.

An insider recently said of their relationship, "He's funny, scary-smart and in love with her. This is a serious one, and they seem to be in it for the long haul. I've never seen her so in love or connected to somebody. I definitely wouldn't be shocked if he popped the question (of marriage) soon."

Let's have a look at these ingredients of marriage. First, we have Natalie Portman:


So, there's not much wrong with this picture. She looks quite normal here. That guy on the left isn't Devendra Banhart, though. It's the boyfriend from last November.

This.... is Devendra Banhart:

I actually didn't know any of this. I had to go and look it all up, and the pieces just aligned as I expected they would.

"Don't be judgmental.... don't be judgmental.... don't be judgmental"

Technorati: judgmental

Vegetable garden update, August 2008.

I haven't posted any vegetable photos from my garden for awhile, so here goes.

Let's begin with a pretty bad photo. The focus is bad, the colourful part is cut off. But you get the point. No prizes for guessing what vegetable this is (although it's not really a vegetable).


Green tomatoes! The tomatoes seem to be ripening at a rate of about 10/week at the moment. I expect it'll accelerate as the season wears on.



New growth on the parsley. This is part two, because the first part has already gone to flower and collapsed (it is off the frame, on the ground, to the left).

A confusing photo showing some thyme (which I started from seed this year) and some purslane (which is actually a weed). Purslane grew wild in this spot, and I am also cultivating some in a pot. Purslane is one of the highest plant sources of omega-3 and likely isn't sold in the supermarket because anything bearing high levels of omega-3 has a short shelf life. I've eaten quite a bit and am still alive.

As for the other weeds, I'm not a big believer in unnecessary weeding. As an example, I have a 6-7 foot thistle that grew this year, and it's protecting my blueberry bushes from birds.

The top of the bean structure. The beans exceeded the pole and are now reaching for the sky. I tried to fix a horizontal post to encourage them to broaden their horizons but they didn't have any of it. They look healthy, though, and there are already some beans on the bottom.

Basil, started this year from seed and transplated to a sunny spot. It looks very nice.

Technorati: gardening

Roasting the fruits of the Whole Circle Farm CSA: pork with roasted vegetables

The Whole Circle Farm CSA has been giving out a lot of beetroot and carrots lately. This is one of the main reasons I was interested in the CSA: to force myself to try vegetables that I normally might not try. I've always eaten carrots (has anyone not?), but beetroot are something I usually only eat sparingly and are usually pickled in a jar when I do have them.

So far, I've steamed beetroot and then mixed them with goat's cheese, apple, olive oil, salt, and pepper to make an apple & beetroot salad. I've steamed them and eaten them as a straight vegetable, and below is the new method.



Our friend on the left is pork. On the right are beetroot (this should be very obvious!). And at the top, and underneath some of the beetroot, are carrots. There are some garlic cloves in there, too. The CSA gave uncured garlic for a couple of weeks, which I'd never used before. The supermarket garlic is normally dry cured; the uncured stuff is more difficult to separate into cloves.

Roasted carrots & vegetables
To begin with, I parboiled the vegetables for about 5 minutes.

In one bowl, I mixed some olive oil, the juice of one orange, salt, pepper, and thyme, threw in the parboiled carrots and tossed the whole lot to coat the carrots.

In another bowl, I cut the larger beetroot in half and tossed them in a mixture of olive oil, salt, a few whole garlic cloves, white wine vinegar, and thyme.

The contents of each bowl went, as separately as possible, into a roasting tray which went in the pre-heated oven for about 20 minutes at 425F.

Pork
I went and got the pork this morning on my bike. The supermarkets are getting really silly with meat fat these days. I wanted a piece of pork with a nice rind of fat, but it was quite difficult to find. I don't get it: most of the taste of pork comes from the fat, but most of the fat had been trimmed. In the chicken section, it's even difficult to find anything other than chicken breasts in the Superstore near here -- drumsticks are the height of adventure in that place.

Anyway, I found a pork chop with at least a bit of fat on it.

I first pre-heated the oven to 425F with a cast iron frying pan inside.

While that was doing, I scored the rind of the pork chop with a knife (what else?) and salted and peppered both sides of the pork. When the oven was at temperature, I took out the frying pan and put a bit of olive oil in the bottom and then put the pork chop in the frying pan, and the frying pan into the oven.

And then everything roasted for about 15 minutes. After about 7 or 8 minutes, I turned own the oven temperature a bit -- to around 350F -- because the cast iron frying pan holds a lot of heat. With 5 minutes left, I threw the roasted vegetables into the frying pan to finish cooking in some of the pork juices.

And, that's about all. This tasted really good to me -- no sauces or dressings necessary.

Technorati: Whole Circle Farm, CSA, pork, roasted vegetables, cast iron, recipe