Inside of the Seattle Public Library
Raindrop Porn
Everybody should have one shot of raindrops on a window
Food Labs Corrupt
FDA has been caught with its head in the proverbial sand again, sort of a don’t ask, don’t tell policy for food safety. Venue shopping, in other words.
A congressional committee is investigating whether some private U.S. laboratories were instructed to withhold samples of tainted food so that importers could get their goods into the United States.
In a May 1 letter to 10 labs, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce suggests they may have been encouraged by importing companies to discard test results that had failed Food and Drug Administration standards.
“We’re gathering information from both the FDA and private industry about the labs almost being complicit in helping importers game the system,” said Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee that is investigating the labs and food companies. “Someone told us you pay for the result you want to get from the labs.”
The committee’s letter reiterates Stupak’s suspicion that testing on some samples was conducted repeatedly until the food passed.
In other instances, the letter says, importers whose food failed tests at one laboratory would hire a different lab to continue testing until they got a positive result. “This repeated testing is done without alerting FDA that potentially dangerous food has been imported into this country — a practice which we find deplorable,” the letter states.
The committee asked 50 multinational food companies for a wide range of recall- and food-import records dating to 2000. A May 8 letter from the committee to the companies asks about instances when food was found to be contaminated with chemicals or bacteria such as E. coli, salmonella or listeria. “We wish to assess the extent of microbiological and/or chemical contamination occurring during the processing of food and the extent to which controls have failed to prevent or eliminate contamination in food,” the committee wrote.
Three Chicago-area corporations— Kraft Foods Inc., Sara Lee Corp. and the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co.—are included in the second request.
[From Suspicions deepen on food labs — — chicagotribune.com]
Sounds like a pretty big loophole to me: too bad the FDA’s mandate is to protect the business interests of food manufacturers, and not consumers, or else the FDA would run its own laboratories, conducting its own tests. Privatization is usually not the best solution to address public health concerns.
Last autumn the FDA issued an alert on five types of Chinese seafood: eel, shrimp, catfish, basa and dace. The warning was recognition of the fast-growing Asian aquaculture industry and its frequent use of antibiotics banned in the United States.
To import those seafoods, companies affected by the alert must prove that their products don’t contain banned substances. Conducting tests to prove it is one of the jobs the private labs perform.
So far, just 2 of the 10 labs targeted by the House committee have complied with the records request, according to committee staffers. Amir Jalaeikhoo, president of one lab that did comply, Imperial Private Laboratories Inc. of Miami, said that his firm reports negative test results to the FDA. Imperial mostly tests for pesticides in produce imported from Central and South America, Jalaeikhoo said. “Sometimes we lose clients because our standard operating procedure is that basically if something is … in violation, we submit it,” he said. “Some importers don’t like that policy.”
The nation can’t afford to ensure the quality of its citizen’s food – there are wars in the desert to fund!
Hemingway’s Papa Doble
I’ve never been much of a fan of rum. Either the rum I’ve had has been of inferior quality, or perhaps I’ve never had the mixologist skills to make a quality daiquiri. I’m intrigued by this tale however:
Lillian Ross made her career with a New Yorker profile of Ernest Hemingway that suggested his thirst was prodigious. And she made John O’Hara mad: “The most recent, and most disgusting, example of the intrusions into Hemingway’s private life was made by a publication that reported on Hemingway’s drinking habits, somewhat in the manner of a gleeful parole officer,” complained the man who had all but invented the New Yorker-style short story. “But for Eustace Tilley to raise an eyeglass over anybody’s drinking is one for the go-climb-a-lamppost department.”
Truth be told, no one did more to play up the heroic magnitude of Hemingway’s drinking than Hemingway himself. Whenever someone made the pilgrimage to Havana to be introduced to the novelist, Hemingway would meet him at La Florida bar, affectionately known as the “Floridita.” And there, with much bravado, Hemingway would boast of the sheer quantity of alcohol he could consume in the form of Papa Dobles — the double frozen Daiquiris made to his particular specifications.
According to Eric Felten, the Papa Doble recipe was mistranslated for years to use lemon instead of lime:
Cocktail scholar Philip Greene (a government intellectual-property lawyer in Washington) was able to track down the source of the mistake: a recipe booklet the Floridita published in 1937 as a promotional giveaway. Like a volume in the Loeb Classical Library, the Floridita pamphlet presented its text in the original language on the left with a translation on the right. But the copy editing wasn’t all it could be. For starters, the Papa Doble is listed as the ” ‘E. Henmiway’ Special.” The English recipe specifies the “juice of ½ lemon.” But the Spanish original next to it specifies “Jugo ½ limón verde” — which isn’t lemon at all, but lime.
It’s an error that has been repeated for decades. Nearly 10 years ago, Michael Palin of Monty Python fame filmed a television special chasing down Hemingway’s adventures, and at one point he sat himself down at the Floridita bar to work his way through a succession of Papa Dobles. Mr. Palin’s description of the recipe is “basically rum, lemon and sugar over crushed ice, with a Maraschino cherry.” Unfortunately, not only did Mr. Palin repeat the lemon error — he compounded it with a raft of his own errata.
Parenthetic note: I’ll have to look for the Michael Palin documentary, I’ve seen several of those, and they are well done, and a lot of fun. Final note, perhaps the proportions are slightly different – more lime, and more grapefruit:
After meeting Hemingway over Daiquiris in 1948, A.E. Hotchner went on to drink innumerable Papa Dobles at the Floridita with the great man himself, and he paid attention to what Constante was doing. “A Papa Doble was compounded of two and a half jiggers of Bacardi White Label Rum, the juice of two limes and half a grapefruit and six drops of maraschino,” Mr. Hotchner writes. That’s four times the lime juice of the 1937 recipe, and far more than the scant teaspoon of grapefruit juice originally called for. I don’t know which recipe is the truest, but I like the results when you split the difference, combining the two ounces of rum specified by the original recipe with a little bit of extra citrus. The texture is also important. Mr. Hotchner recounted that the Daiquiri ingredients were “placed in an electric mixer over shaved ice, whirled vigorously and served foaming in large goblets.” Hemingway himself described a properly beaten Daiquiri as looking “like the sea where the wave falls away from the bow of a ship when she is doing thirty knots.”
Sounds like a good experiment for Memorial Day (hopefully much better than this one, yikes)
—
here’s my attempt: though didn’t have maraschino. Delicious actually.
[click to embiggen]
Some Jazz Albums
Lists are really the bane of a reviewers existence. Not only can you spend your whole day compiling lists of best so and so, and then defending why Artist X should be on the list but not Artist Y, but then some other reviewer drops a slightly different list of greatest Jazz albums, for instance. A morass of conflicting opinions and options. David Remnick of the New Yorker contributes his top 100 Jazz albums which would be a pretty excellent place to start a music library with.
While finishing “Bird-Watcher,” a Profile of the jazz broadcaster and expert Phil Schaap, I thought it might be useful to compile a list of a hundred essential jazz albums, more as a guide for the uninitiated than as a source of quarrelling for the collector. First, I asked Schaap to assemble the list, but, after a couple of false starts, he balked. Such attempts, he said, have been going on for a long time, but “who remembers the lists and do they really succeed in driving people to the source?” Add to that, he said, “the dilemma of the current situation,” in which music is often bought and downloaded from dubious sources. Schaap bemoaned the loss of authoritative discographies and the “troubles” of the digital age, particularly the loss of informative aids like liner notes and booklets. In the end, he provided a few basic titles from Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Miles Davis, and other classics and admitted to a “pyrrhic victory.”
What follows is a list compiled with the help of my New Yorker colleague Richard Brody. These hundred titles are meant to provide a broad sampling of jazz classics and wonders across the music’s century-long history. Early New Orleans jazz, swing, bebop, cool jazz, modal jazz, hard bop, free jazz, third stream, and fusion are all represented, though not equally. We have tried not to overdo it with expensive boxed sets and obscure imports; sometimes it couldn’t be helped. We have also tried to strike a balance between healthy samplings of the innovative giants (Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Davis, Coltrane, etc.) and the greater range of talents and performances.
[From Online Only: 100 Essential Jazz Albums: Online Only: The New Yorker]
I won’t bother with all one hundred, but here a few of my favorites on this list
“The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings” (Louis Armstrong)
“The Essential Bessie Smith” (Bessie Smith)
“Money Jungle” (Duke Ellington, Charlie Mingus, Max Roach)
“The Classic Early Recordings in Chronological Order” (Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelli)
“Handful of Keys” (Fats Waller)
“Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker on Verve” (Charlie Parker)
“The Complete RCA Victor Recordings: 1947-1949” (Dizzy Gillespie)
"A Love Supreme" (John Coltrane)
"Mingus Ah Um" (Charles Mingus)
"Saxophone Colossus" (Sonny Rollins)
"The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings" (John Coltrane)
Chess Meisters
Chess Meisters, originally uploaded by swanksalot.
I didn’t see who was winning
Nine Letters
Nine Letters, originally uploaded by swanksalot.
Butterfly, Lower Yurtistan (aka Land of Many Names, Austin)
John McCain’s Arab-American problem
Something I never even thought about – Arab-Americans as a demographic group. 3,500,000 isn’t a tiny number, as these things go. Hope McCain’s lack of courage in the Ali Jawad matter costs him a few swing states, or more.
Not long ago, the John McCain campaign dropped a prominent Arab-American businessman from its Michigan state finance committee because of allegations that the man was an “agent” of Hezbollah. The charges, made by a right-wing blogger, were unsubstantiated, but fears of being associated with Arab terror caused Republican knees to jerk, and cost Ali Jawad his position. All politics, even national politics, is local, and Jawad’s abrupt dismissal may cost McCain many votes among Southeastern Michigan’s large Arab-American community. But more important, Arab-Americans across the country are looking for changes in domestic and international policy that McCain seems unwilling to pledge — and they are concentrated in swing states that he will need to win this fall. Does John McCain have a problem with Arab-American voters?
Recent polls show a tight race between either Democrat and McCain in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio, all states where Arab-Americans account for an appreciable percentage of the vote. Such polls have limited utility with November so many months away, but that it will be a close election in those key states seems clear. In a tight election, the votes of a well-placed minority — Arab-American votes — can be crucial.
Arab-Americans are a highly diverse group of up to 3.5 million persons, according to Arab American Institute figures. About three-quarters of them are Christian and a quarter Muslim. Eighty percent are U.S. citizens. Many are from families that have been in the U.S. for decades or even a century. They come from all over the Arab world, from Morocco to Egypt and Iraq to Yemen, but the traditional core of the community is Lebanese and Palestinian.
The Hangover Artist
“Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis” (Kingsley Amis)
Much more fun than being a hunger artist if you ask me.
Kingsley Amis was a hangover artist. Had he written nothing more than his description of Jim Dixon regaining consciousness after a bender, his place in literature would be secure. “He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning,” Amis writes in “Lucky Jim,” his first (and best) novel. Dixon’s “mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”
Feeling bad isn’t such a bad thing, from Amis’s point of view. With its “vast, vague, awful, shimmering metaphysical superstructure” of guilt and shame, the hangover provides a “unique route to self-knowledge and self-realization.” In his book “On Drink,” Amis recommends a raft of remedies for the Physical Hangover and then gets on to the Metaphysical Hangover, a combination of “anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future” that may or may not be the result of alcoholic overindulgence. Dealing with the Metaphysical part of the equation entails reading Solzhenitsyn, which “will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have,” and listening to Miles Davis, which “will suggest to you that, however gloomy life may be, it cannot possibly be as gloomy as Davis makes it out to be.”
“On Drink” is one of three slender books Amis cobbled together from his newspaper columns on the subject in the ’70s and ’80s, the others being “Everyday Drinking” and “How’s Your Glass?” (the British equivalent of the expression that serves as the title for this column). They are back in print at last, Bloomsbury having gathered them into one delightful volume under the title “Everyday Drinking” that’s now hitting bookstore shelves. It is essential reading for any literate bibber.
{Truth Drug – click to embiggen}
There is an art to writing well about drink and drinking, and about other drugs too. Easy enough to write under the influence, ahem, but writing about the experience itself is more of a challenge.
Digg-enabled link for non-subscribers.
Oh, and my memory serves, Amis was for a time a mentor and close confederate to Christopher Hitchens. Don’t really have a point, just trying to see if my fingers still capable of translating thoughts to the page. There were some doubts.
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•Stenography in today’s corporate environment
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(not all courses available in all sessions)
a quickr pickr post
Seasonal Employees
We wrote about this a while ago, but the issue continues to be unresolved.
U.S. businesses that rely heavily on seasonal immigrant workers are grappling with a crippling labor shortage as summer nears. The reason: increased restrictions on H-2B visas, issued for nonagricultural seasonal workers.
The ski industry was the first to feel the impact of the shortage of seasonal workers. Now landscapers, hotels and restaurants are among those being hit hardest.
Anna Spalings, who along with her husband manages two Best Western Inns near Yellowstone National Park in Montana, usually hires more than a dozen housekeepers every summer under the H-2B program. This year, she wasn’t able to hire any workers under the program. “Summer is the only time we make money, and if we aren’t able to get all the rooms clean, we can’t check people into them,” she said.
The U.S. issues 66,000 H-2B visas a year, half for the fall and winter and half for the spring and summer. But in the past few years, Congress exempted from the cap foreign workers returning to the U.S. to do seasonal work. This year, efforts to extend the “returning-worker” exemption, which expired Sept. 30, got tangled up in a broader battle over immigration reform, and both sides say there’s little hope this year for congressional action. Meanwhile, the cap for summer visas was reached in January.
One solution (similar to what I blabbed about earlier) is to radically restructure the economic landscape in America, cut compensation of CEOs and instead pay hourly wage workers a much higher salary. Odds are slim, shall we say?
The concerns are overstated, some say. “I find it beyond belief that there’s any place in the country where you can’t find landscape laborers if you pay them a decent wage,” said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington.
Mr. Eisenbrey argues that the shortage of immigrant workers will force businesses to hire American workers — a good thing, considering the weakening labor market and high teenage unemployment.
But many employers say they can’t find Americans to do the work. In fact, employers must attest to that to be eligible for the H-2B program.
Every year, Jennifer Fraser, 34 years old, and her husband spend the summer traveling from fair to fair in California, selling barbecue, teriyaki and corn dogs from their concession stands. She says American workers are rarely interested. “This is a hard job,” she said, with long days and constant travel.
She and her husband usually hire about nine H-2B workers every summer. But this year, most of their previous employees can’t get visas, so the couple is scaling back on the number of food stands they’re operating.
Employers who do manage to fill entry-level positions, with American teenagers, for instance, are often unhappy with having to treat children of privilege with respect and decency, preferring the old ways of treating employees like immigrants. Or something.
Still, most of the jobs involve low-skilled work in landscaping, forestry and housekeeping. Dede Gotthelf, who owns and manages the Southampton Inn and OSO restaurant on Long Island, says she usually uses the H-2B program to double her work force to 80 over the summer. This year, she has had to look elsewhere for workers to fill positions.
“We reached out right away to American college students,” she said. Her daughter, who will start college in the fall, and her daughter’s friends will help replace the workers from Ireland and Croatia that can’t get visas this year. She says the arrangement isn’t ideal: College students usually aren’t available for the entire April-October season, and their work ethic sometimes isn’t as good as that of foreign workers. Plus, some have “an arrogance and independence” that may not be good for business, she added.
First post
Testing WordPress. Seems easier to configure than moveable type, but that’s probably only because I’m drunk.
Hotel Cedar
“All rooms come with shower or tub” Whoo hoo!
a quickr pickr post
Explosion of reds and yellows
some flower, somewhere (probably Lilacia Park, Lombard)
Turkish Russian Baths
Chuck Berry is Cool
“Johnny B. Goode: His Complete ’50s Chess Recordings” (Chuck Berry)
Can’t go wrong picking up some Chuck Berry, iffen you don’t already have some. The blueprint of a thousand songs is chorded on these tracks, and even fifty years later, they still sound good.
Chuck Berry didn’t invent rock and roll, but he may very well have invented rock’n’roll. His songs fueled and inspired the likes of Buddy Holly, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Who, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, and just about anybody in his wake who picked up an electric guitar. In the invaluable rock doc Hail! Hail! Rock’n’Roll, we watch in awe has Berry puts Keith Richards in his place with just a single angry glare, and watch in double-awe as Richards takes it. After all, the Stones guitarist, like countless other musicians of his generation, knows he owes virtually everything to Berry, and has admitted as much, so he gives deference where deference is due.
Berry’s as worthy of hagiography as any rock legend, but he’s not yet ready for a eulogy. In fact, Berry’s 50-plus year career has been marked by one constant– forward motion. Indeed, Berry’s far too stubborn a man to ever give inertia the chance to slow him down, and he still spends a considerable amount of time on stage for an octogenarian. As far as the studio goes, however, Berry hasn’t released a new album since 1979, and even then his songwriting had been in steady decline since the early 60s. His last (and sole number one!) hit, a live version of the juvenile novelty “My Ding-a-Ling”, was released in 1972.
One perverse but still appropriate way to view Berry’s erratic (or non-existent) output over the past three or so decades is as further validation of the enduring strength of the first decade of his recording career, especially the productive, world-changing last five years of the 1950s collected on the self-explanatory Johnny B. Goode: His Complete ’50s Chess Recordings. It was on Chicago’s Chess imprint that Berry would change the blueprint of popular music, and it’s on this 4xCD collection that we can revisit the fruits of his labor.
[Click to read more of Chuck Berry: Johnny B. Goode: His Complete ’50s Chess Recordings: Pitchfork Record Review]
If you want a smaller sampler of Berry, check out the Great 28.
