let it sit a bit

I spent about 2 ½ hours last evening at a talk on food fermentation with Sandor Katz. You might wonder how a person finds himself in that position, but it was by choice. Katz has been a leading light in the fermentation revival as a response to what he calls the clearly failed experiment of the factory food industry. He’s one of those people you rarely (unfortunately) come across who gives you the feeling that a type of life or society is better than others. X once pointed out while we were driving through Vermont with its open spaces, friendly people, and good ideas that it's all “total bullshit. Who’d want to live like this…” She’s funny. After spending the evening with Katz that joke ran through my mind: living like that would be so horrible, wouldn’t it?

The auction for L.’s school last weekend went well. I think the Parents’ Association made about $25k from the event, so that’s a lot of activities to promote. We managed to get all the food done over 10 hours spread across Thursday night, Friday night, and Saturday morning/afternoon. From what I could tell by the number of trips made for new platters of food everyone ate and drank well. By the time I got home Saturday night I was beat; X kept everyone away as I partook of a four hour Sunday nap. I’m just about back to normal.

The kids are vacating the area over the next few days for spring breaks across North America. The Eleven is once again heading down to the Jefferson Pools in Warm Springs for a long weekend; we’re actually stealing Monday off in order to make it a two-night deal.

I was trying to relay this morning how I find this lottery craze being a bit mispresented by the mathletes. I understand the 1-in-175,000,000 data that is based on tickets sold, etc. What I find strange is that there is no caveat to the number, something along the lines of how every person has an equal chance. A long shot chance, but equal nonetheless. Normally we are bombarded by percentages, probabilities, and statistics that are relative to some other input: 1-in-123,000 high school basketball players make it to the NBA; only 1.5% of children from single-parent families on the south side of Chicago will earn a 4-year college degree. These are numbers that are referential to some other variable. They sort of make sense because we can manipulate them in our minds and build a picture. The lottery? Even Steven. Same odds for everyone. My point is, if you want to drop $5 on the lottery have at it because the odds aren’t for or against you in relation to anyone else. There isn’t much in life where that applies. If you’re kid plays high school basketball you don’t tell him, “Listen, Preach, you has just as good a chance as Jimmy of making it to the NBA. The odds are 1-in-123,000 – every kid is equal and has the same chance. In fact, no need to practice or work hard from here on in. Equal is equal.” That would be insane. The lottery? It’s a flyer, have fun.

I have nothing else to say.

deed is done

On Wednesday AiW hosted its quarterly portfolio show at the National Building Museum in D.C. – graduation for the students this quarter is actually in June, but we’ve all wrapped graduation requirements and the show is the final step. The NBM main hall is impressive and the school has it sectioned off with red curtains for the individual student tables. The far end of the above picture is filled with all the graphic design, gaming, advertising, and fashion students. The near end is where the culinary and pastry students who are exhibiting; about 50 of us. The process of getting the final Capstone class completed, and prepping for the show wasn’t much fun. But, on the day, it was quite enjoyable. The museum is open its normal hours so the public can wander through shortly after the judges, employers, family, and instructors complete their rounds. We all prep 48 servings of our product (about 2 oz.) for people to taste and we set up our tables in varying states and degrees of decoration. Mine was fairly straightforward with a black-and-white service. I did spanakopita and tzatzki as a sample of my menu; many thanks were in order from the vegetarians who showed up, as well as those that started with the baking/pastry displays (more than half the grads) and needed something savory. As expected, a huge hit with dishes that I’m well versed on. My restaurant plan, in three sentences:

A vegetarian, communal seating, Mediterranean-based restaurant serving various fixed menus for dinner service. A rotating and seasonal menu that’s published online three weeks in advance and your ‘menu selection’ is based on the service for that evening. On Monday it may be a five-course Greek dinner, Tuesday is Moroccan, Wednesday is Spanish, Thursday is Egyptian, Friday is Italian.

It’s an idea that would work in a large city like D.C., but would struggle in a smaller area. I am, after all, telling you that the set menu for the night is all that is on offer. We’d have 130 items but focus on only five for a given day: better focus, fewer workers, better food.

One last item on the culinary world of students (and instructors) before I depart the arena. There is a lot of talk among students and instructors that healthier eating, better products (local), and vegetarian options are on the rise, and in their plans. But, based on my experiences it’s a nothing but hot air. Eat and cook as you please, and cooking and eating at home is always better than anything, but the talk of better and local food is simply talk. When you walk the exhibits, and listen to student ideas for their dream restaurants, it’s little different than meat, meat, meat, baking, baking, and baking. There is still a long way to go before we are at a point where putting a risotto on a menu meets more than the mandatory ‘veg’ option. Take that for what it’s worth. Maybe I can take the last of my money and go to Ireland to learn more cooking.

The last cooking battle, and it’s been quite a week, is finishing the catering for L.’s school auction on Saturday. We’ve planned for awhile and finally started the prep last night. I managed to make it a fully Greek and Italian set up this year for the food. (It’s not a sit down dinner, more of a strolling, eating, and drinking configuration): spanakopita triangles, tyropita, small grilled lamb chops, gigantes, tzatziki, pita, and baklava on the Greek side; two raviolis, three sauces (smoked tomato, basil/arugula pesto, and alfredo), grilled beef skewers, and biscotti on the other. Oh, I also broke the bank for them with six cases of wine – a little over the top. It’ll be nice and raises loads of money for the school. I consider the wine to be a wallet lubricant. I’ll sneak out from my cave tomorrow night and get some pictures.

drawing on life

At least twice on my evening commute home I’ve come across this older gentleman who spends five or ten minutes sketching various commuters on the Orange Line. Both times he’s shown a process that involves finishing whatever he hasn’t read in that day’s Post before pulling out a started sketch from the morning, digging his pen from his jacket, and spending about three stops adding some the evening commuters to fill out his morning scene. When his stop comes he takes one last glance around at the people, folds the sketch inside his newspaper, and heads home – hopefully to a warm house and small dinner with his wife.

He reminds me a lot of Cub, someone who wasn’t a grandparent, nor uncle (actually my second cousin), but who was a very important part of my life. This man is about the same age as Cub was when I was younger – as if I’ve grown and aged but he’s stayed forever 65. Cub was an artist who commuted via bus for about billion years to his work, drawing maps I believe, for Cook County in Chicago. He’d spent earlier parts of his life as a traveling musician and troubadour at Wrigley Field. He’d spent a good part of his life helping to raise and entertain my mother. He spent what seemed his whole life with Juanda in Chicago – at least the life I can remember. I always imagined him sitting on the bus heading north on Sheridan Drive in the evenings, doodling a bit, before getting off at W. Melrose and walking the block-and-half home…probably whistling. He was like that; a happy man in a happy life.


I’d meant to post earlier this month on the 25th year of Juanda’s passing; Cub left us about a decade ago, but I didn’t have the heart. Last night's encounter was a nice reminder that maybe some goofy kid comes to visit important people in his life, here D.C., every summer. He probably wanders around the city planning a life far into the future. He’s probably pretty happy with that…

life, or otherwise

I’ve listened to my share of This American Life. I’d consider myself a fan; I also saw Mike Daisey’s show The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs when it first ran here in D.C. about a year ago. The apparently volatile combination of the two on an episode of TAL has turned both his one-man monologue and TAL into strange bedfellows.

First, it’s clear that Daisey used a considerable amount of embellishment/fibbing/lying when creating his script. In particular, Ira Glass and crew question the following (we know this from the Retraction episode last weekend): he didn’t go to 10 factories, he went to either 3 or 5; he didn’t talk to anyone who was poisoned by some type of industrial cleaner (though admittedly, that did happen); he didn’t talk to any underage kids (Daisey maintains that he did talk to a 13-year old); and that there were no guards with guns at the Apple factory he visiting in China. As theater, Daisey should admit fully that his monologue is taken from his visit, news reports, and Apple reports. He should simply say that in theater the picture he is weaving is true even if these things didn’t happen directly to him. As he attempted to point out in last week’s episode, he was creating the arc of a story. Unfortunately, for both TAL and Daisey, this is all pretty sour; TAL will survive because it’s a stronger brand; Daisey may not.

About TAL – Ira Glass and crew, who readily admitted twice during the last episode that they were wrong to not kill the story, really come off as complete assholes. If their decision was to kill the first episode, but then begin to investigate Daisey and his facts, I consider that fair game. But Glass’ repeated admissions to not upholding the vetting and fact-checking of TAL for this story rings hallow as they simply grill Daisey and his work. Instead of simply starting any episode with a retraction that could have filled 3-5 minutes, they decided that the better path was to try to get Daisey to defend himself, which he couldn’t, and put that out there as some sort of detraction (an hour long detraction…) from their error. No matter what Glass says, it was a purely vindictive move; a move he knew that Daisey would take a bite at if offered.

When Glass finally enters part III of the episode and brings in the experts from the NYTimes, what we hear is that the arc of the story is correct: the long work hours, the deaths and injuries (via explosions and failure to stop them), the bad living conditions, etc. What Daisey created via the story was true – and Ira’s NYTimes sleuth confirmed that by explaining to Ira the conditions and how they relate to what we as Americans consider harsh. That was the story.

I haven’t listened to the initial episode they aired with Daisey, but I saw the show. I’ll go back and listen to TAL’s story in a minute. But, what I didn’t hear at all in the Retraction episode was an overview of how in the monologue Daisey takes you from his fucking absolute love of Apple products to the point where he has to decide whether those conditions supported by American consumers, in fact created by American consumers (per Ira’s NYTimes pal), are worth the harsh conditions of Apples factories overseas. And in that production, Daisey did a fantastic job.

Both Daisey and TAL are on the hook for this 15 minutes of fame. Since I consider TAL to be a story-weaving show, regardless of Ira Glass’ declaration of journalistic integrity, Daisey had woven a story. If TAL is seriously going to stand tall and declare that they’ve never embellished a story for emotional effect then I’d be very surprised. What this all stinks of to me is TAL using the heft of their history to use Daisey as an excuse for their failed process, and to simply exact revenge for what they consider a hoodwinking.

I can defend Daisey’s story, but he’s a bit harder to stand up for without questions. I understand the theatrical aspect of the monologue, I arrive at the same place he does at its conclusion, and I wish he’d be more forthright in the details. But, I won’t crucify him for it. Ira Glass will, and that is more bothersome than the fact that Daisey’s question as posed is actually correct.

use the force

There’s a fairly long trail of tears concerning school lunches in America. I don’t need to rehash those details here, I’m sure everyone is capagoogle of finding that data.

One of the massive problems with my school is that they prey on young folks who want to learn cooking and the industry, but can ill afford to pay the tuition cost in their post-graduate lives. As a ‘private’, for-profit school (owned at least partly by Goldman Sachs), the Ai umbrella of schools charge an exorbinent amount of money for a two-year culinary arts degree: somewhere around $64,000, not including housing if you are taking 14 credits per quarter with labs fees, etc. That’s an expensive degree for a career field that will start you out at $10/hour. I could send L. to a lot of high-end universities for $32k per year in tuition.

How about this: some program that offers newly minted culinary graduates a partnership with schools districts in northern Virginia? Between Arlington and Fairfax counties there are only about a gazillions public schools that might be interested in a program that provides them qualified culinarians for enhancing their school meals. Stage two is that the graduates work for X number of years while their loans are frozen. When they complete three years of employment, the loan is paid off, or forgiven (or amnestied – just to rile up the conservatives).

It wouldn’t be easy, but if you think about a 20- or 21-year old grad (two years, post-H.S.) entering the FCPS system at US-10 to US-12 pay, then a three- or four-year commitment isn’t horrible – they can be done at between 23-25 years old, have experience and no debt. Part of that pay would in include health insurance for a full-time employee who’d make about $44k per year from the county. Based on a wage in their hands of $35k per year (remember, no loan payments), there’s $9,000 per year that goes to the program, with the remainder being covered by the county, state, federal government, or forgiven directly from the school. If all four combined, each would ‘contribute’ between $1,750 and $2,250 per year – a pittance, really. What the schools get are employees who may stick with the district for years; the students get to work off their loans/tuition; and kids get food that isn’t complete shit. Truth be told, based on how huge schools function it would be a long road. They’d have to buy in to renegotiating food service contracts so they’d have fresh ingredients. They’d have to cook from scratch. They’d have to menu plan. They’d need cost control. But, as much as I might badmouth certain aspectsof my school, some of the top grads who’ve paid attention are capable of doing all those things. The hope would be that they wouldn’t be tucked off in a corner, angry, mad, and underutilized for three years.

If I dug around I could find evidence of contracts for school lunches that include nothing but ingredients made fresh every day. A betting man will say that the costs involved to districts is either equal to, or just more, than the crap contracts they have in schools now.

And, for those that think kids won’t eat good food, asks X about her position on kids and eating.

And for parents who think by giving your kids only good food at school is some violation of your constitutional rights? Zip it. You’re only embarrassing yourselves….

brackets

I sense my withdrawal program is complete.

Even though I’ve watched probably 5-6 periods of Caps’ hockey since Thanksgiving, it’s a foreign thing to me now. I still know I’d enjoy hockey – as sport – but I’ve never been a watching-for-watching sake kind of person. Being that the brackets are everywhere today, and I have no idea about college basketball, I feel nothing. The truth of the matter is that I was never going to top my 1984 bracket victory – back when we still filled them out on paper and manually tallied the scores each round.

Since we are on the topic of the bracket, and more widely the NCAA, let me get down in writing something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit since last year. I refuse to believe that the NCAA survives this decade; I’d prefer it to disappear in the next five years. There are two factors that contribute to my hatred, and predicted demise: it’s an arbitrarily concocted, wholy illegal band of jackasses. And, secondly, the member schools have no need for the NCAA and their illegal band of jackasses. The NCAA, for whatever its history may be, is an association that has zero legal authority in this world. They don’t have ‘subpoena’ authority, they don’t have any legal basis for anything they do, they conduct closed, mysterious investigations using shitty fact patterns, and they punish/sentence players or schools based on some concocted scale of ‘imprisonment’. Why any school or university would voluntarily agree to this stuff is beyond me. One of the great cases was a kid named Jeremy Bloom who played football at Colorado and was also a professional, freestyle skier – and the NCAA came down on his football career as if they had some grand moral compass. As for the need for having the NCAA around flexing it’s smoothbrain tactics: the schools don’t need them. The two biggest (public) functions that NCAA performs are the ‘bowl season’ and March Madness. As for the bowls, the BCS (which rules the championship landscape) and it’s not linked in any true way to the NCAA. The mass amounts of money and selection process are done beyond the NCAAs reach. The tournament isn’t anything special that can’t be recreated. What? Someone can’t handle the logistics of scheduling venues for regional games years in advance? I’m pretty sure it could be handled.

At some point the damn will break and it’ll take only one, bold, BCS conference team. They will be the martyr for sure, and may pay a heavy price to open the departures, but they’ll be hailed in the end. Maybe an entire BCS conference will agree to walk away. Once either of those things occur the house of cards will disappear in a blink of the eye.

Don’t confuse my disgust of the NCAA with any type of support for college ‘scholarship’ athletics. I’d just as soon be rid of them all.

russian bear

I meant to add this about a month ago. Every year just before the Holidays, the founder/headmaster at L’s school dresses up as Santa and takes at least one picture with every student. It tends to not be the posed “Santa in a chair” situation. He’s also a profession photographer (you can see his work here) and has a studio set up in his offices at the school. L. was supporting her friends in a Russian-themed exhibition for her European History class at the end of the semester, hence the Russian looks and drawn moustaches.

mind the gap

I have no idea why I’ve read the Washington Examiner. Well, I do. I saw the headline about commuting costs and grabbed a copy to see if it addressed my ongoing advice/rant to people about the costs of living, proximities, and the ‘walking dead’-like life beyond the beltway. At the same time, I wanted some numbers that might enlighten my fellow Metro riders when the endless debates –revived every time there’s a WMATA budget announcement – about fare hikes explode. As a preface: I think WMATA is probably one of the most poorly run organizations you can find. The safety issues, infrastructure failures, and big step increases in fares, for less service, are problematic. But, you could live in Birmingham, Alabama or Nashville, Tennessee and be paying more to commute on average than you do here.

According to the story, the average monthly cost for commuting in the DC area is about $12,644 per year. I’m assuming that for a household and not a single person. If you’re young, single and living near a Metro station, even one beyond District bounds, you’re paying about $1,700 a year to commute in and out of the city at rush hour, per working adult. Are the delays? Does L’Enfant sometimes smell of fish? Are tourists a problem? Yes to all. Then again, you don’t have to deal with traffic, the system can function far better than cars in bad weather, and you’re paying about a quarter the cost of the average car living knucklehead. Ask those Leesburg commuters about that 16 hour hell-commute from two winters ago. You’re saving $9,000 per year just on commuting - $750 per month that can go to rent or a mortgage payment. This was all quite obvious even before the article, but people didn’t want to hear it. I had fellow students (young ones) who commuted 25-40 miles per day to go to class – aside from their work schedule – because the horrid suburban garden apartment they are sharing with a little known, trashy roommate was $150 cheaper per month. That ‘benefit’ disappeared when you drove your first 200 miles each month – or three days of class. Add in parking and the time you’ve wasted and this deal went south the moment you signed your lease.

I wondered what our commuter financial hit came to so I did some maths. According to AAA’s driving costs, which include things like insurance, maintenance, gas, etc., it costs us about $.78 per mile to drive Galactica. X runs 19 miles per day (20 days per month) for $300. L rides the WMATA bus to school for $60 per month. My walk/bus/Metro/bus/walk commute is $200 per month. The boys walk their bags of bones to the school bus everyday for nothing. Even taking into account L’s ‘commute’, we only come to about $560 per month / $6,700 per year. I can’t imagine how commuting sucks away the cash for those paying twice what we pay. There are no doubt there are those who are yanking that average up and area paying upwards of $18,000 per year just for commuting. And, quite truthfully, since my company gives me $200 for commuting each month (straight cash, no taxes), and L.’s commute shouldn’t really count, we are at something like $3,600 per year.

I’m glad we staying in our area when we bought. I think we make lots of money, but another $9,000 needed for commuting would be pretty difficult to pull off.