Kind Of A Recovery Day

   I slept in, did a lot of laundry and worked around the house.  Managed to make Swedish pancakes for brunch and a second iteration of Friday's "Hoppin' John From Tins" that added French country vegetable soup and smoked beef sausage to the original.

     The original?  Look, I was sleepy after work Friday and didn't want to shop; I had canned crushed tomatoes, canned blackeyed peas, frozen mirepoix (that's onions, carrots and celery, all chopped) and a can of...Spam.

     Yes, Spam.  We always have a few cans and use them up and replace them so it's reasonably fresh.  I diced it and browned it so it would have some texture, then added the mirepoix (handy stuff, though fresh is better) and a little paprika, thyme and sage for luck.  Got that cooked enough, added the beans and tomatoes and a few bay leaves and let it simmer.  Not bad with little hot sauce, especially over rice.  Adding smoked sausage and the rich vegetable soup today gave it some depth, plus I'd poured off about half the liquid yesterday before freezing the leftovers, so it was nice and thick.

Improvised Green Tomatoes

     Yesterday evening I happened to find myself in possession of a couple of large green tomatoes -- never you mind just how -- along with a nice sweet red pepper and a jalapeno.

     This meant only one thing: fried green tomatoes for dinner!

     Unfortunately, our corner store didn't have any cornmeal -- not a bit.  But they did have a nice-looking organic corn muffin mix; it was better than nothing.  It's got cornmeal, flour, plus baking soda and a dash of sugar.

     Got home, washed and sliced the vegetables, mixed up a little egg/milk batter, and poured out some of the muffin mix into a bowl.  It looked about right, especially after I ground some pepper over it.

      Got out one of the good old skillets, Mom's Revere Ware* with nice tall sides, and got 1/4" of olive oil with a little butter nice and hot.

     The muffin mix doesn't stick really well -- I had to kind of work it into the tomato slices.  But it stuck well enough, and first batch was sizzling away pretty quickly.  I had to ask Tam to fetch me a plate with some paper towel on it to drain them, but after that the production line went smoothly, tomatoes, sweet peppers, Jalapenos.  Tam came back into the kitchen, remarked on the smoke, and had me start a couple of dill pickles though the process while she opened a window and set up a fan (the range hood is a recirculating type, not very useful).

     By and by it was all cooked, other than left-over muffin mix, egg/milk batter and skillet of by now very dark oil; so I mixed the first two and poured it into the pan of hot oil, which produced a kind of terrifying corn fritter that we, of course, sampled (better than you'd think) and simplified clean-up.

     How do the tomatoes taste?  Darned good!  I wouldn't use muffin mix if I didn't have to, but it does well enough.  The peppers were good, too; the process calmed the Jalapeno down sufficiently that I had a couple of rings and the sweet pepper was delightful.

     P.S.: I had a little more of the corn fritter later (still good), and broke it open to look at the texture: light and fluffy!  Then as I proceeded to put things away, I took a closer look at the label on the bag of corn muffin mix: gluten free!  That's why it didn't stick so well.  But for taste and texture, at least when pan-fried, Bob's Red Mill Gluten-Free mix is indistinguishable from regular cornbread, which is saying quite a lot.
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* I ended up with most of her Revere Ware; the oldest pieces date back to 1949 when she married Dad. She loved it and he kept adding to it through the years, most recently in the 1980s, and it's all the good copper-bottomed stuff.  Not as easy to clean up as non-stick but it's wonderful to cook with.

The Ground War Against Allergies

     Since "nuking it from orbit" proved to have near-disastrous fallout, I'm struggling with my allergies the hard way: OTC analgesics, sinus rinses and stoicism.  Well, make that last "quiet whining."  And lots of what we are pleased to call "facial tissue," the good people at Kleenex® being understandably vexed at genericizing their name.

     So much fun.

The Man They Love To Hate Is Hating On What They Love?

     No, it's not the President, for once.

     Whole Foods CEO (and bright green more-or-less libertarian) John Mackey professes skepticism about the various recent non-meat "meat" products, pointing out they're highly-processed foods.  He's also of the opinion that you can retrain your palate to enjoy more traditionally-vegetarian (and far less processed) foods.

     He's right about the latter; when I was younger, the various sorts of vegetarians I encountered, from hippies to blue-eyed Buddhists, generally served up flavorful (if unfamiliar) foods that were what they were, without trying to pretend to be anything else.

     This world is full of good food, from raw fruits and vegetables both familiar and uncommon to tasty dishes you and I have never heard of.  While the various "Beyond Impossible" fake meats are said to be palatable copies of the meats they resemble, that's faint praise; as the comedian said of exotic game meats, "If it 'tastes just like chicken,' why not just eat chicken?"  Your palate deserves better.  If a burger that bleeds beet juice keeps you from trying delicious dhal, it's not doing you any favors.

And Just Like That

     ...I'm sick again.  Or something.  Allergies, I suppose.  Sinus is mildly back despite the OTC nostrum, which has side effects: I almost hit a car this morning.  Coming right towards me though an intersection, too, third in a well-spaced row while I waited to turn left, nose well out into the cross street, one car through, two, started to turn--

     Slammed my brakes when I realized I was about to turn right into car number three, which I had not noticed.

     My timing was off at four-ways; I saw pedestrians in time, but not as early as usual.  And I was a bit dizzy.

     Dizziness got worse at work, as did the scary kind of dozing off, where you wake up with your head moving towards the desk--

     An hour and a half after lunch, I realized it was getting worse by the minute and that if I didn't leave for home soon, I was going to be a menace to others and myself in traffic.

     Let's see-- if I don't take the allergy remedy, my sinus run and run and run, and I have headaches that aren't tamed by the usual remedies; if I do take the pills, I'm only barely present.

     It's time to do some research.  If one allergy medication isn't working, there are others.

I Have Been Successfully Marketed To

     They're selling tiny printers now.  I guess they have been around awhile, gadgets not much larger than a cellular phone that spit out photo-type prints 2" by 3" or a little larger.

     The price has come down a lot and so I have purchased one to try.  It's got to charge up and I need to load an app on my IOS or Android devices -- probably the IOS ones, since they've got room to add one more app while my old Samsung phone is loaded with stuff for work.

     "Marketed to" is not "sold;" I'll try it and see if I like it.  See what it might be useful for.

Roast Pork Hash

     Our grocery store has a nice deli counter.  They often have small pork roasts in their hot food case, which I'll build supper around on nights I am too tired or busy to cook.  I did so last Friday.

     Even a small pork roast is more than enough for two adults; I stashed the leftover roast in the freezer that night and moved  it to the fridge Saturday night.*

     By late Sunday morning, I was up, feeling much better and hungry, too.  There was a potato that wanted cooked, an onion in the fridge, and that nice big pork roast...  Say, couldn't I make hash with all that?

     I could.  I did.

     It cooked up nicely; I added a little this and that (rosemary, fennel seed, salt and pepper) and snipped in some pickled cherry peppers; add a fried egg on top and there it is:

      Roast pork hash! Lots of flavor; might've been even better with a few shishito peppers, which go well with pork, but even without, it made for a fine breakfast.  Served with a little pickled okra on the side, just because.

     I'll be making this stuff again.
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* My cold-or-whatever had become really bad by then.  I could barely breathe through my nose.  I figured Tam could carve herself a slice or two of pork roast for her Sunday dinner while I tried to get through the cold.  Early Sunday morning, well before sunrise, I realized the ailment didn't quite have full head-cold symptoms, took an OTC allergy pill, and hey, presto!  Within hours, I was cured!  It was the worst allergy attack I've ever had.

The Off-Beat Path

     I don't often recommend articles from The New Yorker; while the writing is of indisputably high quality, the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency drove their editorial staff into a frenzied zeal that had the man showing up multiple times in every issue, simultaneously evil mastermind and bumbling moron.  It got to be too much; it would have been even if they loved him because, well, the amount of Presidency I enjoy in my lit'ry reading is somewhere between a pinch and a dot at most.  POTUSes loom large in the news cycle and you can pick up news about 'em most anywhere.

     Conversely, really good writing, writing by people with a crazy love for the color, heft, texture, taste, scent and sound of words like a kid with a bag of licorice allsorts and an open account at an old-fashioned candy store, that's a thing you can hardly find; I've been known to unearth moldy old essays by Buckley and Vidal* just for the joy of reading words from men intoxicated by the language.

     The Trump-Era New Yorker serves up mainly absinthe.  Straight.†  But not always and not today.  Today, they've poured the good stuff, bottled in bond.

     There was a fellow named Stephen Cheng  who emigrated from Shanghai to the United States after World War Two, ending up in New York.  He was a classical Chinese singer, who studied at Juilliard, worked on Broadway, and by the 1960s was touring widely, with occasional television appearances, performing both pop and traditional Chinese music.  He passed away in 2012.  A working musician who moved to teaching later in life, he raised a family and you can find a few of his recordings of Chinese folk music on YouTube.

     You can also find this: "Always Together:"

     It's a minor gem of Rocksteady (a Reggae precursor), recorded in the late 1960s, copies passed from hand to hand since then and reissued as recently as 2010.  It was a minor mystery to Reggae scholars: Stephen Chen was only in Jamaica once, recorded only the one song, and didn't leave much of a trail there.

     He apparently never mentioned the recording to his family, either; in 2017 his son Pascal was looking up his father's recordings on YouTube and the site's algorithms recommended "Always Together;" as he writes, "...until recently, [I] had no idea that he had recorded this song. I accidentally discovered it on YouTube. I am pretty sure that he was not aware of its popularity as a rocksteady classic."

     As we move through life, we leave ripples.  We don't always know what shores they will reach.
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* Which man, do you suppose, wrote, "Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could," and which of them wrote, "Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so."  Among their better shared attributes was their deep loathing for one another.  One doesn't often see feuds of that quality and longevity.

† I'm not going to explain this.

Oh, Yay, Sinus

     Woke up early, got ready for the gun show, felt awful, didn't go.  I was -- and remain -- dizzy, congestion-haunted and out of it.  Other than a brief trip for a late lunch with Tam and the Data Viking, I haven't been out of the house all day,

Now It Can Be Told

     I've been on the 3:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. shift all this week, which I find difficult.  Sleep is elusive, concentration fragmentary, digestion uncertain.

     This was compounded by Tam being out of town for the first couple of days of the week.

     I've been working on a short story in the I Work On A Starship universe for just about forever and in the last month, words have been coming slowly, if at all.  For some reason, I'd convinced myself that August would end on a Sunday and the last-Sunday-of-the-month writer's group I'm a member of would be meeting on the 31st.

     The 31st is a Saturday.  As it turns out -- and perhaps this is a surprise to you as much as it was to me -- there is no August 32nd.  Writer's group is this coming Sunday!

     There is a gun show this weekend.  The Data Viking will be visiting Saturday and we're darned well going to attend.

     After managing to get within shouting distance of 2000 additional words on my story and e-mailing it off to the group, I have four of their stories to analyze and comment on before Sunday afternoon -- and no phoning it in kind of job, either.  I spent too many years unable to find anyone at all to read my stuff and offer useful feedback to not do my best to return as good as I'm getting.

     So it looks like I'm going to be a little busy.

     I did finally manage to get seven really solid hours sleep last night and my day starts with a kind of fly-the-chair tech work that is "bursty," short interludes of frantic busyness at not-quite random times among a lot sitting and waiting.  Might at least manage some pre-reading.

    

Going Back To Electoral College

     Some of the people I encounter online, including a few friends, have taken a particular dislike to the Electoral College.  They think it's unfair.

     Most of them were not at all pleased by the outcome of the most recent Presidential elections, and after all, didn't their candidate rack up the most popular votes?  Why didn't she win, they ask, and isn't this a democracy?  The most recent complainant keeps calling the Electoral College "feudalism" and is sure other countries do this in a better way.

     These notions presuppose a number of things.  First and foremost, that the individual states, as distinct political entities, shouldn't have any voice in the election of the Chief Executive of their Federal union.  This idea strikes me as inimical to the very idea of federalism and the organization of Legislative branch into two houses, one of population-proportional representation and the other with equal representation by each state, clearly shows the intent of the Framers.

     As for "feudalism," it requires upward loyalty -- knights swear fealty to lords, lords swear fealty to a King; that's not how any part of the Electoral College works.

     Do other countries have a better method?  The United Kingdom is one of the oldest democracies around -- and the Crown appoints the Prime Minister from seatholders in the party holding a majority in (usually) the House of Commons, typically the Party leader; no one votes for him or her to hold the office.  Canada and Australia use a similar method, with their respective Governors General acting for the Monarch.  The roots of this system do, in fact, lie in feudalism, though about all that's left of that are the titles and ceremonies.

     What about the French?  Surely they've got a handle on it!  It starts promisingly enough for critics of the Electoral Collage: the President of France is popularly elected every five years and serves as Head of State, with control over foreign policy and defense.  But there's a catch: the French President is obliged to appoint a Prime Minister to actually run the government -- and the Prime Minister is chosen from members of Parliament in the party holding a majority, usually the party leader.  Once again, citizens don't get to directly pick the PM.  (This occasionally results in a President having to choose a PM from a party in opposition to his own, which is probably a maturing experience for everyone involved.)

     The method used in the United States is closely coupled to the majority vote, albeit weighted to resemble the distribution of power in Congress.  The Electoral College is supposed to be a safeguard against demagogues and mass enthusiasms; in fact, recent court rules have clarified that electors may, in fact, be "faithless:" they are not obliged to follow their state's popular vote when casting their ballot.  On closer examination, you'd think the people who didn't like the outcome of the most recent Presidential contest would be all in favor of that.

Starship Engineering

     As a practical matter, the spacetime "bubble" used for faster-than-light travel has seventeen dimensions, one less than the eighteen of normal space. When you ask an FTL navigator why this is, he or she will usually reply, "So the seams line up when you fold it." As near as I can tell, they're serious.