Lift Up Your Hearts!

Chocolate Unwrapped:  The Surprising Health Benefits of America's Favorite Passion, by Rowan Jacobsen (Invisible Cities Press, Montpelier, Vermont, 2003)

Like chocolate, this delicious book goes down easily, and the facts about chocolate's health benefits are not hard to swallow.  At a mere 126 pages from introduction through references, it's a quick and easy read—I read most of it on the way to and from church today—and yet manages to cover the history and production of chocolate, a good deal of detail on why chocolate—which begins as a fruit, after all—should be considered a health food, environmental and labor issues in the production of chocolate, unusual chocolate recipes, and list of great chocolate sources.  It is necessary to ignore a few insults to Columbus, the Puritans, and anyone who likes milk chocolate, but on the whole these are minor annoyances.

Did you know that there are three types of cacao plant?  The criollo beans of Mesoamerica have the best flavor; but the forastero beans of South America (transplanted to Africa) have taken over 90% of the market, because their trees are hardier and more productive.  Trinitario, a hybrid of the two, was developed in Trinidad and though it supposedly carries the best characteristics of each, it runs a far-distant second.  It is a familiar story, this choice of quantity over quality:  think instant coffee, Velveeta cheese, cheap wine, Wonder Bread, and red-rock tomatoes.  But as more and more people join the taste revolution, choosing to enjoy whole grains, local vegetables, and espresso, so also are the more flavorful varieties of cacao becoming popular.  And as with wine and cheese, where chocolate comes from—the soil, the climate, the environment—makes a difference in the flavor.

It's not too surprising that the darker the chocolate, the more beneficial components it retains. The author recommends 70% cacao, as beyond that the melt-in-your-mouth effect is lost.  I figure I'm close enough with my Ghirardelli 60% cacao chocolate chips.  :)

And what are those beneficial components?  Legion.  Anti-oxidants galore—it blows away the competition, including blueberries, red wine, and green tea.  "[O]ne good-quality dark chocolate bar can have more polyphenols than two whole days' worth of fruits and vegetables."  You know how some doctors prescribe daily 81-milligram doses of aspirin for its clot-prevention effects?  Turns out a couple of squares of dark chocolate have the same effect.  Hmmm...I know what my choice would be.

Chocolate also contains a whole slew of low-dose, mood-altering chemicals, including anadamide, which is nearly identical to the THC found in marijuana.  Seems those marijuana brownies of our college days did more than just disguise the illegal drug.  (And no, I didn't partake, didn't even have the opportunity.  But I can't follow President Clinton in saying I didn't inhale, because second-hand smoke of more than one kind was unavoidable back then.)  There's a reason eating chocolate makes us feel better.

The section on environmental and labor issues is balanced, pointing out that the issues are complicated.  In attempting to combat child labor on cacao plantations in Côte d'Ivoire, for example, one must take care not to do more harm than good.

For these cacao laborers, a poor-paying job is still better than none.  And preteens working in agriculture alongside their parents has been part of African culture for centuries, if not longer.  Of the one million cacao farms in West Africa, the vast majority are tiny (less than five acres) family affairs. The child labor abuses reported were confined to the few large plantations, but boycotting cacao from Ivory Coast would affect the family farms even more severely than the plantations.

Jacobson supports the Fair Trade program, which has grown beyond coffee to include cacao, and has two sets of standards, one for small farmers and another for plantations and factories.  He also recommends buying organic chocolate, which is grown in a more environmentally-sustainable fashion—and also is more likely to contain the better-tasting criollo beans.

There's one more delightful side effect of Chocolate Unwrapped:  last night I read a section of it out loud after dinner, and Porter immediately brought me a bowl of Publix Chocolate Trinity ice cream and a glass of red wine.  :)

King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, by Roger Lancelyn Green (Puffin Books, 2008)

I bought this book for my grandson, who so enjoyed Roger Lancelyn Green's The Adventures of Robin Hood.  His mother reported that the Robin Hood book was "perfect" for him, but I wish I had read it myself, first, so I could compare it with King Arthur, since I'm having second thoughts.  King Arthur has been read by and to children for half a century, and there's nothing at all inappropriate about it, but there are not a few battles in which people's heads get lopped off, and a few babies conceived under less than ideal circumstances (Arthur in a scenario not unlike Solomon's), and—perhaps more disturbing for a child—a couple of examples of children raised by others instead of their own families.

In other words, the stories are real, no matter how fantastic and mythical.  They have not been cleaned up, Disney style.  Which I say is all to the good, and makes this book great for adults as well as children.  The Knights of the Round Table are not born saints, but learn chivalry through trial, error, sin, and forgiveness.  Although the characters are shown to be complex, doing both good and bad, there is no question that sin is sin, and has terrible consequences, even though sometimes God brings good out of evil actions.  The Church is central throughout, and miracles and magic abound, not surprising for a collection of Medieval (and earlier) romances.

Everyone should read Green's book who is past the age of being overly disturbed by fears of being taken from his parents and given to someone else to raise.   Which brings me to the Digression:  How did I get through 17 years of education, and more than three times that many years of life, knowing so little about the King Arthur stories?  They make everything from the stories of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien to the operas of Wagner more understandable and enjoyable.  They are clearly part of the foundational education that such writers assumed every one of their audience would have.  They are a basic part of the heritage of Western Civilization.  So why were they lacking in my education?

There's enough blame to go around:  to me, for not seeking out the classics on my own; to my parents, for not seeing to this part of my education themselves; but mostly I am once again astonished that school should have devoured so many years of my life and not given back even the rudiments of this and other classic literature.  Have we traded our birthright for a mess of...Disney?

I'm tempted to keep King Arthur for myself, but would I then be any better than my schools? :)

I wasn't going to waste blog space on the Harvard prof flap, but since I took the time to comment on Facebook, I'll add it here.

• It's not about race, other than the understandable prickliness of one who has experienced racism. This kind of thing happens to while people, too, with exhibits A & B in my own family (no arrests but undeniably wrong behavior on the part of the police). But that doesn't make the news, and garners no presidential commentary.
• If a policeman had entered my house, uninvited and without a warrant, and asked for my ID I would have been on the phone to 911—or maybe a lawyer—if  not fleeing like a felon myself out of sheer terror. Didn't we fight a war about that sort of thing?  Back in the early homeschooling days, we were advised never to let an official without a warrant into the house, but instead hand them our attorney's telephone number.  That still seems like reasonable advice.  I tend to sympathize with policemen, who put their lives on the line daily for us—not to mention that a friend of ours is one of New York City's Finest—but that doesn't mean I trust everyone sporting a badge.
• Maybe it is about race.  Would the charges have been dropped like that if the person had been white, or poor? Would there be such an uproar? Unfortunately, I have enough experience with the system to doubt it.
• Lesson learned (or should be): Mouthing off is stupid. Sometimes it gets you suspended from hockey games, sometimes it gets you arrested, always it diminishes you as a person.

My sister called me a geek because I adorned reserved church pews with such labels as "DSTB 1" and "NMB 2."  To me, that was a compliment, but I still maintain I'm too old to be a geek.  Nonetheless, I was pleased to note that I scored higher than expected on Geek Dad's 100 Essential Skills for Geeks.

1. Properly secure a wireless router.  I can't count this one, as Porter has always done it for our systems.  But I could have figured it out and done it if necessary.
2. Crack the WEP key on a wireless router.
3. Leech Wifi from your neighbor.  Not for long, but I did occasionally back in the day when most people didn't bother to secure their routers and before there were air cards.
4. Screw with Wifi leeches.
5. Setup and use a VPN.
6. Work from home or a coffee shop as effectively as you do at the office.  My home is my office, so this is a given.  I'm not so comfortable with coffee shops, though I've done it.  If I were a real geek, maybe I wouldn't be so paranoid about security.  Or maybe I'd be more.
7. Wire your own home with Ethernet cable.  Porter did this.  I could have done the geek part, but I'm not so sure about the crawling-around-in-tight-spaces-in-the-attic part.
8. Turn a web camera into security camera.
9. Use your 3G phone as a Wi-Fi access point.
10. Understand what “There’s no Place Like 127.0.0.1” means.
11. Identify key-loggers.
12. Properly connect a TV, Tivo, XBox, Wii, and Apple TV so they all work together with the one remote.  Wouldn't want to.  :)
13. Program a universal remote.  Not high on my priority list, but I think I did it once.
14. Swap out the battery on your iPod/iPhone.  Hmm, this skill must be more difficult than it is on my non-i phone.
15. Benchmark Your Computer
16. Identify all computer components on sight.  Probably not.  But I bet I could identify some 1970's computer components that many modern geeks can't.
17. Know which parts to order from NewEgg.com, and how to assemble them into a working PC.
18. Troubleshoot any computer/gadget problem, over the phone.  Nope.  Few things are more frustrating.  I'm not bad if the other person has the same system, version, and set-up as I do, but does that ever happen?
19. Use any piece of technology intuitively, without instruction or prior knowledge.  I do like to play with things and figure them out without reading the manual first—more so now that mistakes only break my computer, not someone else's—but I want a real manual, not a booklet that's only more than a couple of pages by virtue of saying the same thing in 10 languates, and not a .pdf that I can't read until I've already installed the system.
20. How to irrecoverably protect data.
21. Recover data from a dead hard drive.
22. Share a printer between a Mac and a PC on a network.
23. Install a Linux distribution. (Hint: Ubuntu 9.04 is easier than installing Windows)
24. Remove a virus from a computer.  I don't ever want to have an opportunity to learn this skill.
25. Dual (or more) boot a computer.
26. Boot a computer off a thumb drive.
27. Boot a computer off a network drive.
28. Replace or repair a laptop keyboard.
29. Run more than two monitors on a single computer.  Aw, shucks.  When I first read this, I thought it said "two monitors," not "more than two."
30. Successfully disassemble and reassemble a laptop.  Never done that, but I know a completely non-geeky, blonde musician who replaced her laptop's hard drive using a screwdriver and tech support from India.  This is the origin of our family's "O as in Nancy" reference, that being a phrase said tech support used when giving her a key necessary for installing the drivers.
31. Know at least 10 software easter eggs off the top of your head.
32. Bypass a computer password on all major operating systems. Windows, Mac, Linux
33. Carrying a computer cleaning arsenal on your USB drive.
34. Bypass content filters on public computers.
35. Protect your privacy when using a public computer.  If there's more to this than clearing the cache and browsing history, and closing the browser, I don't know it—which is one reason why I avoid public computers when possible.
36. Surf the web anonymously from home.
37. Buy a domain, configure bind, apache, MySQL, php, and Wordpress without Googling a how-to.
38. Basic *nix command shell knowledge with the ability to edit and save a file with vi.
39. Create a web site using vi.
40. Transcode a DVD to play on a portable device.
41. Hide a file in an image using steganography.
42. Knowing the answer to life, the universe and everything.  Clever, though I didn't realize it until I added "42" to the list of numbers I could say "yes" to.
43. Share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple computers without a KVM switch.
44. Google obscure facts in under 3 searches. Bonus point if you can use I Feel Lucky.  I never use I Feel Lucky, but I am apparently better than most at finding what I want with Google.
45. Build amazing structures with LEGO and invent a compelling back story for the creation.  Too old for the LEGO questions.  Do Tinker Toys count?
46. Understand that it is LEGO, not Lego, Legos, or Lego’s.  Of course it's not Lego's.  Even geeks should punctuate correctly!
47. Build a two story house out of LEGO, in monochrome, with a balcony.
48. Construct a costume for you or your kid out of scraps, duct tape, paper mâché, and imagination.  This was SOP when I was growing up.
49. Be able to pick a lock.
50. Determine the combination of a Master combination padlock in under 10 minutes.
51. Assemble IKEA furniture without looking at the instructions. Bonus point if you don’t have to backtrack.  Would you believe I've never been in an IKEA store, as far as I remember?  There's one around here somewhere, but too far away for me to look for it without a compelling reason, and I HATE SHOPPING FOR FURNITURE.
52. Use a digital SLR in full manual mode.
53. Do cool things to Altoids tins.
54. Be able to construct paper craft versions of space ships.
55. Origami! Bonus point for duct tape origami. (Ductigami)  I have done some origami in my time, but when John Montroll is your standard, you don't claim to do origami unless you've made it all the way through one of his books, and I haven't—even though we own at least 15 of them.
56. Fix anything with duct tape, chewing gum and wire.  Does it count that on a high-school trip to Europe I fixed my camera with string and glue?
57. Knowing how to avoid being eaten by a grue. I've been eaten by one many a time, but finally succeeded in avoiding being lunch.
58. Know what a grue is.  Doggone.  I looked it up once, but as with many things I look up once, the definition currently eludes me.
59. Understand where XYZZY came from, and have used it.  Oh, the memories.  My first computer game ever, and still my favorite, despite its simplicity.
60. Play any SNES game on your computer through an emulator.
61. Burn the rope.
62. Know the Konami code, and where to use it.
63. Whistle, hum, or play on an iPhone, the Cantina song.  Many times, though not on the iPhone.
64. Learning to play the theme songs to the kids favorite TV shows.  I can sing "It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" and most of the songs from The Pirates of Penzance, which pretty much exhausts my kids' "favorite TV shows."
65. Solve a Rubik’s Cube.  Now that my five-year-old grandson can do better than me at this, maybe I'll resort to looking it up online.
66. Calculate THAC0.
67. Know the difference between skills and traits.
68. Explain special relativity in terms an eight-year-old can grasp.
69. Recite pi to 10 places or more.  Piece of cookie.
70. Be able to calculate tip and split the check, all in your head.  This is why I don't go out to eat without Porter.  I can do it, but I like to leave the restaurant before midnight.
71. Explain that the colours in a rainbow are roygbiv.  That's geeky?  I thought that was normal.  Geeky is "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain."
72. Understand the electromagnetic spectrum - xray, uv, visible, infrared, microwave, radio.  Once upon a time...though "understand" is perhaps too broad a term.
73. Know the difference between radiation and radioactive contamination.  Radiation is what I was soaking up at the beach yesterday.  Radioactive contamination is what I was hoping was not present at the nearby nuclear submarine facility.
74. Understand basic electronics components like resistors, capacitors, inductors and transistors.  At one time I could have told you a lot about them, and even recited a rude mnemonic for remembering the resistor color code.  But I never could remember whether "bad" meant black or brown.
75. Solder a circuit while bottle feeding an infant. (lead free solder please.)  Illegal question.  What's that infant doing with a bottle?  This is merely a cover-up for the fact that approximately 50% of the potential geek population would be eliminated if the skill were "Solder a circuit while nursing an infant."
76. The meaning of technical acronyms.  I know many TLA's, but not nearly enough to qualify.
77. The coffee dash, blindfolded (or blurry eyed). Coffee <brew> [cream] [sugar]. In under a minute.
78. Build a fighting robot.
79. Program a fighting robot.
80. Build a failsafe into a fighting robot so it doesn’t kill you.
81. Be able to trace the Fellowship’s journey on a map of Middle Earth.  Despite my poor memory for such details, I could probably do it.  Having read the books a couple of dozen times can make anything stick.
82. Know all the names of the Dwarves in The Hobbit.  To my embarrassment, I could only come up with nine of thirteen off the top of my head.  The rest would come with time, however.
83. Understand the difference between a comic book and a graphic novel.  I can do this thanks to Groshlink.  Prior to reading Tom's post I thought graphic novels were something to be avoided, like graphic violence.  I still think they're something to be avoided, but for different reasons.
84. Know where your towel is and why it is important.
85. Re-enact the parrot sketch.
86. Know the words to The Lumberjack Song.
87. Reciting key scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  I've never seen any Monty Python movie, so that probably disqualifies me completely.  But I can nonetheless recite, "Bring out your dead!"
88. Be able to recite at least one Geek Movie word for word.
89. Know what the 8th Chevron does on a Stargate and how much power is required to get a lock.
90. Be able to explain why it’s important that Han shot first.  I did not know this, but having looked it up, it is, indeed, critically important that Han shot first.  I am exceedingly disappointed in George Lucas for caving in to—what? Political Correctness?  I don't know how to name it—and with one seemingly minor change removing the depth and moral evolution of Han Solo's character.
91. Know why it is just wrong for Luke and Leia to kiss.  It doesn't take a geek to know this, merely someone who sees all kissing in sexual terms.
92. [Rude item removed.  See the original if you care.]
93. The ability to name actors, characters and plotlines from the majority of sci-fi movies produced since 1968.  I guess this assumes one has actually seen the majority of sci-fi movies produced since 1968.
94. Cite Mythbusters when debunking a myth or urban legend.
95. Sleep with a Cricket bat next to your bed.
96. Have a documented plan on what to do during a zombie or robot uprising.
97. Identify evil alternate universe versions of friends, family, co-workers or self.
98. Be able to convince TSA that the electronic parts you are carrying are really not a threat to passengers.  No, but I've had to convince a tollbooth attendant that the dollar coin was legal tender in the United States.
99. Talk about things that aren’t tech related.  Sure, as long as they're related to education, childrearing, genealogy, conservationist living, and whatever else I talk about on this blog.  Oh, you mean actual, physical conversation?  Hmmm....
100. Get something on the front page of Digg.  In my dreams.  Or nightmares, I haven't decided which.