Purchases of the day.

From the February 17, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

Snyders Old Fashioned Pretzel Sticks 3 pounds 7 ounces (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.00)

(3) Jones Oboe Reed Medium (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $2.82)

ch ching:

Black & Decker SPCM1936 19-Inch 36-Volt Cordless Electric Self-Propelled Lawn Mower With Removable Battery (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $33.67)

... and 57 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers — giving the blogger that warm, sweet, softly piercing, lush, straight untwisted feeling of being appreciated by some of the greatest blog readers of her generation.

Thank you.

"Was the problem that had no name possibly the lack of Wi-Fi?"

Noreen Malone gets a grip on what Betty Friedan — on behalf of suburban women in general — was bellyaching about in "The Feminine Mystique." She's responding to a piece by Emily Bazelon, which we talked about in a long comments thread yesterday. Malone says:

I grew up with a whip-smart mom who stayed at home with us, and so I always approach discussions like these with a bit of a chip on my shoulder, alert to any slights whatsoever against the choices and life mission of someone I so love and admire — even if I don’t plan to make precisely the same ones. But more of it is probably generational. For recession-scarred twentysomethings, staying at home or taking menial jobs is involuntary, but not because social mores dictate that women can’t achieve: It’s because so few of us, regardless of gender, have gotten hired at jobs Friedan might consider fulfilling...

I’m sure Betty wouldn’t be happy to see all the expensively educated young women of Brooklyn, where I live, spending their free time taking floral-arranging classes and knitting and fussily setting up their living rooms just so....

What's so wrong about paying close attention to the details of the beauty of your environment? Fussy... there's a word. When is intense, attentive work deemed fussy? This is a word that has long been used against women and against gay men. Is a person supposed to be interested in something other than what he or she finds interesting? Why? Who says what the proper foci of interest are in this world? Some people are more sensitive to the visual specifics of their environment. It's not as if the people who aren't spend their lives plumbing the meaning of the universe. Perhaps the interior decorator is closer to the core of what truly matters than the corporate lawyer. 

Now, I've derailed onto the subject of the word "fussy." I just had a long conversation with Meade about his associations with the word. Knowing nothing of the context in which I'd encountered the word, he associated it with objects — specifically drawings and handmade pottery — that are inferior because they have been overworked. I prompted him to think of calling a person fussy, and he said "a baby." Time to check the Oxford English Dictionary (which I can't link to). The first meaning applies to "persons, their habits and actions": "Fond of fuss, moving and acting with fuss; habitually busy about trifles." Examples:

1831  T. Moore Mem. (1854) VI. 201   Lucky for him that he is so little of an irritable or fussy nature.
1850   Fraser's Mag. 41 163   She is fussy and fidgetty (if there be such words).

The third meaning relates to things: "Of dress, etc.: Full of petty details. Also, in dressmaking language, without depreciatory implication; With many flounces, puffs, pleats, etc."

1858   J. G. Holland Titcomb's Lett. i. 92   Let every garment be well fitted.. fussy in no point....
1896   Westm. Gaz. 7 May 3/1   The fussy sunshade is much beflounced with lace-edged chiffon.

Flounces, puffs... Hear the homophobic echoes. Anyway, the etymology of fussy is obvious. It's just a -y added to fuss. What's the etymology of fuss?

Perhaps echoic of the sound of something sputtering or bubbling, or expressive of the action of ‘puffing and blowing’. 

The 2 oldest examples for fuss:

1701   G. Farquhar Sir Harry Wildair iii. i. 21   Ah! I hate these Congregation-women. There's such a fuss and such a clutter about their Devotion.
c1730   Ld. Lansdowne Wild Boar's Def. in Wks. (1732) I. 140   With your Humanity you keep a Fuss; But are in truth worse brutes than all of us.

And now, I am fully off track, looking for the full text of Lord Landsdowne's very cool poem "The Wild Boar's Defense," which I'm going to type out in full, because I'm only seeing images of book pages and I want to make it more available. The wild boar wants to be free:

A boar, who had enjoy'd a happy reign
For many a year, and fed on many a man,
Call'd to account, softening his savage eyes,
Thus suppliant pleads his cause before he dies:

"For what am I condemned? My crime's no more
To eat a man than yours to eat a boar.
We seek not you, but take what chance provides,
Nature and mere necessity our guides:
You murder us in sport, then dish us up
For drunken feasts, a relish for the cup.
We lengthen not our meals: but you much feast;
Gorge till your bellies burst — pray who's the beast?
With your humanity you keep a fuss,
But are in truth worse brutes than all of us.
We prey not on our kind; but you, dear brother,
Most beastly of all beasts, devour each other:
Kings worry kings, neighbour with neighbour strives,
Fathers and sons, friends, brothers, husbands, wives,
By fraud or force, by poison, sword, or gun,
Destroy each other, every mother's son!"

My Wi-Fi took me there, in my unfussy riffing this morning. I suppose I could tie it all up somehow. Husbands, wives... destroy each other.

Who's the beast?

"When Sad, Single People Get Together And Eat Only Black Food."

"Black Day" — in Korea, where "there are roughly 13 holidays devoted to love."

Diet tip: "Wait 20 minutes for seconds."

Reason this should work: "Food must move 22 feet through your intestines from your stomach to peptide YY cells — the switch that says you are sated."

That's very helpful. Not that I want to think about the location — somewhere in the long, twisted path through my intestines — of what was so recently in my mouth, but I've noticed the tendency to eat and then eat again. It seems to be easier to avoid eating all afternoon than to resist getting one more thing after dinner. The dessert impulse. Even after breakfast or lunch, there's this feeling of needing to eat again. So the idea is: Just wait 20 more minutes. If the science quoted above is accurate, the feeling will ebb. Tell yourself: I can have something more if I still want it 20 minutes from now. The meal you just ate will, by then, have arrived in your peptide YY cells (whatever that means).

Drudge slags the First Lady with the unsupported assertion that the "Inaugural lunch tops 3,000 calories."

Drudge links to a Washington Times article that refers without linking to another website that supposedly lists the items on the menu and purports to know the calorie count. I found that other website myself, and here's the article, which is obviously exaggerating the calorie count by assuming immense portion sizes. A first course of lobster, with some sauce and potato is unlikely to add up to 783 calories. It's almost surely tiny. A second course with grilled bison and some squash puree is not going to be 1194 calories. It's a lunch entree of lean meat.

This is a very nice and sensible lunch. Stop pooping on it!

"Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York..."

"... every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves."

I warned you I was going to do this. Come on. Play along. (And, no, I wasn't thinking about Andy Kaufman when I dreamed this up. It was all a riff on that Baz Luhrmann trailer for the new "Great Gatsby" movie.)

So, now, let's talk about oranges and lemons. The phrase "oranges and lemons" appears twice in the sentence, unchanged, even as the oranges and lemons themselves are changed. That's the whole action of the sentence, the transformation of oranges and lemons in one form into oranges and lemons in another form. Here they are on Friday, in crates, and here they are on Monday in "a pyramid." That is, they have become, in that alluded-to time period  — the weekend — a pile of garbage. But the pile is called "a pyramid," A pyramid! We're called upon to think of the grand erections of pharaohs, in comparison to crates from the lowly little character with the silly-sounding occupation "fruiterer."

Are the crates even stacked up? There's the absurd and obviously false notion that the fruit has been improved by whatever it was that went on in that house over the weekend. That absurdity calls upon us to think about the people who arrived and left, the people who ate all that fruit. But of course, they didn't eat it. They drank it. The pulp was extracted for use in alcoholic mixtures, and if the fruit emerged from the weekend as "pulpless halves," then, we may infer, so did the people. We don't hesitate to keep calling them human, yet we see the inaptness of calling the mere rinds "lemons and oranges." Even if you could conceptualize the big pile of rinds as a pyramid, you'd easily perceive it as garbage. Since that perception is easy, we have energy left to think about what is more difficult. Who are these people?

Things done in 2012.

1. Eating ribs in Muskogee.

2. Caught a lost dog.

3. ...

Blog project begun. Not completed.

"Has anyone ever told you that your high-wattage passion for no-collar American food makes you television’s answer to Calvin Trillin, if Mr. Trillin bleached his hair, drove a Camaro and drank Boozy Creamsicles?"

"When you cruise around the country for your show 'Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,' rasping out slangy odes to the unfancy places where Americans like to get down and greasy, do you really mean it? Or is it all an act?"

3 of the many questions in Pete Wells's now-legendary, all-questions review of Guy's American Kitchen, one of 6 "Must-reads of 2012" in the "food" category, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. Wait — actually, there's one non-question, the last sentence: "Thanks."

Also on the enticing list:

"How the Chicken Conquered the World." ("How did the chicken achieve such cultural and culinary dominance? It is all the more surprising in light of the belief by many archaeologists that chickens were first domesticated not for eating but for cockfighting.")

"Here Are Our Five Favorite Food-Cliché Sentences." ("The velvety-smooth bisque's unctuous mouthfeel is lobster-tastic with its toothsome tidbits. To. Die. For.") I prefer the article upon which this writing game is based: a list of food-writing clichés. ("Mouthfeel: The blow-job-iest of all food words.")

"An Oyster in the Storm." ("[O]ysters... once protected New Yorkers from storm surges [and] played a critical role in stabilizing the shoreline from Washington to Boston.")

"I Was a Cookbook Ghostwriter." ("I know a lot of chefs who write their first book themselves. Then they say "I’ll never do that again." It’s just not worth it.")

"The Twee Party." ("Is artisanal Brooklyn a step forward for food or a sign of the apocalypse?")(By the way: 1.  "artisan" is on that banned clichés list noted above, and 2. art is anal.)

"The anti-fragile is beyond the resilient or robust."

"The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the anti-fragile gets better and better." On that theory:

1. Build cities that won’t just withstand super storms, but gain from them....

2. Let banks fail and abandon economic stabilization practices....

3. Eat like a caveman....

4. Workout like an Olympian. Sleep like a college kid....

5. Be a doer not a thinker....

The author... points to the idea that rich countries have high levels of education and literacy. Therefore, there’s the belief that education leads to wealth, when actually the opposite occurs—countries get rich, and then they get educated. Since studies show that education does not equal GDP, to be anti-fragile, first have skills, and then obtain formal education.

An example given is, “The merchant profession has lots of variance. A dentist has very little.” Although parents want a life of stability for their children, Taleb’s theory would put the odds of success on the merchant in an unpredictable world. “College insulates students from downsides,” he says, “but also prevents brilliance.”

In terms of theory, doing is convex and study is concave. Taleb asks, “Can you study chemistry for a formula for the perfect hummus?” In cooking you can get a big gain from an error (adding lemon or garlic) but you only find out by trial-and-error.

Taleb’s philosophy is also hopeful about our country's mediocre global math and science scores, which he believes, “don’t capture the effectiveness of our citizens on the world,” because we are a country of risk-takers and entrepreneurs.

Here's the book: "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder," by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (who, according to the linked article is "a notorious jerk." Well, he's got his own way of talking, which I love. (Just bought the book, too.)

"The Internet's most ostentatiously blissful women — the curators of domesticity on Pinterest, Tumblr, and thousands of female-driven blogs..."

"... occupy a sexless aspirational world, a modern Douglas Sirk fantasy of color-saturated feminine mystique."

So-called “food porn” or “shelter porn” is as close as we get to corporeal abandon. Forget teen sexters posting DIY erotica online. At the forefront of female cyber-exhibitionism, lifestyle blogging barely even acknowledges that physical pleasure exists, never mind its key role in domestic bliss.

"Court keeps alive inmate's quest for pork feast."

Headline at the National Law Journal makes the "quest" sound more absurd than it is. The prisoner, Derek Kramer, is an Odinist and he's suing in pursuit of his rights under the Free Exercise Clause and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.

From the 7th Circuit court's opinion (PDF):

Odinism is a polytheistic religion, which was practiced for millennia in northern Europe before the rise of Christianity and has been revived in recent decades. The practice of Odinism includes group worship ceremonies. Pork is a sacred food to Odinists....

Specifically, Kramer asked for a feast on December 21st for the “High Feast of Yule” and “further requested that HAM/PORK be included in with the FEAST MEAL.”...

Kramer had a larger problem with the group worship at the Green Bay Correctional Institution: The Department of Corrections lumps the "Pagan" religions together for group worship purposes, and he objected to a specifically Wiccan ritual at the service. The demand for an annual pork feast was part of a larger effort to separate the Odinists from the Wiccans.

Kramer's loss on everything but the pork feast (which he hasn't yet won) is based on procedural matters that are probably only interesting to lawyers — unless you know how to be interested in the way procedure can operate to undermine rights.

"In America all cornbread is in the shape of corn, that's how you can tell if it's real. "

So saith Chip Ahoy, who tells a very old joke about learning numbers and gives a recipe bereft of numbers.

And Chip wants me to tell you that "you can get your hands on one of those pans that makes cornbread in the shape of corn... through the Althouse-Amazon portal where you'll find several styles to choose from. He's right. There's this, this, and this extra-fancy one.

"'White turkey chili': That's what President Obama served Mitt Romney for lunch."

"Was this really an intentional (ungracious, gloating, etc.) slap? I'm a paranoid — but it is the sort of thing the hard core politicos I've known would find funny...."

ADDED: Just before Thanksgiving, The Atlantic published this item: "Why Does the White House Always Pardon White Turkeys?"

A "concerned sister" gets press petitioning Hasbro to put boys in commercials for Easy-Bake ovens.

"The toy has long been marketed to girls and made in gender specific colors like pink and purple. The calls for Easy-Bake to take on a more gender-neutral stance has been made numerous times in the past."

Funny that it's still okay to call some colors "gender specific." But progress comes incrementally. The day will come when we get our viral video pleading for the end of stereotyping pink and purple as girl colors.

Meanwhile, in Sweden:

Sweden's top advertising watchdog—known as Reklamombudsmannen, or RO—has taken [Toys "R" Us] to task in recent years for catalogs and ads that showcase girls playing with dolls, scrapbooks, and kitchen and beauty toys and boys with guns, cars, trains and tech gadgets....

The Swedish government has been on the front line of efforts to engineer equality between men and women....

"I think it's amazing that they've actually listened to the consumers," [said a female shopper]. "I didn't used to shop here as much before they changed, because I didn't like the way they separated between girls and boys, pink and blue."

Here's what you get with government pressure (and maybe with You-Tube and Change.org):



Somehow, I don't see that photo bringing in any boys that wouldn't have felt drawn to the activity anyway, but perhaps it's intended to make parents feel and act better when their son tells them that's what he wants.

As for the 13-year-old girl's video:



Was that little boy scripted? Leave him alone, and don't put him on YouTube. It seems to me he's already saying he likes to cook and wants a toy oven and the lack of boys in the ads wasn't perceived as a problem. Hold off on the indoctrination and let him discover his own happiness.

Recycling your turkey-frying oil in Madison, Wisconsin for the greater good of America and the world.

A City of Madison news release:

"We know that there are many people who have lots of oil left over after frying their Thanksgiving turkey," Madison recycling coordinator George Dreckmann said. "We are very excited to be able to offer them a chance to turn that old cooking oil into fuel for cars and trucks in our area."

Dreckmann — a euonym! The Oxford English Dictionary defines "dreck" — from Yiddish drek (German dreck) filth, dregs, dung — as "Rubbish, trash, worthless debris":

1922 J. Joyce Ulysses ii. 491 Farewell. Fare thee well. Dreck!
1947 Horizon Feb. 90 The anonymous countryside littered with heterogeneous dreck.
1965 E. Lacy Double Trouble v. 58 Drek your dolls are!.. I wouldn't stick my customers with such junk!...

Back to the press release:

"Every year thousands of gallons of old cooking oil is tossed in the landfill or flushed down the drain. Since we began our cooking oil program we have recovered over thousands [sic] of cooking oil" Dreckmann said. "Now we can recover this resource and use it to reduce our reliance on foreign oil and cut air pollution."

Cooking oil must be brought to the 1501 W. Badger Rd. or 4602 Sycamore Av....

So hundreds/thousands of citizens with their gallon jugs of used oil will get in their cars and drive to the oil collection site and then various unseen processes will be applied to convert that stuff into something useful. Is there a net benefit to the environment and to the American economy? I don't know, but think how wonderful it is that the nice people of Madison can feel good about themselves (after they went ahead and deep-fried the turkey instead of just roasting it).

Oh, Althouse, why are you so cynical?!  I'm sorry. Let me paint a different picture. The turkey-frying Madisonian hangs gallon jugs of used oil on his handlebars and bikes down South Park Street to Badger Road.

How to make your own Twinkies.

Chip Ahoy explains:

I have a pan made for East coast style hotdog buns. It's like a flat bread with bumps in it the shape of Twinkies. You cut through for individual hotdog buns, like cakes. So each pan makes about 10 hotdog buns.

There's also a Chicago hot dog bun pan, which seems like it might be easier.

Then squish a filling inside using a pastry bag. You poke a hole in it and like a surgeon deposit the filling by squeezing the bag while simultaneously withdrawing the fill tip through the puncture with machine like precision. 

But the chocolate cupcakes are better. With the white curly frosting on top of thin chocolate ganache. Those can be improved too.

The filling. It's like a whipped cream foam. Lemon custard would be better, or banana. But if you're stuck on white foam then real whipped cream. Or you could jab the can of spray whipped cream in there but then you couldn't control the flavor of it.

Now that I'm poking around over at Amazon, I'm seeing the Kaiser Bakeware Basic Tinplate Eclair/Lady Finger Pan and this Eclair Baking Pan and realizing that Twinkies are eclairs (with the chocolate frosting). And check out the Norpro 3964 Cream Canoe Pan With Bonus 9 Piece Decorating Set:

Old fashioned cream canoes and traditional French eclairs are simple to make with Norpro's Cream Canoe Pan. Featuring durable heavy gauge construction, the pan has 8 elongated cups that are the perfect shape for baking eclairs or cream filled sponge cakes - homemade Twinkies, anyone?

Cream canoes! I Google that term and come up with a recipe for "twinkling good vanilla snack cakes" made in your "a filled cake pan (aka cream canoe pan)." The fall of Hostess is a wake-up call: Get twinkling!

ADDED: You can still buy Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpets, which is what we ate in Delaware in the 1950s and 60s. And here are the Tastykake cream-filled cupcakes, which I think you might find similar to the Hostess cupcakes. No white curlicue on top, but I think you might find they taste better.

Extwinktion.

The end of Twinkies.

What will you eat instead?
	Whipped cream right out of the can.
	Sugar, spooned from the bowl, with a side of cream.
	Stick of butter, dabbed in a pile of sugar.
	Soft white bread, slathered in butter, with sugar sprinkled on top.
pollcode.com free polls

That last poll choice was, in fact, a big favorite in my childhood home. We used the expression "sneaking up on Mommy" to refer making and eating what we called sugar sandwiches. They were good! Feel free to use my recipe. Unfortunately, you won't be able to use Wonder Bread for your soft white bread, because that brand is going down too in The Wreck of the Twinksperus.

"Since human blood has more salt than animal blood, once wild animals get the taste..."

".... of salty blood, they do not like other animals like deer."

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 is leaving kids hungry.

Or so they sing:



Link to video via Drudge, who also links to:

'WE ARE HUNGRY'...
WASTED FOOD...
COMPLAINTS MOUNT AGAINST MICHELLE O'S NEW LUNCH MENU

Who gets free school dinner in Madison, Wisconsin?

"Unlike the lunch program, eligibility for a free dinner is based on whether the school qualifies for the program based on school poverty rates, rather than the income level of an individual student. So any student participating in an eligible after-school program can eat the dinner meal for free."

Eligible schools for the dinner program must have at least 50 percent of students qualify as low-income. In Madison last year, 18 elementary schools, seven middle schools and East and La Follette High schools met that requirement.

To be eligible, students must take part in an academically focused after-school program, not an after-school sport. Memorial is looking into setting up a homework club for athletes between practice and the free meal so that they can participate in the free meal.

So, in this affluent city, we are nevertheless so poor, that the federal government is subsidizing free dinner at 18 elementary schools, 7 middle schools, and 2 of the 4 high schools. And it doesn't matter how much money your parents make, you get free dinner if you go to that school and do an after school activity... as long as your activity is not sports.

Yeah, that makes so much sense. What's with discriminating against the students who, after sitting at desks all day, choose a physically active after-school activity? Aren't they more in need of food? What's the connection between this policy and fighting obesity?

"This progressive city is way behind other cities in that regard," [Mayor Paul] Soglin said. "We should not look at this as a frill, or as an experiment, but something citywide."

This is not a frill. It's an imperative... within the progressive agenda... which seems to have to do with increasing dependency of government and inspiring the young to look to the authorities as their nurturing, nourishing mothers.