Here and There

Okay, so this summer, my friends who skipped town (you know who you are) were kind enough to leave behind one small Weber grill, much like the one seen in the link.

After a few experimental grilled chickens cooked over white-hot Kingsford briquettes, I decided I wanted to cook with something more … organic? The idea of some poor mountain in West Virginia being further reduced to a pile of earthen ashes, or another poor mining town getting left in the dust when the multinational mining corporation skips town was, well, starting to bug me. Plus, there’s the appeal of the flavor of wood chips.

So I called my local hardware store to make sure they carried cooking chips, and that they’d fit in my backpack. “Yeah, the bag is about the size of kitty litter, if you can imagine,” the clerk told me. Great.

When I showed up and was pointed to the charcoal section, I was a little confused. They had wood chips, alright. But I was told a bag of “Mesquite Charcoal” was what I wanted. “Oh, but, see, I’m trying to get away from charcoal,” I said, “and start cooking with plant-based products instead.” “I think all charcoal is plant-based, but let me double-check,” he said.

A few minutes later, one of the managers was there, and the situation was explained to her. “I was hoping to get a non-coal charcoal, to get away from a mined-type of coal,” I said. My lesson was about to be served.

“Yeah, all charcoal comes from wood,” the manager replied, not entirely accurately, but close enough. “Really?” I said, literally feeling the lobes in my brain shift a little. Fuck me, I thought. I’ll look that up when I get home.

Lo and behold, charcoal is primarily derived from wood. Specifically, it’s produced by heating large quantities of wood (or, in some cases, saw dust) with enough of a flue to convey the heat.

A few years ago, one of our dogs had diarrehea, and, unexperienced pet owners that we were, we asked the breeders what to do. They told us to get charcoal capsules (sold at most health food stores), and dissolve the powder in her water. Sure enough, the runs went away!

And, according to Wikipedia, the carbonization of wood (which is what the heating process that gets the charcoal is called) also leads to gunpowder and drawing crayons. Who knew that bullets and crayons had so much in common?

Most importantly, I can rest assured that the coals I use to cook with are sustainable (I hope. Next project: find out). And man, that mesquite-cooked chicken was delicious!

I don’t quite have a true commentary ready for The New York Times’s TimesSelect service, which charges a premium for certain parts of the paper’s content (most notably for types like me, the Op-Eds). Initially, I thought it was criminal: charging for something you’ve been giving away for so long. I mean, come on!

Then, the realizations that news needs funding, and that The Times is still one of the U.S.’s leaders in newsgathering, both set in, and I was instantly okay with the whole proposition. Only problem was I didn’t have the eight bucks a month or $50 per year they’re charging for it. Yes, seriously.

What I am writing about, though, is something quite nifty I discovered that I wanted to pass along.

With as little as a Sunday-only subscription to the paper (a relic from my early days at journalism school, held onto mostly for the Times magazine), you can sign up for TimesSelect at no additional charge. Wow, I sound like a salesman now.

So, I’m not sure if the paper (or the [still privately-held] megacorporation that runs it) can punish me for publicizing this little treat. If so, you’ll hear about it … who knows? Maybe in The New York Times itself.

A little comic relief from David Rees.

* Thanks to Mark Bryan for this one.

Morbid curiosity is a wonderful thing. Who among us doesn’t crane their necks at the site of a car crash on the highway? Who wouldn’t stop in their tracks to watch to squirrels “doin’ it”? Who doesn’t ready the chips and dip and booze, settle into the cushy sofa, a grab the remote for the boxing match? (me, actually, but that’s another entry.)

Suppression of the press is a curious thing. A morbidly curious thing, you could say. Sometimes, it’s apparent, as can be seen with the corpse recovery efforts in New Orleans, or the barring of photos of the coffins of slain soldiers returning to America from Iraq. The curious part, as I see it, is when we don’t know it’s happening. What do we not know? Finding out falls as much within the job description of journalists as does reporting on and explaining what we already know.

You can’t know there’s a war going on, or how truly terrible the whole endeavor of war is, if you can’t see it or hear it. You can read about the conditions under which people were left for dead in New Orleans, but it’s easier to deny or to move on if you don’t see it.

Speaking of moving on, I think that’s the salient issue here: never mind the wars and natural destruction, the ineptitude and gross failings and obvious mismanagement of government going on all around us. Just donate a little money to the Red Cross and go back to work and football.

I’m still personally holding out hope that Hurricane Katrina will be the one event that will not recede in the American psyche. As I wrote in my second entry on the storm, this could be what swings the pendulum the other way, whatever that may mean.

And there’s something more vital, less fleeting and animalistic about the need to see the bodies in New Orleans: it reinforces and verifies the reality that this disaster occurred. It also brings home the magnitude of the destruction of human life. Suppressing the media ultimately adds salt to the wound, when it’s meant to serve as a sanitizing balm.

Daniel Kurtzman of Independent Media TV has done me a favor. He has collected and organized 25 Mind-Numbingly Stupid Quotes About Hurricane Katrina. Guess who makes an absurd amount of appearances on this list? Yep, chances are about one in two that you voted for him last November (assuming my readership has fanned outside of my close friends).

* Thanks to Lisa for sending this to me.

Something’s up. The package says “Free Range” and “Organic,” which I would take to mean NO FUCKING HORMONES!!!

The 4th Egg:


And (yawn) the 5th:


And, just in case you still don’t believe me, here’s the package:

Postscript: the last egg of the bunch, which, based soley on its appearance, was obviously not laid by the same drug-ridden poor hen, was a reassuring single-yolker. I can breathe again.…

Note: This morning I’ll be cracking the fourth, fifth, and sixth eggs from the same crate that gave me three twins in a row yesterday. I’ll post the “results” later today.

Setting: Late 1970s, Texas:

As a kid, I was always attracted to so-called “freaks of nature.” Looking back, had I been born three-quarters of a century or so earlier, I’m sure I would’ve naïvely been a fan of the traveling carnival, especially the side show, with its bearded ladies and elephant men. Speaking of those great proboscidean creatures, seeing David Lynch’s Elephant Man as a child only served to enhance my love of the odd, the not-everyday. Also, having a copy of The Guinness Book of World Records lying around didn’t detract me one bit. But, I digress…

Setting: This morning, San Francisco:

As I opened a crate of half a dozen eggs, I noticed one of them protruding a little higher than the rest. I pulled it out, and sure enough, it was oblong. I showed it to my girlfriend, who told me to take it away, that it grossed her out. We joked and played a game we often play — suggesting alternative names for our already-named dogs. “Oblong,” I said, pointing to the one with an elongated body we call Switch. Seeing that I wasn’t getting much attention from my audience of one, I headed back to the kitchen to make breakfast.

So, I cracked the egg, and what do you know? A twin! A set of twins! Okay, neat, but it’s happened before, at least a dozen times. On to egg number two.

You guessed it: Twins! Two in a row! That is unprecedented. I announced this event, and received complete disinterest and lack of surprise in return. Oh well, maybe I’m just being a dork. Time for egg three, cracked with the thought that since I had two twins, did I really need more eggs? What is the yolk-to-whites ratio in a set of twins? The yolks themselves are smaller, but surely overall the yolk count is higher. Maybe I’ll settle with three eggs total, instead of four.

Holy crap! A third set of twins! Completely unbelievable and I’m 100 percent certain it has never happened before (delusions of grandeur?). This time, I managed to get a rise: “Take a picture.” Yes, take a picture, write a blog entry. Share.

So here you are. The picture isn’t proof positive, so you’ll just have to make that leap and believe me. And for all you out there wondering why I didn’t press my luck and try for four twins in a row…well, this is not a time to play wildcard with food. Plus, a bird in the hand…

Okay, okay, I admit it: I was a TLC fan. To those of you for whom that’s a good thing, my proof is a vinyl copy of “Fanmail” that I have to this day. To those for whom it’s a laughable thing, well, at least I still haven’t managed to get any TLC into my iPod.

A few weeks ago, I played that “Fanmail” record, after “No Scrubs” popped into my head randomly. As I’m wont to do, I left the jacket cover laying out for all to see. A couple of days ago, a friend was visiting, saw the cover, and asked, “Have you heard about the show that T-Boz and Chilli are doing?” Thinking it was a joke, I eagerly took what I thought to be the bait: “Lemme guess, ‘You can be the next Left Eye Lopes”? I responded.

“Yeah, more or less.”

My heart sank. Like millions of other teenagers across the nation, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes had been my favorite “letter” in this group with the alphabetic double-meaning name. That’s the great thing about super-groups: there’s always at least one you can like, typically at the expense of at least one other member. Still, my love for Left Eye didn’t diminish how I felt for T-Boz and Chilli.

I never dove too deeply into TLC fandom. All I knew was here was a group of three beautiful women who sang interesting (the adjective you use when you can’t think of a real adjective) songs. I also never got past the hits, mainly “Waterfalls” and “No Scrubs.” It was the nineties, I was in my twenties, and they were hot.

Then Left Eye was killed in a car crash in 2002. After my grieving period, I foolishly assumed that was that. It just made TLC that much more special. Their time was over.

Then, RU the Girl happened. Leave it to TV, leave it to the not-so-hot-anymore members of the group to denigrate the memory of someone so special with a cheap, disrespectful, tasteless, plastic TV show whose premise is, whether they admit it or not, “You can be just like Left Eye.”

I feel I have to reiterate for those who don’t know me that I don’t watch a lot of TV, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything on UPN. I have watched from a distance the whole “reality” phenomenon. Truth be told, I have no clue what’s going on with TV. My beloved PBS has come to resemble corporate-sponsored television of late, with what appear to be network-ready advertisements for stuff no one needs.

It’s not the case that “RU The Girl” takes the trend any further. It just hits home — a part of me that wishes people could just leave well enough alone. Couldn’t T and C have settled for early retirement? Or at the very least, start a new group without the pretense of replacing the irreplaceable?

The answer, I know all too well, is no. None of those options make good TV.

I’m borrowing a page from my good friend Daniel, who moved out east a couple of months ago and has since cataloged several journeys around his area. This is my version of “Bay Area Traveler.”

Some East Bay friends invited us to spend Labor Day low-key hiking in Tilden Regional Park, situated in the hills above UC Berkeley. So we loaded the dogs onto BART (contraband-style, of course), and headed under the Bay to Berkeley, where we were swiftly whisked behind campus and up into the hills. It was my first foray into said “hills,” that naturally occurring boundary between the general Bay Area (Berkeley and Oakland and points south) and the United States of America.

The first thing that struck me was the air. It reminded me of our trip last summer to several national parks in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. There’s something completely indescribable about being at a higher elevation, surrounded by trees and brush (and the occasional wild animal). Not seeing too many other humans around is also key.

Here are a couple of images of what we saw upon arrival and a short hike up (click for slightly larger images in a new window/tab):

After another short hike, we could see to the north and east, toward what I assume to be Martinez and the Carquinez Strait:

As we rose in elevation, the eucalyptus began to dominate:

I turned around to catch amazing, airplane-style views of the city I live in (look closely for Sutro Tower):

Slightly to the northwest, a breathtaking view of the Golden Gate, with Bay waters in the foreground:

We got our breath back in what my friend called “the refrigerator,” a shady area under some eucalyptus where the temperature had to have dropped at least 10 degrees. We decided against having lunch there, opting instead to tread on to the top.

A couple of dog poops later, and we were at the summit. From here, you could fully see the stretch from Carquinez to Pittsburg, as well as the San Pablo Reservoir:

Then, after an amazing lunch of drumettes, lemon pasta, and salad with tomatoes, green beans, tuna, and basil, I snuck around a bend to get my closest glimpse to one of the Bay Area’s premier peaks, Mount Diablo:

All in all, it was a great way to spend Labor Day. It reminded me of a big reason I love living here in the Bay Area: proximity to such amazing natural attractions (for want of a better word). And even though it was sunny in SF that day, there’s no way to get that kind of “kids in summer” heat without leaving the city.

You know things are bad for this Republican administration when conservative columnists like David Brooks publicly slam its pathetic response to the hurricane in New Orleans.

Speaking with Jim Lehrer and other journalists on The News Hour, Brooks brought up the idea that a disaster of this scale is exactly the type of event that brings about a massive change in the national consciousness. Brooks’ comments really struck a chord with me. It’s one thing to read Paul Krugman or Maureen Dowd (arguably the Times’ most liberal columnists) parsing the failures of the government when it comes to rescue and evacuation efforts. Coming instead from someone who admittedly “support[s] [Bush's] politics quite often,” Brooks’ thoughts made me think there finally may be a political sea change (bad analogy?) on the horizon.

For those who don’t feel like opening the link to the transcript of the talk, I’ll list some of the more prescient offerings:

“in 1897 there was the famous Johnstown Flood, a pond owned by millionaires including Andrew Carnegie flooded the town of Johnstown. The public anger over that helped spawn the Progressive Movement.”

“in 1927 you had the great Mississippi Flood, which flooded New Orleans. And there you have first of all, you had great demand for the government to get involved in disaster relief which had not happened much before then. And that helped lead the way to the New Deal.”

“they (the government) violated the social fabric, which is in the moments of crisis you take care of the poor first. That didn’t happen; it’s like leaving wounded on the battlefield.”

“this was really a de-legitimization of institutions. Our institutions completely failed us and it is not as if it is the first in the past three years — this follows Abu Ghraib, the failure of planning in Iraq, the intelligence failures, the corporate scandals, the media scandals.”
“it feels like the 70s now where you really have a loss of faith in institutions.”

“Sitting up there on the airplane and looking out the window was terrible. And the three days of doing nothing, really, on Bush was terrible.”

I actually enjoy agreeing with my polemical adversaries. It means we’re all onto something, and that something could be an irrefutable truth…

I had a thought a couple of years ago, as it was becoming apparent that the military effort in Iraq was being bungled: is the US good at anything anymore?

My fear (and I apologize for its utter abjection) was confirmed by the lack of preparation and botched handling of the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.

What I see (and please, someone tell me I’m wrong) is an utter betrayal by the federal government of one of America’s favorite cities. The fact that the government cut funds from the maintenance of New Orleans’ levees isn’t an isolated incident, either. The Bush administration, through it’s reckless economic policy of endless tax cuts, has passed the burden on to state and local governments, themselves strained due to the slowdown that began in 2000. The “starve the beast” politics of lobbyists like Grover Norquist, once held in the fringe, now get prime play in the government’s repertoire.

The logical conclusion to starving the beast (Norquist is the one who said he’d like to shrink the government so small that it could fit in the bathtub drain), is that the beast can then no longer bear the burdens it was meant to bear. Who, then, should step up in its place? Yeah, that one wasn’t thought out.

The result: what we’re seeing in the south this week.

That thing we call “our” economy has somewhat recovered from the slowdown and 9/11 attacks, but not in any tangible way. We only recently started adding jobs at a significant rate (a growth of something like 100,000 jobs is irrelevant, as the job pool adds many more people than that every month). Meanwhile, corporate bosses are still raking it in, ostensibly due to their bringing the shareholders marginally increasing profits (the US corporation of the last five years has operated almost identically to the government: cuts costs and services. The difference is that the major companies are able to stay in the black, where the government is awash in red ink).

We’re bombarded with reports of the mishandled war in Iraq, of the failure to capture Bin Laden, of our government turning its back on the Middle East peace process, of mad cow, West Nile, avian flu, of obesity, of the lack of health care for 45 million Americans, of Detroit losing out to Japan again. And, to top it all off, we lost the Olympics to London!

What I’m waiting for/dreading is some douche bag like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, or Tom DeLay to issue some absurd statement, placing blame for the catastrophe that is Katrina on New Orleans residents, or gays and lesbians*, or Saddam. Or Clinton.

I return to the question that spurred me to post today: what is America good at anymore?

* I don’t normally like to link to sites like Repent America. My feeling is that I don’t want to be responsible for a single click groups like this get. But in this case, it’s necessary to demonstrate just how far some cuckoo clocks are already going in laying blame for the hurricane.