Impolite Company

Sneaks Back in with Some Tunes

Greetings and salutations.  I know I've been gone for several weeks now--after over a year of posting voluminously every day I woke up one morning and realized I needed to step away from the blog.  So I did.  I think I got tired of forcing myself to have an opinion on everything that happened in the world and I've been digging a lot of dirt, planting a lot of plants and reading a lot since then.  And biking.  And swimming.  And teaching karate and stuff.  I'm just sneaking in to post a couple of songs--one was mentioned by a friend of a friend in a recent blog post (quoted actually, not quite mentioned) and the second is one of the few other John Prine songs that I know and love (...got more balls than big brass monkey!).  So here's Prine's Spanish Pipedream (3:10):

And on the other side of the break you'll find "In Spite of Ourselves"--the song doesn't start until about the 1:30 mark:

Note to All Friends

This is a quote I just ran across that I'd like to apply to all of my friendships because I think it's a good mantra.  It's meaning is quite different taken out of context and applied liberally to all relationships--I hope that Griffin & Sabine won't mind:

I wonder if we will ever understand how and why we are linked.  Griffin, why try?  Let us simply take pleasure in each other.

So many friendships spring up out of unusual circumstances and via chance--does that make them more ephemeral and weightless or does that make them even more valuable?  In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the relationship between Tomas and Tereza was born of six improbable fortuities:

But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?

Chance and chance alone has a message for us.  Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute.  Only chance can speak to us.  We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.

Is that how we should weigh friendships, pull out a piece of paper and add up the number of chance occurrences that led to the birth of the friendship?  Hell no, we just do that in novels and to pass the time maybe when we've had too many drinks.  How much better to take pleasure in each other, to occasionally borrow someone else's eyes, to give help when needed and receive support in times of trouble. 

Dear eHarmony

Dear eHarmony,
I don't know if you can help me with this with all of your surveys and questionnaires and what-not but I thought I might try you first and see if you can steer me in the right direction if you can't help me yourself.  I think it'll turn out that what I'm looking for can't really be found by means of metrics and measurements, likes and dislikes but it's worth a shot.

A friend of mine gave me a book this weekend that made me remember or realize what I miss most about not having a girlfriend--it's not the sex or the laughs or even the companionship (though I'm not saying those things aren't important in their own right), it's more not having an extra set of eyes I can see the world through.  Think about it--we're able to see the world with depth and in three dimensions because we have two eyes that see things from slightly different angles.  But when we add another set of eyes that we can occasionally borrow and add to our own vision, think how much better we can see things!  It's like there's an added fourth dimension, like we've got a pair of opera glasses we can pull out on occasion to add that extra dimension or sometimes we can just close our own eyes and use theirs and see an entirely different world. 

Of course, you can't just go along and pick up any extra set of eyes and say that's the one for me, they've got to be pretty closely calibrated to your own in order to get the full effect.  So that's where you come in eHarmony--if I send you information about my own eyes do you have any sort of computerized matrix you can sort the information through and find someone that would be a good match on the visual front?  I have a feeling it calls for a fairly exotic set of eyes, some eyes that can see things from a fairly radically different angle in order to get the full effect.  So what kind of stuff would you need to know--how sensitive my eyes are to detecting different colors or to extremes of contrast?  Do you need to know what color my eyes are (hazel) and whether or not I have to wear glasses (nope)?   I haven't looked at the types of questions you ask on your website before, so maybe all of this stuff is included--if so, please forgive my laziness in not finding this out for myself but it didn't seem worth it to give you my email address to find out. 

Sincerely,
g.

p.s.  if any of the three people who gave me books this weekend run across this post, thank you very much for the gifts.  I can tell you for certain that the book about the Patriot Act is not the one that touched off this revelation.  The other two books were both very image-oriented and lovely in their own ways and so I'll remain coy for now and not make any further www.announcements on the matter.  Thanks to all of you who made my birthday interesting and to all of you who add depth and variety to my life by occasionally letting me see things through your eyes.

"Obama Joins the Cover-Up"

Dan Froomkin wrote yesterday in Obama Joins the Cover Up:

President Obama's about-face on the release of more photos depicting detainee abuse is a colossal mistake.

My tendency is to disagree with this perspective and I imagine it's a perspective that is shared by a lot of people who were against the war and the abuse of detainees in Iraq and the torture of suspected terrorists in Guantanamo.  By releasing the memos that served as the intellectual and apologetic framework of these abuses, Pres. Obama made clear the extent of such treatment of individuals in US custody and the official sanction of the treatment.  I think it's appropriate for the courts to decide this question--I think their release could have negative global effects and it's exactly the sort of question that the courts should address.  We know what the abuse looked like thanks to the eariler pictures and I'm not sure that a fresh collection of photos will meaningfully increase our knowledge but they will definitely up the emotional ante, at least in the short term.

There's gonna be a lot of squawking on the left over this one but I think it's a judgment call and, as much as I have an opinion, I'm tending to agree with the president.

Here's the ACLU's release on the Obama reversal:  Obama Administration Reverses Decision to Release Torture Photos.

And you can get more info on the ACLU's FOIA lawsuit here:  Torture Documents Released Under FOIA

Majority Doesn't Care About Minorities on High Court

The LA Times has an article out today that discusses the results of a recent Gallup poll that shows that a majority of Americans don't care if there is minority representation on the Supreme Court, Americans Not Concerned With Diversity On Supreme Court, Poll Says:

There is but one woman on the nine-member Supreme Court, in a nation where women outnumber men at polling places; one black justice, in a nation that shed legalized racial discrimination only decades ago; and there never has been a Hispanic on the high court, in a nation whose fastest growing minority population is Latino.

Yet, with President Obama weighing his first appointment for the high court and promising to pick a nominee with "diversity of experience," Americans apparently are in no rush to even the score for women or minorities on the court.

The article goes on to discuss opinion on whether we need more women on the court in more detail than the minority question and the results on that question are lower than results in a poll taken soon after Justice O'Connor stepped down from the court. 

It shouldn't be surprising that a majority of people don't think it's that important to represent minorities on the court--you know, they're the minority and they usually get the short end.  The only interesting point I thought the article made was:

Women are more likely than men to call it important that the president nominate a woman for the court. Yet just 38% of the women surveyed by Gallup this month called it essential or a good idea. Among men surveyed, only 24% called it essential or a good idea.

But they didn't dig down into the numbers with minority groups in a similar fashion.  I would be very interested to know what percentage of African Americans and Hispanics think it's essential to have a voice on the Court compared to the overall national numbers.  Somehow, I bet it's a little bit higher than the roughly 26% and 32% discussed in this article.  Further research didn't show any articles addressing a greater breakdown of the numbers--I'll keep an eye out for Nate Silver addressing this.

Giro Stage Five: Armstrong Cracks

Lance Armstrong's loss of fifteen seconds in yesterday's stage of the Giro was at least partially blamed on an equipment problem (derailleur) but on today's full-on mountain stage, he looked spent by the end and lost right at three minutes on the stage which was won by Denis Menchov.  This is not surprising as Armstrong is coming off of almost four years of retirement and is recovering from a broken collarbone.  It would make more sense if we looked at the Giro as an opportunity to see if he can ride himself into shape to be a factor in this years Tour de France and so celebrating or agonizing over his performance in the Giro could be a waste of emotion.  What doesn't make sense to me is that Astana sent back three riders at one point to pace Armstrong and try to keep him in contact with the leaders.  From the coverage I saw, this left team leader Levi Leipheimer with just one teammate up front with him and Levi wound up nine seconds behind the stage winner Denis Menchov.  I'm not saying that if Levi had more support up front he would have won the stage but it might have put him in better position.  And Lance probably wouldn't have lost any more time with one less teammate babysitting him.  If nothing else, it was interesting strategy.

Colorado-based Grocers in Austin?

What's up with another Colorado grocer setting up shop here in town?  The new one is Natural Grocers in the old Rooster Andrews location and while it looks like a more attractive option than the Newflower Market (the other Colorado grocer) down here, it's going to take business away from Wheatsville Coop which doesn't make me terribly happy.  They have an impressive list of things they won't sell for various reasons (most of the reasons are pretty good; for example:  Irradiated Food: This is a process of exposing foods to radioactivity to prolong the shelf life and reduce the risk of bacterial contamination. It is currently approved for meats, grains, some produce, herbs, and spices. The radioactive rays can change the flavors and textures of food; reduce vitamins, minerals, and enzymes; and create chemical changes. All irradiated foods must be labeled as such; however, products containing irradiated ingredients do not require labeling.) and I do like that.  Since they're up north-central, I won't be shopping there even if I thought it was the best option in the area but it's probably worth checking them out. 

But I'll always prefer my people at Wheatsville:

Rep. Joe Barton: More Brilliance

Just ran across a quote from Joe Barton, one of the Texas delegation in the US House who is the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.  Grist quotes Barton from an interview that appeared in Newsmax, regarding his fears that the EPA could regulate marathon runners under its authority to regulate sources of CO2, Barton Worries that EPA Will Regulate Runners:

Barton says the average healthy adult exhales between four-tenths of a ton and seven-tenths of a ton of CO2 a year.

“So if you put 20,000 marathoners into a confined area, you could consider that a single source of pollution, and you could regulate it,” Barton says. “The key would be whether the EPA said that 20,000 people running the same route was one source or not.”

What the hell?  This is what he thinks is going to break the back of efforts to regulate carbon dioxide?  Stoking fears that marathon racers will be regulated?  Maybe a more effective route would be to claim that any mass gathering of people could be considered a single source, like the Super Bowl or the Final Four.  Marathoners are a rather small slice of the American population to make much of a difference but if you could convince football fans that they were somehow threatened by the EPA, that could change things in a big way!

Presidential Perks--Finally, A Reason to Run

I'd never thought that running for president was anything that I would be even remotely interested in doing.  But the president gets to hand out with Carolina's national championship basketball team and that's not to be lightly dismissed.  I'm sure there must be easier ways to hang with the Heels but if you're president you get your own personalized jersey...

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Giro d'Italia

Stage 4 of the Giro d'Italia just ended, with Danilo Di Luca taking the victory.  It was an uphill finish at the end of the first stage with any significant mountains, Lance Armstrong was in the mix but dropped back at the very end, while his teammate Levi Leipheimer finished up front with the big dogs du jour.  They're still figuring out the General Classification as the current race leader Alessandro Petacchi was well back on today's stage.  Looks like a Swede named Thomas Lovkvist will be tomorrow's race leader, with Di Luca right behind him and Astana's Popovych, Leipheimer and Armstrong in 4th, 5th and 6th. 

This is the first grande tour of Armstrong's comeback.  He dropped back at the end today but I didn't watch enough to know if he did this because his work keeping Levi up front was ended or if it's in doubt who the main man for Astana is this race. 

Positive Actions by USDA

Grist has a good summary up of positive actions taken by the USDA, particularly in the realm of organic farming, Vilsack's USDA Shakes Things Up.  Those who are big into the sustainability and organic farming side of things had a lot of concern over Secretary Vilsack being appointed head of the USDA and though a lot of their concerns remain, they may have to realize that they're not going to get everything they want and try to see the good things that Vilsack is doing.  I'm glad to see that Grist is doing this:

I know some are still reeling from the recent Obama administration announcement on biofuelscontinued pimping for Monsanto and other biotech companies seems both unsustainable and uninformed. But a slew of positive decisions have come down from the USDA in recent days that merit attention and suggest that business is very much not as usual at ag’s end of the Mall.
and its implication that it remains a bit too much in thrall to the concerns of Big Ag. And Tom Vilsack’s

The article has the details but the recent moves include $50 million earmarked for current and transitioning organic farms in the environmental quality program, an end to the fight to prevent the EU from banning beef raised with the growth hormone rBST, full funding for a settlement of longstanding discrimination claims over how the agency treated black farmers in various programs and improvements in the standards that require a certain amount of grass-feeding for dairy products to be considered organic.

Thai Cooking Class

Austin's Thai Fresh is offering a cooking class this Thursday night at 6:30.  I have other commitments that will not suffer being snubbed but I thought I'd pass the word, Learn About Thai Cooking and Tipsy Cocktails:

Jam Sanitchat, owner of Thai Fresh on West Mary and blogger behind Thai Cooking with Jam, has teamed up with David Alan and Joe Eifler, aka The Tipsy Texans, for a Thai food and cocktail class at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday.

Brewster McCracken Bows Out

Good for Brewster--by dropping out of the runoff (he was 20-points behind in the general election), McCracken has saved the city a bunch of money and allowed us to get ready to move on into the new administration sooner rather than dragging things out (Here that, Norm Coleman???).  Lee Leffingwell will be the new mayor of Austin and will be sworn in on June 22nd.

Sunshine Community Gardens MiniDoc

KLRU's Docubloggesr show has apparently been canceled but there are still some little documentaries in the pipeline that look like they'll be coming out.  I caught one this morning about Sunshine Community Gardens, a community garden up in north central Austin on property owned by the School for the Blind.  I remember when I first moved here we drove past the gardens and I thought it was a cool idea to have community gardens but didn't totally get it at the time.  Now I know people who have plots there and I think it's one of those great Austin institutions--it's been around for 30 years and has around 150 garden plots.

This doc is mostly about some of the people who garden there and I think it's pretty interesting, though maybe not great film-making (nearly nine minutes):

The Story of Stuff

I'm not sure how many of us need to watch a somewhat over-simplified video to understand that the cycle of production and consumption in the world is pretty much out of whack but there's a twenty minute video making the rounds these days that does just that.  And it does it pretty well, though I would imagine that if you aren't at least a little bit simpatico to the idea that conspicuous consumption is digging us into a huge hole, well, you might find it preachy.  You can watch the video online at The Story of Stuff (though the site wasn't keeping up with traffic today, maybe because of higher volume due to a New York Times article that mentions it). 

Here's how the Times introduces the video, A Cautionary Video About America's Stuff:

The video was created by Annie Leonard, a former Greenpeace employee and an independent lecturer who paints a picture of how American habits result in forests being felled, mountaintops being destroyed, water being polluted and people and animals being poisoned. Ms. Leonard, who describes herself as an “unapologetic activist,” is also critical of corporations and the federal government, which she says spends too much on the military.

Here's a little teaser video from Youtube, which is probably more than enough to let you know if the tone and subject matter are likely to set your head to nodding or set your teeth on edge:

The Internal Combustion Engine v. Electricity

A recent study is out showing that using electricity that has been produced using biomass to run your car is 81% more efficient on a per acre basis than running a car on cellulosic ethanol (not currently available for consumption).  The study used a straight comparison between plug-in battery cars (not quite available for the regular consumer) and internal combustion cars; it didn't look at hybrids.  Here's the bit in the Grist article on this subject that I found most interesting, Electric Cars Get Better MPA (Miles Per Acre):

What we have here is a battle forming up between increasingly electrified transport (hybrid—plug-in hybrid—fully electric) and corn ethanol powered internal combustion engines (cellulosic is and will probably always be just five years from economic viability). One side is championed by consumer demand being met by market forces and the other side is championed by our politicians who force us to pay to turn our own food into fuel and then pour it down our throats. These are the same politicians who subsidize oil with one hand and its competitor, biofuels with the other. If it hasn’t dawned on you yet that our politicians are not capable of solving complex problems like this, maybe it’s time it did. Take matters into your own hands. Make your next car purchase a hybrid, plug-in hybrid, or full electric when they arrive (on dealer lots next year).

An Overwhelming Sense of Deja Vu

Thursday night dominoes featured a little more 5-0 excitement last week (Speaking of Dominoes--5-0, 5-0!).  I'm not sure how well I've described the venue in the past, but we play in the back office room of a small warehouse in South Austin--the warehouse is long and pretty narrow with a small office and bathroom at the back of the space.  When we're lucky, we have a couple of tables of play going (on unlucky nights we're reduced to one table of 42 and one of Moon or cribbage or just sitting and watching the other game)--Thursday night was a Moon night.  The way we were seated, I was the only one who had a good view of the covered up and dusty window that gives a shadowy view of the warehouse and so I was the one who noticed the play of flashlights on the window. 

Flashlights...

Flashlights?

"I think the cops might be here again," I said.

And it was true.  Apparently, new police chief Acevedo is keeping a pretty close eye on domino players this year, though fortunately this time around they didn't have their guns drawn when they came in and we didn't all have to trudge out there and blink at them--they readily accepted that the warehouse wasn't being robbed.  But twice in three months is a bit much, chief.  We're hatching conspiracy theories to cover the scenario as quickly as possible.

Austin City Elections

The mayoral race is headed for a run-off between Lee Leffingwell and Brewster McCracken--Leffingwell smoked everyone else with 47% of the vote (McBrewster polled 27%) but because of the crowded field wasn't able to win outright.  As to the other races, there weren't really any surprises, unless maybe the size of Riley's victory over Cavazos (66-34%)--I wound up voting for Perla but I'm not really disappointed that Riley won--like I said before, they're both good candidates and I'm sure that Austin will benefit from Riley's perspective on the council.

Taters

At the extreme risk of being mocked as "Farmer Graham" by Mac yet again, I present to you the first fruits of my labors, the first crop of potatoes (red lasota) from my back yard.  As I'm sure you'll notice, they are a bit inconsistent.  And I have to admit that on plant number one I did barely better than double my output--one seed potato equaled two real potatoes (with a couple of starch marbles on the side).  But that's all right--I planted the spuds a little too close together and I didn't have the soil prepped as well as I would like in retrospect so I'll just call this a proof of concept run and then the next time around I'll dig my trenches much deeper, with a lot more good compost and with two rows instead of three.  But I gotta tell you, these guys were delicious cooked in olive oil with just salt and pepper.  A little more complex in flavor than a normal tater and what I like to think of as brighter and livelier than what I get in the store.  Of course, that could all be in my brain but as you can see in the picture, even the skins are a little lighter and not so dull:

So what can you do with taters?  According to Sam you can boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew:

Chicken de Provence

Today was a big project day and so I stayed away from all things Impolite.  I've been toying with the idea of installing blinds on some of the windows that let in the hottest sun over the summer and finally did it today.  If I didn't feel weird about taking pictures of my damned windows, I'd have a picture but just trust me that it turned out well.  Did some other things too but the major triumph of the day has to be the chicken I just baked while watching Dollhouse and not paying too much attention to what I was doing.  It was that easy and turned out that tasty.  I'm going to tell you exactly what I did and it will give you the basics for some tasty chicken breasts that you can alter as you see fit.

Chicken de Provence

Three chicken breasts
Preheat oven to 400 degrees
Mix a couple of tablespoons of herb de provence (available at Central Market in the bulk section) with one clove of garlic, two or three tablespoons of olive oil and salt and pepper in a medium sized bowl.
Coat each chicken breast with the oil and herbs by flipping them around in the bowl till all of the goodies are no longer in the bowl but are on the bird.
Place the breasts skin side up in the baking dish of your choice.

Bake for 20 minutes and pull it out and take a look.  It won't be ready, so put it in for another ten minutes.  Pull it out and take a look.  It still won't be ready so put it in for another ten and then pull it out and take a look.  It'll be starting to look done and so you can check the internal temperature (though it probably won't be done yet).  It wasn't done for me and so I put it in for another 8-10 minutes and then it was golden brown and delicious.  If I'd had a good Meyer lemon at this point I would have finished it by squeezing half a lemon over the three breasts but I didn't so I didn't.  But you might could if you wanted to.

Credit where credit is due--I took the timing and the temperature setting from a recipe in The Joy of Cooking (my latest and greatest cookbook purchase) but otherwise the recipe is mine--simple and straightforward and inspired by how incredible the herb de provence blend smells.  Why the hell do we so frequently screw up food by making it too complex?