Like my mother, I say I'm reading history when what I'm really doing is reading old issues of the NY Times. Today's readings included two bell weathers of economic tidings. From February 5th, Vanity’s Downturn: Botox Use, and Allergan Sales, Dip reported that facial fillers were down 8.8%, breast implants were down 12%, and botox injections were down 3% for year over year quarterly sales. This is taken as a sure sign of a decrease in disposable income.
As someone who sense of style is notable by its absence, even more fascinating was learning that Allergan, whose main business is eye care pharmaceuticals, will be introducing Latisse an "eyelash growth drug". My immediate thought was that this might be the next Pretty Feet, the product which put Jerry Della Femina on the map. (A web search shows that the product, now known as Pretty Feet and Hands, is still on the market.) (The pro forma sarcastic comments are now inserted: Now in addition to worrying about the economy, health insurance, violence and locusts, women will also have to worry about the thickness of their lashes.)
And if you needed additional confirmation about the tragic state of the economy, there it was in black and white in today's NY Times: More Artworks Sell in Private in Slowdown. Private sales are increasing for a number of reasons. From the sellers side a private sale hides the seller's need for money and loss of face if an auctioned item gets not bids or if the selling price is low. Auction houses on the other hand charge less for private sales, but that is balanced by reducing expenses by avoiding price guarantees, advertising, insurance, and the logistics of shipping and storage.
It's a different world from my college days when a Personality Poster was all you needed to decorate your room. You knew the student had class and money if the poster was framed instead of just tacked to the wall. (Diverted by the thought, I stumbled around the web trying to locate the iconic W.C. Fields poster: "Never give a sucker an even break". It was offered for sale for $99 plus $6 shipping on ioffer.com. That the offer had no takers since November of 2008 indicates that it might be overpriced. maybe the poster is available in a store. Should real, traditional, you walk-in-the-door store now be preceded by the retronym: "brick and mortar"?)
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Friday, April 10, 2009
I Make Matzos Balls (Everyone Survives)
I promised my brother I'd make matzo balls for Passover. After many years of experimentation we found the "best" recipe, that is best by the normal culinary standard of uniformity of texture and taste, to be the recipe on the side of the box. All we had in the house was a canister of whole grain matzo meal which did not have a recipe for matzo balls on the side. The previous year my father had a family friend buy regular matzo meal rather than use the whole grain stuff so the whole grain stuff was at least one lunar year old.
Where was I going to find a recipe? I turned to the web of course. (A more traditional approach would have been to go to go to a supermarket and look at boxes of matzo meal.) In the course of searching I learned that Manischewitz revolutionized matzo by inventing machines which could satisfy the rabbinical strictures (I believe that to be kosher for Passover the dough has to be be baked within 18 minutes of mixing), and that Streit's sold their lower East Side bakery in 2007, but I had a hard time finding a recipe. (In these times "hard means a web search which takes more than a minute.)
There were recipes for tri-colored matzo (green colored with pureed spinach, yellow made with turmeric and a red using tomato paste), using matzo with veal, for frying fish, etc. I passed on every recipe which promised "light and fluffy" matzo balls. My brother and I like matzo which my brother describes as aldente. I describe my preference as soft on the outside and rubbery on the inside. (Guess which one of us works in the food industry.)
Matzo Balls III (jewishfood-list.com) got my attention:
The recipe promised to serve 5. That sealed the deal: we expected 5 for seder.
A background in chemistry and biochemistry prepares one to following recipes, but not necessarily for creative cookery. I almost followed the recipe. The list of ingredients contain a "dash pepper", but the recipe doesn't describe when or even if to add the pepper. (Maybe the pepper was to throw at people who annoy the cook or to ward off evil spirits.)
Matzo balls are a subset of genus dumpling. To my embarrassment, I was surprised that the melted margarine solidified when I added it to the dry ingredients. Getting a uniform mix of the dry ingredients and the margarine provided a good aerobic workout.
I stored the matzo balls in the refrigerator, my brother used the turkey broth frozen since Thanksgiving to make the soup, and we all got to weigh in on their matzo ball preferences. Much to my relief nobody complained about the matzo balls and, as the heading states, everybody survived.
My brother conducted two services: Michael Rubiner's "The Two-Minute Haggadah" and then his own service (complete with seder plate orange) from the Maxwell House haggadah. I might have been tired. It might have been the realization of the futility of some other reason, but I refrained from complaining that the erudition of rabbinic sages is a cover for delusional numerology.
So passed another Passover.
Where was I going to find a recipe? I turned to the web of course. (A more traditional approach would have been to go to go to a supermarket and look at boxes of matzo meal.) In the course of searching I learned that Manischewitz revolutionized matzo by inventing machines which could satisfy the rabbinical strictures (I believe that to be kosher for Passover the dough has to be be baked within 18 minutes of mixing), and that Streit's sold their lower East Side bakery in 2007, but I had a hard time finding a recipe. (In these times "hard means a web search which takes more than a minute.)
There were recipes for tri-colored matzo (green colored with pureed spinach, yellow made with turmeric and a red using tomato paste), using matzo with veal, for frying fish, etc. I passed on every recipe which promised "light and fluffy" matzo balls. My brother and I like matzo which my brother describes as aldente. I describe my preference as soft on the outside and rubbery on the inside. (Guess which one of us works in the food industry.)
Matzo Balls III (jewishfood-list.com) got my attention:
"I use a little over a cup of matzo meal but be careful, too much turns them into 'sinkers.'"
The recipe promised to serve 5. That sealed the deal: we expected 5 for seder.
A background in chemistry and biochemistry prepares one to following recipes, but not necessarily for creative cookery. I almost followed the recipe. The list of ingredients contain a "dash pepper", but the recipe doesn't describe when or even if to add the pepper. (Maybe the pepper was to throw at people who annoy the cook or to ward off evil spirits.)
Matzo balls are a subset of genus dumpling. To my embarrassment, I was surprised that the melted margarine solidified when I added it to the dry ingredients. Getting a uniform mix of the dry ingredients and the margarine provided a good aerobic workout.
I stored the matzo balls in the refrigerator, my brother used the turkey broth frozen since Thanksgiving to make the soup, and we all got to weigh in on their matzo ball preferences. Much to my relief nobody complained about the matzo balls and, as the heading states, everybody survived.
My brother conducted two services: Michael Rubiner's "The Two-Minute Haggadah" and then his own service (complete with seder plate orange) from the Maxwell House haggadah. I might have been tired. It might have been the realization of the futility of some other reason, but I refrained from complaining that the erudition of rabbinic sages is a cover for delusional numerology.
So passed another Passover.
Friday, April 03, 2009
"Hey kids! Let's put on a show!"
I was asked to help one of the bigger cheeses with his presentation on the current economic turmoil ramifications for higher education. I've enjoyed working with him in the past because he freely admit his limited understanding of technology, but he knows what he wants, has a decent feel for what technology can do, and has an excellent sense of organization. By this last I mean that he'll find references and statistics and knows how to arrange them in the presentation. I do the dog work, make a few stylistic suggestions which are usually taken, and, in this case, had two slides I suggested included in the presentation. We used PowerPoint in the past and this was no different except we used a newer version.
As deadlines approaches there are always modifications, but these never even rise to the level of an imposition: moving a few slides around or maybe deleting or adding a few slides a day or two before the actual presentation. Anyone in a similar position will recognize this as nothing unusual or onerous. What was gruesome was the videos.
Jumping to the chase: the presentation worked flawlessly on multiple laptops and desktops whether run from hard drive, CD or USB key. On his Lenovo X61 notebook videos froze. Because we weren't as sharp as we should have been and because of certain initial problems with the videos we didn't realize that the problem was the notebook not the videos. We tried to contact the conference's technical contact because it wasn't clear from their instructions whether presentations had to be run on their equipment or whether we'd be allowed to use our own. Could the presentation be on a CD or USB key? Our preference would have been to FedEx a CD with the presentation to someone at the conference who would let us know if there were any problems, but the conference's technical contact didn't get back to us until the day before the conference.
(Because of an ugly incident at a conference we hosted many years ago we've been exceptionally sensitive about these things. People who indicate that they don't need anything special don't realize that their standard company issued PC includes a special sauce.)
Something no one anticipated sucked several other members of my department into the project. In desperation some proposed converting the whole presentation to Flash.
My throw-in-the-towel solution was to send him to the conference with the old laptop they had around his office (the same laptop I used to develop the presentation) and his X61 which he used for business. When I say old I mean a laptop with no Windows key on the keyboard, a Y key which is askew, and a defective left Ctrl key. (The right Ctrl key works.) My guy's attitude is great: if he won't be embarrassed during the presentation he's satisfied. (They may kick sand in his face because he's schlepping an old laptop, but as long as the presentation doesn't blow up he'll be satisfied.) The conference organizers might not have liked it, but it was unlikely that they'd tell the keynote speaker that he couldn't use his own laptop.
That said, he knew humor was needed to leaven the steady drumbeat of grim economic news. Video clips seemed the most natural.The first was a clip from Horsefeathers, the Marx Brothers' farce, where Groucho deciding that it is too expensive to maintain both the college and the football team decides to tear down the college. Where will the student's sleep? "They'll sleep where they always sleep: in the classroom." (Always mindful of running afoul of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) the Horsefeathers clip came from a VHS tape.)
Then there was a scene from Damn Yankees. He wanted to introduce the clip by saying "Nobody likes times like these, except..." and then the clip of Appplegate (the Devil) singing about the "Good Old Days". (The clip included scenes of people jumping from windows on Wall Street. )
What we all felt would be a natural conclusion was a clip with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland saying "Hey kids! Let's put on a show!" A quick web search turned up an einsiders.com review indicated that it was in Girl Crazy in which Rooney and Garland put on a show to save Cody College. As fast as you could whip out a credit card the box set was ordered on a Friday and delivered to me on Monday. (I did say the presentation was for someone at the top.)
After watching over 6 hours of the dynamic duo (Babes in Arms, Babes on Broadway, and Strike Up the Band in addition to the aforementioned Girl Crazy), I stand before you to say that "Hey kids! Let's put on a show!" may join the ranks of "Play it again Sam" or "Alas poor Yorick. I knew him well." - lines which everyone remembers, but were never said. The line may exist in an Andy Hardy film, but not in the versions of the films in the boxed set. (What did you do today? I watched 4 Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland films to find 5 seconds of non-existent dialogue. Three other people scanned the films looking for the line.)
We tried to cobble three snippets from Girl Crazy) to show a radio news flash of the legislature's intention of closing Cody College due to a lack of enrollment, Mickey and Judy suggesting to the dean that they put the college on the map with a rodeo show, and the scene where they dump a sackful of applications on the dean's desk as Judy triumphantly exclaims "The governor can't close the school now!" Our ability to extract a clip from DVD to QuickTime worked fine. Editing the QuickTime clip worked fine. The conversion to WMV format not so fine. We lost or gained fractional parts. In the end we never got a usable clip from the boxed set. (I now have the background, but not the nerve to apply for a grant for Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland studies.)
As deadlines approaches there are always modifications, but these never even rise to the level of an imposition: moving a few slides around or maybe deleting or adding a few slides a day or two before the actual presentation. Anyone in a similar position will recognize this as nothing unusual or onerous. What was gruesome was the videos.
Jumping to the chase: the presentation worked flawlessly on multiple laptops and desktops whether run from hard drive, CD or USB key. On his Lenovo X61 notebook videos froze. Because we weren't as sharp as we should have been and because of certain initial problems with the videos we didn't realize that the problem was the notebook not the videos. We tried to contact the conference's technical contact because it wasn't clear from their instructions whether presentations had to be run on their equipment or whether we'd be allowed to use our own. Could the presentation be on a CD or USB key? Our preference would have been to FedEx a CD with the presentation to someone at the conference who would let us know if there were any problems, but the conference's technical contact didn't get back to us until the day before the conference.
(Because of an ugly incident at a conference we hosted many years ago we've been exceptionally sensitive about these things. People who indicate that they don't need anything special don't realize that their standard company issued PC includes a special sauce.)
Something no one anticipated sucked several other members of my department into the project. In desperation some proposed converting the whole presentation to Flash.
My throw-in-the-towel solution was to send him to the conference with the old laptop they had around his office (the same laptop I used to develop the presentation) and his X61 which he used for business. When I say old I mean a laptop with no Windows key on the keyboard, a Y key which is askew, and a defective left Ctrl key. (The right Ctrl key works.) My guy's attitude is great: if he won't be embarrassed during the presentation he's satisfied. (They may kick sand in his face because he's schlepping an old laptop, but as long as the presentation doesn't blow up he'll be satisfied.) The conference organizers might not have liked it, but it was unlikely that they'd tell the keynote speaker that he couldn't use his own laptop.
That said, he knew humor was needed to leaven the steady drumbeat of grim economic news. Video clips seemed the most natural.The first was a clip from Horsefeathers, the Marx Brothers' farce, where Groucho deciding that it is too expensive to maintain both the college and the football team decides to tear down the college. Where will the student's sleep? "They'll sleep where they always sleep: in the classroom." (Always mindful of running afoul of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) the Horsefeathers clip came from a VHS tape.)
Then there was a scene from Damn Yankees. He wanted to introduce the clip by saying "Nobody likes times like these, except..." and then the clip of Appplegate (the Devil) singing about the "Good Old Days". (The clip included scenes of people jumping from windows on Wall Street. )
What we all felt would be a natural conclusion was a clip with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland saying "Hey kids! Let's put on a show!" A quick web search turned up an einsiders.com review indicated that it was in Girl Crazy in which Rooney and Garland put on a show to save Cody College. As fast as you could whip out a credit card the box set was ordered on a Friday and delivered to me on Monday. (I did say the presentation was for someone at the top.)
After watching over 6 hours of the dynamic duo (Babes in Arms, Babes on Broadway, and Strike Up the Band in addition to the aforementioned Girl Crazy), I stand before you to say that "Hey kids! Let's put on a show!" may join the ranks of "Play it again Sam" or "Alas poor Yorick. I knew him well." - lines which everyone remembers, but were never said. The line may exist in an Andy Hardy film, but not in the versions of the films in the boxed set. (What did you do today? I watched 4 Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland films to find 5 seconds of non-existent dialogue. Three other people scanned the films looking for the line.)
We tried to cobble three snippets from Girl Crazy) to show a radio news flash of the legislature's intention of closing Cody College due to a lack of enrollment, Mickey and Judy suggesting to the dean that they put the college on the map with a rodeo show, and the scene where they dump a sackful of applications on the dean's desk as Judy triumphantly exclaims "The governor can't close the school now!" Our ability to extract a clip from DVD to QuickTime worked fine. Editing the QuickTime clip worked fine. The conversion to WMV format not so fine. We lost or gained fractional parts. In the end we never got a usable clip from the boxed set. (I now have the background, but not the nerve to apply for a grant for Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland studies.)
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