I Can't Keep Up

      It's looking like we're deep into the "Grandpa is crazy, humor him" stage of things, with the U. S. Navy supposedly about to resume building battleships (hello, Billy Mitchell! Hello, Isoroku Yamamoto!), increasingly questionable oil tanker seizures, and the Heritage Fundation shedding senior members, most of them decamping to Mike Pence's no less conservative (but far less willing to wink at Nazis and Nazi-adjacent types) think tank.

     In Imperial Rome, when Emperors went whimsical, it was often a prelude to things getting sporty.  The men who wrote and amended the U. S. Constitution did their very best to build in circuit breakers and spillways intended to keep "interesting times" from becoming a pandemic.  Did they succeed?  Better fasten your seat belt and return all tray tables to the upright and locked position.  The ride's liable to get bumpy.

How Does It Work Elsewhere?

     The Bulwark compares the health care system in Japan to ours.  We don't come off looking so great.

     I can only point out yet again that universal health care is apparently so terrifically difficult that the only modern, industrialized country that hasn't come up with some way (and there are many) to deliver it is...us.  If that was the cost of a few trips to the Moon, then, really, we should have stayed home.

Malicious Record-Keeping

      Reading about the history of health risks from asbestos and the things companies did to cover it up, I learned that not all of it was overt.  Sure, people were pressured to sign releases, or sworn to silence as part of settling lawsuits; research was hidden; misinformation was promulgated: all the usual Hollywood-villain stuff really did happen.  But as lawsuits started to pile up, there was another technique: malicious filing practices.  Rather than destroy records, which would have been a red flag, a crime and of itself, some of the bigger offenders began "storing" records by piling them up in random heaps, often in scattered warehouses without climate control.  They could argue it was expensive to keep all those files, and impossible to keep track.

     Of course, they'd let opposing counsel dig through all that -- but don't expect an index.

     I've been thinking about that as the Epstein files have been released, a great big digital heap of stuff, some of it withdrawn for further redaction and then reissued, with no tracking.  Is it all there?  Who can say, but there's certainly a lot of it, and the various journalists and activist organizations are digging through it all, many with their own axes to grind.  It's another six-day wonder for the news cycle, steeped in rumor, adorned with a few facts gleaned catch-as-can.

     More sound and fury, associated with horrendous crimes against vulnerable young women, buried in the noise, much of it self-created.

     Don't think it's not deliberate.

"At The Tone..." (Signal Fades)

     Oops -- the National Institute of Science and Technology's time servers in Bolder, Colorado have been hosed by a prolonged power outage, and at this writing, the atomic clock is way off, at least as such things go.

     I don't see how that can happen without generator issues.  This is connected to the WWV radio time signal complex, a well-built, well-maintained facility that operates on a shoestring budget, with a handful of administrators, scientists, engineers and technicians keeping the equipment running.  They've got UPSs and generators; they've got the skill set.  They may not have the bucks.  The transmitters are pretty much antiques, but they were very well built and have been looked after carefully.  Boulder's got the same combination of people who know what they are doing and budgets that often become political footballs.

     During the first Trump administration, there was some talk of shutting down the WWV stations, due to cuts planned for NIST's budget.  It didn't happen, but this entire operation, the basic time and frequency reference for the United States, is treated like a mushroom farm: left in the dark and mostly ignored except when a fresh load of stable sweepings is shoveled in.  They rarely complain; they're too busy keeping the thing running.

Lessons For The Day

     First lesson, when recovering from a cold, Mandarin oranges are delicious -- and so are imported, dark-chocolate-covered cherries! (One of the first and, by an effort of will, only two of the second.)

     I managed to get to the grocery today, the first time I have left the house since last Saturday.

     Second lesson: Washington rarely gives you what you want.  The Epstein Files were released today -- almost entirely redacted.  Most of the blanked-for-declassification documents nuclear-weapons historian Alex Wellerstein unearths and FOIAs into the light have less blacked out on the page.  Yes, I said it: you can find out more about the once Top Secret U. S. plans to nuke the Moon than about most of the men in nice suits featured in photos in the Epstein Files, their faces entirely elided.

     It's sure nice the Great White Father in DC has managed to clear that up.

Green Peppercorns

     Oh, no, no, no.  Just no.  Green peppercorns are attractive-looking, and they are a standout among the various kinds of pepper, with a bright, sharp bite.

     While the pink (or red) peppercorns you find in mixed pepper are typically a whole different species, black, white and green peppercorns all come from the same plant.  The black ones are picked green, then boiled briefly and dried or picked and dried in sunlight, and either way, they heat up and darken, with some internal changes.  White peppercorns are allowed to ripen, retted (soaked in water for a long time), gently abraded to remove the skin and thin flesh, and dried, resulting in a white corn and a pungent aroma.  I like 'em, but a little goes a long way.

     Green peppercorns have to be picked green and processed in a way that keeps the green hue -- drying in sulfur dioxide and pickling being common.  Whatever the process, the end result doesn't agree with me.  At all.

     We ordered out last night, and I got lasagna with Bolognese sauce.  It was delicious!  But apparently it was made with green peppercorns, and, well, never mind.

     The green ones are uncommon and expensive, and encountering them is rare.  I'm grateful for that.  

Oxtail Soup For Supper

     Tam had picked up a couple of sections of oxtail earlier in the week.  I haven't felt well enough to go to the grocery since Saturday, so that was my only option.  I was thinking I'd use them with some leftover pork roast, but once the cooking was underway, I realized I didn't need to.

     The start for anything with oxtail is to salt and pepper them, and brown them on all sides in a little oil, reducing the fat as much as possible.  It takes a while; I usually give it four minutes a side and keep working all sides until I like the result.  You drain the rendered fat, keeping every browned bit of meat by turning the pan as they settle out.  Take your time; all those little pieces are full of flavor.

     Next, add just enough water to over the meat and let it simmer, covered.  I added a teaspoon of beef broth powder once it was bubbling, along with a few coriander and mustard seeds, a big bay leaf and a little oregano.  After about an hour, I peeled and sliced a couple of large parsnips, followed by about the same amount of sliced "baby carrots" (about a dozen of them) and three stalks of celery cut into 1/4" sections.  Didn't have any onions, so I gave it a shake of onion powder and some truffle powder for luck.

     After a half hour, it was smelling pretty good.  I fished out the meat and started snipping it from the bone, setting aside the larger pieces of fat.  You want pieces sized proportionally to the vegetables.  The meat and bone went back into the pot for another 45 minutes.  There's a lot of savoriness in oxtail bones; you want to cook them clean.

     The broth was clear, light-colored and tasty.  The vegetables and meat were tender.  Tam and I both had seconds.

     I almost always add tomato sauce and strong broth to oxtail stew, but this soup didn't need it -- or anything else, either.

I'm Just Watching

     I'd like to have something trenchant and pithy to say about current events; we're oversupplied with holiday tragedy, and then there's whatever the hell is going on between the Trump administration and Venezuela....

     Historically, there's nothing governments feeling their power slipping turn to more readily than a short, victorious war -- and there's nothing more likely to turn on them.  Ginning up an external (and/or internal) enemy is a common element in many authoritarian efforts; George Orwell was drawing on experience when he wrote (managed) threats of both sorts into 1984.

     We're not there yet, and there's a whole lot of "old man yells at clouds" going on, at home and abroad.  The problem is that when yelling leads countries, bombs and missiles often follow.

     It's not at all suited to the season -- but when is it ever really okay?  Pugnaciousness and preparedness aren't the same thing; neither are confidence and combativeness.

Oh--

     Thought I had posted something this morning.  I'm still fighting this cold, though it seems to be fading.  It's no fun to have a cold on vacation, but it's much better than trying to work while I have one; I used to do that, before COVID and before I had a co-worker who would "bravely" come in with colds or the flu, and give them to all of us.  If I didn't like him doing that, I sure had no excuse for doing the same myself!

     Any more, sick days and vacation days at work come from the same pool; and I am not much given to vacation travel.  So it's no great loss. 

The Cure For Kid Cocoa

     I enjoy hot chocolate in the winter.  I don't enjoy trying to keep milk in stock,* or washing out a pan used for heating it for just one cup of cocoa, so that means the instant stuff.

     One good trick for solving weak instant is to add a teaspoon of coffee creamer.  But the other problem with many brands is they're loaded with sugar.  And the fix for that?  A little more coffee creamer, a little more hot water -- and a level teaspoon or less of plain, unsweetened cocoa powder.  That kicks it up to something better suited to an adult palate, in my opinion, and I'm still not having to mess around heating up milk.
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* For some reason, UHT shelf-storable milk has become mildly scarce at my corner store.  It's still the best choice if you like to have milk handy but don't use it often.

Okay, Then...Dammit

     I have now reached the "obnoxiously crabby" stage of my cold.  It's probably a good sign; it means I've got enough mental processing cycles left over to be annoyed about being sick.

     That does not, however, mean it is any fun.  And I have to keep it reined in, despite an unceasing string of petty frustrations this morning: when I act annoyed, the cats get crabby with one another:
     "Mom's upset and it's your fault!"
     "No it ain't, it's your fault, you fluffy monstrosity!"
     "Yeah, well you're yellow!"
     "That's it!"  And they're off, wrestling, trying to chew one another's ears off, rolling over and over down the hall.
     Earlier, one of them was biting the other as he was headed into the litterbox, an offense against proper behavior so dire that we moved the biter to the front of the house and shut the door -- until his adopted brother, business taken care of, began wailing at the closed door about being so lonely, where was his pal, what had we done?

     There's no managing cats; you just have to figure out where they're headed and try to get there first.

But First...

     I went off to the kitchen for a coffee refill and asked the robot to play "Saber Dance."  She picked a version by the Boston Brass, and it was a good one, the kind of performance that has me idly wondering if they aren't having to rotate valved brass players out to the alley to fan them down while the rhythm keeps plonking along.

     Then it segued into something seasonal, doubly familiar and yet not familiar at all.  It turns out you can borrow riffs from Take Five and hurl them under the wheels of We Three Kings Of Orient Are, and it works out very well.  If you start picturing the wise men from the mystic East arriving in porkpie hats and sunglasses after this, well, I guess you can blame me.  Cool, baby, and dig them angelic trumpeters!