When the Music is Here...

Another serendipitous moment of shuffle play goodness last night as i was cooking dinner. I can't think of a song that is more evocative of young love--the good part and the bad.

Thanksgiving menu

Back from a delightful week at home with the fam and Josie and the Pussycats. Saw the OG cheer at a JV game, Worldwide and the BG in a performance of Drood at the local church, and enjoyed a roller skating birthday party for the BG, where I won a free soda in the Cha Cha slide competition with my slick moves on the hardwood. The dog is still terrified of me, and it is a great feeling to know that I can make her cower with just a stern look--several times, a stern word and a hard stare was successful in keeping her from jumping excitedly into Worldwide's lap.

The Thanksgiving menu came off nicely, and I managed to get everything plated more or less in accordance with the 4:00 time we had agreed upon. The BG was too ill too eat anything, so some of the vegetarian options were ignored, but they were prepared with love, and I trust that the large tranche of leftovers in the refrigerator is slowly depreciating.

I used the dry brine from dadcooksdinner, and I made the three stuffings and the cranberry sauce the day before. The OG made a delicious peanut butter chocolate pie with a crust of pounded wafer cookies to complement my traditional dessert. In retrospect, I wouldn't change a thing.

Thanksgiving Menu 2013

• Grilled Dry-brined turkey (cut up like a chicken)
• Bread stuffing (actually stale soft pretzels) with dried cranberries, celery and apples (Veg)
• Sausage and cornbread stuffing (Joy of Cooking)
• Vegetarian Sausage and Cornbread Stuffing (using Morningstar maple patties)
• Green Beans
• Mashed potatoes
• Drip pan turkey gravy with bacon fat
• vegetarian gravy (flour, butter, vegetable stock)
• Tossed green salad with dried cranberries and toasted pecans
• Garlic knots (using store bought pizza dough)
• Cranberry Sauce
• Pumpkin Pie
• Peanut butter chocolate pie
• Chocolate Milk shakes

I also made a couple of pies with the leftovers--filling deep dish pie crusts with turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and gravy, topped with mashed potatoes. They are in some ways better than the sum of their parts.

November Books

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters

Rose George

Acclaimed as “extraordinary” (The New York Times) and “a classic” (Los Angeles Times), The Big Necessity is on its way to removing the taboo on bodily waste—something common to all and as natural as breathing. We prefer not to talk about it, but we should—even those of us who take care of our business in pristine, sanitary conditions. Disease spread by waste kills more people worldwide every year than any other single cause of death. Even in America, nearly two million people have no access to an indoor toilet. Yet the subject remains unmentionable.

Moving from the underground sewers of Paris, London, and New York (an infrastructure disaster waiting to happen) to an Indian slum where ten toilets are shared by 60,000 people, The Big Necessity breaks the silence, revealing everything that matters about how people do—and don’t—deal with their own waste. With razor-sharp wit and crusading urgency, mixing levity with gravity, Rose George has turned the subject we like to avoid into a cause with the most serious of consequences.

Note; Enjoyable look at the cultural and scientific aspects of the production and disposal of human waste. Interesting throughout.

Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

David Foster Wallace

Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters.

Note; Fresh and beautiful writing about random topics in everyday life. A pleasure to read.

Fragments

Heraclitus

In the sixth century b.c.-twenty-five hundred years before Einstein-Heraclitus of Ephesus declared that energy is the essence of matter, that everything becomes energy in flux, in relativity. His great book, On Nature, the world's first coherent philosophical treatise and touchstone for Plato, Aristotle, and Marcus Aurelius, has long been lost to history-but its surviving fragments have for thousands of years tantalized our greatest thinkers, from Montaigne to Nietzsche, Heidegger to Jung. Now, acclaimed poet Brooks Haxton presents a powerful free-verse translation of all 130 surviving fragments of the teachings of Heraclitus, with the ancient Greek originals beautifully reproduced en face.

Note; Really short. Deep though. Like life.

Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York

Luc Sante

From opium dens to the Bowery's suicide saloons, this lively, learned work of outlaw urban history ushers readers through the dark heart of New York City in the years between 1840 and 1919. "A systematic, well-researched historical account of . . . corruption, vice, and miscellaneous mayhem . . . well-crafted and tightly written. 

Note: Fascinating account of New York in the 19th Century. Unbelievably chaotic, corrupt and violent.

Sleights of Mind: What the neuroscience of magic reveals about our brains

Susana Martinez-Conde, Stephen L. Macknik, Sandra Blakeslee, 

What can magic tell us about ourselves and our daily lives? If you subtly change the subject during an uncomfortable conversation, did you know you're using attentional 'misdirection', a core technique of magic? And if you've ever bought an expensive item you'd sworn never to buy, you were probably unaware that the salesperson was, like an accomplished magician, a master at creating the 'illusion of choice'. Leading neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde meet with magicians from all over the world to explain how the magician's art sheds light on consciousness, memory, attention, and belief. As the founders of the new discipline of NeuroMagic, they combine cutting-edge scientific research with startling insights into the tricks of the magic trade. By understanding how magic manipulates the processes in our brains, we can better understand how we work - in fields from law and education to marketing, health and psychology - for good and for ill.

Note: We are easily duped; and hard-wired for it, too.

Dear Life

Alice Munro

Alice Munro captures the essence of life in her brilliant new collection of stories. Moments of change, chance encounters, the twist of fate that leads a person to a new way of thinking or being: the stories in Dear Life build to form a radiant, indelible portrait of just how dangerous and strange ordinary life can be.

Note: Deceptively simple; always surprising.

Vracar

Vracar is the name of my neighborhood in the WC. I haven't thought much about it, except that I like it--the environs, that is. That's why, although I'm thinking about moving into a new apartment--that's right, it looks like my time here might be extended a little--I want to stay here. The office is close; I can walk downtown, and the green market is just around the corner.

Yesterday, our efficient, overqualified receptionist sent me some listings to check out. When I ran them through Google translate (which I have found incredibly useful BTW, but that's another story), I noticed that the location was listed as "Sorcerer."

I asked about that, and was informed that it was more or less accurate, although one of my more erudite colleagues suggested that "medicine man" was more accurate. Here is Wikipedia:

Name Vračar (derived from Serbian word vrač meaning the 'medicine man', 'healer') was mentioned for the first time in 1495 in Turkish documents. In 1560 it is mentioned as the Christian village outside the fortress of Kalemegdan with 17 houses. It is believed this village is the place where in 1595 the Turkish grand vizier Sinan Pasha burned at the stake the remains of Saint Sava, a major Serbian saint, to pacify and punish a rebellious population.

Where else would a Wizards fan live?

Fueled by Randomness

When I'm making dinner, I like to listen to my music on shuffle--I know that I'll like what I hear, and I also know that I'm likely to hear something that I have completely forgotten about. Sometimes those songs are powerful reminders of times and places gone by--equally indelible and forgotten. Leonard Cohen said it much better: "I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel. I don't think of you that often."

The wonderful logic of randomness means that sometimes patterns emerge--a series of songs that doesn't seem possible by chance, but of course, is.

Last night was all about the OG. We've had a long history with music. I introduced her to Stax, Motown and Hip Hop, and now she is my connection to the pop music of today. I used to sing loudly along with Nelly to obscure the profanity, and now she does the same with Kanye.

Last night, over the course of about an hour, five songs came up, four of which have a direct connection to the OG; the other, possibly the best song ever written about a newborn.

The first was "Hello Anastasia" a reimagined version of the rap at the beginning of Len's Cryptik Souls Crew that I wrote about changing diapers in 1999.

The second was an a cappella version of "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" that the OG recorded in 2005.

Next was "Marie's Wedding." Not the Wiggles version, which the OG loved to watch over and over in 2003, but the Chieftains.

And finally, Bettye Lavette's "Before the Money Came," the high point of my best concert experience ever, in January 2011, where the OG and I sat in the front row of the ArtsCenter in Carrboro with homemade signs, and the OG spoke directly with the singer, who capped her encore performance of the song with a rousing "Anna, the money finally came!" as she exited the stage, holding our sign high above her head.

As I was eating dinner, I decided to create a post about this tomorrow, and I jotted down all of the songs I could think of that have a special place in our relationship; songs we listened to on long trips; on the drive to the Waldorf School in Olympia; with the Ipod jacked for two sets of headphones on the way to Kimo; everywhere. I figured I had better write them down lest they not fade away.

Clash: Pressure Drop; Police on My Back
Juliana Hatfield: Spin the Bottle
Nelly: Hot in Herre
Lloyd Cole: My Alibi
Kurtis Blow: Rappin Basketball
Johnny Clegg; Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World
Prince: 1999
Peggy Lee: Hallelujah, I Love Him So
Barenaked Ladies: Testing 1,2,3
They Might be Giants: Put Your Hand Inside the Puppethead; Number Three
Lynyrd Skynyrd: Sweet Home Alabama
Dobie Gray: Drift Away
Men Without Hats: Safety Dance
Fountains of Wayne: Peace and Love

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few, but when I look at the list, every song is rooted somewhere in place and time. That's precious. Lucky for you child, you look like your mama.

System Failure

I predicted, like many did, that there would be a problem with the implementation of the health care exchanges. One of the main reasons that IT projects fail in government is a top down approach to planning and design that is both suboptimal and incredibly risky. There is just too much unpredictability in the system to think that you can figure out what works on paper and then make it a reality.

My boy Arnold Kling, who saw this coming long before I did, makes this point in a very concise and insightful way:

the deeper answer is that when we look at Kayak and Amazon, we are seeing the survivors that emerged from an intense tournament. In this tournament, thousands of competing firms fell by the wayside. Competitors tried many different business models, web site designs, business cultures, and so on.

Healthcare.gov did not emerge from this sort of competition. It came about because Congress passed a law.

Central to my approach to economics, and that of other economists who are variously called Austrians or market-oriented economists or Smith-Hayek economists or what have you, is the respect that we have for the evolutionary process by which markets produce innovation and excellence. My sense is that what divides us from pundits like Brooks and Shields, and even from most economists, is the credit that we assign to market evolution rather than elite expertise as a process for solving problems.

I have seen similar mistakes throughout my career in government, and nobody ever seems to learn. Yes they passed a law, but they didn't have to implement it with central planning and disinterested consultants who get paid whatever the outcome. Maybe some of the states we'll step up to show the way forward, but the system is not in a good place right now, and this may be irreparable.

Haut Cuisine

I have written before about Kalemegdan, the fortress at the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers, sort of the Battery Park of Belgrade. What I didn't tell you is that there is also a nice looking restaurant up there, and although Tyler Cowen says you shouldn't eat in a restaurant that trades on its location, I think he tends to underestimate the value of some of those externalities (he says for example, that you should avoid places where people are having fun, since clearly they are not there for the food.).

It's about an hour walk from my apartment, including the length of the Knez Mihailova, a pedestrian zone filled with cafes and shops and cafes, with a few charming spots to sit and have a coffee and a cigarette.

Yesterday was, I suspect, the last day of fall, sunny and 50, and I left the house around 1, thinking that I would get there before later in the afternoon, when the restaurant might be busy (since, as everyone knows,  that is the proper time for lunch).

I got there about 2, and, indeed the restaurant was not crowded, although there were a few tables. The hostess seated me in the conservatory with a nice view (too cold for the terrace), and the waiter brought me an English menu.

One of the reasons that I had decided to do this is that the restaurant is running an Orient Express promotion, featuring the cuisine of a different country on the famed Paris to Istanbul journey each week. This wee's stop was France, and as good as duck a l'orange sounded, I just wasn't feeling it today. I was in the mood for comfort food, and, from the main menu, a blend of European and Serbian gourmet selections, I chose some ajvar to start, followed by an appetizer of red wine risotto with duck breast and an entree of local sausage with baked beans and roasted potatoes. I had a tiny glass of apricot brandy with my salad (as is customary) and one of red wine with my meal.

I paid the check ($32) and noticed that the restaurant was now full, including an enormous wedding party. I'd definitely recommend it as a destination, but I'm not so serious about food that the experience wouldn't have been improved by some pleasant conversation. Definitely worth a visit.