Cabbage Leaves Replace Aluminum Foil in Cooking Salmon

Trying to minimize the aluminum foil we use in cooking, my lovely wife tried Savoy Cabbage leaves for covering a 3-pound salmon baked in a pyrex dish, with a few chopped veggies.

It worked! It worked great! The salmon was tender, tasty and perfect.

In the photo, the leaves may be a funny shade of brown but remember, we weren't planning to eat them (we don't eat the foil after all). I'll probably toss them in the crock pot anyway.

This is only a minor savings, but every little bit helps. We can grow cabbage a lot easier than we can mine and refine aluminum!

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Previously, we cut out using aluminum to edge piecrusts by getting a pie ring: Pie for the Apple of Your Eye

Planted This Week

This week I planted:

• Vincula (complete plants) among the boulders. These came from a neighbor a few blocks over (on our route to the busstop) who had evidently cleaned out a patch and left a big bunch on the sidewalk with the sign "FREE"!  I hope these will displace some of the grass and be more attractive.
• Sunflower (seeds). These are the little sunflowers you get by planting sunflower birdseed. My experience last year is that they grow into a variety of sizes, none huge but all nice flowers that the birds enjoy pulling the seeds out of. I spread some next to the fence where they'll be no trouble.
• Watercress (complete plants). Kris bought some live. They're "planted" in a couple of slightly chipped coffee cups half-full of rainwater.
• Dill (seeds) in pans of dirt to be transplanted when they are big enough, and the remainder among the boulders. This packet came from the seed swap at Seattle Community College where we stopped at Saturday. We bought a few bucks worth of stuff, but this packet was in the free pile of "last year's seeds" so it's a complete gamble. Dill's pretty tough so I imagine it won't mind the boulder/dirt environment.
• Bulbs from my sister Kat's. Frankly, I don't know what they are. One recent holiday (maybe Christmas?) she just handed some over. I put them in pots on the deck so they can come with us when we move.
• Cantelope. This is a total gamble. I unfortunately forgot the cantelope I'd bought last week, and it went squishy. I halved it with my shovel and buried it in two places near the fence. Hopefully at least one of the seeds will turn into a nice surprise for whoever rents this place after us! At the worst, we have merely enriched the soil.

That's it for now, but there's a lot more to come! The above were free or almost-free, which is always nice, but we also ordered a huge batch of heirloom seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds  - all old varities, pre-GMO and dating from the time when taste and nutrition mattered more than shippability. We may have gone a little teensy bit overboard quantity-wise, but we'll plant something from each pack and swap the rest. We had so much fun with our small container gardens last year, and expect this coming year to be even better.

When we move to the Hummingbird House down the street, we'll leave behind everything but what's in pots, but we like to keep the grounds up and we'll enjoy seeing the results every time we walk by!

Ben Salmon: Working-Class Religious Conscientious Objector

I don't have this guy's stones but I definitely have to admit his courage AND fortitude. Having heard about him on Thom Hartmann's listerner blog, I did some quick research:

Ben Salmon (1889-1932) was a World War 1 conscientious objector who completed a lengthy critique of his Roman Catholic Church's Just War Doctrine while in prison.

Salmon was born and raised in a working-class Catholic family, and became an office clerk with the Colorado and Southern Railroad. Outraged by the Ludlow Massacre, he become more active in populist causes such as unionism and the single tax. When President Woodrow Wilson ordered a draft, Salmon was one of a small number of Americans to refuse to cooperate.

Salmon was arrested in January 1918 for refusing to complete a Selective Service questionnaire. While out on bail, he was re-arrested for refusing to report for induction. He was locked in guardhouse for refusing to wear uniform and work in the yard. Despite not having been inducted, he was court-martialed at Camp Dodge, Iowa on July 24, 1918, charged with desertion and with spreading propaganda. He was sentenced to death, but later re-sentenced to 25 years in prison at hard labor. After World War 1 ended, his imprisonment continued, so he took up a hunger strike "for liberty or death". The government claimed that his fast was a symptom of mental illness and sent him to a ward reserved for the "criminally insane" at St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C.

While in custody, and despite having only a grade school education, Salmon wrote a lengthy and systematic critique of just war teaching, probably the first American Catholic to do to so.
The fledgling ACLU eventually took up his case, and the tide of public opinion, post-war, favored the release of conscientious objectors. Salmon was pardoned and released in 1920, and given a dishonorable discharge from the military service he had never joined.

Upon his release, Salmon led a quiet life with his family but his prison ordeal, which included beatings and force-feedings, had permanently damaged his health. He died of pneumonia in 1932.

Salmon cited his religious faith as the reason for his utter pacifism and refusal to cooperate in the business of war. In this he suffered initial opposition from his local church leaders and prison chaplins, who refused to administer to him the Sacraments, even in prison (one brave priest who relented and gave him communion was disciplined for this act!) Today, however, he has been cited as an inspiration for other religious pacifists, such as Father Daniel Berrigan.

I put the above into a little wikipedia biography and hope better scholars can clean it up. When you look at the details in the references, it's quite a ripping yarn.

Evolution's Problem of Transitional Forms

A evolutionary biologist walks into a bar, and the bartender says, "Whaddya having?"

The scientist says

Let us say that we have two species S0 and S1, and it is clear to everyone and his dog that S0 evolved into S1. However, creationists insist there's no "transitional form". So we go over the evidence, to see if there's a pattern.

Problem #1: Creationists say that there is no transitional form between S0 and S1.
Solution #1: We find a fossil transitional form between S0 and S1 is found, which we call S0.5

Problem #2:  Creationists say that there is no transitional form between S0 and S0.5, or between S0.5 and S1.
Solution #2: We find fossil transitional forms, which we call S0.25 and S0.75

Problem #3: Creationists say that  there is no transitional form between S0 and S0.25, or between S0.25 and S0.5, or between S0.5 and S0.75., or between S0.75 and S1.
Solution #3: We find fossil transitional forms, which we call S0.125, S0.375,S0.625, and S0.875.

Problem #4: The more fossils we find, the more Creationists bitch about the lack of transitional forms.
Solution #4: We go get ripping drunk.

Something There Is That Does Not Love a Neatly Stocked Bookshelf

SOMETHING there is that doesn't love a wall
Of books neatly ordered for easy browsing
And spills the upper shelves on the floor;
And makes gaps unevenly thorough the display.
The work of shoppers is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one book next to book,
But they would have each volume out of dust jacket,
To tease we yelping volunteers. The gaps
We sometimes see them made or hear them made,
But at daily stocking-time we find them there.
I let my department lead know;
And on a day we meet to walk the shelves
And set the shelves between us once again.
We split the shelves between us as we go.
To each the books that have fallen to each.
And some are paperbacks and some so nearly boulders
We have to use a spell to make coffee-table books balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of indoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
She is all history and I am science-fiction.
My SF will never get across
And take the shelves from her history, I tell her.
She only says, "Good shelving make good shoppers."
Spring is the mischief in us, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in someone's head:
"Why do they make good shoppers? Isn't it
Where we have good donations? But what brings good donations?"
Before I stocked a shelf I'd ask to know
What I was setting out or passing on,
And to whom a book was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love neat shelves,
That want them random!" I could say "Elves" to her,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
We said it for ourselves. I see her there,
Bringing a book grasped firmly by the spine
In each hand, like a librarian armed.
She moves in shelving as it seems to me,
Not of books only but of the community.
She will go beyond the marketer's saying,
And she likes having thought beyond, well,
Beyond again, "Good shelving makes good shoppers."

- REW (with apologies to Robert Frost)

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Today, as I do several times a month, I stocked books on the shelves of the Mercer Island Youth and Family Services Thrift Stop (MITS for short). In theory it is some sort of volunteerism, but it's really for fun. Putting things into order is a great puzzle; there is the formal order (fiction over here, by author; non-fiction of various types over there; genre fiction (romance, SF, westerns); children's books (sorted by binding, as a proxy for age rage).

And then there's the non-formalizable order: display to maximize sales, to maximize convenience for customers: groups series and interests, drawing attention to special books, balancing rigid order with opportunities for quick sale.

And there's the fun or friendship of working with other volunteers, the work-study students, and the paid staff. After a few years, they are nearly family.

I'd love to run a bookstore, but making a living running a bookstore is hard, and getting harder. SWeveral fine bookstores went out of business in Seattle in the last couple of years, and I'd be nuts to think I would do much better.

But ah! to stock books! To bring order to chaos, to chat with customers over their preferences, and the endless variety of donations! that is something I can do, and enjoy!

Theory of Gravity DISPROVED! by SCIENCE!

Dearest Colleagues:

I write to you from the Intensive Care Ward of Vancouver Polygnostic University Hospital, where I am recovering from injuries sustained in the name of Science, thusly: I have utterly dis-proven the Theory of Altitudegenic Gravitational Waning, or AGW.

You will recall that a vast conspiracy of intellectuals, motivated by the lust for grant money funded by sources Better Left Unnamed, have covered up all evidence questioning their assertion that the attractive force of Gravity does wane with the increase in altitudinal separation from our Mother Earth. Burdened by this false "theory" they concocted complicated rationalizations involving square-cubes "laws" in defiance of the commonsense observation that our Earth is a neither a square nor a cube, but an oblate spheroid! Yet THEY control the scientific journals and THEY control the grant money!

Brave space explorators should have toppled this Theory, for in Skylab (mean altitude 50,000 km) gravitational attraction indeed wanes to near zero, whilst Tranquillity Base on the Moon (mean altitude 258,000 km) experiences significant gravitation! Mars (mean altitude 28,000,000 km) has even greater gravity than on the moon, and on mightly Jupiter (mean altitude 68,000,000 km) the force of Gravity, far from waning altitudinally, may actually exceed that of Earth herself!

Surely (you must be thinking) these scientific observations shattered forever the AGW myth; but alas! the pro-AGW cabal currently controlling our Institutions of Learning REFUSE to publish peer-reviewed papers disproving their AGW "theory", they have kept the lid on this, the greatest scientific scandal since Galileo was suppressed as well!

To overcome the fearsome forces arrayed against truth, I conceptualized a simple experiment bypassing scientific publication IN FAVOR of public demonstration. Journeying secretly to the Vancouverian Winter Olympics, I placed myself at the altitudinal maximum of an instrument commonly called a "Snow Boarding Half Pippet". Were the pro-AGW theorists correct, I would slide down the structure monotonically, and not experience an increase in altitude along the way.

By means of my Beetleborg Altitudimeter, I determined that the test run would collect data from 1955 to 2010 C.E. (Canadian Elevation, denominated in Canadian Reverse Notation, or meters from the summit of Mt. Whistler). Ignoring the cries of uniformed security officers seeking to interfere in the Advance of Science, I lept into the Half Pippet and accelerated by means of the strong gravity present at that lofty altitude. I confess I felt a moment of doubt and then a thrill as I proceeded downwards, wobbling in the chaotic nivaic fluctuations. Then, having accumulated a sufficient decrement in altitudinality, in conformity with the technical exercise recommended by Professor Shaun White, I re-oriented semi-orthogonally to the axis of the pippet and then EUREKA! at 1998 C.E. I was propelled upwards along the wall of the pippet!

Audible gasps and even cheers arose from the crowd of assembled researchers as I flew not downward as the false theory of AGW would require, but upward into the clear air of reason! So great was my joy that I immediately produced from the pockets of my vest two bottles of champagne in celebration, and in a single maneuver pulled off a doubled cork.

Due to local altitudinal perturbations, I soon effected co-incidence in space-time with structural features, and regrettably, the rest of the experiment is unclear to me. No matter! no matter! For all have seen that gravity of 1998 C.E. went higher than in later altitudes such as 2010 C.E.!

AGW is proven to be teh complete hoax!!!!

The honors have already poured in; whilst I have not yet the Nobel Gold, already a bracelet of silver metal is on my wrist, connected to a like honour on my bedstead. The uniformed Servant of the Queen who presented me with these awards is taciturn, but I am given to understand that more is likely to be forthcoming.

Ever onward, my friends! Ab luce ad tenebras!

Signed

Professor Certain.

Freedom to Choose Public Option Possible If You Act

Great news! If you call your Senator right now you can demand an up-or-down vote on a public OPTION for health care. Get their phone number here, then follow this simple step-by-step process

Why Should You?

The freedom to choose a public, non-profit insurance company nationwide was declared dead by the aristocrats who run our media and our politics, but they screwed up and now it has suddenly become possible, but only if We The People make the Senate more afraid of us than they are of the insurance lobbyists.

You will recall that the extremely ugly Senate health care bill, in order to appease industry shills such as Joe Liebermann (I-CIGNA) and Evan Baugh (whose wife earns millions of dollars lobbying for insurance companies ... did you know that?) included a mandate to buy insurance from the same for-profit insurers that are causing the problem in the first place. This piece of insanity died when Scott Brown entered the Senate, running on the promise to vote against the bill.

But when Brown joined the Senate, Joe became irrelevant. Baugh became so irrelevant that he's quitting the Senate to send more time with his lobbyist wife. Those millions need to be spent somehow! Now, by the strange rules of the Senate, it opens the way to passing the bill via up-or-down vote, via the reconciliation process, the same way that the George W Bush tax cuts for the rich got through. The question is, does the Senate have the guts to go for an up-or-down vote?

That is to say, are they more afraid of the voters or the insurance companies?

Sen. Michael Bennet from Colorado has taken the dare. He's circulating a letter to Harry Reid, in favor of passing a health care bill through budget reconciliation - which provides for an up-or-down vote, where the side with the most votes wins (...hey, that's a strange concept! letting the side with the most votes win?)

How to Do It

We can all, in a very positive way, give the Senate something to fear. A telephone call works better than an email or an internet petition because it takes more of your time - so Senators don't get as many of them. That means they pay more attention to your call! Call your Senator and demand an up-or-down vote on the public option!

You can check your Senator's latest position here. If your Senator is on board, great! Call him or her and thank them.

But if your Senator is not yet sure about voting for what the American people want - the freedom to choose to buy health insurance through a Medicare-type public insurance plan. It's easy! If you've never called a Senator before, just get their phone number here, then follow this simple step-by-step process.
Be polite! but be firm. Don't sound angry - no-one likes a sorehead but you have the right to demand your Senators get an up-or-down vote on this.

God vs. Coca-Cola

The Christian God has, in two thousand years, persuaded less than half of the planet that he is the One True God.

Frankly, Coca-Cola has a better record of market growth in a short time. The Christian God cannot be said to have made His Case clearly since it is, on the evidence, not terribly persuasive. Indeed, it's not even the most rapidly growing religion today.

Thus if, upon my demise, I were to be confronted by the Christian God demanding why I did not prostrate myself before Him, I must in honesty reply just as I would to the God of the Zoroastrians: "Sir, you failed to provide the proof that would persuade a reasonable man, and as evidence I offer the fact that most reasonable men have not been persuaded."

The True God is not unreasonable.

Why Men Mock

Men make fun of each other. A lot!

We mock each other even when we discuss important subjects; we mock each other especially when discussing important subjects. Why is that?

This seems irrational. Why go out of your way to irritate other people? When you're discussing something important, why introduce humor and little mock attacks?

It doesn't help to say, "Because it's fun."  The question is, why is it fun? I'm not saying everyone enjoys it; to the contrary, sometimes the butt of the joke finds it very unpleasant and sometimes the smart nerd with all the facts loses out to the jock who has the completely wrong answer, just because the nerd can't handle mockery. It is important to figure out: what's going on here?

Maybe you're thinking, "Hey, why are you talking about men? What about women?" Simple fact: I am a man. I don't know whether women do the same thing among themselves; but from the outside, it seems that they have their own system. Ladies: feel free to chime in!

This was all a total mystery to me for about 50 years. I was kinda of a science nerd or something when I was young. I am really good at taking multiple-choice tests, and I read a lot of science fiction in which smart kids just like me saved the world and got the girl, plus the respect of the Ben Grimms of the world. Being young and stupid, I figured that this was reality; I and my kind would dominate the herd and run the world by virtue of our enormous intellects!

Man, what a surprise reality turned out to be!

It's taken about half a century, but I think I have it worked out. Male mockery is a game about figuring out who to trust. Trust is not related to intellectual prowess. When things are going well, it doesn't matter so much who you're working with but you really need to figure out who will have your back when things go to hell. The game is to probe a little bit to see if the guy folds under pressure, or takes a hit and come back harder. In a crisis, you can't use someone who collapses in a heap, even if he's the smartest guy in the room, and even if he gets 100% on multiple-choice exams.

The Test Of Mockery is about whether a guy who is mocked lets it get to him. Under pressure, does he laugh it off or, even better, mock you back? You need friends and allies who have "Grace Under Fire". Brains you can hire; a guy who laughs when he gets hit and bounces back to cover you cannot be bought.

I call this is the "Klingon Science Probe" theory of male mockery. According to the dreadful Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Klingons probe unexplained phenomenon by firing photon torpedoes at them. This is a most efficient way of determining whether it is a threat, and if occasionally you lose a starship, well Klingons don't mind: they died for science!

Human males mocking each other is the same thing, but gentler because we aren't actually Klingons. Everyone wants to go to Sto-vo-kar, but no one's in a hurry.

In reality, the procedure is even better and complicated. Because There Are Lines You Don't Cross, the mockery test includes determining whether mocker and mockee have Situational Awareness of where the mocker's head is today, what's a real threat, what is harmless, and so on. It's complex stuff, and it's important to know your ally can handle complex situations.

I'm not gonna say this is a fair test. Some people have communications issues; some people just never figure out what the test is. I am suggesting that, in my experience, this is a real test, and our choices are to beat the test or to fail. I like to beat tests!

I suffered a lot of discomfort from this system in my early life, but it now works well for me. I have guy friends with radically different views of the world from me; I know corporate lawyers and Tea Party Patriots. We mock each other and we get along. When we have a problem, we help each other out, and then we mock each other more. This is not Vulcan logic, but it makes a lot of sense.

I'm not complaining, but my life would have been a lot easier if I'd learned this early in life. I hope this record of my experience helps at least one budding Starfleet science tech to live long and prosper.

And ... to have a certain amount of fun mocking and being mocked!