Author: Philip Weiss

Nothing Wrong With A Rich President

One of the current narratives that I see on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and all over a lot of blogs is that Mitt Romney is too rich to be voted into the office of the Presidency.

To which I call bullshit.

First off, we’re never going to have a poor President. At best, we’ll have someone who was poor at one point. But you don’t build a political base large enough to get into the presidency without having the skills to make enough money to live comfortably. The closest we got to poor might have been Harry Truman (a haberdasher) or Abraham Lincoln (who had a successful law practice). There are plenty of Presidents who weren’t rich, but all of them were at least comfortable before they became President.

The basis of this narrative is that a rich person cannot possibly be a force for the have-nots. That’s total crap. Franklin Roosevelt was very rich, but also enacted programs that are the basis for America’s modern welfare state. Not all kajillionaires are self-interested Koch brothers. Sure, many are, but the key thing isn’t that they are rich, but that they are self-interested assholes. And Mitt Romney has plenty of that in spades. I’d much rather that his lying, asshole nature be the focus.

Why does all this bother me? Remember when the media bought into John Kerry as a rich elitist out of touch with America because he wind-surfed? Instead, we got a second term of George Bush. He was folksy, but he was no less rich than John Kerry. But also, and this is the important part, he designed his policies unrepentantly to benefit rich people. But the media rarely talked about that.

Additionally, Mitt Romney, as bad as he will be for America if he’s elected, is a far cry better than some of the poorer Republican possibilities. Remember, Sarah Palin is only 6 years removed from being the mayor of a small podunk city in Alaska.

Sure, rich as an epithet might work at the moment, but it can also be used to tag our candidates unfairly. I’d much rather that the idiots be tarnished with brushes that can’t be used against us. Like his willingness to lie. Or the fact that he will cause the United States to descend into a fiery pit of hell. You know, things that matter.

Caramel-Bottomed Guinness Chocolate Pie

This pie turned out quite well. Everyone at Pie Night loved it. The caramel was a bit boozier than I thought it would be, but I coulda been doing it wrong. Recipe comes from Dennis Wilkinson. As is normal, I’ve modified it slightly.

Crust

  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 stick cold butter
  • 1 tablespoon sugar
  • dash salt
  • 1½ ounces cold water
  • 1½ ounces vodka

Pretty standard crust, except there’s a bit more liquid than I normally would use for one crust.

  1. Mix the flour, sugar, and salt in a food processor
  2. Cut the butter into 1 tablespoon pieces
  3. Add the butter to the flour mixture
  4. Pulse the food processor until all the chunks of butter are less than pea size
  5. Transfer the flour mixture to a bowl
  6. Combine the water and vodka into a cup
  7. Add the liquid to the flour, alternately adding some and mixing it with a pastry cutter or fork
  9. Work the dough until the liquid is pretty thoroughly combined and the flour forms a ball
  10. Mush the dough into a disc
  11. Wrap it in sandwich paper
  12. Chill for a half hour to an hour in the fridge
  13. Roll into a crust
  14. Place the crust in a 9 inch pie plate (deep dish works better, but I didn’t do that)
  15. Crimp the edges
  16. Weight with foil and pie weights
  17. Bake at 400° for 20 minutes, then remove the weights and bake for 10 more
  18. Remove from oven and allow to cool

Caramel

  • 1 cup sugar
  • ⅓ cup water
  • 1 tablespoon corn syrup
  • 1 cup heavy cream
  • 2 ounces Grand Marnier (original recipe calls for 1 ounce, but I don’t have a 1 ounce measure)
  • 1 orange
  1. Grate all the zest from the orange
  2. Combine sugar, corn syrup and water in a saucepan
  3. Cover and bring to a boil
  4. Remove the cover and continue boiling until sugar starts turning brown
  5. Swirls the pan on the burner periodically until the sugar is reddish brown (it really does turn a reddish brown)
  6. Add the cream and Grand Marnier
  7. Stir until dissolved
  8. Continue boiling until it’s pretty thick (original recipe says thread stage which I have no clue how to judge)
  9. Add the orange zest
  10. Pour it into the pie shell
  11. Cool

The caramel was boozier than I expected. Perhaps sticking to the original amount mighta made it more acceptable to me, as I don’t drink or eat anything with more than a trace of alcohol left in it. I kinda expected it to have cooked off considering how long it was boiling.

Filling

  • 4½ semisweet bakers chocolate
  • 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
  • 2 tablespoons corn starch
  • ⅔ cup sugar
  • dash salt
  • 1 cup heavy cream
  • 3 eggs
  • 1 can (14½ ounces) Guinness stout
  • ¼ cup water
  • 1 packet gelatin
  • 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
  1. Combine the water and gelatin in a small saucepan
  2. Separate the egg yolks and discard the egg white
  3. Melt the chocolate in the microwave
  4. In a medium saucepan, combine the cocoa powder, corn starch, sugar, and salt
  5. Whisk in the cream
  6. Whisk in the egg yolks
  7. Whisk in the Guinness
  8. Whisk in the chocolate
  9. Cook and stir the mixture over medium-high heat until thick enough to coat a spoon
  10. Heat the gelatin until it dissolves
  11. Whisk in the gelatin
  12. Remove from heat and strain the chocolate through a strainer into a bowl
  13. Whisk in the butter
  14. Pour into the pie shell (the one with the caramel, not a new one)
  15. Cool to room temperature, then chill in the refrigerator until set

At this point, I had some leftover chocolate, though not a lot. I really should have used a deep dish pie plate. C’est la vie.

Serve with whipped cream.

Click through to the original recipe to see a lovely photo. I didn’t get a good photo of my edition of the pie.

Two loops of … well, not raisins

I am still walking around Green Lake 4 or 5 times a week. Today I was feeling a little depressed over stuff, and halfway around I decided I was going to go for a second loop. Work off some of the mood possibly. I worried though that I might go into zombie non-thinking mode and head over to the car after one loop, forgetting the second loop. I do that a lot when I’m pre-occupied. Sunday I meant to swing by U.W. Bookstore and pick up Sly Mongoose from the science fiction section, but forgot despite thinking about it when I got in my car. Today though, I went into zombie mode and actually kept walking around. My preoccupation actually got me to do what I wanted to do. Got 5.6 miles of a very brisk walk in.

I do need to figure out how to keep the little rocks out of my shoes though. At a swift walking pace, my shoes pick them up just enough to fling one or two of them inside a shoe about 4 times in a loop. So I have to stop, remove my shoe, and shake it out. Multiple times. I wonder if spats would work. That has the added bonus that I would be the dorkiest guy at the park.

Sounders vs. Seattle Pacific University (exhibition)

In addition to buying season tickets for the Sounders Men, this year I bought a season ticket for the Sounders Women. After they signed a bunch of women’s national team players, I figured it might be the only chance I get to see such great players regularly. The team is an amateur team, so it can’t normally get top flight players. But with the demise of the W.P.S., they want to play somewhere and apparently it’s for soccer-crazy Seattle. If WPS revives, we might not get a team simply because of travel costs.

Anyway, last night was the first match of the season. It was an exhibition against Seattle Pacific University. Seattle Pacific is out of season, so they didn’t have a lot of their players. Basically, we all expected a rout, and that’s pretty much what we got. SPU’s second half keeper was pretty good, and they had a forward whose play I liked as well. I didn’t catch either of their names. It was a chance for all of them to say they’d played against Hope Solo, Sydney Leroux, Alex Morgan, etc.

I noticed two big differences between the teams. First, the Sounders were much faster. They could run rings around SPU. And did a couple of times. Second, SPU players were really indecisive. When a ball dropped somewhere, Sounders immediately moved. Some moved toward the ball to pick it up or challenge for it. Others immediately moved for the pass. Even though they haven’t played together much, their experience tells them what their role should be. Their execution wasn’t always crisp, but they knew what to do. SPU players took a half second to decide, and they frequently appeared to change their minds two steps after starting.

Final score was 5 to 0. Hope Solo had maybe one save, and she spent a fair amount of time wandering around the midfield. If SPU had the skill, they could have easily scored on her with one well placed kick from midfield. But the Sounders dominated so much that wasn’t going to happen. Things will be different when they start played the regular season. But first another couple of exhibitions, one on Friday.

Dropping weight

I haven’t walked around Green Lake every day, but I’ve managed to do so most days since I realized a couple weeks ago that my weight was climbing toward 200. Between the walks and an emphasis on eating at home, I’m down to about 186 lbs. Eight pounds lost in two weeks ain’t bad.

Where stuff will get difficult is when I hit 180. I’ve dropped to that amount a number of times in the last 10 years, but always start having trouble from then on. Ideally, I’d like my weight in the 170 to 175 range, and it’s been a while since I’ve been there.

The 1940 Census

This morning the National Archives released the census schedules for the 1940 census. 72 years after each census, the government sends all that information into the wild. For a genealogist, this information is gold. Right now all it’s not searchable. In order to find someone in the census, a person has to know where they already are. Either that or stumble on them among the 132 million records released in image form. Which isn’t completely impossible. I ran into one relative while looking for another. But if you don’t know where they are, it’ll be a huge fishing expedition. Over the next few months, a few genealogy sites will be creating indexes and it will be searchable before too long.

Luckily, I know where a few people would have been in 1940.

Unfortunately, the main release of the records was a disaster. Archives.com is operating the official National Archives site, which is the only site that had all the records for the public, releasing them at 9 a.m. The site promptly fell over. It wasn’t until about midnight I could access any census schedules on it.

In the meantime, Ancestry.com, myheritage.com, and familysearch.org all got a hard dump of the images at 12:01 a.m. They’ve been putting them up since then, but it takes a bit of time to get them prepped and tagged by location. Ancestry loaded up Washington, D.C. first so they could tout that they found F.D.R.’s census record. Then they added a few territories and Nevada. I assume that’s because those places are sparsely populated and they could test their systems for classifying and loading the images. Then they added Indiana and Maine. Most of the family I’ve researched lived in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Washington in 1940. However, I did find a couple of distant relatives in the first couple of states. They are now working California, New York, Virginia, and Rhode Island.

FamilySearch is loading their states in a different order. I don’t remember what they’ve done, but when I first looked they had Colorado up. As a number of great great aunts and uncles in the Ryan branch moved to Colorado from Wisconsin. I was able to find all of the Colorado ones because either they lived in a small rural area that was easy to scan through, or they hadn’t moved since the 1930 census which gave me an address for them.

I haven’t yet looked at what MyHeritage.com has loaded up.

Around midnight, the official site got something working, and I could use it to access Washington records. I decided to look for Otto, Othelia, and Vera Hallin, my grandmother and her parents. I knew Gram grew up in Snoqualmie, and it’s not a huge place: two census districts comprising 44 images total. Pretty easy to scan through. I was slightly worried they hadn’t moved there by 1940. However, Gram was 11 by then, and she didn’t talk about spending a lot of time in their previous house in Skykomish, so my guess was they were already in Snoqualmie.

The first enumeration district I looked at (17-183) didn’t have them. It did have Otto’s brother Sivert Oman and his family though. I’m not surprised to find one of his family in the same town. They were all loggers mostly and Snoqualmie was a logging town.

Otto was on page 6 in the second enumeration district for Snoqualmie.

1940 census district 17-182 of Washington, page 6, Otto Hallin excerpt
Otto, Othelia, and Vera Hallin in the 1940 census

Did I learn anything new about my grandmother’s family? Not really. But I do get to fill in details of their lives. I didn’t know they’d lived at least briefly in Everett. One set of columnns asked where folks lived in 1935. I’d always assumed they went from Skykomish straight to Snoqualmie. Othelia’s occupation is owning and running a restaurant. I only vaguely recalled that. From his job at the lumber mill, Otto made $1,740 during 1939, which is about $27,000 in 2010 dollars. Othelia doesn’t report any wages for her business; presumably any profit didn’t count as wages. Otto was either sick or got some vacation or leave, as he only worked 48 weeks out of 52. Othelia worked all 52 weeks.

And now I need to lay off the genealogy for a couple of days, as I have stuff to do.

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.