Posts in the topic "Personal"
Grade-School Gourmet
Posted 01 Sep 10
Some of our family members love CALVIN AND HOBBES. Those familiar with the books — like, if you’ve read them all aloud about ninety times — will recall Calvin’s favorite breakfast cereal, Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. It turns out these are unavailable in grocery stores (we’ve looked), so our son went ahead and wrote up his own recipe. He thought the rest of the world might want to know too.
“SUGAR BOMBS
2 pounds of sugar in a bowl. Add 1 tablespoon of brown sugar. Add 2 pounds of: 1/2 pound milk chocolate and 1-1/2 pounds dark chocolate. Add cookie dough and cook on high for 10 min. Then chop up to 1/2 inch circles. bake for 20 min. Put chocolate sauce around. Put in freezer for 20 min. Allow to lose coolness. That makes – I don’t know how much. Enjoy!”
I lost my coolness many years ago, sadly, but this does seem like a good way to start the day.
This post indexed as: Personal
Goldman = Cheesy 70′s Restaurant
Posted 22 Apr 10
Although the big picture is clear enough — Goldman Sachs deceived one client on behalf of another, leading to $000,000,000′s of losses — the whole Paulson-Abacus-ACA-etc deal is complicated. Other commentators have tried analogies to explain the mess. Here’s mine.
In high school, in central Missouri in the late 1970′s, I worked at a buffet-style restaurant right off the interstate (“Busses Welcome!” which tells you all you need to know). For a flat price you got all you could eat from a long food line. Naturally, the owners were most interested in minimizing how much people consumed — at least of the expensive items. The entire place was basically designed to encourage diners to fill up on bread and celery, then leave.
Thus the plates were unusually heavy and a little smaller than normal, and only available at the beginning of the food line. The line began with a huge bowl of iceberg lettuce, then an array of cheap vegetables, then some starch like rice “pilaf” and “buttered” noodles and bread pudding. (Never, never, ever eat bread pudding in a cheap restaurant! Think about where the stale bread comes from …) Finally, at the very end, a teenage lineboy (that would be me) sliced pieces of ham and roast beef, kept warm under heat lamps.
The name of the game was to give as little meat as possible to the customers. So the lineboys were taught to cut slices like gossamer. Thin enough to see through, almost.
But that wasn’t enough. Imagine a standing rib roast, or a full ham: there’s fat and gristle on them, too. Not so much, actually, but after a busy night, there might be a quart or two of trimmings left in the catchment pan. Eventually, the owners decided they wanted to see as little trimmings as possible. No more waste!
What they meant was, leave the fat, etc, on the edges of the slices, so the meat looked a little bigger. But bits of crud still fell off; the trimmings pan still filled up (albeit more slowly). I resolved to get down to zero.
And this is how: instead of allowing the trimmings to fall into the pan, I slipped them onto the cutting board. Then, after cutting some meat, I would slap the slice down on on top of the trimmings, slide the knife under both, and transfer everything to the unsuspecting diner’s plate. Done with flash and verve, the result would be a rather lumpy but thick-appearing serving. Only at his table would the mark discover that, under a paper-thin wisp of meat, he’d been given a bonus quarter-cup of gristle and rind.
You can see the metaphor. Goldman sliced and diced tranches of mortgage-backed securities into CDO’s they then sold to various suckers (who then sold many of them on to smaller customers, which is why school districts and municipalities in Europe and the US are now broke). Instead of even reasonably solid mortgages, however, they let John Paulson hand-pick the rottenest, rock-bottom worthless toxic waste available to package up — just like the inedible fragments of fat and gristle I served to customers, long ago.
Hey, it’s what my bosses told me they wanted. Which suggests other implications of the metaphor — about designing proper incentive systems.
Anyway, Paulson went on to bet against these CDOs (by buying credit-default swaps that paid off when the CDOs collapsed in value, as they’d been designed to do), which is where the metaphor runs out of steam. But you get the idea.
The restaurant had other tricks. We believed the decor was deliberately designed to minimize appetite (lots of browns and greens), for example, and that the piped-in music was selected to subtly nauseate people. (Of course, the latter may have just been a teenager’s typical reaction to the oldies-muzak programming; the cooks had much better music in the kitchen.)
The place went out of business more than twenty years ago. Wall Street shows no signs of a similar fate.
This post indexed as: Finance, Personal
“The Insider” is now outside
Posted 06 Apr 10
So to speak. My first paranormal story, “The Insider,” is included in the MWA’s new anthology CRIMES BY MOONLIGHT, which has just been released.
This post indexed as: Personal, Writing
Why do we have to throw everything away?
Posted 30 Mar 10
Today’s off-topic rant:
Some of the lights in our kitchen stopped working. Not the bulbs, the sockets. When I took them back to the (expensive) lighting store that sold them to us, 4-1/2 years ago, the clerk actually laughed when I wondered whether they’d replace them. In fact, he was impressed the fixtures had lasted even that long — far past their one-year warranty.
And it’s not just one corner-cutting manufacturer. He said they’re all like that.
The irony, of course, is that the failing component probably cost less than a dollar, somewhere in China. For just pennies (okay, maybe a few hundred pennies, but even so) they could build something to last.
I know, I know — planned obsolescence, all that, companies have been shaving costs since the dawn of time. Still.
I’ve been looking for a used table saw lately. Like most machine shop tools, if you can find one made a few decades ago, for similar cost it’s probably better and more serviceable than anything more recent (after minor maintenance, granted).
And don’t get me started on, say, current house-construction methods.
We used to build things to last. Now we buy them to throw away.
This post indexed as: Personal, Technology
Use The Right Word
Posted 16 Mar 10
Okay, sure, I’m more sensitive on the topic than people who don’t get paid for writing. But: a typical English speaker has a learned vocabulary of some 20,000 words. Total English “word units” (that is, counting declined forms, plurals, etc etc all as one) approach four times that. No matter what concept you hope to express, there’s almost certainly one good, precise, well-established word for it.
So why not use it?
Just one example. It is common to hear someone described (often by himself) as a “fiscal conservative” — meaning, in favor of tax cuts. But “fiscal” refers to both halves of the income statement: revenue and expenditures. Using the word properly, a fiscal conservative wants a balanced budget. “Fiscal conservatives,” especially Republicans, often neglect the second half, with problematic results.
Every Republican president since 1974 has increased the annual federal budget deficit: Ford, from $26bn to $275bn; Reagan, from $190bn to $279bn; Bush I, from $279bn to $434bn; Bush II, from a surplus of $90bn to a deficit of $455bn. Carter and especially Clinton cut the deficits: from $275bn to $190bn, and from $434bn to a surplus of $90bn respectively. (all figures in current dollars.)
True, Obama’s deficits are even higher. No need to argue about whether they’re justified or not; my point is simply that you don’t hear Obama describing himself as a fiscal conservative.
It is not an act of political courage to vote for tax cuts. But, in isolation, it is not the act of a fiscal conservative either.
This post indexed as: Personal, Writing
Spring
Posted 11 Mar 10
First juggling of the season this week (can’t do it inside, too much damage would occur, so winter is time off). The new Dube Euro clubs are keen, though it’s a longer adjustment than I expected from my older, heavier, harder clubs. We’re supposed to have goals, right? — so: four by next year, maybe …
Also, the first bike ride (and for some, the first bike wrecks, but if you’re seven you can walk away from what might hospitalize the old guy).
First use of the new computer; not exactly spring related, but good to get done. The actual build turned out to be the easy part. Software, file transfer and configuration took much longer.
First plantings will go into the potting trays this weekend, almost on schedule.
Now that it’s spring, there are so many ways to avoid writing.
This post indexed as: Personal
How to Raise Tom Sawyer
Posted 12 Feb 10
I happen to be reading The American Frugal Housewife this week (I found it at the library, but a Project Gutenberg version, nicely formatted, is here). First published in 1833, the handbook was popular throughout the nineteenth century. Not just a window into how people lived 150 years ago, it also has advice that anyone might find useful today.
Not the recipes, I’m sorry to say; most begin with some variant of “Boil three hours.” Nor the medical recommendations (though I do like this one: “the constant use of beer is a preservative against fevers”).
But Mrs. Child does have relevant advice for modern society in one area: parenting.
In this country, we are apt to let children romp away their existence, till they get to be thirteen or fourteen. This is not well. It is not well for the purses and patience of parents; and it has a still worse effect on the morals and habits of the children. Begin early is the great maxim for everything in education. A child of six years old can be made useful; and should be taught to consider every day lost in which some little thing has not been done to assist others.
Children can very early be taught to take all the care of their own clothes.
They can knit garters, suspenders, and stockings; they can make patchwork and braid straw; they can make mats for the table, and mats for the floor; they can weed the garden, and pick cranberries from the meadow, to be carried to market.
Provided brothers and sisters go together, and are not allowed to go with bad children, it is a great deal better for the boys and girls on a farm to be picking blackberries at six cents a quart, than to be wearing out their clothes in useless play. They enjoy themselves just as well; and they are earning something to buy clothes, at the same time they are tearing them.
As I announced at breakfast this morning, things are going to change in this household!
This post indexed as: Personal, Reading
I, The Jury
Posted 01 Feb 10
Some time ago I sat on a jury. The case was difficult — if it were easy, it wouldn’t have gotten to trial — and after long deliberation, we deadlocked, 11-1.
This was unfortunate, but not rare; while only two percent of federal cases result in a hung jury, the rate for local jurisdictions is 6-7% (NCSC). It’s up to the prosecutor what happens after that (commonly a retrial).
What should we make of the individual who remains steadfast in his or her opinion, despite considerable pressure from everyone else in the room? In our case subsequent information, revealed after the trial, strongly suggested our holdout was mistaken — that the other eleven had come to a proper conclusion.
Popular opinion tends to glorify the individual, especially against mass conformity. But really, we don’t live in 1984, or 1930′s Germany, or even 1960′s Greensboro. Chances are, if you think one thing and everyone else thinks something else, you’re wrong.
We can’t all be John Galt.
That said, I have a short story that has accumulated a dozen rejections, and I keep sending it out. It’s a good story, by God, and someday someone will realize it!
This post indexed as: Crime, Personal, Writing
The Juggle
Posted 11 Nov 09
Not the WSJ’s feature column, actual juggling. In college I learned three and four-ball juggling (pretty much all I learned freshman year, in fact). Lately I’ve taken up clubs, and after a few months I can keep three airborne fairly well. Double-spins are coming along, and I’ve just started to manage two-in-one-hand — left and right.
Crosswords don’t actually prevent Alzheimer’s, and juggling isn’t going to stave off arthritis. But there’s something to be said for practicing a small skill, and getting better at it.
It would be nice to think writing is like that.
This post indexed as: Personal