MyPO

I suspect my mind was in neutral for a few minutes this afternoon — again — when two ideas collided: my own (lack of) personal finances, and the Supreme Court's apparent insistence that corporations should have constitutional rights, just like people. Hey! I thought, if corporations can do things just like people, maybe people should start doing things just like corporations. Now, from that perspective, any number of possibilities leap to mind, but I quickly fixed on one that could help improve my negative-cash-flow problem: I could sell stock in me.

Thus: my public offering, or "MyPO" for short. I'm thinking two classes of stock, common and preferred, so that select shareholders might be allowed more access: they could buy me dinner, for instance, or take me on high-class vacations, or shower me with expensive gifts and negotiable securities. For the common shareholder, they get what any corporate shareholder gets: the illusion that they actually have something to say about my future. The yearly shareholder meetings could be quite a fun party, actually. Of course, all executive powers of the "corpus" would inhere in me, so there would be no nasty scenarios with attempted hostile take-overs, although I might entertain a white knight or two.

I'm thinking of an initial market capitalization of around $24 million, but details will be worked out in the prospectus. And remember: past performance is no guarantee of future behavior.

Gay Marriage or Dick Cheney more Dangerous?

My ability to get a marriage license hurts nobody: Gay marriage is less harmful to straight people than Dick Cheney on a hunting trip.

New York Assembly member Daniel J. O’Donnell [quoted in Robin Finn, "This O’Donnell Picks His Fights in the Legislature", New York Times, 13 July 2007].

Tammy Faye's Eyes

I have to admit that mostly I've just been perplexed by people's reactions — and devotion — to the late Tammy Faye for the past couple of decades. I always figured it for a camp motivation, but maybe not. I never thought much of her ridiculous performances for the PTL cameras in the 80s, and I never quite understood her rehabilitation years later — nor, exactly, what happened to Jim Bakker that ignited such swift and mighty retribution. I didn't particularly care, either, since I didn't generally harbor much sympathy for televangelists, particularly adulterous ones.

I haven't altered my attitude that much after reading it, but I appreciate Gabriel Rotello's "The Lies About Tammy Faye" (Huffington Post, 24 July 2007), which has clarified, with calm dispatch, the events surrounding the downfall of the Bakkers. Perhaps I just approved because it confirmed that the late, not-lamented Jerry Falwell was even slimier than the slimy swamp-thing I already had imagined.

Worth Staying Up

NASA alerts me that the upcoming Perseids meteor shower, on 12 August, may be particularly good this year, largely because it's the evening of the full moon:

"It's going to be a great show," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "The Moon is new on August 12th–which means no moonlight, dark skies and plenty of meteors." How many? Cooke estimates one or two Perseids per minute at the shower's peak.

The source of the shower is Comet Swift-Tuttle. Although the comet is nowhere near Earth, the comet's tail does intersect Earth's orbit. We glide through it every year in August. Tiny bits of comet dust hit Earth's atmosphere traveling 132,000 mph. At that speed, even a smidgen of dust makes a vivid streak of light–a meteor–when it disintegrates. Because Swift-Tuttle's meteors [appear to] fly out of the constellation Perseus, they are called "Perseids."

[More information.] The Perseids I always think of as the best meteor shower of the year — although that may be because it's the only one I ever remember to stay up for. Regardless, it's on my calendar already.

Riefenstahl vs. Coulter

Avedon Carol offers this lovely essayette (The Sideshow, 18 July 2007) comparing Leni Riefenstahl with a the Odious Coulter:

It occurs to me that someday, when Ann Coulter's oeuvre becomes part of the collection of works that are taught in college, along with the works of Leni Riefenstahl, as examples of using the media to promote fascism, that Coulter, if she survives the way Riefenstahl did, will be interviewed as an old woman trying to explain that she didn't really mean any of that stuff and that it never occurred to her that anyone would take it seriously and it wasn't really her fault that it all turned to crap because of people like her. And she'll even claim she felt she had no choice, no other option if she was to survive. "After all, the polls said 90% of the people supported him!" Just like Riefenstahl did. [pause] Or maybe not.

Park on Prayer

PRAYER: SENATE’S MORNING PRAYER WAS INTERRUPTED YESTERDAY.

Hindu priest Rajan Zed, the first Hindu asked to lead a Senate prayer, was just getting started yesterday when protestors from a fundamentalist Christian anti-abortion group began shouting “this is an abomination” from the Senate visitor’s gallery. Abomination? The prayer was as inconsequential as any other opening prayer. But why, in light of the First Amendment, is any prayer offered? Maybe the Senate should consider Transcendental Meditation instead.

[Robert Park, What's New, 13 July 2007.]

Brief Hiatus 2

Once again, for the second time this year, we are taking a tour group to Italy. This time we will be a team of 10 visiting the Tuscany region. Our hotel is in Pisa, and we plan to visit Florence, Lucca, Siena, San Gimignano, and the Chianti region. Leaving late this evening, we plan to return by 20 July with, I hope, additional interesting stories to tell.

Bob Park Speaks

Herewith two items from Bob Park's What's New, issue for Friday, 6 July 2007:

2. SCIENCE ADVICE NOW: GEORGE W. BUSH IS LOOKING FOR ANSWERS.
A front-page story by Peter Brown in the Washington Post on Monday says the meetings are never listed on the president’s public schedule, and remain unknown to many on his staff, but Bush is summoning "leading authors, historians, philosophers and theologians to the White House." He is searching for answers to the collapse of his presidency but scientists were not consulted. Perhaps it was an oversight by the writer, but it may explain the number of terminally stupid Bush programs that could have been averted by checking with freshman science students. They could have told him: 1) Not even Dick Cheney can break The First Law of Thermodynamics – hydrogen is not an energy source and for that matter neither is corn ethanol. 2) Ballistic missiles are easier to make than they are to stop. 3) Because the sexual urge, even of presidents, is shaped by evolution to insure procreation – girls under 18 need access to Plan B. 4) Embryonic stem cells are not one-celled people – the "soul" is an ancient superstition with no legal standing.

3. EMBRYONIC STEM CELLS: WHY NOT ASK INFERTILITY PATIENTS?
A survey of patients at major infertility centers, reported in today’s Science, did just that. In contrast to the prevailing view, they found that only 22% would even consider donating excess frozen embryos to other couples. Most patient couples prefer that their excess embryos be used for research, and if not needed for that, simply destroyed.

Via Crucis

When we were in Rome in April (of this year, 2007), it was for the third time in six years — twice in the last two, in fact. It seemed more familiar this time, and I felt like we had a more relaxed time choosing what old familiars to see for the second or third time, going back to our favorite restaurants from before, or finally getting to see some things for which there'd not been time before.

One day we walked down the capitoline hill towards the theater of marcellus and stopped to see things along the way. In one place, some little ruins in which a field of poppies were growing. In a side street, a former church that had been turned into an art gallery with some pleasant if uninspiring photographs on display.

Further down the hill we went, for the first time, to visit the church of Saint Nicholas in Jail. The building is old, about 13th century, and built over the ruins of classical Roman temples that stood there c. 200 BC. The walls of the church incorporate columns of the temples in its exterior walls, and we visited the excavations of the temple foundations under the nave of the building, which was fascinating. Just why it's called "in jail" no one seems to know, because there is nothing to indicate that Nicholas ever was in jail, but never mind.

One thing that caught my eye was the paintings of the Stations of the Cross that were distributed around the nave. Now, every church we went into — at least the Roman Catholic ones, which was nearly every one — had Stations of the Cross placed around the nave, but rarely were the pieces themselves of any artistic interest. Many would be mass-produced plaques that served their purpose without much inspiration, some might be antique and of some interest, others might be cheap reproductions of perfunctory images.

But this church was different. Their Stations of the Cross was a series of 15 (the 14 traditional stations plus a depiction of resurrection) contemporary oil paintings, each one about half-a-meter square. I found them very interesting, very beautiful, and strangely haunting, even without a spiritual response on my part.

I photographed the series (all except one, which I didn't capture for some reason that mystifies me) and I've finally gotten around to putting the photographs in a place where I could share them with you, in a photo album called Via Crucis.

"Via Crucis" because that is the name of the series, the name in Italian for the Stations of the Cross. As you will see when you look at the album, the paintings are by the contemporary Italian artist Vanni Rinaldi, a fact that our tour guide had pointed out with justifiable pride. Here is Rinaldi's own website (in Italian) in case you want to see more of his work.

On Reading Breaking the Spell

I am a fan of philosopher (and noted atheist) Daniel Dennett. I like reading his books, I like his style, I like his writing. Last year I read a couple more of his books. So far nothing has excited me more than Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which I thought absolutely brilliant, but they're still pretty good. Whether I like his arguments or not, his metaphors, examples, and ways of putting them together I find stimulating.

I just finished up the long-suffering book note for Dennett's Breaking the Spell : Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York : Viking Penguin, 2006, 448 pages). With someone like Dennett, it's not surprising that I had a bunch of leftover excerpts to quote. Here's the bunch:

(Sperm are like e-mail spam, so cheap to make and deliver that a vanishingly small return rate is sufficient to underwrite the project.) [p. 59]
—–
Elephants– and baboons and other African animals–have been known to get falling-down drunk eating fermenting fruit from marula trees, and there is evidence that elephants will travel great distances to arrive at the marula trees just when their fruits ripen. It seems that the fruit ferments in their stomachs when yeast cells resident on the fruit undergo a population explosion, consuming the sugar and excreting carbon dioxide and alcohol. The alcohol happens to create the same sort of pleasurable effects in the elephants' brains that it does in ours. [p. 66]
—–
So science, and the technology it spawns, has been explosively practical, an amplifier of human powers in almost every imaginable dimension, making us stronger, faster, able to see farther in both space and time, healthier, more secure, more knowledgeable about just about everything, including our own origins–but that doesn't mean it can answer all questions or serve all needs.

Science doesn't have the monopoly on truth, and some of its critics have argued that it doesn't even live up to its advertisements as a reliable source of objective knowledge. I am going to deal swiftly with this bizarre claim, for two reasons: I and others have dealt with it at length elsewhere [references not given here], and, besides everybody knows better–whatever people may say in the throes of academic battle. They reveal this again and again in their daily lives. I have yet to meet a postmodern science critic who is afraid to fly in an airplane because he doesn't trust the calculations of the thousands of aeronautical engineers and physicists who have demonstrated and exploited the principles of flight, nor have I ever heard of a devout Wahhabi who prefers consulting his favorite imam about the proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia over the calculations of geologists. If you buy and install a new battery in your mobile phone, you expect it to work, and will be mightily surprised, and angry if it doesn't. You are quite ready to bet your life on the extraordinary reliability of the technology that surrounds you, and you don't even give it a second thought. Every church trusts arithmetic to keep track accurately of the receipts in the collection plate, and we all calmly ingest drugs from aspirin to Zocor, confident that there is ample scientific evidence in support of the hypothesis that these are safe and effective. [pp. 370–371]
—–
"Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy." [Quoting, on p. 270, Ambrose Bierce, from The Devil's Dictionary]
—–
[After talking about Marxists who inculcated Marxism into their children: red-diaper babies.]

Today we have a similar phenomenon brewing on the religious right: the inevitability of the End Days, or the Rapture, the coming Armageddon that will separate the blessed from the damned in the final Day of Judgment. Cults and prophets proclaiming the imminent end of the world have been with us for several millennia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule them the morning after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off. But, just as with the Marxists, there are some among them who are working hard to "hasten the inevitable," not merely anticipating the End Days with joy in their hearts, but taking political action to bring about the conditions they think are the prerequisites for that occasion. And these people are not funny at all. They are dangerous, for the same reason that red-diaper babies are dangerous: they put their allegiance to their creed ahead of their commitment to democracy, to peace, to (earthly) justice–and to truth. If push comes to shove, some of them are prepared to lie and even to kill, to do whatever it takes to help bring what they consider celestial justice to those they consider the sinners. Are they a lunatic fringe? They are certainly dangerously out of touch with reality, but it is hard to know how many they are.¹⁶ Are their numbers growing? Apparently. Are they attempting to gain positions of power and influence in the governments of the world? Apparently. Should we know all about this phenomenon? We certainly should. [pp. 397–398]

¹⁶ A recent poll in Newsweek (May 24, 2004) claimed that 55 percent of American think that the faithful will be taken up to heaven in the Rapture and 17 percent believe the world will end in their lifetimes. If this is even close to being accurate, it suggests that End Timers in the first decade of the twenty-first century outnumber the Marxists of the 19340s through the 1950s by a wide margin. But what percentage of these adherents are prepared to take any steps, overt or covert, to hasten the imagined Armageddon is anybody's guess, I fear to say.

An Industry is Born

Here's a provocative fact:

The [Los Angeles] Times reports that there are 160,000 troops in Iraq and 180,000 US contractor employees.

followed by a trenchant observation (in the form of a rhetorical question):

In the longer term, where does this new "war service industry" go when we get out of Iraq?

For more, see Dina Rasor's "It's Official; the War Service Industry is the Majority in Iraq", The Huffington Post, 6 July 2007.

Pnk-Pistol-Totin' Dykes

Here's one for the Will Rogers scrapbook — file under "you can't make this stuff up".

Do you lie awake at nights worried about violent, roving gangs of pink-pistol-totin' lesbians out to recruit your ten-year old daughters? Neither do I. However, some people with over-heated imaginations apparently do.

I suspect that merely giving you the title of this report by Susy Buchanan and David Holthouse of the Southern Poverty Law Center gives you about all the information you need: "The Oh-Really Factor : Fox News' Bill O'Reilly offers up an 'expert' to claim that pink pistol-packing lesbian gangs are terrorizing the nation".

Well, almost all. The pistols are allegedly 9-mm Glocks, painted pink.

Some Elizabethan Food

I like to read cookbooks, and sometimes I take a particular delight in reading cookbooks that reveal some of the history of cooking. Recently I enjoyed Francine Segan's Shakespeare's Kitchen : Renaissance Recipes for the Contemporary Cook (New York : Random House, 2003). She takes a nice tour of choice recipes from Elizabethan sources and updates them nicely for the modern cook, often including the original receipt and bits of folklore and such here and there. For instance, this note about appetizers, also known as "kickshaws: the Elizabethan misspelling of the French quelque chose".

Here are a few sample recipes, some updated, some original.

Dried Plums with Wine and Ginger-Zest Crostini [p.18]

• 1 cup red wine
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 6 ounces pitted dried plums
• 1 2-inch cinnamon stick
• 1 loaf French baguette bread
• 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• salt
• 2 tablespoons finely julienned fresh ginger
• zest of 1/2 lemon

1. Place the wine, sugar, dried plums, and cinnamon stick in a nonreactive saucepan. Simmer over medium heat for 30 minutes, or until the mixture is thickened. Remove the cinnamon stick and mash th dried plums with a fork.
2. Preheat the broiler. Cut the baguette into 1/4-inch-thick slices and place on a baking sheet. Brush the slices with the olive oil and sprinkle lightly with salt. Toast under the broiler for 3 to 5 minutes, or until light golden brown.
3. Spread 1 tablespoon of the warm plum mixture on each toasted bread slice and sprinkle with the ginger and lemon zest.

How to make Farts of Portingale [p.53]

Take a peece of a leg of Mutton, mince it smal and season it with cloves. Mace, pepper and salt, and Dates minced with currans then roll it into round rolles, and so into little balles, and so boyle them in a little beefe broth and so serve them foorth.

[from The Good Huswives Handmaide for Cookerie in Her Kitchin, 1588]

To make a sallet of all kinde of hearbes [p. 70]

Take your hearbes and picke them very fine into faire water, and pick your flowers by themselves, and wash them all cleane, and swing them in a Strainer, and when you put them into a dish, mingle them with cuwcumbers or lemmons, payred and sliced, and scrape sugar, and put in Vineger and oyle, and throw the flowers on the toppe of the sallet, of every sorte of the aforesaid thinges, garnish the dish about with the aforesaid thing, and hard Egges, boyled, and laid about the dish and upon the sallet.

[from The Good Huswifes Jewell, 1587]

Sweet Pea Puree with Capers [p. 109]

• 1 pound peas (fresh or frozen)
• 1/2 cup coarsely chopped mint
• 3 tablespoons coarsely chopped flat-leaf parsley
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1/4 cup capers, rinsed and drained
• salt and freshly milled ground pepper
• 2 sprigs of mint

1. Place the peas in boiling water and cook for 5 minutes, or until done. Drain the peas and place in a food processor with the mint, parsley, and butter. Puree until smooth. Add the capers and pulse twice. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
2. Spoon the pea mixture into a serving bowl and top with the mint sprigs.

Chicken with Wine, Apples, and Dried Fruit [p. 118]

• 4 chicken legs and thighs
• salt and freshly milled black pepper
• 1/4 cup whole-wheat flour
• 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 cups dry white wine
• 1/4 cup currants
• 1/2 cup dried plums
• 1/2 cup pitted dates
• 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 2 tart apples, cored and quartered, skin on

1. Cut apart the chicken legs and thighs. Sprinkle the chicken pieces with salt, pepper, and flour. Heat the olive oil in large saute pan over high heat and brown the chicken on all sides. Remove the chicken from the pan. Add 1/4 cup of the wine to the pan and stir to loosen the pan drippings. Add the remaining 1&3/4 cups of the wine, the currants, dried plums, dates, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, an dapples. Return the chicken to the pan, cover with a tight lid, and reduce heat to low. Simmer, stirring occasionally, for 30 minutes, or until the chicken is very tender. Remove the chicken from the pan and cook the pan sauce for 5 to 10 minutes, or until reduced by half.
2. Place the chicken on a serving platter and pour the sauce over the chicken.

Witches & Liberty

I've been enjoying reading Napoleon's Buttons (citation below), sort of the history of the world through the eyes of a couple of organic chemists. More later when I get to the book note.

Anyway, what follows is a longish quotation that I found lots of resonance with for some reason — perhaps because it's US Independence Day and many of us are thinking deeply about independence and liberty, particularly in view of the mendacious Bush administration.

Anyway again, this is a short but spirited summary of witchcraft in the Western world. Rather than write a rumination afterwards, let me inculcate a few background thoughts into your heads as a preamble to your reading:

• It's been fashionable lately to blame hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks on gay and lesbian people;
• Further, gay and lesbian people are generally considered to be in league with Satan, and persecuted for what they are;
• Note the role of corrupt government officials, working in concert but probably not actually conspiring with the Inquisition to fan the flames of hysteria for financial gain;
• Reflect on how the hysteria grew in tiny increments, until it reached the point that entire towns were destroyed;
• Note in particular that the problem was considered so threatening that special action outside the law was widely considered necessary;
• Consider the special role of torture as a vital adjunct to solving the "problem"; and
• Think of all those people who ask, usually in reference to their religion: could all those people have been wrong?

Now: witchcraft!

Before 1350 witchcraft was regarded as the practice of sorcery, a method of trying to control nature in one's own interest. Using charms in the belief that they could protect crops or people, casting spells to influence or provide, and invoking spirits were commonplace. In most parts of Europe sorcery was an accepted part of life, and witchcraft was regarded as a crime only if harm resulted. Victims of maleficium, or evil-doing by means of the occult, could seek legal recourse from a witch, but if they were unable to prove their case, they themselves became liable for a penalty and trial costs. By this method idle accusations were discouraged. Rarely were witches put to death. Witchcraft was neither an organized religion nor an organized opposition to religion. It was not even organized. It was just part of folklore.

But around the middle of the fourteenth century a new attitude toward witchcraft became apparent. Christianity was not opposed to magic, provided it was sanctioned by the church and known as a miracle. But magic conducted outside the Church was considered the work of Satan. Witches were in league with the devil. The Inquisition, a court of the Roman Catholic Church originally established around 1233 to deal with heretics—mainly in southern France—expanded its mandate to deal with witchcraft. Some authorities have suggested that once heretics had been virtually eliminated, the Inquisition, needing new victims, set its sights on sorcery. The number of potential witches throughout Europe was large; the potential source of income for the inquisitors, who shared with local authorities the confiscated properties and assets of the condemned, would also have been great. Soon witches were being convicted not for performing evil deeds but for supposedly entering into a pact with the devil.

This crime was considered so horrendous that, by the mid-fifteenth century, ordinary rules of law no longer applied to trials of witches. An accusation alone was treated as evidence. Torture was not only allowed, it was used routinely; a confession without torture was seen as unreliable—a view that seems strange today.

The deeds attributed to witches—orgiastic rituals, sex with demons, flying on broomsticks, child murdering, baby eating—were, for the most part, beyond rationality but were still fervently believed. About 90 percent of accused witches were women, and their accusers were just as likely also to be women as men. Whether so-called witch-hunts revealed an underlying paranoia aimed at women and female sexuality is still being argued. Wherever a natural disaster struck—a flood, a drought, a crop failure—no lack of witnesses would attest that some poor woman, or more likely women, had been seen cavorting with demons at a sabbat (or witches' gathering) or flying around the countryside with a familiar (a malevolent spirit in animal form, such as a cat) at their side.

The mania affected Catholic and Protestant countries alike. At the height of witch-hunt paranoia, from about 1500 to 1650, there were almost no women left alive in some Swiss villages. In regions of Germany there were some small villages where the whole population was burned at the stake. But in England and in Holland the witch craze never became as entrenched as in other parts of Europe. Torture was not allowed under English law, although suspected witches were subjected to the water test. Trussed and thrown into a pond, a true witch floated, to be retrieved and properly punished—by hanging. If the accused sank and drowned, she was considered to have been innocent of the charge of witchcraft—a comfort to the family but little use to the victim herself.

[Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson, "Napoleon's Buttons : How 17 Molecules Changed History." New York : Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2003. pp. 224—226]

Eight Facts & Habits

My friend "Three-Thumbs" Tim had the nerve to tag me with one of these pointless internet "meme" things. I'm an old-enough fart that they seem rather like glorified chain letters to me. Yes, yes, I know all about memes and such — I suspect I've read more books by Dawkins and his ilk than most of the people who carry on about memes with such enthusiasm.

I don't object to the notion of memes at all, despite appearances, although I think the name is hopelessly silly. In fact, memes have always sounded to me basically like a notion that Karl Popper (one of my very few favorite philosophers) developed in the 1970s or 1960s, that ideas have an existence independent of the human minds that created them, largely because of writing. I believed it then, although I don't think they take on any sort of tangible existence beyond human minds, and I believe it now even when it's called a "meme" and the notion becomes glib and a bit cheapened with this unsophisticated internet / blog version.

So there. Nevertheless, I like to be remembered and picked for the team as well as the next person, so I can curse and kiss Tim for his tagging, whether thoughtful or thoughtless. On to the wretched meme:

The Rules are: Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

Here's a list as they come to mind.

1. I never sang solo in public before our Theatre Troupe's production of "A Grand Night for Singing" in 1998. Six months later I played the part, with singing, of Captain Courageous in "Dames at Sea". My parents were so disbelieving that they flew 2000 miles to see a performance with their own ears. I now sing a fair amount, both in musicals and with a small group that performs renaissance literature.
2. I write adult gay fiction under the name "Jay Neal" and have been publishing stories since 1999, about three dozen publications so far. This is no secret, of course, but I can use the publicity from mentioning it again. For those who might be interested: Jay Neal's website.
3. I play 'cello, something that I've done continuously since I was in fourth grade, with a hiatus of a few years during graduate school and most of my years working at the University of Maryland. I've even been paid to do it on occasion. This, too, is no secret by any means, but there are forever people turning up who learn about it for the first time and are surprised.
4. When I was in High School I played 'cello for a year with the Kansas City Youth Symphony. For one concert our guest conductor was the actor Werner Klemperer, famous for his role as Colonel Klink in the old TV sitcom "Hogan's Heroes". He was actually a very good conductor — music was his avocation and his talent was not a big surprise since his father was the world-famous conductor Otto Klemperer.
5. I once dined with Sheldon Glashow, Nobel-laureate in physics from 1979. There were three other people in our group. I won't name names right now because there were unusual relationship dynamics going on at the time of which I really had no part despite appearances to the contrary. I also had one of the worst migraines of my life during that meal, as our waiter found out when he was over perky in asking "How are we tonight?"
6. I had a severe heart attack in January of 2004, when Isaac and I were in Kansas City for my mother's funeral. I was 47 at the time. Well meaning nurses kept saying things like "but you're too young to have a heart attack". What could I do but shrug my shoulders? I had two rounds of angioplasty and 5 stents put in. Of a week spent in the hospital (KU Medical Center, where I had excellent treatment), 5 days were in intensive care. In private I tell an anecdote about getting a catheter put in that inevitably makes my male listeners cringe.
7. I stopped smoking in January 2004, having smoked for about 25 years. Not coincidentally, cessation was accomplished during intensive care. I spent a good part of 5 days heavily drugged and by the time I came out of my haze, I had no craving and it never returned, so I decided to work with it.
8. My best friend and I in graduate school, at Wesleyan University, used to spend sunny afternoons watching the men — younger or older, it didn't matter so much — walk across the main quad. After suitable visual evaluation and contemplation we would jointly rate their individual callipygian attainments.

Oh dear, it seems that my list is all facts and no habits. Perhaps I'll think of some really juicy and disgusting habits to share another time. On second thought, let's have each of my four regular readers think up two really eccentric habits for me, and I'll do my best to oblige.

Now about this tagging thing. I'm disinclined to do that, largely because I don't do chain letters, but also because I'd have to think of eight people to irritate.

How about a stochastic approach? I hereby tag the first eight people to read this who want to pick up the meme. Leave a trackback or comment so I know and then I can tag you retroactively.

Running Man

Sometime a few weeks ago I was reading some novel — I'm afraid I don't really remember what it was, but it almost certainly was a modern crime/mystery novel — when one of the characters made a passing reference to Paul McCartney & Wings, and their long-ago hit song "Band on the Run".

"Band on the Run", I thought, "Band on the Run". I wonder how that goes. I'm sure I've heard it before. Oh, my goodness, could it be that song that I've thought for some 30 years or so was called "Man on the Run"? Yep, it could, and it was. Which is a bit of a tragedy, this personal mondegreen, because I think "Man on the Run" sounds rather more intriguing, although that might be because it sort of makes me think of "Psycho Killer" ("Run run run run run run run away" seemed related in my mind to "Man on the Run", at least, with all those "runs," the psycho killer was certainly a man on the run).

It sort of amazes me that I've gone this many years without ever discovering the "real" name of "Man on the Run". Then, as salt in my wounds, I was enjoying luncheon only a few days later when the next track of the dining-room music was — wait for it — "Band on the Run".

Still sounded like "Man on the Run" to me, I thought smugly.

Chicken Cacciatore

Let's continue on these food thoughts for just a bit longer. A couple of weeks ago we had the annual meeting of the board of directors of Ars Hermeneutica, and I made dinner for everyone. We had a casual sort of meal: slow-cooker chicken cacciatore, served with angel-hair pasta, a big Italian style green salad^*, a Waldorf salad because Waldorf salad is always good, and for dessert I made a no-sugar-added lemon mousse with raspberry puree. Everything was delicious! I'm always happy when dishes come out nicely. Right now it's the chicken recipe that I want to talk about; I'll try to remember to share the recipe for the lemon mousse later.

This recipe for the slow cooker, a large-capacity one, gets high marks for simplicity and taste. It gets thrown together with virtually no fuss and the results are remarkably good. I like the idea of chicken but how often does it come out perfectly cooked, moist and tender, like it did with this recipe? We had nearly half the dish left over, but that was readily dealt with: dump the pasta into the cacciatore, stir it up, and it's a casserole ready to go from refrigerator to oven for another meal.

This recipe comes, with only minor modifications, from Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann, Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook (Boston, Massachusetts : The Harvard Common Press, 2005), p. 276.

Slow-Cooker Chicken Cacciatore

• One jar tomato-basil spaghetti sauce (mine was 18-ounce)
• 1 medium yellow onion, cut in half and sliced into half moons
• 1 to 3 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 medium green bell pepper, seeded and cut into 1-inch chunks
• 8 chicken thighs
• 6 ounces fresh mushrooms, quartered

1. Layer half the tomato sauce and all the onion, garlic, bell pepper, and chicken in the slow cooker. Sprinkle the mushrooms on top and cover with the remaining tomato sauce.
2. Cover and cook until the chicken is tender and cooked through, 2.5 to 3 hours on HIGH, or 6 to 7 hours on LOW. The chicken will add some of its own juices to the sauce.

__________
^* I say Italian style because it was inspired by the salads we enjoyed so much in Rome at l'Ensalata Ricca. In a big bowl I put a pound of mixed greens and a pound of arugula — arugula gives it a characteristic flavor. I dressed that with lots of olive oil and only a splash of red-wine vinegar, tossed it, then decorated the top with sliced roma tomatoes, some black olives, and a sliced, very ripe pear, over which I sprinkled a handful of cooked (canned) corn. There's no need to toss again; arrange the additions nicely on top of the dressed greens and then let serving take care of mixing and moistening everything as necessary.

Against Garlic's Savour

My friend Richard writes with this historical tidbit: "Sir John Harrington, the man credited with inventing the WC, was Queen Elizabeth's cousin. He also left behind this kitchen poem."

If leeks you leake, but do their smell disleeke, eat onions
   And you shall not smell the leek.
If you of onions would the scent expel,
Eat garlic – that shall drive down the onion smell.
But against garlic’s savour, if you smart,
I know but one receipt. What’s that? A fart.
— Sir John Harrington, 1592

Now, why he should have thought of me when he discovered this poem is another matter entirely.

Brussels Sprouts Wisdom

For years I have cut a cross in the bottoms of brussels sprouts, but this time I bought them ready to cook, I forgot about it, and it didn't make any difference.

[Ava Astaire McKenzie, At Home in Ireland : Cooking and Entertaining with Ava Astaire McKenzie (Niwot, Colorado : Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1998), p. 102.]

So there.

Sloppy Joes Again

The Sloppy Joes saga continues; now it threatens to get thoroughly out of hand and rather sloppy, if you will. Recently, in my search for a simple, basic recipe for Sloppy Joes that recreated a taste I remember from childhood, I presented "Jeff's Sloppy Joes". Whatever it was that I was remembering, I knew that it was drawn from a Betty Crocker cookbook for kids that I had c. 1970.

Very kindly my friend Tim (at Son of Timatollah) located his oldish Betty Crocker cookbook and gave us the recipe for Sloppy Joes that he found there. It's a nice enough recipe although, along with Tim, I think that the celery flavors, the green pepper, and the hot sauce were later additions over my Sloppy Joes ur-recipe. (By the way Tim, that recipe for Open-Face Hamburgers looks quite yummy — thanks for giving it. Believe it or not, I've never had them!)

Now, please don't take me for a Sloppy Joe purist. At my advancing age I'm rarely a purist about anything, not even performances of Bach on original instruments. My quest has not been to establish, in any sense, the correct recipe for Sloppy Joes. Instead, I've been trying to recreate a memory of a taste and, at the same time, try to establish what was in the ur-recipe and how far I've deviated from it (as a matter of interest).

I don't mind at all, really, that most modern Sloppy Joe recipes can't leave good enough alone and get themselves all gussied up with all sorts of modern, adult-oriented ingredients. If ever there was a recipe ripe for quick and varied evolution, it's Sloppy Joes. Also, I suspect that most cookbook writers who feel an urge to include a recipe for this classic also can't bring themselves to include a recipe that's too simple, too retro, and not touched by their own hand in an attempt to update, modernize, or lower the fat.

Thus, I like mushrooms, and green pepper, and celery, and I expect that they taste great in Sloppy Joes, but they don't match my memory for childhood Sloppy Joes. (And — sorry Tim — the Manwich stuff never tasted quite right to me.^*) Now, it's quite possible that green pepper was an original ingredient in my own ur-recipe and, not having any on hand at the time, I simply dispensed with it forever as a necessary ingredient. I don't know. The mists of time, etc.

Also, I'm not above amendments myself: I don't know whether the mustard was an original ingredient, nor the Worcestershire sauce, probably not the garlic, and certainly not the wine, but they round out the flavor in a way that I was looking for. Maybe I'll try my own gussying sometime — I wonder how anchovies and capers would taste thrown in?

But that still leaves open the question of what was in my ur-recipe and whether I remember it with any fidelity whatsoever. Then, that question quickly spirals down into the whole matter of Sloppy Joes recipes and the origin of the dish. Oh dear.

As befits anything so iconic and simple as Sloppy Joes, claims of its origins will likely be contentious. For instance, here's a excerpt from an article on the history of sandwiches (from In Mama's Kitchen):

H.K. Heinz in Pittsburgh says their research at the Carnegie Library suggests that the Sloppy Joe began in a Sioux City, Iowa, cafe as a "loose meat sandwich" in 1930, the creation of a cook named Joe…" Since ground meat, stretched as best as possible, was a staple throughout the depression, we will credit the creation of the sloppy joe to the general spirit of all people who use their imagination to make food taste good without cost.

I've read others who discount the rather obvious suggestion that it's named for some cook called "Joe". Some will let its origins lie in the Midwest but claim that it's named for Sloppy Joe's Bar in Havana, Cuba, apparently a favorite spot of Hemingway's. The Food Timeline's "History Notes: Sandwiches" believes its origins are more murky, growing out of any number of approaches to using ground beef that became popular in the second half of the 19th century.

They quote the Encyclopedia of American Food & Drink as saying

The origins of this dish are unknown, but recipes for the dish date back at least to the 1940s. It dates in print to 1935. There is probably no Joe after whom it is named–but its rather messy appearance and tendency to drip off plate or roll makes "sloppy" an adequate description, and "Joe" is an American name of proletarian character and unassailable genuineness.

I was also amused by their off-hand remark — filled with what I suspect was unintentional humor — that "The state of Iowa does seem to have a history of loose meat sandwiches". Now, there's a history to cherish.

As for recipe origins, they give the following, found in a 1963 McCall's Cookbook

• 1/2 lb ground beef
• 1 can (1 lb) beans and ground beef in barbecue sauce
• 1/4 cup catsup
• 3 hamburger buns, split and toasted

1. In medium skillet, saute meat, stirring, until it loses its red color.
2. Add beans and catsup, mixing well. Simmer, uncovered, 5 minutes. Spoon mixture over buns.

Pretty basic and un-gussied, but what's going on with that can of beans and ground beef in barbecue sauce? Yuck!^#
___________
^* By the way, for those who need basic Sloppy Joes training, there is a YouTube video, featuring one Kit Traynor, called "How to Make Sloppy Joes". He uses the "Sloppy Joes mix", which I don't really approve of (because it tastes off to me), and his kitchen technique leaves some things to be desired, but at least he's enthusiastic about his subject. He also seems to think that "Sloppy Joe" is the singular form of the name, but I incline to the opinion that this is a faulty back-formation and that can either eat a single Sloppy Joes or multiple Sloppy Joes, but I don't feel fanatical about it.

^#Oddly enough, the McCormick spice people, who make a "Sloppy Joes Seasoning Mix" (hardly necessary, in my opinion, and not only because the principle ingredient is sugar), have a number of pages suggesting uses for the product. One, called On the Go Sloppy Joe suggests adding a can of pork & beans, apparently without irony considering the name of the recipe. That recipe also calls for mustard as an ingredient, for "a little kick".

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