Lift Up Your Hearts!

I made cheese today, my first effort since succumbing to the lure of Ricki Carroll and her New England Cheesemaking Supply Company.  It was not, perhaps, an auspicious beginning, since the never-fail, easy-enough-for-a-seven-year-old mozzarella recipe...failed.  Maybe I need a grandchild or two to help.

On the other hand, what I did manage to produce is a great, lower-fat substitute for cream cheese, and if I knew what it was I did wrong, I could replicate it.  My biggest mistake was clearly to ignore Ricki's instructions to keep a cheese journal, logging everything from ingredients to procedures to the ambient temperature and humidity.  Cheesemaking is an art, and at some point you're bound to create something you'd like to be able to make again; keeping a log doesn't guarantee that you'll be able to, but it greatly increases the odds.

For now, I'l enjoy my "cream cheese," and try again with the mozzarella another day.

I don't expect most of my Loyal Readers to wade through the entirety of Paul Gottfried's Voices Against Progress: What I Learned from Genovese, Lasch, and Bradford at the Front Porch Republic, but I include the link for those of us who were students at the University of Rochester during those times.  I find it fascinating to glimpse the political maneuverings that were going on over the heads of mere students.  I knew neither Eugene Genovese nor Christopher Lasch; I stayed as much as possible in the science and engineering part of the school, and never set foot in that "hotbed of the New Left, the University of Rochester history department."  But everyone had heard of Genovese, whom we usually referred to as Our Resident Commie, and his wife, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, the Resident Feminist.

Of even more interest is how the thoughts and ideals of these people changed over time.  I don't regret having avoided the U of R history department in the 1970's, but find myself wishing I had known these folks as friends.

The future may belong to the Indians, or perhaps the Africans—or anyone who grows up in a multilingual environment.  Adding to the evidence of the benefits to the brain of speaking multiple languages is the research of Lera Boroditsky at Stanford University.  (Newsweek article by Sharon Begley.)

When the world's tallest vehicular bridge,^* the Viaduc de Millau, opened,

German newspapers described how it "floated above the clouds" with "elegance and lightness" and "breathtaking" beauty. In France, papers praised the "immense" "concrete giant." Was it mere coincidence that the Germans saw beauty where the French saw heft and power?

 (More)

Hat tip to Andy Bonner for this humorous look at the copyright mess.

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. (More)

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. (More)

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.  (More)

I don't know why anyone would want to annoy a worm, but apparently lemon balm does the trick.  I had some less-than-perfect leaves that I didn't use in making my lemon balm tea, so I fed them to the worms.  Rather, I put the leaves in their bin; feeding was out of the question.  The next time I checked, all the worms were huddled on the side of the bin furthest from the leaves.  They didn't seem particularly unhappy, but they didn't return to the other side until a few days after I removed the offending foliage.

Making vegetables grow in our nutrient-poor, nematode-rich sand soil is always a challenge.  After the initial shock of moving here from a world where one puts the seeds in the ground and stands back, we pretty much gave up on gardens until a couple of years ago.  We do a little better each year, but at least financially the balance sheet is still dismal.

One plant that is still thriving, even in the oppressive Florida summer heat, is our lemon balm.   We planted it this year for no other reason than that it was available at Lowes (or Home Depot, I forget which) and I remembered that Porter had remarked on how good it smelled when we encountered it at Leu Gardens.  We let it grow untouched for a long time, mostly because I didn't know what to do with it, but when a friend mentioned making lemon balm tea, I had my answer.

Now I brew a pot of tea with one regular PG Tips tea bag and a handful of bruised, fresh lemon balm leaves.  I don't know how it tastes hot, as we're not in that season, but I can attest that it makes a wonderful iced tea.  I generally prefer my tea unflavored, but at least for now I can't get enough of this delicious combination.

The worms have completely devoured their Carnegie Mellon t-shirt moisture mat, except for places—stitching, and part of the design, I think—that were not natural fiber.  Therefore, since they are now more mature, and have clearly excelled in their majors of eating and excreting, I hereby declare that they have graduated, and confer upon them a new moisture mat.

It's possible they may end up in grad school—we have a couple of University of Rochester t-shirts that are getting on the worn side—but for now they are enjoying their venture into the wide invertebrate world.  (Or not so wide.  We still insist they stay in their dorm-turned-apartment.)

I'm thinking of moving to Canada, and it has nothing to do with avoiding the draft, nor with frustrations over our current political direction, nor because of the recent heat wave in which our near-100-degree daytime temperatures "cooled down" all the way to 85 in the middle of the night—and not even because Canada ranks close to Switzerland and New Zealand at the top of my list of the world's most beautiful places.  No, what makes being Canadian particularly attractive at the moment is this study of the relationship between body mass index and death of more than 10,000 Canadian adults.

Researchers found that while underweight and extremely obese people die earlier than people of a normal weight, people who are slightly overweight actually live longer than those of a normal weight.

[U]nderweight people were 70 percent more likely than people of normal weight to die, and extremely obese people were 36 percent more likely to die.  But overweight individuals were 17 percent less likely to die. The relative risk for obese people was nearly the same as for people of normal weight.

[T]his was the first large Canadian study to show that people who are overweight may actually live longer than those of normal weight.

But wait...there's good news...I may not have to move after all:

An earlier study, conducted in the United States and published in 2005 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed similar results.

Gotta love medical studies. You can find one that proves whatever you want.  Now to get my hands on a copy of Chocolate Unwrapped:  The Surprising Heath Benefits of America's Favorite Passion.

I know enough about my computer's software to get by; in fact, I know enough to do many wonderful things.  But what I don't know exceeds what I do to a depressing degree.  Only today did I stumble upon the fact that with Office 2007 I can publish documents in Adobe Acrobat (pdf) format.

It's not obvious, because there's an add-on required, but the add-on is free and available from Microsoft.  It's a quick and very easy download and installation process; it would have taken less than a minute had I not bothered to read the directions and the license agreement.   :)

I don't know what I'll use this new-found ability for, but now that I know about it, I'm sure I'll think of something.

I'm filling out a political survey.  My friends can now pick themselves up off the floor, as they know that in our house such things go immediately into the trash without passing Go.  Political surveys, from either party, are inane nonesense with loaded questions on the order of, "You certainly don't support our evil opposition's murderous polices, do you?" and of which the true purpose is to solicit contributions.  But this survey is different.  Oh, it's inane, all right, with all of the above problems.  But this survey, which is REGISTERED IN MY NAME ONLY and MUST BE ACCOUNTED FOR, which requires my immedate attention, and which assures me that my answers are important in the battle against the Obama Democrats' aggressive push to expand the federal government into every area of our lives and businesses; this survey from the National Republican Senatorial Committee that is sent only to a select few to represent ALL Republicans living in my voting district because it is cost-prohibitive to send a Survey to every registered Republican in my area; this survey is addressed to me.

It appears to have escaped the attention of the National Republican Senatorial Committee that I've been a registered Democrat for all 38 years of my voting life.

Well, I commend them, inane questions or no, for reaching out to the opposition even at the cost of slighting the registered Republicans.  I hope they enjoy my answers, which for some questions will indeed sound as if I were "one of them" and for others will leave them scratching their heads.  But they're not getting the $11 contribution they ask for "to help cover the cost of tabulating and redistributing my Survey,"  even though $11 isn't out of line for a days' amusement.

To prove the Front Porch Republic isn't all academic discussions of too much length and intensity for the casual reader, check out Animals Were Definitely Harmed in the Production of this Story, explaining why, unlike modern movies, farm life entails "‘the harming of animals of every shape and in every fashion."

The story is less morbid than amusing, and rings true to life outside of Hollywood.  Here are a few excerpts to tempt you. (More)