Interesting Times

     Let's all do whatever we can to keep the times from getting any more interesting, okay?  A little more dull routine, a few less bold strokes of BS.

One-Skillet Breakfast

      Bacon, diced Russet potato, cubed brown mushrooms, diced red onion and scrambled eggs, served with sliced golden tomatoes, Peruvian Tari amarillo pepper sauce, a sprinkle of dried parsley and grated Manchego cheese.

     I added a little black pepper and smoked paprika to the bacon and truffle flavoring to the mushrooms.

Better Off Than I Was Four Years Ago?

     Am I better off than I was four years ago?  I went looking.  I'm way better off now.  In 2020, COVID vaccines were still months away.  The economy was stumbling.  My comments section was infested by people who thought the pandemic was "just a bad cold" and were grievously irked at having to wear a mask in the grocery store.  There was widespread misunderstanding of the utility of measures meant to slow the spread of the virus or even if that was a good idea.  (It was.  Hospitals are not, in fact, infinitely large.)  Prices were up and supplies were down.

     Four years ago, a Supreme Court Justice had died and commenters were saying nasty things about her, which -- look, the dead cannot hear your cutting remarks and their friends and families don't care to.  Save your put-downs for living persons or admit to a fabulous degree of cowardice.

     On the good side -- and speaking of the Supreme Court -- there was not even a hint that any of the Justices might be in someone's pocket, or hold any particularly fringe notions, Left or Right.  The U. S. Capitol had not been breached by a violent mob at the behest of a sitting President in an effort to change the outcome of an election which he had lost, fair and square.  Oh, the halcyon innocence!  I was still comfortable voting for Libertarians and a few Republicans.

     Four years ago, I didn't understand the full nature of the threat to this country.  I do now, and I am better off for it.  I voted for Democrats with some concern in 2020.  I'll vote for them this year in confidence that they're running competent people with the best interest of this country at their hearts.  I don't agree with all of their positions and polices, but I can be certain they're not running as would-be authoritarian autocrats and that they're not pushing lies and willful ignorance, that they're not demonizing portions of the population to get the rest of us riled up and easy to control.

     Four years ago, I was still somewhat convinced that the outcomes of elections didn't much matter, and yes, I would like to get back to that.  Putting the party that shattered that belief back into power won't get me there.

Resilient Wheat -- Chickens And Eggs

     The weather's highly variable these days.  Few people dispute that, however much they disagree over causes.  Weather becoming more variable is a problem for farmers -- and when farmers start to have problems, the rest of us has better worry: nobody's growing corn or cattle in a factory, at least not yet.*

     One problem is that cereal grains are nearly monocultures,  There's not a lot of diversity within each type.  Specific varieties of corn, wheat and so on are bred to be disease, insect and whatevericide resistant, to grow to a uniform height, and to grow under specific conditions.  (The late "Farmer Frank" James waged a long fight with commercial seed companies, since he grew his own stuff from his own seeds gathered the previous year and they were sure he was cheating; he wasn't.  What he was, was stubborn.  As farmers often are.)

     It wasn't always that way.  Prior to (highly) mechanized farming,† there was a lot of genetic variation even within the broad varieties of grain.  It gave the plants as a whole better odds of getting through droughts or prolonged wet weather, cold spells or baking heat.  But that variety wasn't so great for harvesting equipment, nor for maximizing yield for a given situation.

     But we're human beings.  Our species lives in the space between chaos and order, bouncing from one to the other.  When enough of us face a challenge, we'll try all the possibilities.  Up in the Pacific Northwest, small-scale "artisanal" farmers and bakers and a university lab full of bread enthusiasts are trying things -- like greater variety.  Like whole wheat.‡

     And these days, you can grow that more-varied stuff with commercial equipment.  Farming machines are better, smarter, more able to deal with randomness.  --At a price.

     Greater variety means greater resilience.  But it also make it more likely farmers will need new machinery.  It means seed companies are going to have to look for a broad spectrum of resistances and introduce new and more internally-varied lines of crops, and they do so love their matched-up seeds, weedkillers and pesticides that work together as smoothly as a key in a lock -- and are locked into tight genomes that will fall in lockstep unison if a new bug or plant virus emerges, or if growing conditions change too much. 

     As a culture, we can get there from here, moving from vulnerability to resilience.  And if the past is any guide, we probably will.  But it may not be especially easy, and it sure won't be cheap.  And there's the chicken-and-egg: it's not going to happen out of the blue.  Events drive changes; changes drive events.
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* They are growing chicken, at least on a small scale.  State governments have not reacted well to Chicken Of The Beaker, and if you were hoping to try a platter of chicken nuggets that never clucked, don't be in a hurry.
 
† Let's not kid ourselves: farming has always been about mechanization.  Rows replaced random planting; Sharp sticks replaced poking holes in the dirt with a finger, plows replaced sharp sticks and underwent continuous improvement.  Oxen replaced people; horses replaced oxen -- but only after a proper horse collar was invented; horses gave way to steam, steam to internal combustion, and some bright guy has already shingled the house and barns with solar cells to keep his electric tractor charged up while laughing at diesel prices.  In dim prehistory, it was apparently sufficient for early farmers to see a wheeled wagon from afar to spur them making their own versions.  Humans have been cheating Malthusan limits for centuries by getting better and better at growing food though better technology.
 
‡ I grew up in a household where there was always whole wheat bread -- usually Roman Meal -- next to the white bread, and most of us preferred it.  It'll hold up to a proper sandwich better than store-bought white bread, and it tasted better, too.  One driver of this was that Mom would occasionally bake white bread from scratch, and that'll ruin you for the store stuff; commercial whole wheat is much closer in taste and texture to scratch versions.

Last Night's Debate

     You probably saw last night's debate between former President Trump and current Vice-President Harris.  TV ratings aren't out yet but I won't be surprised if the ratings exceed those of the June debate between then-candidate Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

     If you didn't watch the debate, you've probably seen excepts or read them, and you've got your own opinion.  Most people who went into the debate with a firm notion about who they were going to vote for in November will not have changed their opinion afterward; the candidates we saw on TV were exactly who they both have been throughout the abbreviated campaign.

9/11

     It's the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S.  It was a wake-up call for a complacent nation.  It was horrendous.   Over 2,900 people died that day, murdered by a sudden, unexpected assault.

     But we'd been there before.  December 7, 1941: over 2,400 killed in the unannounced attack on Pearl Harbor. 

     Both attacks precipitated wars.  The masterminds behind them were hunted down and dealt with.*

     On December 7, 1964, Americans remembered Pearl Harbor.  We honored the fallen -- and we went on with our lives.  We laid wreaths and went back to work.
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* Or at least most of them were.  Captain Minoru Genda, a less-confrontational Japanese counterpart to American air-power advocate Colonel Billy Mitchell, was instrumental in planning the attack on Pearl Harbor.  After the war, he eventually went on to command in the Japan Self-Defense Forces and retired in 1962 to begin a long career as a conservative politician.  While visiting London in 1961, he said of the Pearl Harbor attack, "We should not have attacked just once -- we should have attacked again and again." In 1969, on a speaking tour of the U.S., he answered a question from the audience by saying he thought the Japanese would have used the atomic bomb if they had had it. This caused a bigger outcry in Japan than in the U. S. and sharply curtailed his political influence. Is there a moral to this story? Not that I can find.

Who We Used To Be

     I stumbled across a 1950s police drama inspired by Dragnet: in Code 3, real-life stories from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office are dramatized, in much the same valorizing manner.

     The officers in Dragnet and Code 3 were supposed the represent the best elements of American law enforcement, and while you can easily fault them for being goody-two-shoes and papering over the worse aspects of the profession, ignoring the harsher treatment often encountered by people at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale and the leniency expected by those at the top, the programs represented an aspiration, showing the police not, perhaps, so much as they were as who they were supposed to be.

     Even taking all that into account, the first episode of Code 3 had me doing a double-take.  In it, a former member of the Czech underground, now a naturalized U. S. citizen is going though training to become a deputy.  Older than the others, driven, he's too rough in hand-to-hand training and too outspoken in the classroom.  Sent out to observe with a pair of experienced deputies, he's furious when they break up a fight among truck drivers and shrug off (and diffuse) hostile comments from the separated combatants by refusing to take them seriously.  "Why do those people not show us respect?"  He shoves one driver who directs a comment to him; the guy reacts angrily, the trainee's hand creeps towards his holster and the situation is briefly tense until he's told to stand down.

     In the patrol car afterward, the deputies explain that in this country, an unarmed citizen feels safe talking back to law enforcement, and that it is a point of pride.  "Those guys were just blowing off steam.  We sent them on their way and didn't have to arrest anyone."

     He struggles with that; plot complications and so on follow, but in the end, in the course of a dramatic confrontation with another immigrant from Eastern Europe, he comes to terms with the way policing works in the U.S. and is on his way to a career serving public safety.

     So, tell me -- just how comfortable would you feel talking back to a police officer today?  How comfortable with it, really, were truck drivers in 1950s LA County, and was it more or less so than their counterparts are now?  How much respect does a police officer or sheriff's deputy expect these days, and how much disrespect will they treat as semi-amusing routine?  And what kind of behavior does our entertainment media model for officers and the public along those lines?

I Could, But Why?

     Some of the wilder claims made by a major political candidate about people getting into the U.S. cry out for debunking, but why bother?  It's been done.  Done, and the people who most need to hear it are not listening.  When that same candidate promises that removing these largely imaginary invading hordes will be "...a bloody story," his fans cheer.

     What am I supposed to do, against people who cheer for bloodletting?  I know who will bleed, and it won't be a fantasy cadre of wild-eyed, border crossing ax murderers; it'll be powerless schmucks who can't get out of the way.  It won't be anyone with cash to burn, ill-gotten or otherwise.

     Populism ends in blood, or at least in bloodlust.  In this country, it often wraps itself in religion.  Looking up background for this piece, I started out investigating what Huey Long had promised.  It was more than potted chickens -- and a little surprising.  His "Share Our Wealth" plan called for sharply progressive taxes ("progressive" in context means the more money you make, the larger a percentage of it the Feds take -- which did happen, though not as steeply), plus caps on maximum income ($23 million in 2024 dollars), inheritance ($118 million likewise) and private wealth (1.2 billion, 2024) that, while vast, are barely a patch on their one-percenter counterparts today.  He was also pressing for a shorter work week, free higher education, free medical care and old age pensions.  "Why, that's socialism," you may exclaim.  Socialists in Long's day (then a sizable third party) disagreed and debated against it.

     So that's Huey Long, and it's pretty standard populist fare for his time, with a world mired in economic depression and autocrats on the rise.  He managed to get himself shot, ending whatever might have come of his efforts; some of his ideas were massaged by the Roosevelt administration and showed up, unattributed, in the Second New Deal.  But what caught my eye was the Long acolyte who tried to step up afterward: Gerald L. K. Smith.

     More experienced politicians forced him out of Louisiana politics in short order.  But Smith, chaplain of the American Federation of Labor, was a fan of autocrats.  Labor involvement, deep into Share Our Wealth; a modern eye might expect he was looking to the Soviets, but far from it.  No, by 1935, Smith had gotten in with pension advocate Francis Townsend (whose "Townsend Plan" was something of an ancestor to Social Security) and had convinced him to join with Father Charles Coughlin in backing a third-party Presidential candidate opposed to "the communistic policies of the Roosevelt administration."  Smith admired Hitler and was an avowed racist and antisemite; you can look up his own words and actions on those things.

     Smith went on to found the America First Party after failing to ally with the America First Committee; he joined the Silver Shirts and after America's involvement in WW II discredited isolationist and explicitly fascist organizations, went on to start the Christian Nationalist Crusade.

     His efforts only gained traction among the nuttier extremes of the far Right.  As his star faded in later years, Gerald L. K. Smith was better known as the man who masterminded construction of Christ of the Ozarks and the associated passion play.

     And there he is, history's lesson, ostensibly conservative populism fueled by racism, clutching a cross and wrapping itself in the flag -- but rejecting charity, compassion, brotherly love and the American tradition of equality before the law.

     We have seen the current movie before; the only difference is that it has got a much bigger screen now and a louder PA system.  What it doesn't have is any better a philosophy than it has ever had.  It runs on envy, exclusionism and hate.

Bergamot Marmalade

     It exists!  I don't know why it never occurred to me, but of course people make marmalade with begamot -- and yuzu, and a huge number of other citrus fruits.  It's priced almost like perfume, but some day, I will try it.

Clearing Up Confusion

     Blogs attract comments, at least they do if you make it possible for people to leave them.  Even after politics heated up to hatred, I didn't want to give up comments altogether, so I've been moderating them.  Sometimes things don't make it through moderation, and sometimes that bears mention.

     For the helpful person who left a comment consisting entirely of information cut and pasted from the hot pepper list at Pepperscale.com: thank you very much and it's good stuff, but we don't just take content from a site.  That's "scraping," and is frequently a copyright violation.  Nevertheless, it's a great link, which I am happy to share: Pepperscale.

     Another commenter was...not so helpful.  Addressing my pointing out that former Vice President (and arch-Republican) Dick Cheney will be voting for Democrat and current Vice President Kamala Harris in the upcoming Presidential election, he wrote darkly (and illiterately) about "Globalist" government and America's "managed" democracy.  These terms are, in fact, antisemitic dogwhistles, and when someone uses them, he's revealing a great deal about himself while telling you nothing accurate about the world.  While it's a handy way to identify members of the covert hooky-cross crowd, the claims are hateful blather.  Let the record show that Dick "Darth Vader" Cheney is a United Methodist, about as mainstream a version of Protestantism as you could find.  There is no Jewish conspiracy pulling the strings of world government; the one government in the world that is dominated by Jewish people has got its hands full right now trying to keep their own electorate from shutting Israel down.  This ancient nonsense remains the same nonsense it has been all along, and is always used to manipulate people and gain power for demagogues -- who never have any coherent plan themselves, only a lust for power and a desire to beat up the weak.

     Commenters, I will check your links and references.  Hostile or threatening comments will not be published, nor will comments supporting Trumpism,* which I consider to be a dangerous political movement with plenty of its own loud megaphones.  I will look up terms and claims and if you are too vague or obscure, your comment will not be published, simply because I don't know what you're talking about and prefer to err on the side of caution.
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* The leaves me open to charges of "You just hate Trump."  But you know, I don't.  I think he's a very sad man, an aging and desperate example of the kind of prejudiced, not very clever asshole managers I have worked for in a few jobs, men who didn't quite have what it took and inflated themselves with bullshit while lording it over the underlings who were doing their best to keep the bad boss propped up.  They did so because if he fell, it was going to rain crap on everyone under him.  I didn't like the situation and those guys would always get worse and worse as time went on.  Sometimes their bosses removed them before things came to a head, much as voters did in 2020.  Sometimes they failed spectacularly, and anyone near them when it happened took damage.  I think the United States of America, its government and citizens, deserves better than that.

Meanwhile, In Whackyland

     Come to think of it, that may be unfair to Bob Clampett's vision.  Call it the lunatic (but not yet goosestepping, not quite) far Right of the blogosphere.  A discussion elsewhere, by other people, sent me looking and--

     It's gotten very strange out there.  Look, there's no pretending that a Presidential contest that started with a 78 year old challenger and an 81 year old incumbent is the usual thing, or that their first debate revealed anything other than a very slow guy struggling to think on his feet against a discursive blatherer willing to throw nonsense at the wall, hoping some of it might stick.  The GOP saw it and did nothing; the Dems saw it and took action.  But the leap from that and the subsequent changes at the head of the Democratic ticket to asserting that the country is being run by a secretive cabal "akin to the Soviet Politburo" in which even the usual Right-wing villain list -- Soros, Pelosi, Obama -- are no more than figureheads and intermediaries is sheer paranoia.

     There's a lot of influencing and attempted meddling in American politics, everything from big-money donors, groups and individuals that you can look up online with a few mouse-clicks to sneaky, illegal efforts by hostile nation-states -- China, Russia, North Korea and so on -- that range from funding gray and black propaganda to computer hacking and more.  There's so much of it, in fact, that it tends to balance out and it take a really big move to have much effect.*  That's not evidence of a sooper-sekrit bunch of puppetmasters pulling strings: it's a sure sign that nobody's running the show despite so many of them wanting to.

     In 2016, announcing his intention to vote for Hillary Clinton, conservative pundit and incisive observer of governments P. J. O'Roarke said he thought she was wrong on a many issues, but she was "wrong within normal parameters."  Dick Cheney -- Dick Cheney -- didn't say that when he announced this past week that he's voting for Kamala Harris, though he might as well.  He said that Mr. Trump "...tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again. [...] As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our constitution...."

     Wrong within normal parameters beats wrong well outside them.  It's not a plot, and you don't have to take my word for it; just ask Dick Cheney.  He's voting for Team Normal.  It's not because he's onboard with their policies and positions.
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* Interested readers may want to have a look at the late Michael Flynn's In The Country Of The Blind, which starts out with the notion of statistically-accurate scientific prediction and guidance of future events and asks what happens if everyone's doing it.

They Did It

     RCA's 44 ribbon microphone is iconic.  It's essentially rectangular, with a perforated metal windscreen in a truncated-diamond shape.  After RCA stopped making them, surviving examples were treasured and a small corps of dedicated technicians helped maintain and repair them.

     I once owned one.  From junkbox storage at a small radio station that had no use for it, it (somehow) still worked and I kept it for many years, occasionally using it on the air.  It was the main studio microphone at my college radio station, straining an Atlas boom arm almost to the limit.

     Then I fell on hard times.  The radio station where I was Chief Engineer was sold, and the new owners sent in their own managers, with a mandate to cut budgets and their own notions of how a Chief Engineer ought to look and act (not at all like me).  Unfortunately for them, the station was already running without excess; when you cut Engineering budgets so far that you cannot keep transmitter parts in stock, reliability suffers.  Something had to be done!  It wasn't going to be a budget increase; I was replaced by someone with whom I hope they were able to establish better rapport, and he promptly spent the money I hadn't been able to convince my bosses needed to be spent.

     It wasn't a great time to be looking for work.  Cable TV was hiring but it didn't pay much.  I ended up working two full-time jobs for two different cable companies, seven days a week, three sixteen-hour days and four eights, about $30K before taxes.  It wasn't enough to keep up with rent and utilities.  Long story short, I had to sell my RCA 44DX microphone.  By then they were worth big money.  I sold it to a local collector, with a verbal agreement that I could buy it back.  But by the time I was able to, many years later, the mike had been sold on several times.  Prices had gone way up, and what did I want with a ribbon mike, anyway?  Hardly anyone used them.  They're fragile.

     Then they started to come back.  Quality varied a lot, but the best were very good -- and priced to match.  Meanwhile, the last of the old RCA technicians were training their successors (or not) and original RCA microphone prices kept going up.  A dedicated recording engineer was repairing them, having to make more and more replacement parts and finally did what seems obvious in hindsight: he brought them back.  His company, AEA, makes spot-on copies of the original, and some less-expensive versions.  They've branched out into some other mikes, including the KU4, originally used in the film industry, and their own designs.  They are meticulously made, gorgeous-sounding mikes and the only difference between their top-of-the line 44 and the RCA original is the logo and the lack of dents.  It's a serious microphone for serious work and sells for over five thousand dollars; the economy model is about $3500 and they're worth every penny.

     I'll never own one.  I have a nice Electro-Voice ribbon mike, bought used and repaired by AEA, a kind of two-thirds-scale version of the RCA.  I've got a couple more that E-V "repaired" after they were out of the ribbon mic business by bolting a dynamic element inside the shell, and I have an aftermarket kit that should let me install a modern ribbon mic element -- known as a "motor" -- in the best of them.  I was content.

     Enter Warm Audio.  A scrappy start-up, Warm looked around for a niche and found it in making updated versions of old classics -- audio processing and microphones, including their own copy of the RCA 44.

     It's not a total match.  It's very close and the differences are mostly cosmetic.  And it's priced under a thousand dollars.

     The temptation is great but it would mean no luxuries for a very long time -- or taking out a loan.  But it is almost the microphone I had and lost, I would use it, at least a little.

     I should strike while the iron is hot.  Companies come and go in the recording business and it's not purely on quality, but on quality, price, owner determination and "vibe."  Sometimes it's one person with a vision and when he goes, it's all gone.  Sometimes a company that was hot stops being the big thing for no discernible reason.

     On the other hand, there is a long list of more practical things to spend a grand on, starting with replacing the dishwasher and stove.

Secret Agent Man

     Or secret agent woman; high-level skulldugerousness has been a profession open to women longer than many others.

     New York's state government had embedded Chinese agents for years. Linda Sun worked her way up to deputy chief of staff for the governor before being axed over apparent misconduct.  Investigators found she and her husband Chris Hu had been living the high life on Red China's dime.

     Elsewhere, the Department of Justice says Russian propaganda mill RT hired their very own influencer/troll farm.  The description in the indictment matches Tenet Media, employers of Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, among others.  Oops.

     Then there's Senator-for-hire Bob Menendez, D-Dominican Republic, D-Egypt by way of New Jersey.  He was convicted of being on the take in July, with sentencing to come in October.

     Su Mi Terry wasn't a U. S. Senator or even a highly-placed aide to an elected official.  She was a former CIA analyst turned think-tank expert at a level that included meeting with the Secretary of State -- and she was passing notes to the South Korean government in exchange for goodies.

     And here's the thing -- while bribes are illegal and elected officials and government employees are supposed to put the interests of the U. S. first and foremost, if you're not on Uncle Sam's payroll and want to go lobby for Lower Slobbovia or otherwise help advance Slobbovian interests in the U. S.* for gifts or pay, you can do that; it's a free country.  But you have to be up front about it.  You have to register as a foreign agent.  The people you're advising or lobbying or leaning on need to know that you're acting on behalf of a foreign country.

     I wonder who else is lining their pockets in return for surreptitious shilling, sharing secrets and influencing public opinion or legislation?
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* And who wouldn't?

The Past Was A Different Country

     The loss of every single electronic parts place in Indianapolis still gnaws at me.  We had so much, and now there's nothing.  Likewise, our homegrown supermarket chains and department stores have faded -- Eavey's (I may have misremembered the name), O'Malia's, Marsh, Block's, L. S. Ayres -- all gone.

     The little independent used book stores are almost all gone, too, and most of them went away before Half-Price Books moved into the vacant niche.  Don't get me wrong; I like HPB a lot and I hope they stick around.  But I grew up going to the crowded old stores, filling a paper grocery bag with beat-up paperbacks for five dollars (about thirty bucks in 2024 money) and reading for a month.  You'd take the books you didn't like back for credit against the next bagful.  Broad Ripple's Book Exchange was a good one, but it faded away.  Most of them didn't make much profit, a bare living for the owner after rent and utilities, a haven for a bibliophile.

     It's easy to turn nostalgic, longing for a lost past.  But we forget the bad parts -- I was working in small-town radio, at bare-living wages.  That fiver for a bag of books was a luxury expense.  Ramen was a staple and fast food was a rare treat.

     Watching a documentary about the the Star Trek universe of TV shows and films, I encountered mention of an episode of Deep Space 9 that features the staff of a late-1940s or early '50s science fiction magazine -- with the cast of DS9 playing all the roles, out of makeup and costume.  I'd never heard of it, and in this age of streaming and on-demand video, it took thirty seconds and $1.99 to call it up.  A far cry from that five-dollar bag of used books!

     Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess used similar conceits a few times, Hercules in humorous self-mockery.  "Far Beyond the Stars" is not played for laughs.  Benjamin Sisko, as "Benny Russell" is an SF writer, alongside cast members playing writers modeled on Isaac Asimov, William Tenn and other Futurians, possibly Eric Frank Russell and Damon Knight, C. L. Moore and Andre Norton, under an editor who looks a bit like John W. Campbell, working in a "writer's room" (something TV programs have and SF magazines quite definitely do not; but I'll give them that).  Without giving too much away, the storyline sends an overstressed Sisko into hallucinating or dreaming events that roughly parallel what happened when Samuel R. Delany's novel Nova, already headed for hardback publication by Doubleday, was rejected for serialization in Analog magazine in 1967.

     Galaxy magazine and a few of that time's bigger names in printed SF are namechecked and it's a well-made episode, with levels of resonance that connect the story-within-a-story to the larger arc of DS9.  And it's a reminder that the past was far from halcyon.

Food For A Holiday Weekend

     Sunday, I grilled burgers.

     Yes, burgers.  Nothing exotic -- well, okay, they were pre-made Hatch chili burgers, with chopped-up bits of the hot peppers and some cheese in them.  Tam bought Kaiser rolls* and I had a bagged salad ready to assemble.  It made a quick, delicious meal, with good flavor from the lump charcoal.†  I found the burgers to be plenty spicy.  With a slice of Hvarti cheese and plenty of ketchup, mine was fine, but between the heat and the size (huge burgers!), I wasn't tempted to try another.  And I'd made four.

     Ground beef, hot peppers...  H'mm.  Yesterday, I was running late getting out of work.  (Yes, I worked Labor Day.  Needed the money; my real estate taxes went up again.)  I picked up a container of diced onion and another of sliced, multicolored bell peppers, plus a third of a pound of bulk sausage.  I had a large can of crushed tomatoes on the shelf and picked a generous handful of tiny cherry tomatoes from our patch on the way from the garage to the house: chili!

     I browned (and drained) the sausage with a little chili powder while the left-over burgers got defrosted, and had added the onion, tomatoes (plus a few slightly larger store-bought cherry tomatoes that were going soft) and chopped peppers.  By the time the burgers were thawed enough to cut up with kitchen shears over the pot, they were all cooked through.  Added the can (really a carton) of crushed tomatoes, stirred it, put the lid on and ignored it for fifteen minutes: chili!

     Would it have been better if it had simmered longer?  Absolutely.  But it was darned good, and plenty hot for me.  Tam added hot sauce to hers.
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* We're not big fans of the last reigning German monarch (absolutely not who they are named for), but my instructions were "Get baker-made hamburger buns or crusty bread. No brioche!"  I dislike cushiony-soft hamburger buns.  A lot.  Our corner store had made a big batch of their excellent version of a standard burger bun -- and were sold out by Sunday afternoon.  The Kaiser rolls were a good compromise.
 
† If you're not using this stuff, you should be.  The end result tastes better, and it burns better, too.  The downside is that it isn't as easy to work with as briquettes; sometimes I have to use a little hatchet to split the bigger pieces, and the smallest ones are tiny.  But the flavor of the meat (etc.) is so much better that it's worth it.  Around here, the big Meijer stores sell it for not too much more than pressed briquettes.

Magic Square

     The magic didn't happen.  Last week, I decided to try my hand at arepas, a kind of South American corncake that works something like pita bread: properly prepared, it is easily split to form a pocket for sweet or savory filling.  The simple batter (water, salt and a special pre-cooked cornmeal) appealed to me, and they're usually pan-cooked.  I ordered the cornmeal and gave it a try this morning.

     Simple batters are never simple; popover batter is nothing more than egg, milk, melted butter and flour, but if properly made they puff up amazingly, light, hollow shapes to fill with breakfast goodies; get it wrong and you have baked hockey pucks, dense, hard and barely edible.  The tricks to getting them right are subtle and best learned by doing.  You have to add things in the proper order and mix them the correct way.  The same ingredients that make airy popovers and dense hockey pucks produce thin, delicious, non-rising Swedish pancakes when mixed and cooked differently.

     My arepas were a learning experience.  Leathery on the outside and soupy in the middle, cooking them longer didn't help.  I know (now) the batter was too wet, but there's plenty more to learn.  Like popovers, I'm probably going to have make lousy ones a few more times before the end result gets better.  Letting yourself make mistakes is one of the best ways to learn this kind of skill.  It goes faster if you're able to work with someone who knows what she's doing to guide you, but first efforts are still likely to be less than ideal.  You accept it and try again later.

     And the post title?  Not directly related, other than perhaps the "magic" aspect.  It's from the old Roman (and possibly early Christian and/or Jewish) magic square:

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS
     What does that mean?  Opinions vary; the linked article goes into considerable detail  Possibly no more than, "The farmer Arepo runs the plow," in every direction you read it, but of course we couldn't leave it at that.  Sadly, "Arepo" may be a made up word to make the square work; it is not a Latin nickname meaning "eater of flatcakes." (Students of Latin say "Arepo" is a harpax legomenon, which is not a particularly pointy Lego piece, but a word known through a single example: you will find it nowhere else in the language.)

     I had a backup ready for breakfast: fried red potatoes, cubed up, with some leftover sweet Italian sausage, bacon, scrambled eggs and two different kinds of pickled hot peppers.  Other than the potatoes, it was what I was planning to fill the arepas with.

     Next time!