perfidy

Have a hankering to know the level of freedom in your neck of the woods? Just look at this nifty web map thingy from Freedom House and divine the answer instantly.

It occurred to me and a coworker that it would be an amusing tshirt exercise to combine the slogan of the great state of New Hampshire with the languages of the bottom ranks of Freedom House's annual survey. Arabic accounts for a full third of the nations, though Chinese wins on numbers. Korean, of course, wins on pure mean. You could put a nice big American flag on the back.

I think I shall have to exercise my mad photoshop skills. Any readers willing to translate the phrase "Live Free or Die!" into Arabic, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, French, Burmese, Lao, Vietnamese, Uzbek and Turkman, please contact me.

Juxtaposed headlines from the Drudge Report:

PAT ROBERTSON: STROKE MAY BE GOD'S PUNISHMENT...

IRAN PRESIDENT HOPES FOR SHARON'S DEATH

I didn't have the heart to read either article. It is a cruel fate indeed that strikes down every peacemaker that Israel makes Prime Minister, while loathsome criminals survive for decades living off the fear, credulity and hatred they inculcate in their nations.

Of the President of Iran, I expected no more - for someone who has both denied and praised the holocaust, wishing for the death of a single Jew (however prominent) ranks almost as loving kindness.

But I dearly wish to travel to wherever Pat Robertson is lurking, and beat the ever-loving crap out of his sorry, putrid carcass. Either everything is God's punishment - everything - or else it is the ineffable work of a loving God who wishes nothing but our salvation through means that we will by no means comprehend fully. Robertson is either hopelessly banal or tragically wrong.

Or knowing him and his works, he has managed to be both.

I supposed it's not such a fine line between going out in grand epic style and bleeding to death because you comically screwed up your own suicide, but a Belmont, NH man achieved just that nonetheless.

From the Mancheste rUnion-Leader:

With common items such as concrete blocks, a saw blade, bare wires and gasoline, a despondent David Moore devised systems that would first kill him and then turn his home into a funeral pyre.

Neither worked as planned.

On Monday, Belmont police discovered Moore dead in his bedroom, some 20 feet away from a homemade guillotine he had built in his living room. He had gone as far as bolting tracks of metal piping to a ceiling beam to guide the blade, authorities said.

Flawless it was not.

Upon entering Moore’s home, police found dried blood throughout the living room. Moore’s body had a deep gash to the back of the neck, said New Hampshire State Police Sgt. Andrew Parsons, the commander of the state police bomb squad.

The badly wounded Moore had crawled or staggered from his guillotine to his bedroom to die, Parsons said.

Police also discovered hard-wired Molotov cocktails that had never detonated at the 10 Silkwood Ave. home.

Belmont police called in the bomb squad when they found eight to 10 plastic water bottles stuffed into holes punched into the living room wall. All held a couple ounces of gasoline. All were wired to two electrical timers and a power strip.

But the strip’s switch was in the off position.

All kidding aside, imagine for a moment not dying in a flash but instead groaning in agony as you drag yourself bleeding through your house, having managed to cut your own head halfway off. What a sad way to go.

Via J-walk. I had to go be alone for a few minutes to settle down after this one.

Most States fit so closely together that almost no space is wasted.

One of those American Voices bits, where they recycle the same six pictures giving opinions on different subjects. The topic: A planet-killer asteroid may hit the earth in 2036. What do you think?

The best response, well, possibly ever: "This sounds like something that would have to be co-managed by NASA and FEMA. God help us all."

You know who should totally run for President?

Oprah freaking Winfrey.

Think about it.

Speaking of hardened little cans of sad, faded powders languishing in the backs of spice cabinets, you know what's fun? I have a little collection of community cookbooks from various places I've lived and where I grew up, and they are a hoot. Entire books have been written about these tomes, charting the rise and fall of rise of canned mushroom soup, Cheez-whiz, Velveeta, pesto, and enough ground beef to kill an army. But what really gets me going is the spices.

Almost all these books contain a recipe much like this:

Chili Con Carne With Hamburger

2 lbs ground beef, browned and drained
1/2 a small onion, diced
1/2 a small bell pepper, diced (optional)
1 can kidney beans
1 can diced stewed tomatoes
1 tsp salt
pinch black pepper
1/4 tsp chili powder

Combine all ingredients in a pot and simmer for one hour. Serves 4-6.

Although I'm paraphrasing from memory, I'm not kidding. 1/4 teaspoon of chili powder - or as much as a whole teaspoon for the incurably bold - in a "chili" meant for six people. Let us take a moment to laugh at the rubeness of our past! Haw! Older cookbooks treat spices as practically nuclear, calling for a "pinch" of cayenne or a 1/2 teaspoon of curry powder in a giant pot of "Curry Surprise," and that never ceases to charm me.

Today, it's fats, with perfectly good recipes practically ruined by replacing fat - any fat! all fat!! - willy nilly with water. Water, not being a fat, is incapable of dissolving fat-soluble flavors, thereby making eating these recipes an exercise in self-abnegation rather than absorption. They may taste perfectly okay, but I guaran-damn-tee you that adding a nice half teaspoon of fat per serving (one half of one teaspoon!) it would taste a damn sight better.

Similarly, sugar is now evil, evil, evil. And while, yes, unrefined sugar in immoderate amounts such as may Americans eat is really very much not good for you, let's be real. Sugar is also food, and it tastes good. And if you're supposed to cut back, cut back! Why go halfway with such disappointing half-measures as those little blue and pink packets of lowered expectations they give you at restaurants? I prefer Diet Coke to the real thing because I don't really care for incredibly sweet things, but I'm not fooling myself into thinking that Diet Coke tastes like anything but a miracle of modern chemistry. On the same note, I recently had the misfortune to try cookies made with Splenda, a noncaloric sugar substitute made by swapping out one hydrocarbon on sucrose for three chlorine atoms, making it undigestible and noncaloric. Splenda behaves like sugar chemically in every way in recipes and on the tongue, except that it is perfectly indigestible. At least that's the claim. Well, let me tell you, Splenda might be made from sugar, it might behave like sugar, but no sugar I've ever had tasted faintly bitter and made the center of my tongue go numb. A cookie made with Splenda is like a handjob from a hot chick with hands of fine-grit sandpaper.

There is no content or structure to this rant except to lament once again that some folks just don't know what good food is.

End transmission.

Brad DeLong writes:

A Theory About Cinnamon and Recipes

It strikes me that most of the standard recipes come from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the relative price of cinnamon was much higher than it is today. Thus it seems likely that most such inherited recipes economize on cinnamon to what is now an undue degree.

Proposal: triple the cinnamon in everything I cook for the next three months.

I will report back.

DeLong is an economist, and his theory makes sense only as long as you accept his givens as true. In this case, DeLong takes it as a given that the strength and quality of cinnamon has remained constant as its price has fluctuated. In truth, cinammon of a hundred years ago is completely different from cinnamon today.

True cinnamon comes from Sri Lanka and environs, and has been a popular cooking spice since antiquity. It features heavily in the cuisines of the Middle East and India, and all the cookbooks I have from along the silk road contain at least a few classic recipes requiring the spice. Indeed, one of my favorite cookbooks, Lynn Rosetto Kaspar's The Splendid Table includes many stunning savory Medieval dishes from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, many of which feature stunning quantities of cinnamon as well at nutmeg, a cooking tradition adapted from Arab traditions. Cinnamon was (of course) a mark of wealth, and the amounts called for reveal these recipes as feast dishes for the upper class, not regular home cooking for paisanos.

But here's the rub. The cinnamon we use today is far more likely to be cassia, the bark of a tree that tastes similar to cinnamon but comes from Mexico, among other places. Two things to note: cassia's flavor is far less intense than true cinnamon's and lacks the other's warmth and depth; and cassia is far, far cheaper than the real thing. Hence, DeLong is mistaking what's at work here. In reality, he is seeing the transition from cinnamon to cassia as the dominant player in American cooking, with the concomitant drop in price and rise in volume required to flavor our food.

If you can find some true Vietnamese cinnamon (I order it special from a spice distributor), do the following: bake two batches of sugar cookies,one batch containing Vietnamese cinnamon and the other an equal amount of supermarket-brand "cinnamon." Unless your supermarket is really going for the gold, the "true" cinnamon cookies will have much more cinnamon flavor than the others. Also, as with other ground spices, you should only keep on hand what you plan to use in the next six months or so. Like coffee, ground spices oxidize over time and lose their flavor. If you, like I, have a parent or in-law with a cabinet full of curry powder and giant plastic containers of cinnamon purchased in the early 1980s, do them a favor the next time you're home and throw them out on the sly.

(By the way, the cinnamon sticks available in the USA are all cassia, and should not be ground for use as ground cinnamon. This is the only instance in which grinding your own spices fresh is not recommeneded. The bark of the cassia tree contains varying amounts of flavor depending on where it comes from, and by definintion cinnamon sticks are losers for two reasons: they are most likely to contain fewer essential oils overall; and the flavor will vary depending on which of the bark's layers are ground - with sticks you're getting a lot of just plain sawdust. Not that they don't have their uses, mind, but only as stirrers for your cider drink.)

For the interested, here is a wikipedia entry on cinnamon.

For the really interested, buy On Food And Cooking by Harold McGee, a fascinating and comprehensive one-volume encyclopedia of food, chemistry, and techniques. His discussion of the chemical compounds characteristic of various herbs and spices (e.g. cinammon's flavor deriving in part from cinnamaldehyde and also from small amounts of linalool (lily fragrance) and eugenol (clove), among others) makes creative mixing of flavors easy - just find spices containing complementary compounds and go to town! If you're a geek, that is.

Either way, good luck to Brad DeLong. Although his premises may be wrong, bumping up the "cinnamon" in his recipes will make them more as the writers intended. However, caution is warranted. Too much cinnamon can be unpalatably bitter and harsh tasting, and can have emetic properties besides. I know the former is true for cassia as well, and I really don't care to hear about experiments with the latter.

Pans can explode or separate when preheated, used on high heat or used for frying.