This Site is Being Superceded

This site is being superceded by http://syntheticblog.com

Henceforth that will be the main repository of my creative superpowers. As such, it will have a certain 'everything and the kitchen sink' charm to it.

Soon I will tramp-up this site with all manner of ads. If you have enjoyed reading anything here, please click through to one or two of them. The pennies I receive will be 'Pennies from Heaven.'

thanks,

 

Clyde

Michael Jackson: Insomniac Sought Amnesiac Bliss

Google Tags: Michael Jackson, Propofol, amnesia, insomnia

It is an irony of Michael Jackson's peculiar life that a recording star would die in pursuit of a drug that confers a form of erasure: the erasure of duration from one's awareness.

Propofol, the anaesthetic apparently responsible for the sudden cardiac arrest that ended Mr. Jackson's promising re-entry into arena performance, has often been termed 'milk of amnesia.' Police interviewers reported that, in the course of issuing his demands for the drug, Jackson himself had referred to it as his 'milk.' An aqueous emulsion, propofol has the white appearance of milk, but it is plausible that the surgery-savvy Jackson was also familiar with the colloquial moniker satirizing the drug's mental effects.

Typically, abusers of this drug first seek it out in an attempt to treat an otherwise intractable insomnia. The Guardian reported an expert in addiction treatment commenting, "What's shocking is that most Propofol [addicted] patients are not looking for euphoria or for a high, they just want to go into a coma. They are wanting to disappear." Many of them are choosing to do so to avoid the intrusive thoughts that accompany traumas like PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) or a history of childhood sexual abuse.

While there is public knowledge of Mr. Jackson's poor treatment at the hands of his father during his childhood, any suggestion of sexual abuse would have to be inferred from allegations of inappropriate relationships with young boys that dogged Jackson over a period of many years, resulting in a criminal trial and, separately, a reputed payoff of a substantial sum of money to buy the silence of a family whose son was alleged to have engaged in some type of sexual activity with Mr. Jackson.

But as a self which presumably faced itself in the mirror at least on occasion, though perhaps only then by accident, this logical referent of 'Man in the Mirror' seemed to evolve over the years into a Möbius strip of negative identity feedback, a fact to which the endless plastic surgeries and ever more garish facial sculpting attest. It could well have been a case of plastic surgeons treating body dysmorphic disorder.

If we think of the propofol experience as a lacuna of the self, an absence or obliteration that lifts only when the drug ceases to be dripped into the veins, it possesses phenomenological resemblance to an amnesia.

Amnesia as an 'organic' psychological defense mechanism exists too, of course, and, as if to remind us, a month after MJ's demise, a man wandered out of Seattle's Discovery Park, knowing nothing of his past. What drew him to Discovery Park? Perhaps he was hoping to 'discover' his identity, though this is unlikely given that the subtype of amnesia he most probably suffers from is 'psychogenic' amnesia, resulting from psychological trauma, rather than, say, a degenerative brain disease. Contrary to the propofol example, if personal choice is operative here, it is at a deeply obscured and perhaps inaccessible level.

Separately we are confronted with the possibility of dissembling as a  manifestation of 'fraudulent amnesia,' when considering the odd discrepancies in the timeline of events given by Mr. Jackson's personal physician, the eminent cardiologist, Dr. Conrad Murray, who has acknowledged administering several sedatives and subsequently, propofol, at 10:40am, an odd hour to go for the heavy guns.

His is the type of deposition that often morphs into a base form of legal posturing, as defendants testify in court with answers like 'I don't recall' or 'I have no recollection of that happening.' Where has their memory gone, we are left to wonder. One would have imagined such a hair-raising series of events to be accompanied by a concomitant sharpening of the senses.

For this sub-species of man the beautiful lie is the one that can be contorted from the facts, like an alphabet from paper clips, rather than the one that needs to be manufactured from whole cloth.

When Weasels Attack

Given that the entire global economy has tanked in the wake of unscrupulous lending practices that began in the US sub-prime home mortgage market, you would think that CNN, the self-proclaimed 'Worldwide Leader in News,' might chose to distance itself from mortgage lenders as customers for a while, at least until things cool off and the DOW rebounds a bit more.

Instead, CNN had sold airtime- for months now- to an advertiser called 'TMU,' which is running ads that deceptively mimic the visual style of TV news.

The ad begins with a swoosh graphic announcing 'BREAKING NEWS' and proceeds to an 'on-air personality' delivering what appears to be a news story. The typical elements of a CNN piece are all readily apparent: the over-the-shoulder graphic, the lower third, the crawl. They dovetail quite nicely with the lead-in promo for Anderson Cooper and the outro promo for Lou Dobbs. The ad shown ran on August 20, 2009.

An implicit association with the Federal government is apparent not only in the mention of the FHA, but also in the 'toll-free hotline,' which readers will recall was part of the 'Bush plan' to provide emergency assistance to those seeking to avoid foreclosure. In this case, it's a hotline to TMU. I never called it, but I may give it a shot.

I find this type of blurring-the-lines between news and those paying for airtime to be an inexcusable offence. If CBS can be fined for a Janet Jackson boob, CNN should be made to pay for this money-grab. Below I have appended images from the promos that appears before and after the ad, as well as the intro graphic to the next-up CNN story.

   

My Continental Airlines Hindu Meal

There was a time when you ordered a special meal because there were so few requests for them that they had to be individually prepared. This meant you usually ended up with something that was a grade above the ham and cheese on a fat white bun that you could otherwise expect. Well those days are gone. Now that cost-cutting measures have resulted in fees for checked bags, pillow-count reduction and other assorted insults, airlines have found a way to make the 'special' meal absolutely ordinary. The good news is that their secret research might have unintentionally provided us with a ray of hope for achieving world peace.

How do they do it, you ask? Let's call it 'meal-combining.' This sounds a little like the faddish 'food-combining' that peaked in popularity a few years ago. The idea is to take the common denominator of all the special ideological dietary mandates of the World, and to create dishes that simultaneously satisfy every set set of rules!

Of course, the airlines didn't think of this first. My guess is that the pioneering efforts should be attributed to Kosher Indian-Vegetarian restaurants, which differ from airlines because their food tastes good. Take a look at the label below:

Let me first draw your attention to the fact that this is the ingredient label for a breakfast sandwich. This breakfast sandwich was served to me on an evening flight, more typically the time when 'dinner' is served. This certainly didn't bode well, but I had a seen an Indian woman eating lentils with chapattis that looked really tasty just weeks ago, so I was still caught off-guard.

Now, this was only a single item out of the whole tortuous meal box, and all the other offerings had similarly long lists of ingredients, so I've chosen to use this merely as a representative example.

From this label you will see that our hope for world peace lies in our common interests. All of us, well not all of us, but VGML, VLML, MOML, and HNML people all want the same things! Among those things are, apparently, azodicarbomide, calcium sulfate, and vital wheat gluten. To decode the encrypted meal descriptors, they translate as follows:

VGML= Vegan Meal	VLML= Ovo-Lacto Vegan Meal
MOML= Moslem Meal	HNML= Hindu Meal

How something like ethoxylated diglycerides qualify as Vegan is a bit mystifying to me, but I guess it's listed in a handbook somewhere. In case you have trouble reading the label, you are looking at the recipe for a 'Wheat English Muffin, Vegan American Cheese, and a Vegan Sausage Patty.'

The accompaniments included a quinoa salad, which tasted even more like bird food than quinoa usually does, if such a thing is possible. It promptly went back in the box. Maybe that should be the name of the 'restaurant' where this food is made, 'Back in the Box.' There was also some sort of cookie-ish thing, which I found detestable, but which my 3½ yo daughter had no trouble happily gobbling down.

I don't know what Air France is doing these days, but the paté de campagne, the camembert with a crusty baguette, and the little bottles of Bourgogne rouge that followed one another, like loyal French mercenaries, in an endless procession toward their demise, still stands for me as the pinnacle of inflight meal service. Adieu, HNML!

Airplanes should be retrofitted with USB power on the armrests.

I can't believe they use Hi8 tape for their entertainment playback. What dinosaurs- a 20 year-old tape format! Haven't they heard of DVDs? It's a  format which is built around easy menu driven, chapter-based playback and pausing, eliminating the need for swapping out tapes. But if you take a look in the closet of most passenger jets, you'll see ancient tape playback.

The fact that they still don't offer WiFi is stupid enough. When it comes to cellular, I am not in favor of introducing cell-yell to the cabin, but texting and email would be ok.

USB would provide a safe, low-voltage power supply that passengers could use to charge their mobile devices during long flights, when available battery power is taxed. The cables are already widely available and it is a standard in peripheral device power.

The FAA approach to green-lighting cabin technology works about as quickly as NASA's. NASA has a flight-worthiness certification that takes so long, that it sent up twenty year-old tube cameras on probes, long after much-improved CCD technology was available. Of course, airlines don't want to spend money when they are losing money. They don't even like to paint their planes anymore, it seems. But if they can get people to swallow paying for baggage and food, anything is possible.

Sensei Coffee

I've only managed to get within thirty feet of this device, so it is still on my to-do list to sample its brew. I know there are some who say they can taste the different between coffee brewed with bleached-paper filters and whole wheat filters, but I am not of that ilk. I don't disdain diner coffee, though I don't laud it either. But as the master says (see article) 'I am not ready.'

clipped from www.nytimes.com At Last, a $20,000 Cup of Coffee WITH its brass-trimmed halogen heating elements, glass globes and bamboo paddles, the new contraption that is to begin making coffee this week at the Blue Bottle Café here looks like a machine from a Jules Verne novel, a 19th-century vision of the future. Called a siphon bar, it was imported from Japan at a total cost of more than $20,000. The cafe has the only halogen-powered model in the United States, and getting it here required years of elliptical discussions with its importer, Jay Egami of the Ueshima Coffee Company. “If you just want equipment you’re not ready,” Mr. Egami said in an interview. But, he added, James Freeman, the owner of the cafe, is different: “He’s invested time. He’s invested interest. He is ready.”

Mr. Coffee Model VBX20: Drippiest Coffee Maker Ever?

Certainly, drip coffee makers are expected to drip in order to perform their life-sustaining function of brewing coffee quickly and reliably. This Mr. Coffee Model, the VBX20- (an inexpensive model, I grant you) delivers, however, a large number of extraordinarily stupid and irritating drip modalities that render it, in the domain of kitchen appliances, something akin to an infant learning to eat cereal. It is a messy affair, from start to finish. The coffee it brews is fine, let's fact facts: that is mostly about coffee plus water, but soiling the counter top is an unacceptable by-product, and is indicative of an intolerable level of carelessness from the industrial designers responsible for creating this insulting plastic monster. Joe DiMaggio would be aghast. Let me explain.

First, if you look at the back of the machine, on the far right in the photo, you will note two holes in the water tank. Bizarrely, should you attempt to fill the tank with water from the carafe and approach at anything but a precisely correct angle, water will spew forth from the holes. Ludicrous. Then, when the dripping process begins, it is accompanied by spattering, as seen in the middle image. Should you interrupt the brewing process before completion, a fairly standard technique of morning coffee lovers, the dripping head will not cease its dripping instantly. One, two, three four, five remaining drips will luxuriantly emerge from the spout and tumble onto the heated platter below, where they spatter and vaporize. Invariably, if you place the carafe on the counter- something I know by now never to attempt, you will be the proud papa (or mama) of a charming series of coffee rings.

The final and most egregious insult comes from the mere act of POURING the coffee into your cup. This, the quintessential act of coffee maker deployment fails, in the typically baffling drippy manner of the VBX20. With every pour, mysterious drops of coffee unavoidably scatter on your counter top. Have your handi-wipe handy, that's all i can offer as advice.
It's more than a coffee maker. It is a mess maker.

Iron Chef: Battle Spice Chopper

Two chopping implements compete to see which one will reign supreme. The contestants are: the Herb Mill, which comes to our competition with the lofty pedigree of Zabar's, and, second, the Mezzaluna Knife, a gift of uncertain origin bearing the name Hoffritz, which sounds sufficiently fancy to command respect, as opposed to say, Ronco. Don't get me wrong, Ron Popeil is an illuminati of our era, he's just not featured in this competition, and to me his name conjures up plastic more so than steel.

I tested both gadgets on mint and parsley and, additionally, I tested the Mezzaluna on fresh rosemary. The results were fascinating.

The leafy herbs are quickly reduced to mince with the herb mill but, given the milling nature of the process, there is a high degree of leaf crushing that accompanies the mincing. The process, though, is fast and the herbs are easily removed by simply throwing the handle into reverse, or by pulling them off the bottom, which can be done with little fear of slicing one's finger on the blades. The overall construction of the gadget is a bit flimsy and it feels as if it may suddenly disassemble itself from the violence of its operation. However, over the many years that I have employed it this has never occurred. The end result is a pile of smashed and shredded leaves that are perfect for taboulleh.

The Mezzaluna knife is a completely different beast, and I must say, despite a couple of drawbacks, it could become my go-to gadget for chopping herbs. Unlike the herb mill, which can deposit its efforts directly into a bowl, the knife requires the use of a cutting board. Although this means you will have another surface to clean, it also affords much more control over the mincing process, allowing you to mince leaves in a continuous spectrum of sizes from large coarse flakes to tiny little crumbs. This was particularly useful with the rosemary, which I seldom, if ever, chop in the herb mill. Rosemary was easily reduced to dust with the Mezzaluna, a consistency that renders it ideal for sauces, where large needles would be objectionable.

The most serious drawback to the Mezzaluna is that bulk amounts of unchopped leaves cower between its double blades, and must be continually forced back onto the chopping surface. This can be performed by inserting one's finger from the top of the knife blades, nevertheless, it represents a somewhat more dangerous exposure of the digits to the blades and would necessitate some sober care, particularly if one likes to sample the wine that will be served with dinner, as I am known to do.

Peasant Food Gone Wild: A Recipe

Several years ago, when Daniel Boulud opened another of his grand palaces of degustation, I noted that the menu included, nay, featured, certain items that should only be characterized as offal, and also, though perhaps not fitting precisely within this characterization, pieds de cochons, which I am pretty sure is French for 'proceed with caution.' I took it all as the antics of another bored chef-genius, who, tiring of short ribs and steak-frites, felt the need to delve deeper within his animal. A press release quoted him saying he had been 'transported back to the food of his childhood.'  A recent glance at the Bar Boulud menu turned up this telltale positioning of charcuterie as merely 'cute':

FROMAGE DE TÊTE GILLES VEROT 
HEAD CHEESE TERRINE
GILLES VEROT'S AWARD WINNING SPECIALTY

My main purpose here, though, is not to dwell on innards and the pursuit of grossification, but to point out that in cooking, the dream of the Alchemist sees its true realization. From baser ingredients come precious masterpieces. There is a certain process whereby the humble onion, the potato, a pasta, bean, a simple thing, achieves a unity with its fellow pot-sharing comestibles that is not fully explicable in terms of the backward-engineered recipe, as achievable as this may be.  E pluribus unum, as the dollar bill would have it: out of many, one. Call it a gestalt of cooking. The 'season, taste, repeat' cycle of fine-tuning flavors is aimed at hitting a bulls-eye that is a unitary experience, not a mere mixture of ingredients.  I submit for your approval: the mac 'n cheese, the chili, the pasta e fagioli. A catalog of comfort foods, perhaps, but ones built upon a few simple ingredients that magically harmonize in one another's presence like the understudy cast of a Broadway play who, together, trump a playbill of stars.

And so I turn to another such recipe, one that I've only recently encountered, but which perfectly fits into this category: Bacalhau à Brás.  This is a Portuguese recipe which I can describe, without oversimplifying, as a salt-cod hash. I first sampled it in Maplewood NJ at Churrasco BBQ & Steakhouse. The video clip shown above is a bit more high-brow in execution, with its fancy prawns and cucumber,  but is still in the same vein.

Let me rewind a bit to touch on my fascination with salt-cod.  It's a big topic and an entire foodie book has been written about it.  I really haven't read that book,  so I'll just summarize according to another book I haven't read. If you remember anything about 'Mutiny on the Bounty,' you'll recall Captain Bligh, whose name sometimes connotes cruelty, but should instead summon the qualities of intellect, loyalty and steadfast courage. He was a brilliant sailor, managing to navigate 3000 miles of the Pacific, in a dingy,  to save the lives of the fraction of the crew who fulfilled their sworn allegiance to the captain of their vessel. Well, it turns out that Bligh's mission, foiled in the famous case, but later revisited, was to transplant breadfruit trees from the Pacific Islands to the Islands of the Caribbean in order to feed a growing population of slaves, cut-off by the Revolutionary war from their life-sustaining supply of salt-cod. As it so happened, the enslaved workers balked at the breadfruit, in all of its various preparations: steamed, as a pudding, tofurkey style- none of it was for them. Even today, throughout the Caribbean, you will find the lingering evidence in a continued reverence for salt-cod dishes. And let's not forget who was doing all that fishing. It was the Portuguese emigrant, who had settled in Newfoundland or Fall River, or New Bedford. They sailed out on large creaky vessels and then were dropped over the side in tippy little dories with nothing more than oars, hooks, bait, and a few hundred feet of fishing line. But they caught lots of fish! Of course, in the absence of refrigeration, the proven method of preserving their catch was desiccation through salting.  In a culinary sense, this is where  my interest was piqued.

One revives the salted fish through immersion in a fresh-water bath, changing the water over the course of a couple of days, by which time most of the salt will have been removed. Today this happens in the fridge of course, but I suppose it would have been done at room temperature in bygone days. Bye, gone days! Now the fish is ready for cooking. Whichever recipe you choose, one fact that becomes apparent immediately is that you have not, through the water bath process, returned the filets to their pristine state, for the salt exerts a curing action on the flesh which causes a subtle, curious and, in my opinion, delectable adulteration in its flavor. Its the difference between picnic shoulder and ham.

At the outset of this peripatetic discourse I promised a recipe, so let me hop to it, lest this post languish interminably in 'draft' mode.  If you happen to own this cool Euro cookbook, 1080 Recipes, you need only turn to recipe 551, where the dish is named in the descriptive fashion 'Bacalao con Patatas Paja y Huevos Revueltos'. So now you know the secret: it's basically shredded bacalao with fried matchstick potatoes, onions, and scrambled eggs. It couldn't be simpler, ingredient-wise.  Keeping a blind eye to the cardiovascular and caloric demands of the dish, let me elaborate a little bit on the magic  that happens when you follow the recipe. First, you crisp the thinly-julienned potatoes in sunflower oil and set them aside. Then, reserving a small amount of the oil of the sunflower, you add the onions, which have been sliced, and pulled into rings, and then, ever so slowly, you coax them into a sweet, light-brown, gloriously softened manifestation of their original harsh selves. Following, you add the desalted cod, which I meticulously shredded into threads of exactly the same size, but which you may pull apart in a less obsessive-compulsive fashion. Did I mention that cooking can be therapeutic?

After a little browning, the last step is to crack the eggs directly into the hot skillet, scramble them with a fork and, as they begin to solidify, add the crunchy potatoes. After the whole thing firms up, it's ready for plating. I added some Chohula Hot Sauce, but Crystal, Frank's, or Goya would all be appropriate, or skip the hot sauce altogether if you can't handle it. Don't be ashamed, just enjoy.

Men of Finance Beat Out Men of Science in Race to Create Black Hole

For Earthlings of a certain crazy-science bent, fear that the Large Hadron Collider, once revved-up to full speed, could create a micro-black hole that would subsequently swallow the earth faster than  you could set your TiVo, afforded good reason to tremble in fear every waking morning.  Then, when the superfluid Helium cooling system broke-down, pushing back the start date, many of them looked on this event as a reprieve from a date with cosmic destruction. How wrong they were.

Furnishing proof that not even the wackiest conspiracy-scientist can outwit Nature's singular evil genius, there would be none among them to predict that the first black hole would emerge, not from CERN, but from AIG. With shrewd dedication and a computational command of the forces of Greed, Men of Finance crafted a marvel so dense that it is able to suck-in, from the greatest civilized societies on the earth, their entire economies, while leaving the planet, and its inhabitants intact.

This incalculable capacity for swallowing wealth and spitting out nothing, surely must rank as one of the greatest mysteries of the Universe.