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.

Give US the Money

The bank bailout amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars thrown at institutions that made poor decisions, while rewarding their executives with millions of dollars in cash, stock options, and perqs. Precisely what the banks are doing with our money, no one knows. Transparency seems to have been engineered out of the legislation.

Meanwhile, the Big 3 automakers come with their hats in the their hands, warning of the direst of fates for millions of workers in their supply chain and the workers they employ that enjoy so much the benefits of having a job.

Then there is Iraq, a place where American contractors have squandered $100 billion on infrastructure that is coming unwound as quickly as the checks are cashed, and falls to bits like so many sand castles in the desert wind.

The US, where bridges collapse periodically, where children are schooled in out-buildings. where the rail system is as modern as the Edison light bulb, gets nothing. Worse, the standard of living is falling for all but the wealthiest of Americans. They get paid less and less to do more and more. They live with the constant threat that their jobs may simply be erased, that their health care may bankrupt them, that they might lose their house because their American dream arrived with a poison pill of readjusting interest rates, that their government, which dutifully collects their taxes with brutal efficiency, will be incapable of meeting its contractual obligation to help them when disaster strikes in the form of a hurricane, an epidemic, a terrorist attack (which they promise is already gift-wrapped and in the mail), or one of the countless other threats from a planet that is being plundered and swathed in the muck of industrial production.

The model has outlived its usefulness. Even the 'Maestro', Greenspan, has to scratch his head and wonder aloud 'I never knew this could happen.'

Let's have the government do something for the citizens. I know it's a radical idea. It's not even my idea. The Obama economic stimulus package seems to be aimed at the goal of rebuilding the infrastructure of the nation, and modernizing our decrepitude. I applaud this. We must be vigilant, however, and proceed with our eyes wide open, with the GAO keeping its pencils always sharpened, with careful Congressional oversight, because, where large sums of money are being doled-out, corruption and graft are attracted like buzzards to road-kill.