Pinter-Testing the Paleo Watermelon Cake

Pinterest's 'Everything' screenshot, May 9, 2013

 A MONTH or two ago I finally launched a Pinterest account. For those who do not know what Pinterest is, it's a website where everyone who is registered can assemble picture boards full of photos which link to or simply show recipes, weight loss tips, exercise regimens, survivalist equipment, loving photos of rifles and other firearms, professional posed baby photos, gardening advice, aggressive humour, cartoons, crafts and millions of wedding planning tips. It has been around since March 2010. In 2012 it had some 11.7 million registered users.* Amongst others, the wives of the two candidates in the last U.S. presidential elections, magazines like Martha Stewart Living, and museums from the Prado in Madrid to the Museum of Cinema in Texas run Pinterest accounts.

* "Pinterest" [Wikipedia]

Looking at Pinterest from a serious critical perspective there is a lot that is neither entertaining nor very healthy ('thinspo' in which young girls are encouraged to become thin enough to develop a gap between their thighs, the obsession with weddings, racist 'jokes,' and supposed medical advice which is not reputably sourced, etc.).

It is a climate of haphazard fact-checking. A harmless example: Some 'pins' which often reappear on Pinterest due to popularity are inspiration quotes which are misattributed to arbitrary dead celebrities. For instance, 'Oscar Wilde' : "You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear."

TO REMEDY this empirical Wild West in a small way, I have decided to try out, research and — if necessary — debunk an assortment of Pins. There are many tempting notions, e.g. 'Exercises to increase drainage of lymphatic fluid and get perky boobs,' but let's begin with Paleo recipes.

***

THE 'PIN'

The Paleo Watermelon Cake derives its name from the 'Paleo diet,' which attempts to reestablish the food spectrum common in what used to be called the Stone Age. This time period covers some 2.6 million to 10,000 years ago,* before the advent of broadscale agriculture.

* "Paleolithic" [Wikipedia]

THE OVERVIEW

THE RECIPE I found — through Pinterest — is from the website Paleo Cupboard. The cake's ingredients are a watermelon, coconut milk, vanilla extract, honey, seasonal fruit, and almonds. It asks you to carve the rind off a watermelon so that you have a cylinder, to coat it in coconut whipping cream, and to decorate it with almonds around the sides and with berries or kiwis or other fruit above. So there is no baking involved, and indeed sugar and flour are anathema to the Paleo diet.

Watchdogs on Capitol Hill

There was nothing funny about the 2010 General Services Administration conference in Las Vegas that featured a clown, a mind reader and an overall taxpayer price tag of $820,000.

— Rep. Mike Coffman and Rep. Jackie Speier, March 18, 2013

Opinions may differ on that statement; in fact, more than one 'segment' of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart has made comedic capital out of the GSA's spree. But it is undeniable that the United States has an enormous public debt* and that wasteful spending within the federal government only makes things worse.

* Over $9 trillion according to the 2011 CIA World Factbook, under the definition of public debt as 'the total of all government borrowings less repayments that are denominated in a country's home currency." [Wikipedia]

***

THIS MONDAY, Reps. Jackie Speier and Mike Coffman wrote an op-ed for Politico to announce a Congressional Watchdog Caucus, which hopes to ease matters for federal employees and others who want to report misuses of funds and other problems within government.

For anyone who wants to report, the route is complex. There is more than one office (or, watchdog) which undertakes investigations and passes on preexisting records to those who request them.

A Verse on Squash for Nowruz

Cucumis sativus
Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé: Flora von Deutschland,
Österreich und der Schweiz (1885)
Via Wikimedia Commons

IN HONOUR of Nowruz, the Zoroastrian feast day which celebrates the beginning of spring, here is an Iranian poem.

It echoes the Aesopian fable which is known in French as "Le chêne et le roseau," in English as "The Oak and the Reed."

But Nasir Khusraw, the 11th-century Iranian poet who was of course not Zoroastrian considering that Islam had replaced that faith, wrote it in qasida verse. It was collected in his Divan.

HAVE you heard? A squash vine grew beneath a towering tree.

In only twenty days it grew and spread and put forth fruit.

Of the tree it asked: 'How old are you? How many years?'

Replied the tree: 'Two hundred it would be, and surely more.'

The squash laughed and said: 'Look, in twenty days, I've done more than you; tell me, why are you so slow?'

The tree responded: 'O little squash, today is not the day of reckoning between the two of us.'

'Tomorrow, when winds of autumn howl down on you and me, then shall it be known for sure which one of us is the real man!'

(Divan, 256)

نشنیده‌ای که زیر چناری کدو بنی بر رست و بردوید برو بر به روز بیست؟

پرسید از آن چنار که تو چند ساله‌ای؟ --- گفتا دویست باشد و اکنون زیادتی است

خندید ازو کدو که من از تو به بیست روز --- بر تر شدم بگو تو که این کاهلی ز چیست

او را چنار گفت که امروز ای کدو --- با تو مرا هنوز نه هنگام داوری است

فردا که بر من و تو وزد باد مهرگان ---

N.B.: The diction of the translation drives me a bit nuts, but de gustibus.

"Squash" is a noisome word in this context because it often refers to species which were imported to the 'Old World' from the Americas during the western Renaissance period; in fact the very word is derived from Narragansett according to the ITP Nelson Canadian Dictionary on the table beside me. A German translation I came across has کدو = kadú = pumpkin, but 'gourd' might be accurate, too.

***

"Nasir Khusraw: A Portrait of the Persian Poet, Traveller and Philosopher" [Institute of Ismaili Studies], by Dr Alice C Hunsberger
"Nasir Khusraw" [Wikipedia]

[Edited for brevity and style, August 2023]

Misanalysis

IT is ten years yesterday since the US under the Bush administration invaded Iraq. To celebrate the anniversary, Wired published a column on its website by Nada Bakos, a CIA analyst at the outset of the Iraq War. Under pressure from Vice-President Dick Cheney and his associate "Scooter" Libby to make the case that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was linked to al Qaeda, she writes that she and her colleagues even rehearsed with her superior how to reply to the questions of the administration.

Photo: A September 2002 antiwar demonstration in London.
By William M. Connolley, (CC BY-SA 3.0) Licence. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Pope-Watching on Twitter

AFTER black smoke poured from the Vatican chimney last evening, and again this morning, the sun reached its apex above clouded skies amidst continuing uncertainty far beneath it over the identity of the new Pope.

Father Federico Lombardi passed the time describing to journalists the cartridges which are used to create the smoke. When "asked if the smoke harmed the Michelangelo frescoes on the walls of the Sistine Chapel, or the cardinals' lungs," he could reassure them with a negative.

Even outside of the press briefing, journalists were still assembled, thronging around St. Peter's Basilica like worker bees around their queen:

Source: @DianeSawyer

THE Guardian's liveblog helpfully noted that Barça (Barcelona FC) has played three games during papal conclaves, and that they've won each of them 4-0. Yesterday it was AC Milan which bit the dust. Other Catholics and non-Catholics were also celebrating the conclave and preparing for the final decision in their own particular, if untraditional ways: e.g. displays of irreverent wit on Twitter, and this:

Source: @thepioneerwoman

Then came the grand moment in which the tide of smoke turned:

White smoke!

proclaimed the Huffington Post at 6:06 p.m. UTC. The cry amplified through different newspaper websites, television broadcasts, and blogs, in Italian and Portuguese and Greek and Spanish and all sorts of other languages.


THEN came the seemingly interminable wait until the name of the pope would be given.

A Catholic's Swansong

This noon, Pope Benedict XVI spoke his last angelus address in St. Peter's, in front of a crowd of around 200,000. Thursday will be his last day in office. This is his text, which I have taken (hopefully legally) in an English translation from the Vatican Radio's website:

***

DEAR brothers and sisters!

On the second Sunday of Lent, the liturgy always presents us with the Gospel of the Transfiguration of the Lord. The evangelist Luke places particular emphasis on the fact that Jesus was transfigured as he prayed: his is a profound experience of relationship with the Father during a sort of spiritual retreat that Jesus lives on a high mountain in the company of Peter, James and John , the three disciples always present in moments of divine manifestation of the Master (Luke 5:10, 8.51, 9.28).


Photo: Altar bells, image by Eu. Hansen (2009)
via Wikimedia Commons, (CC BY-SA 3.0 Licence)

War and Peace on the Автомагистраль

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

An insight into the dashboard cameras which are in fashion amongst Russian car drivers, which I am posting for entertainment purposes only.

From The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, February 19, 2013

[Edited August 2023 for style]

Happy Birthday, Ansel Adams

"The Tetons and the Snake River" (1942) Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.
National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the National Park Service. (79-AAG-1)
(Licencing: Public domain because it was taken while Ansel Adams was working for the US government.) 

More photos can be found at Wikimedia Commons. Above photo via Wikipedia.

Tip of the hat to Library of Congress (@librarycongress) on Twitter.

Ten Years After: The Path to Iraq and 'Hubris'

On Monday (9 p.m. ET/PT), a new MSNBC documentary will investigate the deceptions which the Bush administration used to go to war in Iraq. It derives from the book Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (2006), by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.*

For an article in Mother Jones, Corn describes doubts which prominent Bush administration figureheads held at the time, revealing this scene in the film about former Secretary of State Colin Powell:

[. . .] Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff at the time, recalls the day Congress passed a resolution authorizing Bush to attack Iraq:

Powell walked into my office and without so much as a fare-thee-well, he walked over to the window and he said, "I wonder what'll happen when we put 500,000 troops into Iraq and comb the country from one end to the other and find nothing?" And he turned around and walked back in his office. And I—I wrote that down on my calendar—as close for—to verbatim as I could, because I thought that was a profound statement coming from the secretary of state, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

Wilkerson also notes that Powell had no idea about the veracity of the intelligence he cited during that UN speech: "Though neither Powell nor anyone else from the State Department team intentionally lied, we did participate in a hoax."

In March there will be the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

"Hubris": New Documentary Reexamines the Iraq War "Hoax" [Mother Jones], by David Corn (February 16, 2013) [Read February 17, 2013]

* Update: David Corn, of Mother Jones, has just won a Polk Award for his reporting in 2012, specifically for the '47% video' starring Mitt Romney at a fundraiser. ("LIU Announces 2012 George Polk Awards in Journalism," February 17, 2013 [Long Island University])

Follow-Up: Mandatory Minimums for Drug Trafficking?

To recapitulate part of what I wrote in November:

It was in New York State where the Rockefeller Drug Laws were passed into practice in 1973. Under these laws, anyone who was convicted of selling, for instance, 60 grams of marijuana would have to be sentenced to a minimum of fifteen years.

This measure was also used in future drug laws like the federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act.

All of this legislation revived (as far as I have gathered) the mandatory minimum sentences which had been removed from federal law three years earlier.

Since then, 'mandatory minimums' have been seen as a problem because they force the courts to imprison convicted criminals for excessively long periods of time — without adequately redressing, or even exacerbating, crime rates.

*

Forty years after the legislation, the American radio broadcasting company NPR (together with the North Country Public Radio's Prison Time Media Project) is running a series on the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Today it described the experience of G. Prendes, a native of New York State who was affected by the Drug Laws after he was arrested at the age of 23 and then jailed, convicted, and imprisoned for a fifteen-year term.

ACCORDING to the article,

in 1977, he made the big mistake that put him in the crosshairs of the new laws: He agreed to help with a drug deal, selling a pound of cocaine upstate in Rochester, N.Y. It was a sting.

[. . . The former prisoner,] Prendes was a first-time offender, and no one saw him as a kingpin drug dealer.

*

The effects were harsh for him individually but they also victimized a broader sphere: