Magic Spot Flowing

According to Michael Pollan, rocket is also the “proper American name” for arugula:

It is true you might want to plant iceberg lettuce rather than arugula, at least to start. (Or simply call arugula by its proper American name, as generations of Midwesterners have done: “rocket.”)

Arugula is the Italian name for it, so I’m not exactly sure what people have against it. Zucchini and broccoli (hardly pretentious vegetables) also have Italian names. Lots of American favorite foods are Italian in origin — pizza and pasta, anyone? Well, unlike zucchini and broccoli (and pizza and pasta), it is often expensive, and since it is expensive and sounds foreign, its existence must clearly be at the insistence of liberal yuppiehood. (It probably helps that Italian is now also associated with Starbucks and other gourmet coffee brands, as I presume it wasn’t when zucchini, broccoli, pizza, and pasta became part of American culture.)

Dan commented on the LJ feed of my blog on the same thing Pollan is talking about:
You know how arugula is the new metonymy for all things liberal yuppie? I doubt that’d be the case if we called it “rocket”.

My response was:
Maybe I’ll start calling it rocket. (But then I think people will mocket (ha) by calling it ‘roquette’.)

As it turns out, it actually is called roquette too.

I enjoyed the article a lot — I love the thought that some of the White House’s South Lawn could be turned into a Victory Garden of sorts. I don’t agree with everything that Pollan suggests, but it’s a great batch of ideas to assess. And it has this amusing tie-in to my last entry. Win!

After my first year of employment (I think first full year, but it doesn’t really matter to this story) I had saved more money than I expected. I was telling my mom this and that I really wasn’t sure how I’d done it, since I didn’t keep a good budget (I still don’t; it is something I really need to work on).

Later on we were talking about the farmer’s market and how sometimes the stuff there is really cheap and awesome (like beets and carrots and basil for $1 per relevant unit), and sometimes it’s expensive but worth it, but sometimes it’s just expensive. So then I don’t buy it, most of the time. Arugula [rocket, for you UK people], for example, is very expensive at the farmer’s market, and cheaper at Trader Joe’s — but I don’t actually buy it in either case, because it’s expensive at both places. So I joked that I saved all my money by not buying arugula.

But I do buy arugula sometimes, and whenever I do I remember why it’s sometimes worth it. It’s sour and peppery, and it’s so easy to make it into a tasty salad. This time I stuck an avocado I’ve had for a while, raspberries, walnuts, and red pepper into the bowl, and drizzled olive oil and balsamic vinegar over it. And it’s a slightly funny-sounding combination, but it just tastes GOOD, and has all these fun texture contrasts. The same salad with a not-arugula green wouldn’t be nearly as tasty.

And that’s why arugula is sometimes better than saving money.

I love strawberries. The best ones are fragrant and sweet with a hint of tartness. I want to describe them as a “flavor burst in the mouth” but that sounds unfortunatey like a commercial. I buy them almost every week in the summer when they’re available. I freeze them to keep for over the winter when they aren’t available at the farmer’s market. But I also find strawberries incredibly frustrating. Their attractive red appearance can conceal many flaws — an unripe white center, or a soft spot that feels mushy and will soon mold. Even worse, equally ripe-looking and beautiful strawberries can taste completely different. One will be sweet and glorious, the next watery and flavorless with a tinge of sour. And they go bad so quickly. I have to refrigerate them, even though conventional wisdom is that fruit flavor is destroyed by refrigeration.

After thinking about this, I realized that these problems are common to most soft fruits, although they’re probably pronounced with strawberries and other berries because of their lack of a firm skin. But certainly stone fruit (cherries, peaches, plums) is just as much of a crapshoot from one fruit to the next, and it reaches the peak of ripeness quickly and just as quickly goes mushy and over-sweet. Avocadoes and tomatoes also vary some (bad spots and poor flavor), and with avocados you can’t even see inside at all. Even apples, which aren’t even soft fruit, vary a bit from fruit to fruit, though less so. Bananas are about the only 100% consistent fruits. No wonder they’re so popular.

I wish we had the kind of markets that they have in France where you tell the seller when you want to eat the fruit and they’ll pick out ones that’ll be just perfect that day. But I don’t think even they will sell you individual strawberries!

I hear people all the time talking about the Central Valley, and I thought I had a pretty clear idea of where and what it is — inland of here, a big area where there are a lot of farms plus some of the major inland cities, the nation’s major supplier of various fruit and nut crops. But I’ve never looked at it on the map before — I had no idea how big it really is! Just from looking at Google Maps satellite imagery, it seems to go from Chico to Bakersfield in a huge swath (Wikipedia tells me it’s actually as far north as Redding), where virtually everything is either farm, major natural feature inhibiting farming, or urban area.

Delightful Wikipedia factoids:
“Before California’s massive flood control and aqueduct system was built, the annual snow melt turned much of the valley into an inland lake.”

“Virtually all non-tropical crops are grown in the Central Valley,” a sentence that sounds not quite as intended when taken out of context. I assume they just mean that unless a crop is tropical, it can be and likely is cultivated in the Central Valley, not that it is exclusively so cultivated.

Also, the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta is an inverted river delta. And the Capitol Corridor train (and other trains on that line) crosses its outlet portion, the Carquinez Strait, on a very cool rail bridge [jpg].

The reason I noticed all this is that I went to Davis this weekend. Davis is also cool, but since I got sidetracked by this whole California geography thing I’ll have to say more about that later.

I really enjoy being a bona fide professional linguist, with said title on my business card, but I have found a title that is, I think, even cooler, belonging to Jesse Sheidlower (whose surname I would dearly love to know how to pronounce). Jesse is, according to his byline on this Slate article about Sarah Palin’s accent, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary. Beat that for pure awesome.

I never knew there was an Alaskan accent (or even, more than one). You learn something new every day.

Say what you like about the original bailout bill, it did not get better with the addition of tax cuts (yes, tax cuts at a time the government is proposing to give away $700B it doesn’t have anyway) and unrelated items. Write or call and urge your rep to vote against it. Strangely, those of you with Republican reps might have better luck for once. The Democrats so far have been annoyingly eager to save Wall Street from itself in the guise of saving us from them.

It’s sort of unfortunate when people who may have a point undermine themselves with hyperbole, hand-wringing, and inaccuracy.

I got pointed via BoingBoing to what should have been an interesting article about the people behind the sources of Facebook’s funding. I’m no particular fan of Facebook, especially because it just seems to get more and more annoying over time, and certainly there are and have been privacy issues with it.

But I can’t take seriously an article that

1) originally connected something created in 1999 with “after 9/11″ (there’s a correction on it now, but this isn’t just a misprint kind of error — it’s a fundamental conceptual error of the type that tends to be brought on by a desire to connect 9/11 to everything and/or a desire to see nefarious influence everywhere).

2) spends a lot of time hand-wringing about Facebook being “fundamentally uncreative” and disconnecting us from nature. This is just typical The Children Are Too Connected To Their Computers and What Is The Point stuff. Why use Facebook when there are books to read? he wonders. That’s not the issue. Facebook is completely different from books. If I want to read I read; Facebook is a vehicle for something entirely different — social connection.

3) uses the phrase “anyone can glance at your intimate confessions”. If you’re putting intimate confessions on Facebook (which people do) I must say I don’t have much sympathy for you. Facebook is essentially the public internet — and is basically about sharing and other people seeing what you do — even though there are some ways to limit information distribution. The phrase is used in the context of the ToU’s “if our privacy controls are circumvented we can’t necessarily protect your information” which is certainly unfortunate, but the head bit should be “weak privacy controls” not “anyone can glance at your intimate confessions”.

In general, the article raises the issue of Facebook’s connection to people I would characterize broadly as crazy libertarians, but it also conflates them with neocons (without taking any effort to convince you that it’s a valid connection). It uses rhetoric rather than actual argument to try to convince you that because Facebook was funded by these people and can be interpreted, in a certain light, as an experiment in realizing their world vision, it must be that we are helping them out in reaching their allegedly sinister goals. I wasn’t convinced of either the total sinistry of their goals (they range from the off-the-wall bizarritude of the Singularity to very unpleasant extremist capitalism) or of the fact that Facebook actually serves as either an an experiment or actual realization of them, largely because the points are implied and almost assumed. I suppose maybe for the usual audience of the Guardian that’s enough?

There’s also plenty of hand-wringing about the ad-supported nature of Facebook. I do think that this is a general trend that’s concerning — there are very few online social sites that are not ad-supported, and that basically means that all online community is also an opportunity for people to sell you stuff. But the same is true (as the article’s author indeed alludes to) of newspapers and magazines. Ad-supported media is not new and the amount of “OMG your social relationships are being used as marketing devices” seems excessive to me. I find guerrilla marketing and paid shills who act like sincere product users far more disturbing uses of the social network for advertising.

Maybe I’m too complacent about this, but ad-supported websites of all kinds are de rigeur, and I’m sure most of the ones that have any information about you via login use that information to target the ads (Google does, for example). Facebook does have a lot of people’s personal information, but I’m more concerned about the general availability of the information than about them sharing it with advertisers, honestly. At least I know what advertisers want — my money. The government? Random people? Not so sure about that.

It’s inarguable that you’re giving these people ROI (return on investment) through your use of Facebook, and you may quite legitimately want to avoid doing that. It does squick me a bit for sure, especially since the pointer from BoingBoing was about Facebook hiring Alberto Gonzales’s former Chief of Staff as their general counsel. Yuck. I can’t see that going anywhere good.

But it’s less clear to me that these people’s strange worldview and aims are necessarily furthered by Facebook, or that even if they are, that Facebook doesn’t have other uses that are completely legitimate and irrelevant to that. The guy may have founded PayPal as a way to escape monetary controls (see article for this contention), but most people just use it to send money to friends or people they bought something from, or set up an easy payment system for their website. Likewise he may have invested in Facebook because it instantiates a virtual, borderless world, but most people just use it to talk to their friends and share photos. The article, instead of being a consideration of the implications of the financial relationship (most interestingly through providing potential funding to the guy’s weirder organizations — not that he really needs more money to be effective given how rich he is), is a piece of poorly argued hysteria.

I’m currently having a similar problem with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which I expected to like. It may be in part that unlike most of the first generation who had the book available, I was initially exposed to history that was being rethought to give more weight to what happened to the groups that weren’t writing all the books. So although some of what he writes about is new to me, much of it isn’t — it doesn’t feel revolutionary.

But even more so, I feel that he retreats from evidence into rhetoric; that he has a definitive agenda into which he’s trying to fit evidence, rather than letting the facts speak for themselves and guide his points. To his credit, he makes that explicit at the beginning of the book — and indeed I almost stopped reading at that point, because I’d been led to believe that it was a history book from a unique perspective, not an extended essay with a particular thesis (”the guys in power actually suck a lot” to put it shortly).

One example is his discussion of Native American social arrangements. While he seems to stick to the facts, there’s a definite gloss of romance over them. They were egalitarian! They cared about the environment! Europeans suck compared to them! He doesn’t, however, address the issue that the progress of farming tends to give rise to greater hierarchy (this is a Jared Diamond idea so it may not have been around when he wrote the book, but it does affect his point), meaning that given their own time, it’s entirely possible that the Native American cultures could have ended up much less egalitarian. And he doesn’t discuss the less savory aspects of various Native American cultures, of which there certainly are some. His evidence about their behavior is valid and I grew up with the new-standard narrative that yes the Europeans were absolutely horrible to Native Americans and that’s putting it lightly, but he tilts it just that little bit too far, undermining his legitimate points.

I need to read more of the book before I make any firm conclusions, but all the chapters have felt like that so far to me. Some very interesting evidence, interesting framework, just pushed a little too far for credibility.

Some time back, I wrote about the TSA’s policies on knitting needles. Not surprisingly, it isn’t just the TSA which seems to have trouble defining what or why the issue is with knitting needles.

On my way back from London yesterday, the guy at the Continental counter — not an airport screener — asked me if I had anything in my carryon which could be used as a weapon. I thought about it and said no with the possible exception of knitting needles, but the ones I was carrying were bamboo, dull-tipped, and had made it through US security on the way here (all true).

He said that nevertheless I should check them because they aren’t permitted. What really got to me about this is that he said that the airline permits them (also obviously true since I was previously allowed on board with them and they weren’t at any point interrogating me or any old ladies about the contents of our bags) but that security doesn’t, and the reason that security doesn’t is that they are trying to follow what the Americans tell them to do.

The first part of what he said turns out to be true, though I had no way of verifying that at the time except by either leaving the line and walking over to ask them or completing checkin and trying my luck. The Gatwick airport website specifically indicates knitting needles of all kinds as not to be packed in “hand luggage” (the British term for carryon luggage). But the second part is clearly untrue, and I really wish that people would not give bogus excuses like that for their stupid policies. I said rather crossly, but still politely, to him that this obviously had nothing to do with US airport security policy since the US has no such policy, and moved the knitting bag into my checked suitcase.

In Newark I moved it back to my carryon before customs and got absolutely no comment when I went through security again. Whatever excuse Gatwick airport (and it is just Gatwick and a few other airports — neither the government nor BAA which runs many British airports forbids knitting needles!) have for forbidding my knitting needles, it isn’t US security. But I must say, they don’t have an arbitrary policy — just a stupid one.

A sunny afternoon in the Botanic Gardens today with friends, plus Calton Hill, Holyrood Park, and a terrific Highland dress wedding in previous days. I’m loving being back, and sad I have to leave again so soon.

Waves to Wine 2008 is complete! September 13 and 14 I joined my Team Slowpoke teammates to ride 150 miles from San Francisco to Lake Sonoma. All of us rode all 150 miles (in one case 175!) without any major mishaps, just some (very) sore muscles and (hopefully soon to mend) joints. Not even a flat tire among us, though there was one case of a chain coming off.

The team raised a total of $2,997.50 (oh man…how did we miss $3000 by so little?!), with my total being $1000. I was really surprised and pleased by that because I didn’t expect so much generosity, but the world has a way of being awesome when you least expect it.

I wanted to make this into a “Page” instead of a post, so that it doesn’t get lost, but it doesn’t seem to work. If any WordPress geniuses know why, do let me know. Anyhow…
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