It’s an NPR sort of Friday. Ms. S. tells me that her morning commute is often defined by what’s on NPR; I, on the other hand, get it mainly through their website. Years ago in Madison I used that 3-CD-changer, AM/FM radio, 2-cassette-deck bookshelf system, which eventually found its way to the Madison hostel and never back to me, to listen to local commercial radio in the morning, and then to either of the public radio stations.
It’s 2012 … perhaps I should do the whole “internet radio” thing. Quotes necessary.
Cover Me in Chocolate
Last night I craved a dessert; I just did not know what.
I did not want to spend time making ice cream or faux cream (soy-, coconut-, or almond-milk based), I did not want to bake (so cookies, brownies, cake, and custard were out), and I did not want to open cans of coconut milk or pumpkin, both of which would have been “quick,” but I’m saving those pantry items for later.
Then I thought … why not just coat some tasty snacks in chocolate?
Chocolate chips and good baking chocolate are both options here; you simply melt them and use them for dipping. Chocolate chips, which more often than not contain little to any cocoa butter, are good for melting, if for little else. But I was out of chocolate chips and I did not want to waste my baking chocolate for this purpose.
Cocoa powder to the rescue. While not the perfect ratio, melting together one part each, by volume, of butter, sugar, and cocoa powder, along with a splash of vanilla extract and sufficient “milk” (in this case, 45-calorie-per-cup almond milk, about a tablespoon), constantly whisked until smooth, produces something thicker than a chocolate “sauce” and thinner than a ganache.
I used two tablespoons of butter; as a result, I did not have a full pot, and so this was no chocolate “fondue” setup. Dipping was not much of an option. But rolling frozen berries—strawberries and blueberries—along with almonds and walnuts (about 3 ounces, one ounce, and a quarter ounce each of the last two) used up about 3/4 of the chocolate coating (I cleaned the pot of the rest … mmm … spatula!). Then I just plopped the items on wax paper, put that on a cookie sheet, and placed that in the freezer. 30 minutes was enough to solidify the chocolate enough to hold the frozen items, but when I finished them off this morning the chocolate was nicely solid. Strawberries can be too frozen to eat comfortably, but the blueberries and nuts are perfect out of the freezer.
Had I cared to be “gourmet” or “proper” I would have used a more splendid and precise technique, but for a quick and dirty snack this did the trick.
See also:
Friday Health Links
“For Best Toilet Health: Squat Or Sit?“
It is listed under “Shots,” the NPR Health Blog, so it’s not a real “news” article (why do I find myself using so many quotes, air and scare and otherwise?), so I can forgive the lack of depth to the coverage. There are, however, links, such as material on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s work with pseudo-poop (faux feces, counterfeit crap …).
To summarize: some think that the more or less right-angle-sitting posture produced by modern toilets is correlated with colo-rectal problems, and they hypothesize that squatting (meaning a deeper, sharper angle, butt closer to one’s ankles) is both more “natural” (obvious a problematic term) and potentially helpful. Also mentioned are a few somewhat engineered solutions, e.g. the “Squatty Potty” product, the use of a stack of phone books for the feet, etc.
An obvious avenue not followed is that of so-called “Turkish toilets” aka the “squat toilet,” common is Turkey, of course, but found throughout various parts of Europe. I, for example, encountered them in Paris and in Macedonia. This style of squat toilet is not so much an alternative to those proposed in the NPR article—that is, in style, it is, but in terms of function, it’s not—, but rather it represents an entire ready-made toilet use culture that would address the issues brought up in the NPR article. The result is that the NPR blog post is too narrowly focused to be of any use except insofar as it raises a question.
Some Grumble About Changes As School Lunches Get Leaner and Greener
The “story” (a blog post in NPR’s “The Salt”) is less analysis and more examples, which is interesting. Again, there is little history; but as it’s a blog post, as this is, I cannot complain (grumble, even).
But I find several things “annoying” about the school lunch reform discussion/debate. First, I think it is obvious that something has to be done. But just about every discussion I see is framed in terms of excluding the mean; a radical and often impractical alternative that cannot be implemented everywhere is set up as a potential or potentially failed “solution.”
Take the one described in the NPR blog: it’s somewhere around Boulder, Colorado and the “Renegade Lunch Lade” is set up as a former “white-tablecloth sort of semi-celebrity chef.” Her menus featured chicken pot pies, ribs, chicken quesadillas, etc. In terms of cost, preparation time, etc. it seems that “fancy” school food [1] is not entirely feasible and [2] going to be a lightning rod for those who see such reform as a waste of resources.
Consider one of the first blog comments:
Fact Check
Darn tootin’ I’m grumbling.
School lunches used to be a good thing – reasonably priced, the kids liked them, and it was convenient. Now we have to pack lunches every day because after the first week of school my bean-pole thin daughters said they weren’t getting enough edible food to make it through the day, even though the prices went up this year.
As ‘Fact Check’ seems to be a parent, this ‘used to be’ is probably the recent past, but note the criteria: reasonably priced, kids liked them, and convenient.
Relying on—and exploiting for fun and profit!—the taste and tastes of children is one of the things that got us into these problems in the first place: the popularity of junk food vending machines in schools, Pizza Hut and similar fast-non-food delivered and sold in schools, etc. Given the choice, a large number of kids—and adults—will go for (a) salty, (b) fatty, (c) sweet (see also: pizza! burgers!). Also realize that you cannot meet the taste desires of 100% of the population; some people are picky eaters, and of course others have food allergies and sensitivities. These, however, I find to be separate matters. Most young people do not enjoy bitter foods; a taste for bitter items (including but not limited to coffee and a variety of green leafy vegetables) develops usually, if at all, with age. Building an elementary school menu around bitter items is bound to fail, but that, again, is an extreme. Back to ‘Fact Check.’
Reasonably priced: I can agree with this. The school has a budget, which will be funded partially by local or government grants, etc., and partially by however much kids/parents pay. I ate school lunches throughout elementary school. I tried them for a few days in middle school but quickly abandoned them, and in high school I bought them only a couple times. In elementary school I only took packaged lunches during field trips; in middle and high school I took them most of the time; I only employed vending machines a couple times in middle school. In elementary school I was given four dollars every Monday; when the bus got to school I got in line at the back of the building, went inside, and bought my five lunch tickets for the week from the lunch ladies. By the fifth of sixth grade the price may have gone up to $5/week.
Convenience? School lunches are convenient, relative to packaged lunches, as long as getting tickets or similar is convenient, and getting one’s food during a lunch period is convenient. A third aspect would deal with whether the food is relatively convenient to eat: some finger food, not too messy/saucy overall, etc. If this is all met, it’s definitely more convenient than bringing food from home, which requires some preparation and, unless microwaves are provided at school, eliminates the possibility of hot meals. Cleanup, outsourced to school staff, is more convenient to diners with school lunches; bag lunches, however, can be eaten away from a cafeteria, but that’s more an issue for middle and high school.
What ‘Fact Check’ did not propose as a criterion for school lunches was nutrition; perhaps ‘Fact Check’ assumed this, bus since other criteria were listed explicitly, I take it that nutrition was not a high priority. I, in contrast, would maintain that providing nutritious meals is the main priority, and I would argue this through redundancy: a ‘nutritious meal’ should be redundant, since if it’s not nutritious, it should not count as a meal. A school lunch program should provide reasonably priced meals. Period. The ‘My Plate’ system, as of this decade, provides a decent albeit not perfect, heuristic for what constitutes a meal—I must admit that in a way I’ve become quite enamored of it, more so than I ever was with ‘food groups,’ ‘food pyramids,’ etc.—and I’m sorry (no, I’m not), but if you allow canned and frozen vegetables and fruit, it becomes almost trivial in and out the growing season to provide ‘My Plate’-oriented meals that supply fruit, vegetables, a grain, and a protein.
There are difficulties in scaling upward for hundreds of students vs. cooking at home for one through four, but somehow our lunch ladies managed it for a school of five to six hundred. Only the “proteins” were mostly-prepared before they were cooked on-site; the wiener-wraps (oh, such monstrosities now that I think about them) were highly processed; and the so-called burgers (both buns and meat bore little resemblance to what one could get at McDonald’s) had that frozen, mass-produced feel.
And now I’ve moved from ranting about an article—which I could read and analyze and comment upon—and thinking about my own past with school lunches to contemplating material I’m unsure about … the actual politics and economics of school lunches 2012. I can’t propose policy when I don’t know the situation. But I can wonder. I wonder about the entrance of vending machines and delivered foods in the mid to late 80s where I lived. I wonder about how much of this school lunch problem is caused or exacerbated by slashing budgets, culling lunch staff, and outsourcing food preparation and supply. And there’s always the matter of low-quality main ingredients when they’re supplied as surplus or subsidized (crap meat, bad dairy, prison-quality goods).
But I digress.
I grumble.
Reading
“This Week’s 5 Must-Read Stories from NPR Books“
I just like the loopiness of linking to that post, as I’m just referencing something that references something else. No content provided. Links to links. It’s just a hint of ontology. As for reading, I read #2 on that list a few days ago.
What I did not read—yet—was #4, about a new graphic novel about Abe Lincoln. So I link to an aggregating article linking to an article reviewing a graphic novel about a historical figure. Ah, layers of mediation.
But why I find this interesting is that it further brings into focus this weird 2012 fascination with all things Lincoln. We have Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, we have Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies, and we have this graphic novel. I’m sure there’s more. I wonder why. We don’t get the 150th-anniversary of his death until 2015; the Civil War began in 1861, and so we’re a year late for a 150-year “celebration” of that.
“Put Down Your E-Reader: This Book Is Better In Print“
There’s a story to listen to here; perhaps we have a kind of Romantic irony involved in this instance.
Anyway.
The story does not make any kind of unique or strong argument for putting down e-readers, per se. It deals mainly with a new illustrated edition of Homer’s Odyssey; the matter of illustration and of being aimed at children seems to serve as shorthand for “better as a real book.” There’s a line about the book being a kind of perfect technology on its own. There’s the matter of psychology and history, of how we relate to certain books from, say, our childhoods and how they hold a special place for us. As Kant would point out, these are all empirical, highly contingent matters/facts. Things could be otherwise; they are not necessarily so; and one would have a hard time arguing for a generalization, let alone a universal, based on them.
As a story about this version of The Odyssey and its relations to e-readers, I cannot fault the article, but beyond that I find so many avenues for exploration ignored.
Consider the first, something provided by the title itself, “This book is better in print.” Give me examples of such books and show me why. I can give you one right off the top of my head: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. The book relies on a faithful visual repdroduction of certain elements; the book and its representation are tightly-coupled. Ebook formats like EPUB cannot reproduce the print version faithfully; a more advanced but persnickety language like LaTeX could probably do it, outputting a PDF, but then you’re just one step away from just scanning the pages of the print copy. And you miss the ability to skim through footnotes and flip back and forth quickly or easily. The book must be rotated at times during the labyrinth. It works best in a color mode, which is no problem for modern tablet readers, I admit. Still, there is no official ebook version of either House or Danielewski’s next novel, Only Revolutions.
A slightly less challenging but still relevant example would be Steven Hall’s Raw Shark Texts, at least during a certain span of pages late in the book. Then there is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which is less problematic, but still the transition to an ebook format that retains the footnotes and ability to access them will necessarily alter the “reading experience.”
A counterpoint, and a good one but also one that supports my overall position, is that when you look at the newest kind of ebook—or perhaps iBook—formats (I’m looking at you, Apple) you see the multimedia integration and the like that adds to the book format and reading experience, rather than taking away from it. Apple’s iBooks Author is focused around 2011/2012, but to me it seems like a throwback to 1993 and multimedia CD-ROMS in the pre-high-speed-internet days. Back when new Packard Bells came with encyclopedias and the like on CDs. Virtual zoos and animal parks. And more.
Microsoft Bob.
On an iPad or similar much of what Only Revolutions or The Raw Shark Texts does can be replicated and perhaps enhanced. At some point one might argue that certain types of cut-up and mash-up novels and collages and the like were attempts in the linearity of text to do what one can do “natively” digitally: 2-D portrayals/projections of a 3-D world, one might say. They were “ahead of their time.”
And more metaphors and analogies.
Aside: perhaps even metaphors and analogies for what metaphors and analogies do or accomplish. But I digress.
But part of the current experience with House of Leaves is in [1] holding a thick book, [2] shifting one’s eyes to follow the ‘main narrative’ (insert comment about question begging regarding knowing—assuming—what the main narrative is in the first place!), [3] flipping through pages, not thumbing left to right to tapping a menu, and [4] rotating the book when necessary. Or looking at the paper and noticing how the print on one side compares with the blankness on the other. Even if one argues that House of Leave “goes beyond” the traditional book and prefigures, let’s say, the ebook, at the same time it is tied to its physicality, not so much the print page, already an abstraction, but to paper.
So bringing the iPad, iBooks Author, and multimedia ebooks into the equation only takes us back, actually, to questions raised by Lessing in his Laocoon, questions about medium and genre. A novel is not a book; a (print) book is a medium and a novel is a genre, or super-genre. An ebook, even as metaphorical expansion of the book, quickly becomes a different medium, and different media have different potentialities. Sculptures are naturally three-dimensional and static; paintings are naturally two-dimensional and static, stage plays are naturally temporal and three-dimensional in space. And so on. These “constraints” are not absolute bounds; they are, perhaps it is better to say, paths of least resistance. Although traditional sculpture is “static,” one thing that is fascinating about Rodin’s works, at least to me, is how dynamic they feel. Although we now take it for granted, there is something awe inspiring about how some paintings—flat—can play so vividly with illusions of depth, and in the case of anamorphic paintings the very strictures of the medium, the “form,” are fused to the “content” in such a way as to be both playful and thoughtful at once.
What the NPR article on this new edition of The Odyssey didn’t really take an easy opportunity to examine was that we should not take books, as a medium, as a given. In their defense of the print book against the ebook, albeit a tepid endeavor, they failed to note that once the print book vis-a-vis a non-print world was the novelty and aggressor, and works like The Odyssey experienced losses and gains as they became print rather than primarily oral objects. In recent years, if not decades, we have bemoaned our age of logocentrism and the loss of oral culture, but I think too often we focus on [1] these ‘losses’ and [2] the information gain of print culture to the exclusion of [3] the technological-formal possibilities print opened up.
Miscellany
One thing I like about those NPR blogs is that the article title in the page header is the same as the title as it appears on the page. This is an obvious, user-friendly sort of thing to do, but I’ve noticed that a lot of reputable sites fail in this, the NY Times among them.
Take the recent “Vegan Food is Mainstream in Southern California dining article from Sept. 24, 2012. The header uses the title I gave, and so it will appear in your browser window; but the article itself is entitled “Making Vegan a New Normal.”
This annoys me. That is all.
Aside: We Are The Introverts.
