The Bots

Having a hard time focusing on work this afternoon, so here’s a short post on one of my favorite music discoveries of the last year. The Bots are a punkish duo out of Los Angeles. These two kids have talent. Listen to ʼem now so you can be of of the people who can say I’ve been listening to them since before they were popular! Check out their web site to play all their songs, but here’s the video for the song that got me hooked:

Low Salt Broth

I promised to write more. What can I put here? I know! My efforts to find low-salt foods in Seattle.

Huh. And coincidentally today starts World Salt Awareness Week. I had no idea that was the case. I found that out because I wanted to include the official American Heart Association recommended daily limit on salt, so I was Googling®. Anyway, the U.S.D.A. recommends less than 2300 mg of sodium per day if you are healthy and less than 1500 mg of sodium if you have a heart condition. The A.H.A. says that’s too high, and recommends less than 1500 mg per day for everyone.

Finding low-salt foods is hard. Take today for instance. I want to make a hoppin’ john recipe tomorrow. The recipe calls for beef broth. I do most of my food shopping at regular grocery stores because they are cheaper. Today, Fred Meyer in Ballard was convenient. Five feet of one aisle devoted to chicken and beef broth, and not one low-salt alternative. Swanson beef broth has 800 mg of sodium per cup! There’s a less sodium version of it that has 400 mg per cup. But even at that level, I’d go over 1500 mg in well less than a day. Swanson has an unsalted beef stock that has only 130 mg of sodium, but you won’t find it at Fred Meyer, despite the jingle.

So I headed by Whole Foods on my way home, because I know they carry low-sodium broths. Huge difference! There are all sorts of options there. They didn’t have a low-sodium house brand (365 Everyday Value) for beef broth, though they do for chicken. But I could pick from at least three different brands (that I can remember now that I am home) of low-salt beef broths: Kitchen Basics, Imagine Foods, and Pacific Foods. There might have been others as well. The Imagine and Pacific brands of beef broth have 140 mg per cup. That’s 1/3 of anything that Fred Meyer offers, and it’s a bigger store. Kitchen Basics is a bit more at 180 mg.

From this I have to assume that Fred Meyer wants to kill people with heart conditions! Or at least the Ballard location does. I know it seems like a poor selling strategy, but so far all the evidence points that way.

Weight and exercise

I weighed myself Friday. It looks like I’ve gained a bit, as I am around 195 lbs. (my scale is not particularly accurate or exact). Which means I need to pay attention to my diet (stop eating out so much, cook at home!) and get more exercise.

Greenlake path

Today I did not do the former, but I did get some exercise. After a late brunch, I headed up to Greenlake and walked one go-around. I finally started the audiobook of Charlaine Harris’ Living Dead In Dallas, which I had purchased in February while on my road trip but hadn’t gotten to. I will probably do another circuit tomorrow as well.

At some point, I need to make use of my 24 Hour Fitness membership.

Out three times

This last week I went out three times. I’m usually more of a homebody than that.

Tuesday night Faderhead played a show at Chop Suey. I got there fairly early thinking all the Goth kids would be out, and I wanted to get a spot. Turns out that it wasn’t that crowded. Opening band was Pixel Pussy. Not bad music. Awful stage patter. Dude had black and white makeup to look sorta like cat whiskers, and kept on making cat rowr noises while exhorting people to come closer because he doesn’t bite. Second band was Graverzeit out of Spokane. I wasn’t impressed at all. His outfit and schtick just screamed, look at me cause I’m trying so hard! Then Faderhead came on. The guy has charisma. His look reminds me of Steve Saunders with a mohawk. I danced most of his set, except for the couple of ballads he played. It’s hard to pull off an industrial ballad.

Thursday night I drove over to Ballard for a board game night that has met at various coffee shops in the neighborhood. They just moved to Ballard Coffee Works, which is officially opening today in the old Tully’s space on the corner of Market and 22nd. I liked the coffee shop, though I hope they get more comfy chairs and something to mute the noise level a little. The gaming group had a couple dozen participants, and at least 4 tables worth of games constantly going. My cousin Sarah enticed me to go by telling me that there were single women there, one of whom she though I should meet. I played a game of Taboo matching girls against boys that we abandoned after 45 minutes or so. The women were kicking our asses something like 30 to 8. We were not going to catch up. Second game was Cloud 9, which had okay game play but I didn’t find it too particularly compelling. As it was I came in third, 26 points behind the winner. I stayed for another 30 minutes and kibbitzed on a couple other games in progress, but decided to bail after that. I get antsy bouncing around from thing to thing, so I can only usually do a couple of activities.

Last night I went to the Sounders match against Houston with Kim. I don’t think of Kim as much of a sports person, but she seemed to dig the experience. That match was fun. The Sounders played decently though not as well as Houston. The home team attempted a lot of combinations and passes that just didn’t quite work. I’m glad they were trying them though, as that’s my preferred style of play. They ended up winning based on some luck and hard work rather than skill.

After the match I went over to the Central Saloon. Two of the guys who occupy the row behind me at the stadium are in Dapper Jones which was playing there. They had invited me to stop in and see. There were four bands playing, and the first three each ran over. The third band started late, took really long to set up, and played an 80s style hard rock which didn’t seem to go over well. By the time they finished, the Central was nearly empty. Dapper Jones was setting up in the aisle so they could walk their stuff up and get going as quickly as possible. It turns out I liked them a lot. They reminded me a little of R.E.M. or Cheap Trick, but faster. And then they did a cover of Cheap Trick’s Surrender which kinda solidified that impression. They told me a bunch of times I didn’t need to feel obligated to stay for their set, but I’m glad I did.

Death and taxes

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating, if only because I like hearing myself talk.

I hate taxes. Not paying them. I’m fine with paying my taxes. What I hate is the recordkeeping. I am a crappy record keeper. Or rather, I’m a great record keeper, but a lousy record organizer. I always have something more entertaining to do, so I tell myself I’ll deal with some set of papers at the end of the week. But I don’t. So they all go into a box. And then the box fills up. And then I need to assemble all the tax stuff from the stuff previously filed when I did it and picking out the stuff I need from the box. Then I have to track down stuff I think I need, but I don’t have immediately at hand in my box of papers. This usually entails calling brokerages who ask me a security question I can’t remember because I only call them once a year and they set up the security question on that phone call two years ago. Or having to figure out whether my brother or my father has the record I need, and then making the trip to Everett to get it.

I should explain that last sentence. I’m not only doing my taxes, which are fairly easy. I’m also doing the taxes for my father, a trust set up for his benefit, and my mother’s estate. Hopefully this is the last year for the estate. The money has been distributed, but the paperwork ain’t done. Last year I also had taxes for my grandparents and my grandparents’ estate as well as the previous four entities.

Actually doing the taxes won’t be tough. I’ll take all this paperwork and dump it off on an accountant. (Except for my personal taxes, which I can handle on my own.)

But getting all this together is both frustrating and mentally tough. I get a sense of dark ominous dread when trying to sort through all of it, which makes it even tougher to do, so it gets put off. That makes the dread worse, and the spiral intensifies.

I’ll get it all done. I always manage to break through. (Or I don’t, and I will pay a penalty that isn’t threatening to life or limb…)

One thing that occurs to me as I write this was how much easier mentally doing my grandparents’ estate and taxes was. In that case, I had a lawyer who laid everything out and essentially acted as a project manager. I’m a pretty good project manager, but not for myself.

On the plus side, this should be the last year I need to do any taxes for my mom’s estate. And the records for my father’s and his trust’s taxes should be simpler, because all the accounts are now consolidated in just a couple of places. One of which is my personal broker, with whom I have a great relationship. If I can’t find something for my dad’s trust, I know I’ll be able to get it from him with a minimum of fuss.

A Million Hoodies for Trayvon Martin

Have you been following the news about the murder of Trayvon Martin? He was a young teenager who was followed, confronted, shot, and killed by an overzealous neighborhood watch captain who thought Trayvon looked suspicious. There’s almost nothing to say about the tragedy that someone else hasn’t said better, so I haven’t commented about the incident itself or the failure to arrest the perpetrator, George Zimmerman. However, it will come as little surprise that I think the police probably haven’t done their job and have now gone into a reflexive mode where they aren’t going to re-assess their mistakes because to do so would be to admit they were wrong. People find it hard to admit when they are wrong, and when a lot of people will notice, it’s even harder. So many people’s course of action is to cherry pick everything that shows they are right and find ways to minimize things that indicate they are wrong. But, I could be wrong about the Sanford police.

Anyway, a fellow named Daniel Maree has organized A Million Hoodies March for Trayvon Martin. It’s part march/rally/protest, and part what I thought as slacktivism. The march is in New York City later today. Of course I have opinions on marches and protests, but they are conflicted and not based on any kind of actual evidence at this point so I am not going to express them because they are likely wrong.

The second part of the Million Hoodies event is that the organizers have asked people across the internet to take pictures of themselves wearing hoodies to show your solidarity with Trayvon Martin’s family. My initial reaction was Ack! Not more slacktivism!. But my initial reaction to the posting of people wearing hoodies was wrong, as illustrated by this exchange posted by comedian and political commenter Elon James White.

Elon James White:
Elon James White wearing a hoodie
[REDACTED]:
Um no. This guy IS suspicious. I would totally purse clutch and traffic dodge to avoid and I’m not sure of the message here. March for hoodies?
[REDACTED]:
I grasp the point racism is rasicm, no dress code needed. But we need to watch our PR and how our message is distributed. The above is not helping or helpful to disseminate the message. It’s an image of a thug in a hoodie. Treyon was not a thug, he was a child and this is the image that should be used. And the main goal is to make the “point” as EASY to grasp as possible. We can march and protest and leverage petitions, but if our attitude is, “read between the lines to get my point”, then we move no one. We also need to utilize the most powerful, personable images we have. This guy is not one of them.
Elon James White:
Oh HI [REDACTED] I’m the image of the “Thug in a hoodie.” Do you know who I am? Do you know what I do? You said that THAT’s an image of a thug in a hoodie and TREYVON WASNT A THUG. Ma’am, I’m not a thug. I’m an engaged political commentator with a background in I.T. I throw dinner parties and build studios from scratch. But YOU saw a thug in a hoodie.

Do you understand the problem now?

If there are a bunch of pictures of people wearing hoodies to point out that too often a black man looks suspicious but the equivalent white guy does not, well that’s a bit more than the usual slacktivism. Why do you think that guy (Elon up there) looks dangerous, suspicious, and thuggish, while this guy

Me wearing a hoodie

just looks like he has no fashion sense.

Sounders at Santos Laguna

Wednesday night, in addition to being the second leg of the Sounders/Santos Laguna C.O.N.C.A.C.A.F. series, is also Taco Wednesday at the Roanoke Inn. $1 tacos and $3.50 taco salads, they’ll put the Sounders match on, and I usually have half a dozen friends who go there for tacos and alcohol. Since the Sounders match started at 5, I got there early.

First half wasn’t the best, but we kept up with Santos. I saw some troubling signs though. Second half we fell apart. Four unanswered goals by Santos. After Santos went up 4 to 1, I started paying more attention to my friends than to the match.

In the post-game comments, Sigi Schmid talked about not winning the 50/50 balls. Those are the long kicks and headers that are directed in the general direction of a few players, hopefully playing in the opponent’s half, that the team hopes someone from our team can come down with. For some reason that I don’t know, Sigi’s Sounders have played that style of football for years. If your team has a size advantage, it’s not the worst strategy. In M.L.S. we generally won’t have much of a size advantage. Mexican teams tend to play smaller players who utilize speed rather than size. However, we still lost a lot of those 50/50 balls.

Rather than pin the blame on the players who just didn’t do a great job of it, I think Sigi really needs to reconsider the strategy. A) You need a size advantage. B) Those balls are harder to control than other methods of advancing the ball. c) The ball winner needs a person to dump the ball off too who is in the right place. You see the Sounders employ this strategy even on throw-ins. Last season whenever James Riley or Leo Gonzalez would take a ball from out of bounds, inevitably they waited 5 to 10 seconds , few players would move, and then they would throw down the field into a mess of players. I’d much rather we used methods that emphasize possession.

I don’t have a problem with our offense. We had a number of chances where Sanchez improbably saved a goal. It’s getting the ball down the field that was killing us. That and some really lackadaisical defending. I don’t know where our defenders were. Travel killed them? The heat? I don’t know the altitude where Santos plays, but perhaps that? Thoroughly outplayed on defense.

To sum up: 6-1 in the match, 7-3 in the series.

Ouch.

Alfred Edgar Burton

Usually when I stop at a cemetery to photograph the headstones for relatives, I will photograph a section or two around the one I’m looking for. Then I’ll catalog those graves with the photos on FindAGrave.com. I’ve found a number of relatives because other folks have taken the time to add listings that turned out to be related to me. Occasionally someone will find the listings I add and it will help them.

This grave is the first one I’ve run across where the person was semi-famous. It’s Alfred Edgar Burton, buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Portland, Maine. I snapped a photo of this one because his marker inscription said he was the first dean of M.I.T. Turns out he also accompanied Robert Peary on a couple of excursions to the North Pole and was also the father of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harold Hitz Burton.

Grave of Alfred Edgar Burton
Alfred Edgar Burton (1857-1935)
Alfred Edgar Burton
Alfred Edgar Burton

Irish Genealogy Seminar

My great grandmother Frances Eugenia Ryan Weiss was of Irish descent. Neither of her parents were born in Ireland, but all four of her grandparents came from that island. I haven’t yet finished documenting her parents or grandparents, but I’m getting closer to the point where I’ll want to start digging into their Irish history instead of their time in Canada and the United States.

Last week, I came across a post in a genealogy message board advertising an Irish genealogy conference to be held today at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Ballard. Why not go, I thought? So today I got up a bit early (and even earlier when taking into account Daylight Savings Time) and headed over.

First, it wasn’t really a conference, but more of a seminar. In fact, most of the program materials used that word. But I was sort of expecting that. They had two speakers from Ireland. I’m not quite sure of their specialties. The first speaker spent an hour covering the various major repositories of records in Ireland today, both in Ulster and Dublin. His second talk went backward through time telling us what kinds of records were available for each time period. But that part of the talk only progressed to about the 1840s, which is just after my relatives left Ireland. Most people of Irish descent in America got here because of the potato famine of the 1840s and its aftermath. My families immigration predated that.

The second speaker was going to talk about the Scots-Irish and their immigration to the U.S. But man oh man was his talk a wreck. His accent was thicker, and he kept wandering away from the microphone. He also rambled all over without an outline and didn’t use any slides. He mentioned two really important books for researching Scots-Irish but couldn’t remember either of the titles, only that A.C. Myers wrote one of them. As in Arthur Charles, though I just made up those first names… He actually said something like that. A quick search tells me he’s probably talking about a fellow named Albert Cook Myers based out of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. He made it seem as if the books were written in the 1960s, but my Google search shows books published around 1900. Not that the books aren’t good. Anyhow, his presentation was a mess, so I started reading through the collections of flyers I’d grabbed from one of the tables.

After lunch, the first fellow returned and talked about the various kinds of church records available from the different denominations in Ireland. He jumped around again rather than cover them systematically. The other thing he did was spend a lot of time talking about all the information that could be had reading through annotations in the various records rather than the main records themselves. For instance, a baptismal register might have notations of later marriages as the registers were consulted to verify church membership for those marriages. That’s all well and good, but it is only secondarily useful. One needs to know to search for the baptismal register first. Basically, the talk felt like an excuse for the fellow to talk about a lot of the interesting anecdotes he’d dug up whole doing research for hire, rather than an overview of records available.

There was a break following that, and I left, skipping the last two sessions, both of which were planned to cover Ulster history and genealogy. As none of my family comes from Northern Ireland, I decided I’d be better off heading home.

I do feel a bit better about where to start though. There’s a ton of Irish genealogy web sites out there, but none of the guides I’d seen provided much of a guide as to what is important and what is not a good starting point. I at least have that from the first presentation. And a fair number of the flyers will give me information to browse over the next few months before I really dig in. I do think I’ll probably join the Seattle Genealogical Society for its Irish Interest Group. They also appear to be having an event related to Russian Germans later this month or next. Since that’s the background for my step-father, it’ll be of interest.

Last of the cassettes

I got rid of most of my cassettes 18 years ago, but kept a few. I got rid of my stereo 5 years ago. I am now going through the leftover tapes still on my shelf. Why did I keep these?

  • Baltimora – Living in the Background. Ok, this one made sense to keep. It was hard to find for a while.
  • Phil Collins – …But Seriously. But seriously, I don’t remember any of the songs on this tape.
  • Dire Straits – Brothers In Arms. Great album. Coulda replaced it with a CD or MP3 long ago.
  • Icehouse – Icehouse, Man of Colours and Measure for Measure.
  • The Polce – Every Breath You Take – The Singles. I kept a greatest hits tape on cassette? What was I thinking?
  • Two Hooters concert bootlegs. My favorite band ever. I need to find a way to transfer these to MP3.
  • Tom Petty – Full Moon Fever.
  • U2 – The Joshua Tree. I used to listen to this tape over and over and over. I think my musical tastes have changed.
  • Aerosmith – Big Ones. Someone left this at my house and I didn’t want to give it away in case they came back for it. In like 1991.
  • Two tapes labeled Matt Bender. I don’t remember what these are, if they are tapes of my brother speaking, mix tapes he made for me, or possibly recordings of his memorial service.
  • 5 tapes of people telling their stories at a sober conference in Breckenridge that I went to in 1993 and 1994. Will call the Seattle office and see if they would like these. Otherwise, I have no need to keep them anymore.
  • A tape of Abbott and Costello routines. I’m pretty sure most of these (Who’s On First?) are on Youtube now.
  • Pump Up The Volume. Not the soundtrack. I recorded the audio from the movie.
  • Copies of albums made from CD: Was (Not Was), Lotus, and Don McLean. Not sure if I can find my Lotus CD anymore, but that will be hard to replace. The other two…

I swear I’m not a hoarder.