Fear of a free future

Michael Barone had some thoughts on the SOTU speech. (Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the pointer.)

Obama’s Antique Vision of Technological Progress.

Barack Obama, like all American politicians, likes to portray himself as future-oriented and open to technological progress. Yet the vision he set out in his State of the Union address is oddly antique and disturbingly static.

Read the whole thing.

A lot of the speech was like finding an article in a magazine from 1930 about what the year 2000 would be like. The left can't let go of the dream of a command economy, even though command economies always fail. The knowledge problem is not amenable to wishful thinking. Over-regulation stifles activity of all kinds. How many nuclear plants could be under construction now if even half the money from the stimulus programs had been put into a program of construction? Killing the coal and oil industries without replacing them is a recipe for poverty. Lefties fear prosperity because poor people are easier to rule. Lefties fear technology because technology can lead to prosperity. You don't find computers in private hands in Communist countries. You didn't use to find typewriters, copiers or mimeographs, either.

Obama's EPA turning off the water to California's Central Valley is poverty by decree. It's not of the same magnitude as Stalin's Holodomor, or decreed famine, in the Ukraine in the 1930's, but it's the same type of thing. Shutting down West Virginia's largest coal mine is another move to promote poverty. And these moves do not have only local effects. They raise the prices of food and energy to the whole country, and indeed the world.

Update: Rick at Wizbang links to William O'Keefe at the Examiner: "Setting a goal to raise energy prices seems to be the last thing we would want to do as a nation." Yet it is the Administration's policy.

Second Rate Snacks ...

… is the name of a blog devoted to, guess what? I read the whole thing and didn't even need an Alka-Seltzer afterwards. Recommended for anyone who has debated the merits of different brands of potato chips and cheese puffs, and, really, who hasn't?

"You were doing it wrong"

That's the title of a thread at AskMetafilter that has been keeping me entertained for days. The initial question:

What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you've been doing wrong all along?

"Crap, I've been doing it wrong." We've all had those sudden epiphanies where we realize we've been doing something incorrectly, ineffectively or just suboptimally our whole lives, in domains from handicraft to human relations to technical stuff to personal grooming. What have you spent large portions of your life doing wrong?

The first answer: "Tying my shoes." Many people have problems with words such as segue and epitome. Another answer up near the top is "It took me until adulthood to realize that courage, tenacity, and hard work get you a lot farther than plain old smartness." So there are all kinds of things posted here. I was pleased to discover howjsay dot com, an English dictionary of pronunciations. Just pronunciations, no definitions, and it is English, so "balmy" is pronounced as "barmy," and so forth. Another discovery would be this video, demonstrating how to tell when the pan is hot enough.



That video is extracted from a post at Houseboat Eats which explains the whole thing much more fully.

Then there's this mirror trick:

Mirrors are a recurring theme in the thread.

I learned of this from Prof. Althouse, who learned of it from her son John Althouse Cohen.

Metafilter mods are not pleased with the thread and might have killed it, if they had not been distracted, as is revealed in another thread called Doing it right.

I am the egg man ...

… and I'm hungry! Watch out, potatoes!
Sort of like the man in the crescent moon, only hungry. Looking at those taters with that big yellow eye, mouth wide open. You see it or you don't.

A couple of petty domestic gripes

Gripe number one:

The kitchen sink would not stop smelling of mold. Washing the dishcloths, liberal applications of bleach, nothing helped. Months of this. Finally nailed it down:
Do you see that knurled cap on the bottom? It's made of some kind of soft plastic that mold loves to grow on. This pic is of a Scotch-Brite dishwand, but I have seen the same thing marketed under the O-Cel-O name, also. (Both from 3M, so no surprise there.) It never occurred to me that mold would be growing on plastic. Replaced it with another brand with a hard plastic endcap, and no more mold stink in the sink.

Gripe number two:

I do like a big, shallow skillet. A 12" or 12.5" skillet is just right for a three-egg omelet, which can then be split between oneself and one's companion, at about 1.75 egg for one and 1.25 egg for the other. A French company called T-fal, or Tefal, makes skillets that seem like they would really fill the bill for this job. I have owned three of them. Why three? Because they start to warp right away. They get high in the center, so that if what you are cooking is more or less liquid, it takes on a ring shape, like this:

I dropped that egg in the middle of the skillet. It did not stay there. If you do omelets the right way, with the back-and-forth shake to distribute the egg, this warp produces voids in the middle, so that you have to turn the skillet so far on its side that you risk spilling the whole thing on the cooktop. The next big, shallow skillet will not be a T-fal.

Disclaimer: I have not been paid in cash or in kind to endorse these products.

This might be frying too hard

Deep-fried everything.

I could swear I saw a link to this on Instapundit, but when I went back to look for it, it had disappeared.

Posh Nosh

Just the kind of British comedy based on word-play I like. A taste:

Another: Beautiful Food.

Thanks to Althouse commenter peter hoh, who recommended the paella^*. Look for David Tennant in this one, along with the giant prawns.

^* Should one attempt to pronounce foreign words with a feigned foreign accent? Always good for a mild dispute. Pie-yella or pie-eighya ("eigh" as in eight)? Simon Marchmont has his opinion, in that Posh Nosh episode. Toby Young has a paella episode to relate (via). It's not just Americans, Toby Young. Here previously: When in Roma …

Norman Borlaug, R.I.P.

A Nobel Peace Prize winner who deserved it. The real "Green Revolutionary." 1914—2009.

He left the world a better place than he found it.

Buffet

Sprats.

Some wine and cheese.

Olives.

Anchovies.

Too much crystallized ginger. An aid to digestion. If someone does not steal it. About the right amount.

"… who would hide
"behind your chair
"and steal your crystallized ginger?" (At 4:21.) Have some quarter-tones, maybe some eighth- or sixteenth-tones, with that, and a good night.



Part 2 ["amoebas are very small," also long time sun, and pure light]:



Cockles, and whelks, and big winkles! (Video, NSFW.)


Calimari passim, search for critters.

Bon appetit.

Science news

In a piece of original research which took place on the evening of June 29, 2009, a serving of ice cream (mixed chocolate and vanilla) was eaten by your correspondent. Following this, a puppy was allowed to lick the cup. This step shows that when a larger creature is done with some food, a smaller one may still be able to get some good out of what is left. (A more commonly encountered proof is provided by ants at picnics, ubique.) When the puppy was done, the cup appeared to be pretty well cleaned up. It then was replaced on the patio table, and ignored for a while. When next it was looked into, a lightning bug had continued the scavenging of leftovers. This demonstrates that the principle of leftovers, above, can apply more than once to the same dessert. (Leftovers are recursive.) It also demonstrates that at least one lightning bug likes ice cream. Your correspondent suggests that lightning bugs are not commonly thought of as being fond of ice cream because they rarely have the opportunity to feast on a very thin film of it which in turn is on a hard surface, which saves their tiny feet from the possibility or indeed likelihood of sinking into the ice cream substrate.

Preliminary conclusion: Multi-specific mutualism. Humans benefit from puppies; puppies benefit from humans; lightning bugs benefit from puppies; humans benefit from lightning bugs. Ice cream is a constant, or fudge factor, in the system of relations. Did someone say fudge?

Thus it is shown that some of the best things in the world, to wit, puppies, lightning bugs and ice cream, have a closer, one might say more intimate relationship, than previously believed. And now, when I think of ice cream, I will think of lightning bugs, and vice versa. Not forgetting the puppy. Who could forget the puppy? Not I.



The ice cream gets melty, in between the human and puppy. That makes this observation a demonstration of trickle-down economics, and how, in practice, it benefits bipeds, quadrupeds, and hexapodia. In the next installment, the relationship between ice cream and fireworks. The lightning bug may have something to say about nocturnal illuminations.

(The second picture, on the right, gets a great deal bigger if clicked.)

Vindaloo

England used to be powered by roast beef, and fish and chips. These days, it's vindaloo.

The canonical Fat Les video:



But you want another helping, because the first is never quite enough. The slightly less canonical Fat Les video, as the presenter says, "football, curry, and raving loons are the very foundations on which our great nation are built:"



Les doesn't look as fat as all that. (Or is the name a joke? "Less fat" than, say, the average Manchester United fan? These subtleties sometimes go right past me.)

This is the sort of song that you can sing along on even if you have no idea at all. But I'll give you a little bit of help:

Me and me mum and me dad and me gran went off to Waterloo.
Me and me mum and me dad and me gran and a bucket of vindaloo.

There, that's better, now, isn't it?

A few snacks

Cajun squirrel crisps. "What they're eating in Britain."

More food: Bacon pie, the story and all the pictures (via).

Which led indirectly to Chadzilla, a blog with pictures, oh, my, such pictures, of amazing food conjured by a group of chefs in Miami.

Which leads directly to Obama Foodorama: A Daily Diary of The Obama Foodscape, One Byte At A Time. Chadzilla says, "Everybody in the food industry should bookmark this site and read it daily." People not in the food industry might find something there as well. Top post this morning:

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack: Millionaire, Subsidy Recipient

The Office of Government Ethics released Cabinet appointees' income reports this week, and the AP and AM Law Daily point out that Barack has surrounded himself with millionaire lawyers in his admin, including Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

A two-term former Iowa governor, last year Vilsack's income included $300,000 from the global law and lobbying firm Dorsey and Whitney in Des Moines, Iowa; $100,000 consulting for MidAmerican Energy; $63,000 from Iowa State University; and $55,000 from other sources, including honoraria, a fellowship, a director's fee and consulting. In addition, he and his wife have $500,000 to $1 million in farmland that yielded $15,000 to $50,000 in rent.

There's more. So it's not all recipes, over there, by a long shot.

Gleanings

More on the Antikythera Mechanism, including a working model. The 76-year cycle sounds like Halley's Comet. Or can you think of something else with that periodicity?

The Modern Drunkard interview with Gary Shteyngart. Lotsa vodka, a little caviar, some reflections on the condition of Russia, literature and the writing life (via).

Frozen bubbles. Via Althouse, who calls it a "cool photography stunt." Cool? Below freezing, I'd say!

Self-handicapping excuse artisans. "I coulda been a contenda." If all the if-only's were laid end to end … (via)

Wreck of the bark Trajan discovered in Newport harbor.

Faggots in the raw. (SFW!)

UFO sighting in Cumbria, UK. Turns out to be Chinese lantern balloons, released at a wedding at this hotel. Nice hotel!

Morris dancing in danger of extinction? Probably not just yet.

Speaking of dancing, in Finland they spell YMCA with a NMKY (via Althouse commenter jdeeripper).

Gleanings

A trojan that mimics Windows activation. (via) And another one: "It's not clear how the initial infection gets to your computer. But once there, it puts hooks into Firefox to allow the spyware to watch and report on access to banking-type web sites. When such a site is accessed, the spyware grabs your login credentials and sends them off to the evil hacker. And that can't be good."

What makes Idiocracy an unlikely outcome: Balls and brains, at the Economist. (via)

"You kids take it easy with that kissing, now!" "Did you say something, Dad?"
Chinese girl gets 'kiss of deaf': A young Chinese woman was left partially deaf following a passionate kiss from her boyfriend. The story says that she will recover, so a little humor is not completely out of place. All the jokes are at Althouse.

50 worst cars of all time. Up to the present, I think, is what they mean, but it's TIME magazine, so maybe it's the 50 worst cars that have appeared in the magazine, or something else, careful about facts TIME is not, and the writing is highly subjective and personal (are those the same thing?), so "worst in what way," it could be anything, and indeed it's many things, to go with many cars. Worth it for the Horsey Horseless alone. (via)

A real Christmas tree is better for the environment than an artificial one. Via Planet Gore.

One of those blogs that's mostly links, you never know what you'll find there: The Message Digest. A few such links that appealed to me: the bacon and cheese roll. Looks delicious, but you would want to have a defibrillator handy. The Phrontistery, where "you will find the International House of Logorrhea (an online dictionary of obscure and rare words), the Compendium of Lost Words (a compilation of ultra-rare forgotten words), and many other glossaries, word lists, essays, and other language and etymology resources." Oddstrument.com, all about, yes, odd musical instruments, or as the author says, "fantastic instruments and sounds from around the world." Christmas Carol Music dot org: free sheet music for Christmas carols, in SATB and lead sheet styles, and quite a bit more, including MIDIs.

That there Google can be quick

I did not expect to see this:


at all, certainly not so quick.

What a kick!
Top o' the Google to you, Rachel Lucas. I couldn't have done it without you.

The link is to the post right before this one. I won't name it here; the screenshot shows quite enough wackiness for one day!

My "Links to this post" has not worked for a year, though. Oh, what do I want, caviar? Sorry. Room service sent all the caviar up to the Obama suite.

Update: There might be some caviar left after all. It seems that story was fake. Don't believe everything you read in the papers! Only on the Internet are all facts guaranteed!

Stilton and old Port

You eat the cheese, maybe with crackers. Those in the picture are oatcakes. Carr's Wheatmeal biscuits are good for this. You drink the wine. You do not make a paste from the cheese and the wine and then spread it on the biscuits. No, no, you do not do that. Capers and sprats could not do any harm; a gherkin might go well. Click the pic for a recipe for port wine jello! (Oh, all right, jelly.) And another recipe for sake-wasabi-oyster shots. Although with that one, once you know the ingredients, you don't much need the recipe.

Latvian smoked sprats

A propos of nothing at all, something very tasty:

You want to look for that round black can. Sometimes available at Shaw's, always at the Russian deli in Ocean City, MD. (That's the OC Party Market, 300 S. Baltimore Ave. , corner of Dorchester St. Also Russian beer, chocolate, many varieties of caviar and smoked fish, and so on.) Also Zabar's, and the Bedford Cheese Shop in Brooklyn. The pic is a link, also. And there's a list, not complete, but better than nothing.

I like to throw them on top of a pile of what the local markets call German potato salad, which has potatoes, onions, parsley, not much else, and microwave the whole thing for about a minute and a half. The potatoes and vinegar help to cut the oiliness. Gosh, do you think that pouring off a little of the oil might help to "cut the oiliness?" Hmm. Something else to think about. Might be even better in the skillet. What a wonderful world, that contains such possibilities.

I have not been paid by any Latvian fish canners for this endorsement. I just ate some a few minutes ago, and was so pleased by the experience that I wanted to say something about it.

Gleanings

Quickly, now, quickly.

Andrea Harris: England continues to sink. Not post-glacial rebound, here; cultural deterioration.

From the Yemen Times: There must be violence against women. Otherwise, they would be going to the police and the courts all the time. What?!

Paul Graham: How To Do What You Love.
Compare and contrast:
Marty Nemko: Do What You Love and You'll Starve.

Fred Thompson: "I don’t think that it’s the primary responsibility of the federal government to tell you what to eat.… With that, or whether you're talking about education, there's some things the federal government can't do." This reasoning could be extended to the drug war.

New solar cycle coming, looks like cooler days ahead. NASA: Long Range Solar Forecast: Solar Cycle 25 peaking around 2022 could be one of the weakest in centuries.

Aerosols an important factor being left out of climate models. How many more factors are left out? Could Earth's interior heat be one of them? H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe knew that there were volcanoes in Antarctica.

To end with something blessedly funny, Megan McArdle links to Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine. Thanks Jane!

Aand one more of the funny, and possibly practical: edible googly eyes.

Garlic, it's good for you

One more health post, while I'm thinking about it and have the windows open. Rand Simberg links to a NY Times article:

In the latest study, performed at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, researchers extracted juice from supermarket garlic and added small amounts to human red blood cells. The cells immediately began emitting hydrogen sulfide, the scientists found.

The power to boost hydrogen sulfide production may help explain why a garlic-rich diet appears to protect against various cancers, including breast, prostate and colon cancer, say the study authors. Higher hydrogen sulfide might also protect the heart, according to other experts. Although garlic has not consistently been shown to lower cholesterol levels, researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine earlier this year found that injecting hydrogen sulfide into mice almost completely prevented the damage to heart muscle caused by a heart attack.

One of my favorite things to do with garlic is to grow it and then clip the leaves. They are not as fibrous as the leaves of "garlic chives," and are pleasantly oily, making them a good substitute or supplement for scallions in salads or anywhere else that you might want to use green onions.

With six you get cheese steak roll

Looking around some more at the delightful Language Log, I find a synthesis of Philly and Cantonese: Chinese Philadelphia Food. There is a picture of the item, and the address of the restaurant. I'm not a huge fan of the Philly cheese steak, but I certainly would try one of these ones if I were in the neighborhood.