I was thinking of posting about this! It would have been a genuine, non-guest, post!
Also, pacing!
I found most of the contents pretty unsurprising/obvious except for the discussion of Pollan's anti-feminism, of which I was ignorant.
I've been getting into the Locaslave movement as a way out of the dilemna of racism.
Ooh, we're doing random commentariat post submissions? Wife and I were having a FB argument about what hurts more, contractions or getting kicked in the balls (we each had supporting videos- she found some experiment where they wired up two guys to receive electrical shocks simulating childbirth.) Her conclusion was that one late stage contraction is comparable to a good kick in the nads, with the after effects of the kick equivalent to the after effects of childbirth.
And that's on topic for this thread because Feminism.
You have to wake up every two hours for months after being kicked in the balls?
We're always doing random commenter submissions! Just verboten in the first fifteen comments, you jerk.
Hm. I'd want to break apart two things -- what the actual food people are eating is (processed, all natural so on) on the one hand, and the culture of eating regular meals as a family using cutlery and talking to each other on the other hand.
The food industry has been marketing weird processed food to us for a long time, and it hasn't got much to do with feminism. Dumb things like Bisquick, or frozen dinners, or whatever.
The decline in family meals, though, I think does have an awful lot to do with the two-income/long hours family. We eat terribly late, and probably not as a family more than three or four nights a week. Lumping together the two-income/long-hours family as the same thing as, or even caused by, feminism is off -- women have always worked, regardless of their feminist views or the reverse, and most women who work now, like most men and like most women historically, are doing it because they need the money than as an expression of their commitment to their feminist views.
It might be on topic, if you mentioned eating the placenta and/or testicles.
More of 9: Which means that I think Pollan's getting a little unfairly abused. You can regret the culture of long workdays without regretting feminism.
No, no. People who eat women are called gynotarians. But only if they eat exclusively women.
You can regret the culture of long workdays without regretting feminism.
Sure, but Pollan apparently does regret feminsm, if "[The appreciation of cooking was] a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen." is at all representative.
I somehow want to bring the NYT magazine article about Lunchables into this but I haven't yet read the links so it would be reckless blogging.
Here's the full Pollan quote:
Second-wave feminists were often ambivalent on the gender politics of cooking. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in "The Second Sex" that though cooking could be oppressive, it could also be a form of "revelation and creation; and a woman can find special satisfaction in a successful cake or a flaky pastry, for not everyone can do it: one must have the gift." This can be read either as a special Frenchie exemption for the culinary arts (féminisme, c'est bon, but we must not jeopardize those flaky pastries!) or as a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.
The cropped quote seems severely out of context.
14: The basic gist: Corn syrup, in the cafeteria, with diabetes.
with the after effects of the kick equivalent to the after effects of childbirth.
I don't remember the vast surge of endorphins. Maybe I've never been kicked hard enough.
Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place.
Is a weird formulation. Feminism drove women into the work force?
Also the six months to a year of sleeplessness?
Corn syrup, in the cafeteria, with diabetes
Sung to the tune of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".
Childbirth causes babies, which cause lack of sleep.
talking to each other on the other hand.
Because the faces aren't listening?
24: Yes, this was one of those times, I was just pretending to be dumb.
This is reminding me of Calvin Trillin talking about his wife Alice's cooking -- in one of his food books from the seventies, he talks about how she's a feminist highly-educated professional, which means that you'd expect her not to cook, but she's actually a terrific cook, and that this is a fairly common pattern among her feminist professional friends, which he identifies as the "Domestic Deviation". I love those books so much.
29: ? It's news, but are we supposed to do something about it?
22: Or a critique of capitalism version of Clue:
Losing the house to debt, in the cubicle, with a heart attack.
30: did I misapply our folkways? We should... say hooray, collectively? I don't know.
32: Orange post titles are specifically for impassioned calls for real world action than then fall sadly into the void with no result. Celebrations are in our normal blue. (And the Montaigne reading group was teal, IIRC.)
Maybe pink for the special occasion?
Maybe pink for the special occasion?
That would be if he had breast cancer.
In this case, a rainbow post title is indicated.
Possibly it could also flash and move across the screen leaving sparkly trails. We haven't had a 90s nostalgia post lately.
It's a good read, at least. Maybe the orange is a call to actually click through.
There are way too many things going on in this thread. (But yay for Jason Collins!)
Maybe the orange is a call to actually click through.
The very concept of real world action just edged a little closer to death.
I find the word "femivore" so extremely horrible that I simply cannot accept that it has anything whatsoever to offer. CANNOT, I SAY!
"I enter the court knowing I have six hard fouls to give."
Euuurgh I hate this aspect of basketball SO MUCH.
41: it's really, really terrible.
Back to feminism and family meals:
I'd say that a position that could fairly be attributed to second-wave feminism (although not to all second-wave and later feminists, generalizations aren't universal, so on and so forth) would be that a married woman, including a married woman with children, might reasonably have higher priorities than getting an organized dinner on the table for her husband and children every night.
I think this is a reasonable and sane position (and that the pre-feminist presumption that she shouldn't is oppressive). But it is a position that, to the extent it became widely held (which I think it did), probably had some causative effect on the decline of the culture of sit-down family dinners.
I'm a feminist, I do have higher priorities than getting an organized dinner on the table for my husband and kids every night, and I don't feel bad about that. But I do think the decline of family meals is a bad thing. I'd like to see the slack that made family meals more of a norm to come from a culture of shorter work hours and higher prioritization of family life and domestic labor for men and women both, rather than from a one-sided piling of the entire domestic burden on women.
12: Well, I guess Smearcase can be excused for missing the "vagitarian" joke.
Seriously, pacing. Four posts all at once? Mais pourquoi?
41. Agreed. You can't get around the fact that following the established structure of these words in English it unambiguously means someone or something that eats women.
Like that NYC cop who they just tried. I suppose he was a fantasy-league femivore.
As should be obvious to anyone who's peeked at a cookbook from the late 1940s or early 1950s that promotes ingredients like sliced hot dogs and canned tomato soup, we've been eating processed crap since long before feminism.
Whoa there. So feminism, like so much else, began in 1963? History fail, I think.
48: Yeah, how weird was that case? This guy didn't actually do anything to anyone ever, but he thought some seriously nasty stuff!
You can't get around the fact that following the established structure of these words in English it unambiguously means someone or something that eats women.
Or someone who eats Nigerian singers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femi_Kuti
I feel 100% certain that Pollan would agree with everything in 44, especially its last paragraph.
100% may be high, actually. Let's say 97%.
You can't get around the fact that following the established structure of these words in English it unambiguously means someone or something that eats women.
Just like a locavore is someone who eats places.
Von Wafer is secretly Michael Pollan! 97% of the time.
Local places, essear. Give them their due.
50: I didn't follow it closely enough to be certain, but that was what it looked like to me. Sort of a "Have you even looked at the internet?" problem -- if everyone who posted weird shit on the internet were locked up for conspiring to do it for real, there wouldn't be enough of us left on the outside to keep the prisons running.
54: And my late much-lamented bunny, Juniper, was the great bibliovore of our time.
I guess one could be a globavore. Have a diet consisting entirely of oranges, cantaloupes, eyeballs, you know, globe-shaped things.
I have come up with a new word that describes libertarians who ride motorcycles. I call them "libercycles".
55: he was (probably still is?) a big deal in a corner of the scholarly world that I temporarily occupied, and so I carefully read everything he wrote and saw him speak several times. Then I moved into a different scholarly corner, he began trending around that same time, and I stopped paying attention. Thus the 3% uncertainty.
You can't get around the fact that following the established structure of these words in English it unambiguously means someone or something that eats women.
After the zombie apocalypse, those self-righteous femivores will be getting on the other zombie's nerves.
Well, I guess Smearcase can be excused for missing the "vagitarian" joke.
I've been missing that joke for 40 years; why start now?
Yep, feminism has clearly not gone far enough to educate all Anglophone women about proper English coinages before they start lashing back, so I think the road ahead is clear.
I try to be openminded about this, but it's really hard for me to see Ms. Orenstein as anything but a purveyor of sparkly pink princess kale and cutlery. (So my response is "grow up"? I don't know.) And there is no saving "femivore": the badness of the word entails the badness of the concept.
I have come up with a new word for Frenchmen who are homophobes. I call them "Francophobes".
I have come up with a new word for economists who believe space aliens roam the earth. I call them "econo-aliens".
I haven't read the article in the post, but how is this supposed to be distinct from the whole general rise of foodie-ism?
I try to be openminded about this, but it's really hard for me to see Ms. Orenstein as anything but a purveyor of sparkly pink princess kale and cutlery.
I don't know Orenstein specifically, but I kind of agree with this. If I can gesture irritably at all that sort of thing without really knowing what I'm talking about, a lot of it looks like trying to roll back the second-wave feminist position I described in 44 through a combination of way, way overinflating the importance of food (nutrition? Generally important. Maintaining relationships with your family by eating together? Also really important. Making your own cheese? Sounds like a neat hobby and like something I might try for fun sometime, but really, really not important) and assuming that men either don't exist or can't be expected to share our values.
(Oh, ok, Orenstein is describing and not evangelizing. I belatedly remembered this, so the princess kale thing is probably off base. There's a straw-princess in there somewhere, though.)
68 crossed with 67, but I think it sort of answers it.
68: Men exist and share our values! They just can't be expected to do anything! Have you ever seen a man try to cook or sew? LOL!
69: Whoops. Um, transfer what I said about Orenstein to anyone arguing that their decision to eschew paid work in favor of raising chickens and making pickles because ensuring that their family never eats supermarket food is central to their feminism. If anyone like that actually exists, which they might not. But if they do, consider me disapproving of their rhetoric, to the extent that it is as I have described it, which it might not be.
re: 68
Yeah. I just wasn't sure it's a distinctly feminine phenomenon. Obsessive foodies are at least (more?) likely to be men, and the behaviour plays out in much the same way.
Possibly present in my mind because since I've been at home a lot with wife and baby the past month, I've been cooking and baking things I normally never would. Picking stuff from our garden (left by previous tenant, we've not planted jack shit ourselves), and baking with it, etc.
72 is beautifully hedged.
(LB is Edward Scissorhands?)
Her beautiful hedging is central to her feminism.
There's overlap, but there's a distinction between foodie-for-pleasure-and-sane-nutrition (which can slop over into foodie-as-pretension, but is generally pretty harmless), and foodie-obsession-with-avoiding-imaginary-health-risks.
I agree that there are a lot of things mixed up together here: foodies, DIYism, locavorism. But there is also a part of it that is related to those SAHMs who take on childrearing as a giant project upon which to bring to bear all of their intelligence and creativity.
74, 75: I considered ending that comment with an appeal to a hedge fund to extract me from it.
I guess one could be a globavore. Have a diet consisting entirely of oranges, cantaloupes, eyeballs, you know, globe-shaped things.
Presumably Galactus and Unicron are globavores.
re: 76/77
Yeah. There's a conflation of a few things, but yeah, I can see that there might be a SAHM element, too. Both the safety obsession, and the childrearing as project.
But there is also a part of it that is related to those SAHMs who take on childrearing as a giant project upon which to bring to bear all of their intelligence and creativity.
Well if that isn't the feminism Betty Friedan was longing for, I don't know what is.
Her beautiful hedging is central to her feminism.
Tell us more about LB's hedge.
77: Right -- inventing a lot of superogatory aspects of childrearing, and then moving from "My children are centrally important to me" to "Therefore all this laborious nonsense I've burdened myself with also has to be centrally important to me -- how could I possibly do anything at all in addition?"
I have a male friend who is a stay-at-home-dad who is hilariously glib about how easy child-rearing is, partly to undercut the whole childreading as giant creative project thing.
'I'm getting it on a lot of FIFA time on the Playstation 3.'
Local places, essear. Give them their due.
There's a restaurant in the Mission named, I shit you not, "Local Eatery".
he was (probably still is?) a big deal in a corner of the scholarly world that I temporarily occupied, and so I carefully read everything he wrote and saw him speak several times.
I had no idea that Pollan was ever a real scholar!
At our baby shower there was a little thing set up where people could write their predictions of "Why [Tweety] and [Blume] will be great parents" on little pieces of paper and put them in a jar for us to read later. There were lots of sweet responses I really enjoyed reading, several jokey responses, and one that said "They will make their child all homemade organic baby food!" We read that one and said Uhh, yeah no sorry.
re: 88
Heh, yeah. We might, but only because 'homemade organic baby food' will mean, 'we will mash up whatever it is we are having ourselves, and sometimes we buy organic when it's cheaper.'
88: Although, to proselytize as I do for lazy parenting, you'd be surprised by how practical feeding the kid whatever you're having for dinner is. Cutting meat up into teeny little dice doesn't take much time when you consider that the kid's only eating a couple of tablespoons, anything that can be mashed with a fork can be mashed with a fork, and so on. Not that that's necessarily organic, but Newt, particularly, we could have said that we 'made' almost all of his baby food in the sense that what he was eating was the same food we made ourselves.
Jeez, lexA's only a week or two old and you're pwning me on introducing solids already?
I had no idea that Pollan was ever a real scholar!
He's not; he's a journalist. He has a position at the Columbia School of Journalism, but that doesn't make you not a journalist.
He's taken seriously in environmental philosophy, but there is great deal of overlap in that field between scholarship, activism, and popular writing. (Which is good a good thing, too.)
Heh. He's 5 weeks now. Already. He looks like he's ready for solid food, as the wee bugger wants to be on the boob all the time. But no, not quite solids yet. But since we cook most nights, and tend to have things where we could mash a bit up, or leave a bit of spicing out, it seems like it'd be easier to do that most of the time than heating up or making special baby stuff.
Kids + television were the cause of the decline in cooking in the late Forties and Fifties. We wanted to watch TV while we ate, Mom wanted to watch the new-fangled radio with pictures in the box instead of messing with the stove so TV dinners.
Tell us more about LB's hedge.
Do you really want to get into all those privet hedge jokes, nosflow? Do you really?
There seems to be a feminism to blame or credit for everything one trips over in contemporary America, except maybe the carried interest tax problem.
89+90: Oh yeah, that is certainly in the plan. And I've also seen parentfriends make great use of TJs frozen foods (meatballs, sweet potato wedges), since you can microwave them in small bits as needed, and those often tend to be organic.
94: Not to mention TV dinners. Every self-respecting kid in the world preferred them to any home-cooked meal.
90. I know a lot of people who do this. Their thinking is that since God has given us hand blenders it would be disrespectful not to use them; and besides, what did the Heinz corporation ever do to deserve all their money?
97: On the flip side, you're a bike mechanic. Feeding the kid Gerber jarred food can be an important step toward getting your workbench organized.
Funny that you mention it. In the service of freeing up a room for the baby, Tweety and I are combining our offices, and I've just spent the morning going through our bike parts and tools and organizing them. They sadly are all going in big bins, though. No exciting workbench with stuff in babyfood jars until we get a basement or a garage.
98: Exactly. And now I have a jones for a Swanson's beef pot pie.
Before the solid food phase I would have been right with Blume in 88. But it's surprisingly easy to make the kid your own food -- stuff like oatmeal, sweet potatoes, avocados or frozen peas is just a matter of boiling and then mashing or blending. Then stick it in the fridge, maybe add some spices like cinnamon if you feel like it when you're serving. Then you're done. Advanced version: boil chicken and blend that. It takes maybe an hour or so a week in total.
Whatever, haterz. It's gonna be all Go-gurt all the time for little Zardoz.
That is still the best baby name ever.
Red towelling nappies, naturally, for wee Zardoz.
Seriously, pacing. Four posts all at once? Mais pourquoi?
Four? Two today, two yesterday.
Four? Two today, two yesterday.
A day is nothing in this bold new era of 2000-comment threads.
107: Is that how Řehoř is pronounced?
we will mash up whatever it is we are having ourselves, and sometimes we buy organic when it's cheaper.'
That was us except without mashing. We never mashed or blended a thing and it worked great. THROW OFF THE SHACKLES OF MASHING!
60 Can't call them organ donors.
Avocados are nature's baby food and come almost pre-mashed.
I found the article a little head-scratching and was also bemused, as the person who does virtually all of the home cooking. The timing issue is the real hassle - if I get home at 7pm, and we want to put the kid to bed at 8, that doesn't leave a lot of time for me to cook dinner, much less engage in the leisurely process of the kid picking up each bit, considering it, and putting it back down, and accidentally putting some in his mouth from time to time.
(Sadly, our baby did not like avocado. Plenty of other soft things, but not that. My mother noted that she was probably 25 before she liked avocados, so why rush?)
(Halford, cover your ears.) My baby loved/loves tofu.
Re 110
Zardoz is the impending Blume-Tweety baby.
Ooo, "impending Blume" works nicely.
111: Yes, we never mashed our food and gave it to O -- he just got some of our food. Watching a 6mo old buzzsaw an asparagus spear is hilarious. (When, however, O wanted to eat and we weren't eating or we were lazy for any of the reasons we are lazy [many, many] O got standard-issue baby food, although all hippie/yuppie-ed up. He liked that too.)
One of Sally's first bits of solid food was a dill pickle spear handed to her by Gus, the old Greek guy who ran the luncheonette on the corner. Six months old and she gummed every scrap of cucumber off it, leaving the peel hanging like a damp rag.
>107: Is that how Řehoř is pronounced?
"Řehoř" is pronounced "lexA", or so I understand.
120: Just the day before yesterday, my 6 year-old ate a pickle that way. It was pretty gross.
O got standard-issue baby food, although all hippie/yuppie-ed up. He liked that too.
Oh yeah! Those little squeeze packs of fruit-and-vegetable puree are baby crack. We still let Jane have them (we call them "squeezy fruit") occasionally as a treat.
or we were lazy for any of the reasons we are lazy [many, many]
You need reasons to be lazy?
Hokey Pokey went through his baby nephew's supply of those things in like 30 seconds. They just don't last very long when confronted with his gargantuan appetite.
On Saturday, he ate more than half a large cheese pizza. Hawaiian Punch cried out "I only got one piece!" and we were like "Huh? Where'd it go?" and he'd just been helping himself to slice after slice. At age two.
Hawaiian Punch better learn to boss him around with confidence. He's apparently going to be big soon and she won't be able to assert elder-child privilege based on physical dominance alone.
She's pretty dang bossy, so I think we're ok there.
As with so many things feminism is blamed for, feminists have been on it since at least the first wave. From History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, Stanton and Anthony et al. editing, Mrs. Ruth C.D. Havens (D.C.) speaking:
"Jack of all trades, good at none" is the old epithet bestowed upon a man who thus diffuses his energies. You do not expect a distinguished lawyer to clean his own clothes, a doctor to groom his horse, a teacher to take care of the schoolhouse furnace, a preacher to half-sole his shoes. This would be illogical, and men are nothing if not logical. Yet a woman who enters upon any line of achievement is invariably hampered, for at least the early years, with the inbred desire to add to the labor of her profession all the so-called feminine duties, which, fulfilled to-day, are yet to be done to-morrow, which bring to her neither comfort, gain nor reputation, and which by their perpetual demand diminish her powers for a higher quality of work.[...] Everywhere there is too much housekeeping. It is not economy of time or money for every little family of moderate means to undertake alone the expensive and wearing routine. The married woman of the future will be set free by co-operative methods, half the families on a square, perhaps, enjoying one luxurious, well-appointed dining-room with expenses divided pro rata. [...] The girl of the future will select her own avocation and take her own training for it. If she be a houseworker, and many will prefer to be, she will be so valuable in that line as to command much respect and good wages. If she be an architect, a jeweler, an electrical engineer, she will not rob a cook by mutilating a dinner, or a dressmaker by amateur cutting and sewing, or a milliner by creating her own bonnet. The house helper will not be incompetent, because the development and training of woman for her best and truest work will have extended to her also, and she will do housework because she loves it and is better adapted to it than to any other employment. She will preside in the kitchen with skill and science. The service girl of the future will be paid perhaps double or treble her present wages, with wholesome food, a cheerful room, an opportunity to see an occasional cousin and some leisure for recreation. At present this would be ruinous, and why? Because too frequently the family has but one producer. The wife, herself a consumer, produces more consumers. Daughters grow up around a man like lilies of the field, which toil not, neither do they spin. Every member of every family in the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree.
Women tried being perfect producers in the single-family holy home before and, even if you don't count the servants as women, it *didn't work*. It's not just that it was inefficient, as Havens points out, but that they couldn't keep their homes clean because no home is isolated enough. A hundred years ago, which was another era with a lot more college-educated women than there were college-requiring jobs for women, this led to the invention of social work and urban design and the Pure Food Act and the beginning of effluent control and urban planning -- much of it done by `clubwomen' using `city housekeeping' as their cover, and then taken over and professionalized through the New Deal. Spain's How Women Saved the City is excellent on this. (Great illustrations, too.)
Even the pushback against ahistoricism in the Salon is conflating a lot -- e.g., only the early years of the Lowell mills were feminist triumphs, later it was awful work, and the alternative wasn't being a SAHM in one's own home but being a servant in someone else's, with almost no legal protections -- as professional domestics still don't have.
tl;dr -- If the job market absolutely sucks, uber-perfect-SAHMing looks like an out. In the last Gilded Age it wasn't until it turned into political collective action.
87: he wasn't, but B/ill C/ronon became friends with him maybe twenty-five years ago, around the time that Second Nature* came out. And C/ronon began inviting Pollan to speak at scholarly events, both large and small, and so Pollan, by virtue of being smart and a good speaker, became a pretty big deal in one corner of the scholarly community (among enviros of various academic stripes).
* A book whose reasonably interesting central insights have now slipped into the realm of conventional wisdom, which slippage, I think, has happened a few of times to Pollan's work.
If he's already outcompeting for food he may be some sort of brood parasite. Make sure he doesn't push her out of your nest.
If he's already outcompeting for food he may be some sort of brood parasite.
That bird must be cuckoo.
Pictured L-R: Hokey Pokey, Hawaiian Punch, Ace
He's normal-active, not unusually active. What's unusual is that Pokey runs extraordinarily hot. He's always sweaty, leaving salt stains on his sheets even though he's just in a pair of shorts and under a fan. When I was pregnant with him, Jammies would say "You're a furnace! You're heating up the entire bed!" in a way that I wasn't with #1 or 3. (I kind of feel bad for Pokey, having to grow up in the Texas heat. I assume he moves away the first chance he gets.)
Great reads on the emotional rather than economic history of food and women's work:
Something from the Oven, Shapiro, specifically about the 1950s -- James Beard was a total sellout to industrial food -- Worse and earlier, `Aunt Jemima' pancake mix, Slave in a Box.
A Thousand Years over a Hot Stove, Schenone, which is really good on immigration and class and (often unrealistic) nostalgia, expressed through expectations about dinner. The home-maker and her job, Gilbreth (of Cheaper by the Dozen, in 1927), taking an actual utilitarian approach to housekeeping, including the utility people in the house get from enjoying pretty but troublesome things. Everything I've read by Susan Strasser, especially Never Done.
Make the Bread, Buy the Butter tries a bunch of DIY and is good enough at describing what was hard and easy that it seems useful for people with different skills who would have different make/buy decisions. Also, I love that one of her axes of judgement is `Hassle', a scale that goes up to `Epic'.
And if you just feel like cooking some damn fine little tasties, or are far from fancy grocery stores, Helen Witty's Better than Store-Bought and Fancy Pantry rock.
(I spent a lot of my first retirement thinking about real productivity vs. what one gets paid for, etc. I'll, uh, go walk my dogs now.)
Here's a bleg for the Unfogged lawyers: I have jury duty next week. Assuming I make it all the way to Voir Dire, how do I minimize my chances of getting picked? Googling this question brigs up a lot of stupid stunts that sound like they might get you slapped with a contempt of court charge. What's a subtle approach with a pretty good chance of working?
The most promising suggestion I've come across so far is "talk a lot", but I'm not terribly well suited for that one. Any others?
Unless you have an actual hardship, I'm of the opinion that it's your duty as a citizen to go. Otherwise, nobody will have a real jury of their peers.
But, if my guilt trip failed, wearing a Harley Davidson t-shirt with a stupid vest might work.
how do I minimize my chances of getting picked?
Tell them you read a blog with a cop commenter whose words flow like sweet honey and you won't be able to stop yourself from being biased towards the police testimony.
136: Depends on where you live. Being an academic is a ticket out the door in Chicago -- not even close in NYC.
Also, be a good citizen! Serve! In NYC they would let you basically tell them when would be a good time for you and then schedule you for a summons. Why shouldn't you be on a jury?
Insist that you can understand and overcome white privilege because you've played Halo on many different difficulty settings.
136: The absolute best way* is this. Say (especially if it is a criminal jury, but something similar works even if it is a civil jury) "I am so excited and thrilled to be here to get to uphold my duty under the constitution! I really want to serve on a jury because I absolutely want to make sure that the prosecution has completely met its burden of proof and I promise I will carefully scrutinize absolutely every piece of evidence before me before I reach a decision! I know that the prosecution has a heavy burden under the law to prove someone guilty and I want to make sure no one is convicted before they have met that burden, so I will take my duty very seriously."
*Recommended by a criminal court judge. This works.
I'm sure I mentioned this here, but the last time I had jury duty, I almost had a stroke during voir dire listening to people debase themselves in order to avoid being chosen. ("I'm only 24 yeeeearssss olllllllld! I'm toooooo younnnnng to dooooo thissssss!" said the grown-ass man trying not to sit on a jury about whether or not someone should get a down payment back.)
Won't the bailiff make you remove any stupid hats in a courtroom?
Refuse to remove your hat because you're a sovereign citizen and not subject to the court's rules.
Detail your beliefs on jury nullification. We fought the revolutionary war for it!
I figured I'd get booted for working for the Lemonade Society but then 7th Grade Civics Class tapped me on the shoulder and said "they don't have voir dire for grand juries," and I said "I'm sorry I slept through you, but not really" and then I spent a month on a grand jury.
137, 140: I'm not so averse that I'll resort to gimmicks or deception. I'm actually hoping that the Ph.D. & science professor thing will get me tossed automatically.
I'm just wondering if there's some secret "don't pick this person" signs that I don't know about, e.g., "wear birkenstocks with red socks" or something similar.
Wait for an appropriate silence and announce to the room "cocaine is a hell of a drug".
It down, put your hand in the waistband of your pants, and call everybody "Peggy."
I'm just wondering if there's some secret "don't pick this person" signs
Dude, I just gave them to you. In 143 I gave you something that requires no gimmicks or deceptions and that doesn't rely on your profession, that can't get you yelled at by the judge, and that really does work. Saying those things will signal an immediate and strong red flag to the prosecution, and you won't get picked.
I need to go to work. Yesterday I set a personal record for longest blood trail followed (a mile). Those head wounds are bleeders. Victim says hit with an air wrench, others says suspect told them it was a wine bottle. The important thing is, no one wants police involvement. Woo, on to the next call!
I'm actually hoping that the Ph.D. & science professor thing
I've never been called for jury duty but I always thought maybe I should explain to them what five sigma evidence of discovery means and how it's my standard for being convinced.
154; at what point does one say this? Are people given an opportunity to make personal statements (honest question, I have no idea)?
Just stand on a chair and shout it out whenever you feel ready.
Yesterday I set a personal record for longest blood trail followed (a mile). Those head wounds are bleeders.
Yet another statement that, absent the proper context, will likely get you out of jury duty.
It will vary a lot based on jurisdiction and judge, so no hard and fast rules, but just try to get something like 134 across when given a reasonable opportunity, perhaps when you're asked something about whether you have any biases that could keep you from fairly reaching a conclusion based on the evidence.
The time I got called for jury duty, there was a paper questionnaire and after that everybody was questioned individually in a separate room. I didn't get to the question phase because they hit 12+1 before getting to me.
Just stand on a chair and shout
So we live in a society where people are comfortable wearing load or expressive-looking clothes and perfumes. Yet having for instance a recorded theme song is declasse, only mooks have even loud ringtones, let alone say a recorded flourish of brass that announces that someone special has entered the elevator.
perhaps when you're asked something about whether you have any biases that could keep you from fairly reaching a conclusion based on the evidence.
"My bias is that I understand the burden placed on the prosecution"?
Semi-serious question: How/when did it become the prevailing attitude in the U.S. that the first thing you do when you get a jury summons is to try to think of a way of getting out of it? Given the popularity of competition-type reality shows where audience members get to vote contestants on or off the show, and the perpetual popularity of courtroom dramas (from Perry Mason to Law & Order, and all the John Grisham books/movies), you'd think people would jump at the chance to decide someone else's fate.
160: Ugh, though, halford, because of course that is who ought to be on juries.
Don't try to get out of it.
I probably told this story before -- a friend of mine was defending a bank in a predatory loan case, and the first prospective juror said something along the lines of 'this shouldn't be a civil case, it should be a criminal case' and was excused for cause, after which prospective jurors fell over themselves to describe just how awful banks had been in their lives. The bank lawyers did not enjoy this spectacle.
Well, sort of. If it wasn't clear from what I wrote above, the idea is to come across not just as a criminal-justice liberal, but as a hyper-vigilant nutter who is overly psyched about performing their DUTY UNDER THE CONSTITUTION and CAREFULLY SCRUTINIZING THE EVIDENCE. Ie an overzealous and overvigilant weirdo who is likely to do something like waste court time asking excessive questions or hang the jury based on some slightly idiosyncratic theory.
How/when did it become the prevailing attitude in the U.S. that the first thing you do when you get a jury summons is to try to think of a way of getting out of it?
Well, most people have pretty good reasons why they have much more important things to do in their lives and are scared of losing the time (and often) income. Of course jury service is a great thing and everyone (especially everyone here) should do it, except when they shouldn't.
168: Oh, well, then it's easier just to rant about the fringe on the flag!
157: In my experience (OR and MD) the judge asks if you think you can come to a fair decision in a case involving XYZ where XYZ is a rough description of the parameters of the case. If you say no you'll get interrogated a bit about why and maybe dismissed. Then each side questions you a bit to get a sense in more detail and will either move to strike you for cause (IOW they convince the judge you're likely to be biased) or they'll use one of a limited number of peremptory challenges to get you thrown off. The time to make Halford's speech is during the initial phase, tailoring it to the particulars of the case a bit. The prosecution will then dump you using one of their peremptory challenges. Maybe.
Even better would be to serve, because jury duty is not just a civic responsibility, it's also modestly fun if you can get into it. If you're in a jurisdiction where the jurors select their own foreperson try to get selected so you can keep things moving during deliberations. Also don't call any of your fellow jurors stupid even though statistics dictate the more than likely at least a few are dumber than average and as deliberations drag a bit the dumb ones can get a little tedious. Think of it as practice for interacting with people who need to play HALO to grasp the concept of privilege.
170 -- No, but this is the trick: Your particular craziness has to be performing your duties precisely and to the letter. Think of it as going on a work-to-rule strike. The system is very used to garden-variety mild crazies and people trying to fake mild craziness. But no one can do or say anything if you seem crazy in your desire to precisely fill your obligations as a juror.
Re 135, I am not as well read as clew but I enjoyed Laura Shapiro's Perfection Salad, a history of Fannie Farmer and the discipline of home economics.
Also, depending on where you are, getting dumped from a jury may just get you sent to a big room to sit and wait to get called again. In Oregon you serve three days or one trial (going from dodgy memory). Each jury you are dismissed from just means going to wait in a very boring room. Much better to get on a jury and at least have something to do.
Googling "voir dire questions" brings up some lists of standard and recommended questions from various jurisdictions.
In one jurisdiction, one of the recommended/standard questions for civil cases is whether you have any opinion on tort reform. That one would give me an easy chance to get booted because I could answer with 100% honesty that I think it's a blatant attempt by corporations to game the system so they can avoid the consequences for misconduct.
I spent a lot of my first retirement thinking about real productivity vs. what one gets paid for, etc.
As a note, if you are ever tempted to write more about this I, for one, would be very interested. Your occasional comments about work/culture are fascinating.
(Also, just to note, I mentioned last week that I enjoyed Finder which you had recommended.)
164- I think it's not so much about juries as it is about workplaces. True or not (due to downsizing, etc.) people with office-type jobs have all convinced themselves that they are Necessary and Essential to their place of work; no time to take vacation days. I mean, I believe that about myself, but I managed to take 6 weeks of paternity leave without people ruining too much at work.
On the other end of the scale, even though it's illegal, there's probably a good chance that someone working at Wal-Mart etc. could lose their job if they have to miss a week to serve.
Hmm, this comment is rather classist, but I'm just doing my part to keep the conversation going, even if it's to tell me I'm being a dick.
175 -- don't expect that those are the one's you'll get, and you can generally expect that if there's a recommended "trick" online (a) the judge knows all about it and (b) you don't want to debase yourself by trying it.
I went in for jury duty maybe twenty times in twenty years:most days just sitting with voir dire, twice getting empaneled, one full month on Federal Grand Jury.
I got tired, figured I was getting called because I showed up, blew the last one completely off without excuse, and haven't been called since.
179: Unless it's a "weird trick" recommended by a "local mom".
175: But the questions they ask you are like, "Are you able to weigh different pieces of information with honesty and with bias toward neither side?" and then, because you don't want to be a giant liar, you answer "Yes, of course." Because they are going to ask you questions that are going to make a liar out of you, if you want to work a schtick.
179; The googling was more out of general curiosity.
I specifically don't want to resort to any "tricks" because a) I'm not that desperate to avoid being empaneled and b) the lawyers/judges have seen all of this stuff before and I'll just end up looking pathetic.
It's more a question of whether I can give off subtle but clear "don't pick this person" vibes. I suppose I'll just hope that the science Ph.D. does the trick (although the "they never pick scientists for juries" thing is probably an urban legend).
I always wanted to serve on a jury but there's just too much trial-related stuff on my resume by this point. My wife got to do it a few years ago. (Mistake by the prosecution, as it turned out. My wife believes in reasonable doubt.)
My two cents would be that trying to improvise something along the lines of 172 does involve some risk of the judge picking up what you're doing and expressing displeasure.
On a broadly cynical level, if you come off as a smart, educated liberal, you'll probably draw a peremptory strike from the prosecution just by giving honest answers to the questions you're asked anyway.
whether I can give off subtle but clear "don't pick this person" vibes
Maybe through clothing?
Maybe through clothing?
Or lack thereof?
"don't pick this person" vibes.
I wore tattered blue jeans and a ratty shirt, and I still got picked - and this was before this sort of dress was considered a fashion statement. (I was grungy when grungy wasn't cool.)
Further to 187, I was washing dishes for a living at the time, and I told the judge I might lose my job if I had to do jury service. He told me I could surely find another job. Fucker.
But I have to admit, I didn't lose my job and I found the experience valuable.
What are the things that raise your likelihood of getting picked? I might enjoy serving, were I called.
What do you say if you actually believe 134 wholeheartedly?
Sorta unrelatedly, I am going on a hiatus from activism for an indefinite amount of time. I'm pissed off at the majority of the activist scene here, and I can't think of what good my participation has ever done. Looking back on all the drives and campaigns and organizations and what-not that I've been involved with, the only successes I can recall are kicking neo-Nazis off the University campus and preventing Operation Rescue from shutting down an abortion clinic. (Both of which, perhaps not coincidentally, wound up having some of the worst repercussions for me personally.)
So yeah, all the environmental stuff, the anti-war stuff, the various community-building projects: All have come to naught. The only thing that seems to be worthwhile is physically confronting fascists, which I am still down for if opportunities present themselves. Otherwise, it's all a bunch of nonsense. Radical left activism doesn't work.
Have something at work that absolutely must be done that week.
It is hailing cats and dogs here.
What do you say if you actually believe 134 wholeheartedly?
"LOL"
Also, sorry, Nat. You've expressed these sorts of sentiments before and then carried on, so maybe you'll feel better tomorrow. Regardless, it's wretched to feel like one's efforts have come to naught. Ask me how I know!
If it is because I haven't finished your book yet, I just got busy. I've only got 75 pages or so left.
196: you'll be sorry when the cholera gets you.
195: I know, but I feel more at peace with this. The fact is, I have severely neglected my health and my career for too long. Not getting any younger, and I don't want to be totally decrepit at 60 with no money. I hung out the other day with a subset of my social circle who have very similar politics to mine, but don't really do activism as such. And it was very refreshing. We'll see, I guess. They have dragged me back in, just when I thought I was out, several times before.
Like, SERIOUSLY neglected. Saw the doctor the other day. Have gained a few more pounds and my bp was like 145/90, despite the medication I'm taking. I just need to pare down my life so that I can really focus on making some permanent, positive changes to my diet and activity level. Doing activism saps a lot of my energy for that kind of thing, and makes me so upset all the time that I wind up doing things I shouldn't, and not doing things I should.
I'm going to start fasting two days/week. Wanna join me?
197: The last chapter is bad enough the cholera seems more pleasant?
200: I might. Maybe I'll just stop drinking all but two days a week.
199: Your body could very well be telling you to make a break/go in a different direction.
199: FWIW that's part of why I decided to quit my job too. One of my goals for this summer is to lose the 10 lbs. I've put on in the last year.
And you can take a break from activism and come back to it if it makes sense for you later. Nothing's irrevocable.
The California juror system keeps threatening the DE with fines and possible jail time. I now am sending the envelopes back with "She's DEAD!" scrawled on them. If they think I'm going to jump through their hoops to prove it as they are demanding they're totally insane.
190.1: If you believe 143 seriously, you want to be on a jury, so you keep your head down and answer any questions as non-controversially as you can compatibly with being honest.
Hey I'm trying to lose the ten pounds I put on in the last year, too! Actually less than a year. The "free pizza for grad students" regime is tough on an aged body.
I have "losing the twenty pounds I gained having kids" vaguely on my agenda, but given that they're teenagers and I haven't done anything about it, I figure it's staying there.
Both of LB's kids are teenagers?
Where does the time go, asked the person who never really had much of a sense of how old they were.
If it helps, I guess you're thirty.
206: You'd think they could purge their own list.
Well, Sally is at at thirteen. Newt's eleven, but he's large, competent, and sardonic so I lump him in with his big sister.
I suspect I've also put on ten pounds in the last year or so, though I haven't weighed myself anytime recently.
212: One would think so. I was polite in attaching a note to the first jury summons, and they could have verified it by a few clicks of a keyboard. They can go fuck themselves with a Tabasco coated dildo.
I'm glad you've liked them, NickS; see also _Dicebox_. (More like _Finder_ than like work/life, but come to think of it is also more about work/life than _Finder_ is.)
I was on a not-unusual criminal case -- also in my first retirement, and boy were a lot of my fellow jurors retired, and I don't think that does much for representativeness on a jury -- and was the last to agree to convict. As everyone was leaving, the prosecuting and defending lawyers joked about how Vital Evidence Claim A didn't mean in the courtroom what it sounded like it meant, it was just A-ish, A-oid, you know, police jargon. Horrible. (We convicted someone of buying cocaine who, without that evidence, was very plausibly just buying marijuana.)
My entire diet plan is to dislike both elastic waistbands and shopping. One of my grandmothers advised tying dental floss around the waist -- prevents one from overeating or slouching. (Or you bleed a little on your clothes. Courses for horses.)
216 last -- I'm not sure I understand. What testimony was given, and what do you now think it meant?
Then there are all the related health things -- foot and leg pain, back pain, sleep apnea, etc. etc. Can't even hardly drink anymore. Which is sad. Will make an exception for Unfoggedycon, of course.
216 -- This was almost ten years ago now, but it was something like, let's see, exactly when and where a baggie that tested positive for cocaine had been picked up. We may have convicted someone basically for sitting down in Pioneer Square.
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What is this I don't even. I doubt anything analogous would help drum up public support for expensive science projects in the US.
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|| At what age do kids start walking normally and stop stomping around like goddamn elephants?
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220: Like, the testimony was something like "the baggie was found in immediate proximity to defendant" and then you found out that "immediate proximity" meant "on the same block"? I don't know the lingo, so I'm making it up, but that kind of thing?
222: Before kindergarten, but not much before, IIRC. Or, mine at least.
(Actually why am I even asking this? I'm moving out from under the hippodrome soon. I guess I'm just "ventilating affect.")
222: Not at 6 yet. I am grateful every day that no one lives below us.
143 sounds good, but my experience (the one time I even got as far as voir dire) was that the process was carefully managed so that we weren't allowed to volunteer information like that unless we represented that we actually thought it would interfere with our ability to be impartial.
I wasn't willing to outright lie, but fortunately I have a hearing problem that would have been very very slightly inconvenient to accommodate.
At what age do kids start walking normally and stop stomping around like goddamn elephants?
Jammies is 35, and I figure it's part of his charm. But we should never live above someone else.
Amazing that the defense wasn't able to highlight the lack of connection between defendant and bag. Of course, if the defendant told the lawyer that it was his bag, and he was buying cocaine, that might affect how the lawyer would approach the thing.
227: I don't know if non-apartment-dwelling kids ever learn. When we have non-city people over, I find out that while I think I'm all relaxed about letting kids run wild, stomping freaks me out -- I go straight to being totally tensed up, eyeing the kid's parents to figure out if they're going to step in. And they aren't, because they don't know that one man's ceiling is another man's floor. So I start hovering and whining at the kids until they get nervous and sit motionless on the furniture.
230: Why? Isn't it still the defense attorney's job to highlight flaws in the prosecution's case?
228: Yeah, they had fifty years to put me on a jury, now that I can't hear well nor sit still for long periods of time they can stuff civic duty, the importance of jurors, and all that crap.
Constructive possession cases are great.
Actual testimony from actual case:
Police officer: "We found the bag in the car behind driver's seat. Defendant was in front passenger seat. Defendant denied knowing about it."
Inexperience lawyer thinks to himself that since client denied it, why not put client on stand just to double deny it and seal the win.
Inexperienced lawyer: "Client, you were in the front passenger seat, correct?"
Dumbass client: " Yes, we were coming back from buying LSD."
Heh, re: stomping. My wife does it, although she denies that she does. She weights literally half of me, but I ninja silently about the place whereas she clomps. I suspect a legacy of my having parents who yelled at us for that kind of noise.
Serving on a jury was pretty miserable, all in all, but so is paying taxes. At least on the jury I got to help acquit some kid who wasn't quite innocent maybe, but certainly wasn't guilty as charged. Anyway, living in a civil society makes all kinds of annoying demands on our time and pocketbooks.
223: something like that. 230 is some good retconning, but everything else sounded like MJ not hard drugs to me. Unlike the rest of the jury, I thought there was a difference.
Jason Collins's twin didn't know before today that his brother was gay. And apparently they're very close. I find this terribly sad.
I find it impressive so far as hiding things is a real talent.
At 7, Joey has moved from stomping to careening headlong. I don't know if this is an improvement.
240: wait, what? He says in the article that he told him last summer, and I think the brother wrote a companion piece about it that's in the issue.
243: ah, that makes much more sense, thanks, though I suppose I still find it sad that he felt like he couldn't come out to his brother until then.
I went for part of high school to the same high school as Collins and have been loosely following his basketball career since he was 13 (played on the same team with Jason Segel among others). Everyone on Facebook today is all like "we're so proud of him and our school." Which, fine I guess, but if we were all so awesome why didn't he come out earlier?
Yeah, he came out to family about a year ago, apparently. Has always always been a super nice guy according to everyone I've known who has known since forever, though I've never interacted with him personally.
A tape of the 16th president having sex, you doofus.
Daguerreotypes or it didn't happen.
232: TWYRCL played in Mr. Las Vegas' orchestra the other day and said he was very gracious and professional, a showman of the old school, though his voice is much reduced by time's cruelties.
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OMG. That is the bloodiest, grossest Christ lugging a cross up a hill that I've ever seen. I can't tell if it's a blurry still of Mel Gibson or a painting, but the dude is totally shredded to pieces. Why is this in my FB feed.
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I actually can't identify the alphabet that the caption is written in.
|| I almost put myself on the fasting diet today. First I forgot my lunch at the office when I went to eat somewhere else.* Then I forgot the food again when I meant to eat right after work. But I cooked dinner when I got home a couple of hours later.
So by not eating lunch, I found at least $5. Actually, if lunch were only $5, I wouldn't mind buying it.
*For various reasons, I can't eat at my desk.
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*For various reasons, I can't eat at my desk.
It's on fire!!
136
... What's a subtle approach with a pretty good chance of working?
The closest I came to serving on an ordinary jury I said (in response to a question) that I didn't want to be there (which was true). I expect the question was asked because I was radiating irritation and hostility. Don't know if that was what did it but I wasn't picked (they questioned a bunch of us individually and then at the end of the day excused some of us without saying why).
I have served on a grand jury which they told us was much better than serving on an ordinary jury which I expect is true.
256
... Even better would be to serve, because jury duty is not just a civic responsibility, it's also modestly fun if you can get into it. ...
In the case I didn't serve on two kids were convicted of killing another kid. I don't think it was fun for anyone involved, IIRC some of the jurors were crying when they delivered the verdict.
|| If this has become the off-topic thread -- I heard something strangely interesting today. My first instinct was to say, "Yeah, whatever" (and I did more or less say that) but it is actually kind of odd.
My cow-orker's son is in the US military, special ops, or psy ops. He did a few years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then returned home to train as a career military man, and train others. Or something; I'm not clear on that. Anyway, he's based now in Hawaii.
He reports on effects on the sequester: his battalion (approximately 500 people) is limited to 100 gallons of gasoline per month. They can't have any paper, like copy paper or printer paper. So he and others in his battalion are basically reduced to make-work at this point, beyond use of paper they provide themselves.
His battalion is a, um, Stryker Squad. Apparently a Stryker takes 50 gallons of gas to fill the tank. So you can't do a damn thing if you can only use $100/month in gas.
This is so weird! On the one hand, the Stryker seems kind of messed up. And I can't bring myself to be outraged if the military finds itself to be suffering. On the other hand, seriously, 100 gallons of gas per month? For a 500-person battalion? A Stryker unit?
I don't know what to make of it.
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Can we have a thread on effects of the sequester?
... And is the Stryker squad having bake sales?
Electric Strawberry! I've been thinking about ordering the trades of Marvel's The 'Nam as all my original issues disappeared at some point during my late adolescence.
Anyhow, that's the Army for you: "Hurry up and wait!"
(Reading their website, one is again struck by how management doublespeak has completely infected all military rhetoric.)
Sorry, it's 100 gallons of gas/month -- I erroneously switched there to $100/month, which is incorrect.
Can we have a thread on effects of the sequester?
Oh, yes, we should.
"Every unit that's not having a bake sale, please step forward. Not so fast, 1-27IN BN!"
https://www.facebook.com/pages/COLDSTEEL-1-27IN-BN/132441903459606
(Scroll down to see that one section of the Stryker battalion in question is having a bake sale THIS VERY WEEK.)
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I am in graduate school pursuing a Master's degree. Last year I had a project that was my idea and my advisor suggested I bring someone else on board and we both had the same person in mind. She is very dynamic and talented. She was also over-committed and very stressed. So she bailed. I had an idea regarding the project that I was enthusiastic about and laid out in detail to her at the time. She moved on to some other projects including a position working in our field at our institution. And now she's stolen my idea and is rolling it out in a few days. Now, I did fuck-all with this idea in the meantime. But it was a good one and it was mine. Her implementation is far better than I would have been able to pull off. Of course she does have all this institutional support I would not have had. But I'm seriously pissed off and demoralized. I just want to finish this damned degree and move on from this place. Some people are such assholes.
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That really sucks. If your advisor knows you had the idea and that the heard it and bailed, maybe they can help get you some credit or something tangible.
I had to explain the sequester to TWYRCL the other day. I felt very uncomfortable doing so, which feeling did not diminish as I proceeded to detail the workings of recoil-operated firearms, the two-point conversion and why we need a reduction in the capital gains tax for job creators. By God, let Reagan be Reagan!
I tend to become vindictive in such cases, to be completely honest. I doubt I'd actually follow through on the vindictive thoughts, but the thought goes: plant seeds of disparagement in the community at large regarding this person's honor.
But no, I don't know that I could or would actually do that. I'd certainly bring it up somehow or other with my advisor.
Has the NMM alert gone up for Albert Hofmann? A hundred and two!
Unfortunately for me I don't think I ever detailed the idea to my advisor who is also her advisor and her boss as well so she's much closer to him now than I am (I've checked my emails to him and I see no mention of it). I think I might have told it to some fellow students. So if I complained or made a stink she could claim that I was full of it. And I have a feeling that's what she would do. Even if she didn't I think it would still look like so much sour grapes. So I'm fucked.
I'm not really a vindictive type. I'd rather move on and try to forget than sit and stew and try to get my licks in. I've had to eat a fair number of shit sandwiches in my life. This is one such. So I guess I'll just have to choke this one down. It really only galls when I've been forced to attest to the deliciousness of said shit sandwich. At least I won't have to do that bit this time.
272: I just felt like some sort of dirty mansplainer, privileging the hegemony hither and yon, reifying power inequalities left and right.
274: Wow.
276.1: I still don't get it. Were you forcing the explanation on the sequester on her?
Meanwhile I just watched the video linked here, and I feel all kind of happy.
Grover, I'd inform your advisor, even if you preface it with "I realize there's nothing to be done, but..." Ie your speech would go "There's nothing to be done, but [this happened] and I'm upset."
From 2008? Did you check the archives?
Thanks, heebie, I'll have to give it some thought. Unfortunately he's not going to be around for about a month due to illness. I think this has just given me more of an impetus to get on with my work and get the hell out of here with my degree.
All the responses I'm coming up with distill down to something like "yeah, academia sucks in that way, get used to it", which sounds more callous than I mean it to, but I haven't really found a more felicitous phrasing. It sort of comes down to how original and insightful your idea was, though; it may have been sort of kicking around anyway for whoever was thinking about whatever it is you're working on, such that anyone could have done it and, by not pursuing it, you kind of forfeited some of your claim. Or it may have been a really original insight that no one would have come up with anytime soon if you hadn't suggested it. If it's the latter sort of thing, you should be really pissed off and fight back somehow. If it's the former, it happens all the time and the lesson to take away might be that if you really like an idea you have to aggressively work on it or someone else will do it first.
282 More the former than the latter which is probably why I've resigned myself to it so. Still, I have no doubt that she got the idea from me and shamelessly ripped it off and if I hadn't thought of it it's not very likely that she would be doing it. But I do feel like not getting off my lazy ass back when and pursuing it I've forfeited it but OTOH I do think some kind of credit would be in order.
Generally speaking, ideas are cheap and implementation counts for almost everything.
276: Just pat her on the head while 'splaining, it distracts and soothes the little darlings.
From 2008? Did you check the archives?
Where am I? Who are you people?
OMG. That is the bloodiest, grossest Christ lugging a cross up a hill that I've ever seen.
I saw a nearly severed foot tonight. I was in the parking lot of a gas station with another officer and a Sgt. after we were just finishing up a call when an ATL comes out over the radio of a stolen early 90's Civic that just occurred a few blocks away. A second later the other officer looks over my should and says "holy shit I think that's the stolen car." Sure thing, here it comes rolling past and starts to turn onto this big four lane feeder that goes onto a juncture of I-15 and I-80. The Sgt and I were run to our cars and I go flying up this feeder ramp running my lightbar (those new LED bars are the shit) and see this car gunning it onto the interchange for I-80 that has a big looping curve before it goes into the straightaway out westbound. We can't pursue for property crimes and it's obvious he's fleeing so I call it out and disengage my lights and slow down. As I come around the big curve there the car is about 50 yards in front of me with the front end all wrecked to shit where he lost control and rammed against the concrete wall. He's trying to get out the passenger side and we're giving him commands at gunpoint and he's protesting his ankle is hurt. So I have him put his hands high and visible and open the passenger door and look down and holy fuck his right foot is dangling by a strip of meat and we can totally see the bone hanging out of the wound. So, so nasty.
We just had him lay there and wait for the ambulance after patting him down. We're thinking that he maybe had his foot jammed on the brake when he hit the wall and the impact did the rest.
I am alarmed, not so much by 287 but by the revelation that a mile-long blood trail is merely a personal best. Where does this put you on the department-wide leaderboard, gswift?
("Unfortunately, still well behind the legendary Detective Morton, who in 1999 followed a blood trail from a fight in the SLC airport car park, through the terminal, through the gate, down the jetway and on to a flight via Atlanta for Paris-Charles de Gaulle, where the suspect was apprehended ; his record of 5,810 nautical miles is unlikely to be beaten soon.")
4: Not sure about being kicked in the nads, but I can say post-birth that I feel like I ran an ultramarathon and then got hit in the crotch with a baseball bat. The baby is here! Showed up a week late (thanks, oudemia), and labor was more complicated than it needed to be (21 hours, decelerations, giant head,forceps), but we are all fine and he is perfect.
On the OP: it's not surprising that food has become a competition among certain classes of SAHMs. Everything else has, and lots of educated people are into learning about preparing food as a hobby. (Myself included.)
Pollan was pretty bad on this. If I "ate as my grandmother did", I'd be eating baloney sandwiches and jello salad. She was a 50s housewife, not a feminist; one can't blame our love of packaged foods on burnt bras.
Congratulations! Welccome, Calababy!
289.3 Is exactly right. Our grandparents' generation was exactly that which was first offered convenience foods in the something like the range we have today, and they fell upon them like locusts.
Woo! Congratulations! (That sounds grueling.)
Woohoo, Cala and little Shivbaby!
So I have him put his hands high and visible and open the passenger door and look down and holy fuck his right foot is dangling by a strip of meat and we can totally see the bone hanging out of the wound. So, so nasty.
CAT tourniquet?
And congratulations to Cala as well. Are there any more still undetonated elements of the babysplosion? I have sort of lost track.
Yay for Cala, Shivbunny, and BABY!! Congratulations.
Hoooooray! Congrats to Cala and Shiv and the wee one!!!
I feel like I ran an ultramarathon and then got hit in the crotch with a baseball bat
Boy, if I had a dollar for every time I've been told that...
Congratulations, Cala.
Congrats Cala and Shiv. Happy babying.
If I had to pay a dollar for every time I've hid at the finish line of an ultramarathon and swung at people's crotches with a bat as they crossed the finish line...
302: I think that if you get to the hospital fast, attached at all has a decent shot of being good news. They just get better and better at sewing bits back on.
Congratulations, Cala!
Shit, I really am up next. Should be another month and a half, though.
304: Surgery has progressed while I wasn't paying attention. I didn't know they could put a foot back on.
306: oh, yes. They just did a double arm transplant the other day.
Shit, I really am up next. Should be another month and a half, though.
Judging by others' performance - more like two months.
Judging by others' performance - more like two months.
"Unfoggedtarian - pause endlessly, then come out"?
Congrats Cala. Doesn't "eat like your grandmother" obviously have a different valence based on how old you are? Pollan is what, 60, so his grandmother likely grew up cooking in the teens and 20s, not the pre-packaged 50s.
I too am what, 60. One of my grandmothers cooked assiduously, but she was culinarily ambitious, had been to cookery school etc., which made her a bit unusual. The other welcomed the pre-packaged 50s with open arms, being 70 at the time, and she would have welcomed it in 1920 if it had happened then. It was a liberation. A far as she was concerned, sliced bread was the best thing since whatever the previous best thing was.
I am alarmed, not so much by 287 but by the revelation that a mile-long blood trail is merely a personal best. Where does this put you on the department-wide leaderboard, gswift?
Might be pretty high. I've asked around a bit and haven't found anyone who's heard of a longer one. That guy might have been the perfect combination of drunken bleeding mobility.
CAT tourniquet?
Remarkably little blood. It was fascinating.
314.last: There's not much blood in joints. That's part of the reason they heal so slowly. Or maybe all of the reason, I forget.
There's not much blood in joints. That's part of the reason they heal so slowly.
He should be easy to catch when the warrant comes out.
Reading Orwell on what working class people ate in England in the 1930s, people have been eating shitty pre-packaged food since forever. Or at least since the vast bulk of the population stopped living directly from agriculture.
Both of my grandmothers cooked, but it was pretty basic meat and two veg type stuff, with a lot of convenience products and things from packets or tins. The only thing I remember either of them doing that was at all 'culinary' was baking simple cakes and things. There's no question that my parents, and (especially) me are all much better cooks, and the food we eat much more varied, and that's not a factor of increasing wealth.
320.1: Yep -- and a lot of that writing was about the precise town where my grandparents lived. Michael Pollan doesn't want me pouring practically an entire can of condensed milk in my tea, now does he? (My grandmother was an amazing baker, even if she thought you had to mark your cruellers with a cross or they wouldn't rise.)
My grandmother slow cooked sauce at least once a week, because Sicily. Of course, the started with tomato paste, because Nebraska.
My wife's mother on the other hand, is a pretty serious cook and I think that is probably typical for her generation. Czech 'peasant' type cooking, delicious but it's labour intensive and time consuming, and she makes everything from scratch.
323: Ohhh, *that* grandmother was much better at food for sure.
It was very good sauce. The tomato paste wasn't that different from the old county way of making sauce. They'd sun dry a giant pool of tomatoes in a way gave you a giant block of concentrated tomato. Nobody in the family was willing to do that kind of work that anymore.
Of course, the started with tomato paste, because Nebraska.
Tomato paste is also what FX of fxcuisine recommends, so I'm going to give Nebraska a pass here.
I don't know who FX is, but I'll take their word for it.
After all, even the ancient Romans bought their fermented fish guts ready made. One feels that if they'd made it to America, amphorae full of tomato paste would have been unremarkable in the archaeological record.
FX looks like a younger, less assholish Dick Morris.
For tomato sauce, I think that pH of the toms is really important, varies from lot to lot of the same manufacturer.
You sometimes have to adjust the ph with baking soda.
Or maybe that's what the garlic was for.
320 et al reminded me that England had particularly shitty processed convenience food since being a pioneer in industrialization (eg treacle). So maybe eat like your grandmother, unless she was British.
What's wrong with treacle, except that you prefer to call it molasses?
Molasses is heated with sulfur to prevent denaturing.
What about unsulfured molasses, huh mobes? Huh?
I may have confused molasses with rubber. Anyway, most molasses in the U.S. is used for animal feed. The rest of it sits in aging glass bottles to be used one spoonful at a time for gingerbread cookies.
Wrong! Put it on oatmeal! And rolled oats, which I refer to as oatmeal!
Such is the difference between cultures. In Britain it sits in aging tin cans to be used one spoonful at a time for gingerbread cookies.
A wise but often overlooked minority also use it in what we all flapjacks, which you think are granola bars, but aren't, being softer in texture.
What about treacle pudding/tarts?
Uses golden syrup, which is another bye product of the sugar refining process, but lighter and sweeter.
Careful with molasses. Stuff is deadly.
I certainly don't think pancakes are granola bars.
345: Then that makes more sense. Because I generally find molasses to be inedible except in very small amounts.
Molasses is for making gingerbread cookies.
Wm. Coperthwaite has an anecdote about deciding to start eating blackstrap molasses for his health. But he really hated the taste. But he forced himself to eat a tablespoon a day. And after a year, he found himself kinda looking forward to it. Then he found five Bahamian dollars.
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I ordered some of this yesterday to fix an extremely beloved pair of shoes that the local shoe hospital claims are unfixable.
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I wonder if the Molasses flood is something of a holy grail among fluid dynamicists? If I was a fluid dynamicist I know I'd be pretty excited about it.
352: Please let me know if it works and for how long.
Are you a fluid dynamicist or are you just glad to see me?
My gingerbread cookies use a lot more than a spoonful of molasses.
I suppose it depends how many you're making, but yes, I'd have thought so.
Yay Cala! Baby pics please.
I grew up eating molasses on French toast. Om nom nom.
Congratulations Shiv and Cala, and welcome Calababy!
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Harrumph. People who say they can't finish a task because they e-mailed someone for information and haven't gotten a reply. So pick up the damn phone already.
Harrumph, I say.
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New baby, hurrah! Nickname? The Bat? (Too mean?)
320 &ff: US biscuit & cracker makers imported (or maybe stole, eh) machinery from the UK, and the US business was big right after the Civil War and had formed conglomerates (e.g. Nabisco) by the 1890s. And dry soup was a popular 1920s or 1930s thing, following on military rations (the Army and Navy Stores sound like Costco in early-20th-c British novels. Hard to Google).
And well into the 1920s and 1930s*, a great deal of the food consumed in towns and cities was cooked by professionals, because some were rich enough that servants did the cooking and many were poor enough that it was more efficient to eat what the corner bakeshop sold. And lots of middle-class people lived in boarding-houses for at least some of their lives, especially early in the husband's career.
*Even into the 1940s and in some parts of the US the 1960s, so there's really not much time between the Servant Era and the Bought Food Era. There's a whole little comical underlay in proto-feminist novels about how efficiently a clubwoman can convince her husband and/or mother in law that she spends all her time at home -- a dab of polish daily on the chair-knobs, a bit of parsley on the shop-dressed roast, scant makeup and a pretty apron.
Congrats Cala and family! Your kid will keep being tenacious and awesome.
I think the whole Pollan/locovore axis is basically a force for evil. Food safety is one of the great achievements of the regulatory state, and while it can be improved-upon, food safety is has to about 50th on the list of problems in modern America. There are no actual problems in the world that home-raised chickens will solve.
I know a guy who got chickens to eat slugs to protect his garden. He lived in the country so he had to get a dog to protect his chickens from foxes. Then he moved to Florida, for what I think are unrelated reasons.
My sister got bored and decided to raise some chickens. I think she likes it, and her kids (young) really like it. Her husband just got a beehive. They are conservative Utah suburbanites.
Expensive eggs? A lot of people kept chickens during WWII. Solved problems like, is there anything for dinner, which isn't big this week in America, but in the world?
SPEAKING of eggs, does anyone know the name of a black-and-white British movie that takes place in some remote household where many chickens are kept? It's like a thriller or some such.
My old housekeeper lived with chickens in the INSIDE of the house he was squatting in. Eventually my girlfriend made me get a new housekeeper.
Does your girlfriend live with you? Otherwise, that seems a bit too much.
372: He had to raise bears to eat the chickens, and they chased him away.
And Indian pudding.
And pecan pies!
And baked beans!
And Indian pudding.
And pecan pies!
And baked beans!
And crème brûlée!
I would really love to do the backyard chicken and bee things, though Mara's afraid of bees at the moment. Charley's dead right about 370, though. I'm not sure what woke us first in my HS girlfriend's household, the chickens or her dad's loud bluegrass music.
379 -- yes, and also he was a very bad housekeeper even putting aside the sleeps with chickens factor.
Yay Cala & Calababy!
(And H- & Ace- Geebie)
(And thinking good thoughts for Blume)
Also, I'm vaguely attracted to backyard chickens but realistically they would be a gigantic fucking pain in the ass. They shit everywhere and are noisy and butt-stupid and really you can just buy fresh eggs at the store.
Don't you have rats in your alley? The feed from chickens would bring them to your yard.
We did until my neighbors decided to be feedbase station for GIGANTIC FERAL CAT COLONY.
Food safety is one of the great achievements of the regulatory state, and while it can be improved-upon, food safety is has to about 50th on the list of problems in modern America.
Is this true? I thought the criticism of the current food production/food safety practices was they they subsidized large producers and created the potential for low-probability/large-scale problems.
Not the biggest problem in the country, no, but something worth paying attention. But my source for that belief is most likely a handful of Harper's Magazine articles, so I don't know that it's accurate.
389: Cave people somewhere probably domesticated some cats. You can do this, Halford.
369: I think the whole Pollan/locovore axis is basically a force for evil
Talking like I'm about to is going to make me sound like an obsessive foodie, and I'm really not -- what my family eats is erratic and ridiculous, and not particularly local or pure or reliably homecooked. But eating is one of the few serious pleasures that everyone has every day, as well as an important determiner of health. And the industrially-produced preprepared American diet tends to make people unhealthy, and is, IMO, generally less pleasurable than eating more food prepared at home from raw ingredients (in that mildly paradoxical way where collapsing in front of the TV is probably immediately more pleasurable than anything else you'd be likely to be doing, but if that's most of your recreation you're probably sadder overall than if you were doing more interesting things).
Locavorism as an unbreakable rule of behavior is mostly silly. But thinking that a strawberry is a crunchy, watery, bland-tasting fruit available year-round rather than something soft and delicate and explosively flavorful that you can get for about six weeks in the summer is a sad thing to happen, and you're only going to find out the latter if you buy the local strawberries and avoid the ones from Chile.
Yay, babies!
I just read a story somewhere or other about a woman who raises ducks for eggs and fertilizer, as opposed to raising chickens. In Milwaukee, I think? She was quite disparaging of chickens.
389: Is that a good thing, on the whole, or not?
389: Have said neighbors organized a trap-neuter-release campaign for these cats?
Locavorism as an unbreakable rule of behavior is mostly silly.
My attitude about most flavors of, "improve your life through consuming more virtuously" is that (a) the people who are most vocal about it are also putting in more time or money than would be practical for most people (and are also often oblivious or tonedeaf about that) but (b) there are gains to be had which many people can enjoy and appreciate, and you just have to decide how much "hassle"* you're willing to put up with and pick the appropriately low-hanging fruit.
Side note, my brother is involved in the local food community, and has been successful making a product in which taste is the primary selling point and use of local ingredients is mentioned but as something that people can chose to care about or not. So I have an obvious example of the ways in which an interest in local food can be part of the process and philosophy that goes into making a better food product, without being intrusive.
* (hat tip to 135)
We've trapped and neutered about 3/4 of them (when I say "we" I mean other people, but I live near or with some of them). We thought we had them all but recently all-black kitten mob showed up so now there are a bunch more that I guess aren't neutered. I kind of like them, they're much cuter than the rats, but there are kind of getting to be too many. I guess maybe I should worry about toxoplasmosis or something also but I don't.
392 doesn't sound like an obsessively foodie series of things to say at all.
(A moment at a grocery store a number of years ago: woman perusing the potatoes, exclaiming in disgust that they had dirt on them!)
390: "Super-bugs" arising in food critters are sure going to be a problem in the future unless magic happens in antibiotic development, population control, and legislation. Of course, this is all very new, and no one could have predicted it. Bah!
Neutering 3/4 of a herd of feral cats just means you're selectively breeding cats smart enough to avoid traps.
When kittens are born feral, can they be socialized as pets if they're taken off the street right away? I'm sure I could look it up, but why not ask here instead?
373: My outside-of-Austin hippie freelove novelist friend does these things! It's a Coke commercial!
I believe the answer to 401 is yes. All black kitten crew is a little old for that already, though, I think.
401: Absolutely. They can be socialized to human company if they're taken in up to, say, 1 year old, though going that late depends a bit on personality and just where the cat grew up. My household just took one in.
It's a little difficult to force older ones to be indoor-only cats, though.
398: I was attempting to disavow any impression that I meant to imply my children don't wake up on weekends gnawing on packaged danishes like feral animals. To the extent that feral animals do gnaw on packaged danishes.
My feral animals certainly don't gnaw on packaged danishes, LB.
392: If you prefer locally grown strawberries, then by all means, buy locally grown strawberries. But this is not one of the great social causes of our time.
Americans are pretty healthy, and it's far from proven that the industrially-prepared American diet really does make people more unhealthy than they would otherwise be. The US suffers from greater obesity and lower life expectancy than other developed countries, but this could just as plausibly be caused by our car-centric lifestyles, or inequality, or the lack of social safety net, or any number of differences.
And honestly, I prefer restaurant food to home-cooked food, and I always have.
408: There's a lot of room between 'basically a force for evil' and 'not one of the great social causes of our time'. I'd agree that the more-home-cooking strand of foodieism is 'not one of the great social causes of our time', but that's compatible with thinking it's still a basically good thing.
I do think that the standard american diet is horrible, both in terms of long-term health effects and short term physiological and psychological effects.
But even putting that aside a world in which more people sit down to dinner together is a world that we want to encourage -- encouraging that kind of interaction as opposed to work or relentless commercialization of human life seems to me like it should be one of the end-goals of any decent progressive movement. It's certainly true that backyard chicken raising, in and of itself, doesn't do much to get you there, but "slow down, spend more time with your family, share a meal together" are all values that seem important to promote.
408. It's true that it's far from proven, but that kind of population study is very challenging for any kind of certainty. Dietary sodium and saturated fat in high doses are both pretty unfavorable for mice, probably to the average person as well.
Comparing the amounts of political capital that get invested in curing existing conditions to the amounts invested in preventing environmental or dietary stressors suggests that there are easy gains. For example, I honestly don't know whether sodium from soda or mercury from coal-fired power plant emissions cost more in QALY in the US.
409: It's a force for evil because it's taste advocacy masquerading as politics. You don't hear locavorism advocated as a key part of the solution to global warming? I think 90% of every conversation I've ever had on the topic involves this.
412: That is, I think, distinctly silly, but I also think it's got literally nothing (very little? I haven't read everything he's ever written) to do with what Michael Pollan talks about.
Taste masquerading as politics seems completely commonplace, but I agree that promoting locavorism as a solution to global warming is at best worthless.
401: Yes, and sometimes even older cats can be socialized. The longer they're out on the street the longer it takes and they can develop some strange habits that might be difficult to break. (One of mine won't use kitty litter but never makes a mistake about using an empty tray, and carefully covers her eliminations by pawing imaginary litter over them. Strange, but not a problem, no therapy needed.)
412: Megan's never going to come back to the blog unless you mention her by name.
Taste masquerading as politics also cuts both ways. Sure, it's silly to think that locavorism* solves global warming. But your constituency for the politicians and policies that actually might do something to help with global warming may consist largely of people who self-identify with a vague environmentalism through things like locavorism or driving a Prius.
*Or driving a motherfucking Prius.
412: I think your beef* is with the uses that people have made of Pollan's work, rather than with Pollan's work itself. Which, fair enough. Foodies are pretty smug, yes, and smug is a worse threat to our civilization that Big Ag and Big Oil combined. Right?
* Heh.
416: That's locavorism plus a mass die-off.
417: This is true. Silly people who are sort of on the side of the angels are usually harmless in their silliness and sometimes helpful on balance.
Locavorism* is smart for so many other reasons, not least among which is increasing awareness of the local community, the region's ecological and farming and crop situation, the area's farmers, who are part of your community.
* I dislike making this an -ism.
401: My stepmother's new cat was less than a year old and practically feral (and certainly suffering from whatever the feline counterpart of PTSD may be, as a result of past abuse by people who ought to be flogged in the public square) when he arrived, but he is acclimating slowly but surely to the company of people who love him. He has recently learned the joy of chasing the red dot, which seems quite a step up in domesticatedness.
chasing the red dot
The scourge of our schools!
401: Cat is born feral, but is everywhere domesticated.
422: The red dot, oh my. My household introduced its new-found cat to the wonders of the red dot not very long ago, and a (human) friend, visiting not long ago, declared that he thought it was totes unfair! The cat cannot catch that thing! What are you doing, making the cat think it can catch that thing?! Not a good thing at all, my human friend declared firmly.
I felt guilty, but geez. We only do it because the cat is otherwise jonesing for action, and you get tired of the string game after a while.
427: It's educational. The red dot is a metaphor for happiness.
428: I'm afraid it's actually just to tire him out so he'll go to sleep.
Locavorism* is smart for so many other reasons, not least among which is increasing awareness of the local community, the region's ecological and farming and crop situation, the area's farmers, who are part of your community.
I like the local food community, but I'm not sure how far that awareness goes. I was just having a conversation with somebody recently about how (almost) everybody selling produce at the local farmer's market is white. In some of those cases I know that the people selling are the same people who are working the farm, but I know that some of the farms are larger, suspect that they have other people working on the farms who don't come to the market, and I wonder if those people are non-white. I don't know, honestly, but it made me think about the way in which the Farmer's market presented a very specific persona of local agriculture.
Comparing the amounts of political capital that get invested in curing existing conditions to the amounts invested in preventing environmental or dietary stressors suggests that there are easy gains.
Thinking about this, I had something fall into place for me. When I'm talking very casually about food issues I will often say (or think) something along the lines that food offers some very low-hanging public-health fruit. But as I chase down that thought I wonder if "low-hanging" may be the wrong analogy. Changing food culture offers the potential for large public health benefits, but it isn't an easy change to make. It may offer a crucial and largely unexplored territory for public health improvements but we (by which I mean "I") don't know, at this point, how easy it will be to make those gains.
But even putting that aside a world in which more people sit down to dinner together is a world that we want to encourage -- encouraging that kind of interaction as opposed to work or relentless commercialization of human life seems to me like it should be one of the end-goals of any decent progressive movement.
I think this is a really good point. I am not completely comfortable with the class politics of local food, when you look at the working/middle class divide. But when you look at the middle/upper class divide I think it's absolutely on the right side. There's so much in our culture that promotes the idea of unlimited consumption as a desirable goal, I think it's valuable to have a message that stresses the importance of how one spends time as well as money.
I have heard that it actually is long-term dispiriting for the cats not to be allowed to occasionally "catch" the dot.
(Or catch something physical the dot ends up pointing at.)
This has caused me to have a laughing fit. Hit my funny bone. You're a good man, Flippanter.
429: If you really feel bad about teasing him with the red dot, you could use this red dot trick.
432, 433: Sure, why wouldn't it be? You don't want to make a cat neurotic. You have to provide him or her with something to catch (a string or whatever).
I just realized that I should probably get a superball or seven (since they tend to disappear).
430: That's great stuff, Flip!
The smart cat here picks the toy she wants in the evening and pesters me until I play with it and her. Sometimes it's the red dot, sometimes the peacock feather, sometimes "Da Bird". She very clearly knows the locations of each and indicates her preference by using Lassie's "Dumb-ass Timmy is in the damned well again" technique.
417: I used to think that locavorism was in the category of silly things believed by well-meaning people, but it's gotten so big that it seems to me it's now actively crowding out other forms of politics. Well-meaning people are putting more and more time and energy into learning how to can and raise chickens, rather than something that would make a meaningful difference. (I could be completely wrong about this, and foodie-ism is simply displacing other hobbies, but the fact that it's always phrased in such political terms makes me think it's an actual political project.)
431: I don't think food is particularly low-hanging public health fruit. The effect of the range of diets seen in modern America have on outcomes are sufficiently murky that it's hard to say what efficacy any intervention will have. It's genuinely hard to tell if it's Halford or vegans who have the right of it.
439.last: Halford and vegans could perfectly easily both have it right as far as an alternative to mainstream, processed, ultra-high energy density foods being a good idea. That is, it might be the case that eating an arbitrarily large number of bison steaks an hour is tough to compare, health-wise, to eating nothing but Seitan and sprouts between thick whole grain bread, but it's likely either is preferable to a 100% Hungry Man and Sunny D diet.
I guess I'd agree with you if I thought that crowding out was happening. I think crowding out is generally something that isn't much to worry about, though -- IME people who think of themselves as engaged in activism on one issue do more rather than less on other correlated issues. That doesn't mean that everyone raising chickens is advocating for single payer health care, but they wouldn't all have been if they were sitting on their couches eating frozen chicken nuggets.
I think there's something to 439.1. It's pretty good easy to get discouraged about being able to do something about war, poverty, patriarchy, etc. and just focus on making a better pie. It's something you can control, and if there's a positive beyond one's our enjoyment of the pie -- supporting local Hmong huckleberry pickers, for example ++ then all the better.
Taken to pretentious lengths, of course, it looks very silly.
Sunny D is orange. It has to be healthy.
learning how to can and raise chickens
Protip: you want to raise the chickens first, then can them.
I'm extremely skeptical that there's much if any crowding out going on. If anything it seems to recruit people who are basically UMC yuppie consumers into team culturally liberal, which pays (some modest) political dividends. I can't even fathom what political activity it might replace -- it's not like time spent building the chicken coop or going to the farmers market would have been spent at the Let's Build Socialism Now club.
It would have been spent building the Let's Build Socialism Now Club, out of hand-wrapped chicken wire and lumber sourced from the local Luberjack's Market.
"Luberjack" sounds really dirty. I think I'm happy with it.
the way in which the Farmer's market presented a very specific persona of local agriculture
A sexy persona, too! Some of those farmers, man.
I am not completely comfortable with the class politics of local food, when you look at the working/middle class divide
FWIW the farmer's markets here are all set up to take WIC, and some of them extend cooking classes to recipients.
Hooray Calababy! Maybe we could schedule a Google Hangout for all the babies at Unfoggedycon. Get 'em all onscreen at once.
"Calababy" is a mispronunciation of "Calamity", I imagine.
I've never tried the red dot thing on a cat. I don't think I'd do it unless I was trying to get the cat to appreciate the Great Gatsby.
Catsby stared out across the sound at the red dot. "It moves, sometimes, Nick. Just wait."
Happy Babyday, Cala.
Happy Birthday, Calababy.
FWIW the farmer's markets here are all set up to take WIC
Some of the ones here will double your purchasing power if you're using SNAP.
Nice work on coming to be, Calababy. Every other success is much easier after that.
376: Are you thinking of Polanski's Cul de Sac? Escaped criminals are cut off by the tide with nothing to eat but raw eggs.
Donald Pleasance isn't the first actor you'd imagine as Francoice Dorleac's husband
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Two of my senior colleagues (with accompanying factions) are having a spat over the use of certain shared resources. One of them essentially demanded that I send an email supporting their side of the argument. This is very awkward. I have done so but included an inordinate amount of hedging. I thought about trying to work in some kind of coded "I am being coerced" message into it. The weird thing is, I still think the academic politics here are milder than at at least two of the other places where I turned down jobs, although maybe there's something to be said for very open hostility instead of sly insinuations.
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I thought about trying to work in some kind of coded "I am being coerced" message into it.
Acrostics, dude.
Yeah, yeah, I thought about that. But it isn't easy and it can make the sentences seem stilted in a way that gives away the game, you know? Like: everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.
I hate locavorism for the obvious reasons. (IE I am reliant on the "ship food all the way around the world" economy being a thing that exists.)
Can't you just eat lamb and seaweed for every meal?
There must be cows in New Zealand because they keep sending us oversalted butter and "cheddar" cheese that tastes of soap.
My sister has a Prius because she reckons it's extremely comfortable and relaxing to drive. I get the impression she'd keep buying them if they ran on kittens.
There must be cows in New Zealand because they keep sending us oversalted butter and "cheddar" cheese that tastes of soap.
Anchor butter is people!
Do you think you could adapt a Prius to run on it?
The Jamestown colonists were not locavores; they ate imported people.
I dunno, they weren't murderers, just opportunistic scavengers without another obvious protein source. I for one am not willing to sit in judgment.
Update to 463: because of all my hedging, the person on the opposite side of the argument came to me and said "it sounds like you're being more thoughtful about this than anyone else; why don't you draft a new policy that will make everyone happy and try to get it approved?" WHAT? DO NOT WANT.
I'm reminded again, from Essear's comments, how much there really is a personality of an institution, and how vastly important (and impossible to discern ahead of time, except in bold strokes) it is.
Essear is going to wind up a dean of something if he doesn't watch it.
474: Further proof in any was needed that no good deed goes unpunished.
Say you would, except that you're flying to Damascus this morning to negotiate a resolution to their civil war.
474: Proposal to create a (whatever the equipment is) core facility, with essear as director. Non-essear investigators to be charged $120/hour for use of the services.
Just make sure you're a real dean, and not "Dean of the bocce ball studies community" or something. If the latter happens, you'll have to start "regaling" or possibly even "holding court".
