1889 Pressure Cookers and Bad Teeth

1889 Pressure Cookers and Bad Teeth

Pressure cookers weren’t always weapons of mass destruction.  But they always were explosion prone.

A couple of pre-teen kids, a brother and sister are about to surprise their parents with a delicious spaghetti dinner.  They fill the pressure cooker with uncooked spaghetti, put in sauce from a jar, close the pot and put it on the stove.

Closed? Not so fast.  The pot looks closed.  But soon after as the pressure builds, they find out it isn’t.  The way they find out is by walking into the kitchen just as sufficient pressure has built up to pop the lid and send a Vesuvius of pasta and red sauce all over the stove.  And the wall. And the floor. And the ceiling.

Cleanup was neither easy nor complete.

So it was a surprise, alright. Just not the kind the kind they planned.

The nature of pressure cooking has changed.  Now you can get machines that plug in, eliminating the need for stoves.  And you can get pressure cookers that won’t start pressurizing unless both the top and the relief valve are locked tight.

A major advance in modern technology.  

Using a pressure cooker has become foolproof.  Well, maybe not foolproof, but at least fool-resistant.

Pop stuff into the pot, lock the top, lock the relief valve, set the timer and presto! Dinner.

Modern cookware has turned the painting of kitchen walls from mandatory to optional.  

But parts of the cooking have remained untamed.

Rice and beans in nine minutes is fictional, even though that’s what the makers claim in their sales pitches.  The timer doesn’t start its countdown until sufficient pressure builds in the pot.  Sufficient pressure is something we mere humans can’t measure. But we can time it.  It takes longer to build pressure than the nine minutes to cook the rice and beans.

So while you may save your walls and ceilings, and stuff inside will indeed cook faster, you never really know how much time to give your recipe.  If there’s meat or poultry in your dish, you want to make sure that it’s hot enough to kill lurking germs. No one wants e-coli or salmonella.  So you give it a little more time than the cookbook recommends.

The result often is tasty, if industrial cooking is your thing.  But it also will turn your dish into mush.

Mush has its advantages for the tooth-deprived.  If eating a cracker is a source of pain, then pressure cooking a saltine or a Ritz will solve the problem.  Most people don’t pressure cook crackers.  But there are those of us who have contemplated such.

Most people also don’t like eating beef stew with a spoon.  But when you open the pot and find a sea of glop, eating it with a fork becomes impossible.  There are those of us with what the dentists call “compromised” mouths that are grateful mounds of mush. But to most, it’s not a treat no matter how good it tastes.

But at least you don’t have to worry about rice pocks, pasta and red sauce on the ceiling.

GRAPESHOT (pressure cooker edition):

-The dishes never come out just perfect like Wolfgang Puck, Bobby Flay and even Guy Fieri say they will.

-A sudden intentional release of pressure will be accompanied by superheated steam and probably liquid… almost as cringe worthy as the exploding pot that ate Mom’s ceiling.

-Cook the rice separately unless you like rice-like glop.

-Counter intuitively, put the chopped onions in last or they will vanish in the cooking.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

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1888 Today in History

When NBC started The Today Show in 1952, it had nothing to lose and the world to gain.  It gained the world.  Now, here we are 66 years later and things have changed.  And haven’t.

The announcement this week that Hoda Kotb (KOT’-bee) would be the new “permanent” co anchor of the the show’s core, the 7-9am hours, set tongues a-wagging.  “A two woman anchor team! Wonderful!”  “A two woman anchor team? Needs more testosterone.” “A two woman anchor team? Okay, what’s the weather gonna be?”

NBC probably isn’t all that aware of what makes this program a consistent winner even when it’s #2.  Here’s the Dirty Little Secret: You don’t have to watch it.  You can run around doing whatever it is you do in the morning, shave, shower, make breakfast, put on your makeup, and get the kids ready for school.  Anything. Leave the sound up and still catch the drift of the broadcast.  You do not have to sit there trance-staring into the TV set.

That has not changed. Ever.  And it’s not a fully conscious policy.  The competition, ABC’s Good Morning America” and “CBS This Morning” are not as ear friendly.

Without competition, Today had to attract customers. It did that with a combination of NBC News which in 1952 was Very Serious Journalism with severe technical limitations and some entertainment features including an amiable host, Dave Garroway, who combined the virtues of Arthur Godfrey and Garrison Keillor without Godfrey’s politics and Keillor’s monotone.

Oh, and J. Fred Muggs, the chimpanzee.

Now, back to the major issue: can a two-woman team work?  Sure, why not? It did at the competition.  Good Morning America did OK with it, ratings and revenue-wise. They did it on the PBS Newshour.  Why wouldn’t it work?  

On the Serious Scale, Today is right in the middle, between the relatively dour CBS This Morning and the flippant GMA. NBC’s is the best possible positioning.  But since they supersized Today -- this time to four hours from three -- they’ve made it far more labor intensive and far more prone to duchies than in earlier years, and that can be a worry.

Some NBC watchers are not too sure that Hour Three with Megyn Kelly was packaged with a long shelf life.  The fourth hour with Kotb and Kathie Lee, already battered by Kelly’s misery-level lead-in ratings is likely to be without Kotb more often.  She’ll be flying here there and everywhere for what’s still considered the “real” show, 7-9 local time.

Where in the World is Hoda Kotb?  Sounds like a good feature.  The hour-four audience may not take an oft-missing Hoda too well.

But Kotb is doing good things for the main show.  Ratings are up after the departure of Matt Lauer. But please remember that ratings also ballooned when Lauer replaced Bryant Gumbel 20 years ago.

We wish Hoda good luck. She’s a good person, a good newsie and a grown up presence without being showy or stuffy about it. She works well with the Katie wannabe, Savannah Guthrie… their interaction is attractive.

And former NYTimes/NBC/PBS reporter Gwen Ifell wasn’t available.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“(Undisclosed kind words and good wishes)” -Matt Lauer in a text to Hoda Kotb on being named permanent co-anchor of Today.

SHRAPNEL:

--Has Steve Bannon gone off the deep end, or was he there all along and we didn’t recognize it? First he’s trump’s insider brain, then he’s trump’s outsider helpmate and now he’s trump’s turncoat.  Who is to blame for that, bannon or trump?

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WJR 2018

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1887 Everything's Normal in Nassau County

1887 Everything’s Normal in Nassau County

In Nassau County, Long Island, New York they’ll elect a bunch of carrots to public office as long as they’re Republican carrots.  They have done this for the better part of the last 119 years.  It is the richest county in New York State (eat your heart out, Westchester) [1] and also one of the highest taxed. [2] It manages its finances so brilliantly that the State of New York has taken over that job which is unusual because that means some actual work will have to be done in Albany.

The largest geographical sub-entity in Nassau is the Town of Hempstead, which pretty much ran things its own way for the first 90 years the county existed.  Little has changed.  This is a gang that takes care of its own. Here’s the latest example of politics, Hempstead style:

The head guy is called the Supervisor. Until the last Friday of December 2017, the office was occupied by one Anthony Santino who is paid about $160-thousand a year for his trouble.  He was temporarily replaced by his deputy who will then undoubtedly got a raise to match Santino’s pay grade at least for the four days he was in office.

The election last November went to a Democrat. A woman! A Democrat. A woman. In Hempstead Town.  Unthinkable in the insular world of the tax and spend Republicans, though it has happened on rare occasions.  But don’t feel sorry for Tony.  He already has a new job lined up.  He will become the Administrative Assistant to the Board of Elections.  And he will be paid give or take what he has been paid as supervisor, which is more than the Commissioner of Elections he’ll administratively assist.

Those jobs -- called patronage elsewhere in America -- amount to “OK, hire the loser and then we’ll figure out something for him to do on those days he shows up to do stuff.”

The temp hired to be Town Supervisor, Anthony Esposito, will be able to use another trick that was invented at home:  Next election he can run for the job he’ll hold now for only a few days and his campaign signs will legally be able to say “Return Supervisor Esposito to Office.”  That would make him seem at casual glance to be the incumbent which ain’t what happened.  But an incumbency -- real or fake -- often is a leg up in an election because who pays attention to this nonsense in the off season.

SHRAPNEL:

--A possible stupid pet trick to watch for: The story goes that in 1961 when  Eugene Nickerson became the first Democrat elected Nassau County Executive, he opened his desk drawers for the first time to find his Republican predecessor had left them pristine and empty. No paperwork, not even a paper clip or a key to the men’s room.

--Politicians of every stripe give out little campaign trinkets like ballpoint pens, bumper stickers and maybe potholders.  The Town of Hempstead Republicans used to give out sponges imprinted with the names of their candidates.  How apt.

Footnotes:

1.    Source: US Census Bureau

2.    Source: Attom Data Solutions via Long Island Business News.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WJR 2017

1886 Gone Fishin' (Update 1) 12/31/17

Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays and best wishes for the New Year.

Wessays will return on Wednesday, January 3, 2018.

Brooklyn Bluegrass Collective

1885 Dumbed Down, Numbed Up

Let’s take a new look at Occam's razor.  It’s an old saw that says the simplest answer is usually right and the simplest method is usually best.

Maybe. But it’s hard to judge nowadays because we have run out of simple.  Cutting the Gordian Knot was a fine and true example of simplicity. King Solomon’s splitting the baby to resolve a conflict between two women each claiming it was her kid was not, even if it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Today, everything is a production number.  Maybe we have a biological need for moving parts.  At one time you could fix those parts with a little duct tape, a hammer and a screwdriver. Now when you look under the hood of your car or the workings of the government or some corporations and nonprofits, you scratch your head as you ask “what is all that stuff?”

But there’s a problem.  Not only has life become over complicated, it has become digital.  And that means fewer moving parts. So if our need for them is biological, we have to manufacture our own.

Show of hands: what does an MP3 look like? No hands?  No surprise. Like gravity, we know what it does but we don’t know what it is.  We can hear it played, but we can’t fiddle with it. Or touch or smell or taste it.

So we complicate other things.

The simple way around complicated telephone trees is to make the first option “For an operator, press 0.”  Of course if that happened, no one would listen to the rest of the choices because nobody wants THOSE kinds of moving parts.

Tuning a television set is another of these kickline-like techno- processes.  It’s time for another show of hands. Raise your hand if your TV remote didn’t work and you wanted to change channels with the controls on the set itself.  Do you even know where they are?

A few hands up this time.  Y’all must be geeks.  When was the last time you heard that satisfying mechanical click of a knob that turned the set on?  

A faulty knob on a radio or TV or record player could be unsoldered and replaced.  Okay… no duct tape involved. Real moving parts, though, get mechanical fixes.

The refrigerator had a similar simplicity and mechanical satisfaction: One knob.  Two fields of settings, “colder” or “warmer.”  Today’s refrigerators -- smart fridges -- are amazing feats.

“You have two pounds of hamburger meat in the freezer.  It will expire in 21 days.”  Thank you but I’ll wait to use it.  The next day, SmartFridge tells you “You have two pounds of hamburger meat in the freezer.  It will expire in 20 days.”  When the countdown gets to a week, the refrigerator will start to get nasty. “Hey, George, that meat in the freezer has only a week to go, you’d better get a move on.”

And on the eighth day it yells at you.

Marvelous.  Of course you can disable that feature. Oh. Wait. No you can’t. It’s built into the box’s electrical system and behind a wall that runs the height of the machine so you can’t get at it.

Once upon a time if your cat got stuck up a tree, you’d call the firehouse and they’d send over a guy with a ladder and a net. Now you have to jump through 911 hoops and it takes forever.  Not dissing the emergency phone system, but people have started clogging the lines with stuff like “McDonald’s is out of chicken nuggets. I need a cop.”

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WJR 2017

1884 Current Events Summary

In olden times, the definition of an Associated Press "Flash" was "An item of three words or fewer that no one will misunderstand.”

Tax Bill Passes.

Mitch, Mitch you son of a... uh... gun!

The blind and the uncaring approved the tax bill while the whiners and scatterbrains held a hand-wring-in reminiscent of a hippie era love fest only without the sex, drugs and rock n roll.  The procedural things that are out of alignment with the House version will be fixed today and trump will sign it into law.

This senate reminds one of a coven of old men with erectile dysfunction and when they finally get up, don't know what to do other than congratulate one another.

The bill is a minefield disguised as a theme park and no one has a map.  It is based on unsound or disproven premises and the only reason it passed was to give republican politicians what I hope is the last hurrah of this congress.  It's something they can take home to the cheers of the people who purchased them at auction.

You think the slave trade is dead?  It isn't. These men and women are bought and sold, traded and while not separated from their families, they are separated from reality.

Infrastructure rehab: There will be none apart from what's already on the books until the real estate moguls like trump and Corker figure out ways to make a buck.  

Ultimately, they will come up with an answer organized crime has used for years: use diluted cement.  You won't see the effects for years until a bridge falls down or a highway buckles in summer heat.

Kim Jong Un: I don't know why he hasn't developed a fatal brain tumor. It’s something we know how to produce and have done so.

 Why the mighty North Korean armed forces haven’t haven't put this pig on a skewer and slow roasted him? What do the security people in Washington mean when they say a nuclear North Korea is unacceptable?  

China is moving things around on its border with North Korea to be able to enforce a trade blockade should one develop.  And it keeps the NKs at home. China doesn't want them.  They are the palestinian of the far east.  This is not a new policy. And if anyone knows how to build a wall, it’s China.

Reminder: the United States did not pull out of the Paris accord.  Only trump did. The states and even the big corporations still support and will continue implementing the recommendations to reduce the man made components of climate change.

So one guy says “nah.” And even though he’s the President of the United States, he’s still just one guy.  All he’s accomplished is alienating our allies -- real and imagined.  

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WJR 2017

1883 Censored!

This is the first installment in an irregular series, “The War on Thought.”

George Carlin gave us “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television”
and you won’t see or hear them here, either.

 But now the trump administration has given us seven words or phrases
you can’t say in budget documents.  And here they are:

-Diversity

-Fetus

-Transgender

-Evidence based

-Science based

-Vulnerable

-Entitlement

More specifically, these words allegedly cannot be used in budget
documents circulated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
according to a report in the Washington Post.  
Asked about such things, the CDC’s parent agency, Health and Human
Services, says “language suggestions were made."

What could be behind this?  That’s an interesting question because the
answer could be we’re in even more trouble than you think.
And that could mean that the zombies and dolts in our brave new world
could be smarter than we think.

Look at it this way:  Words are symbols of concepts they represent;
shorthand.  Kill the word and eventually you kill the concept. Now what
interest could a bunch of politicians overseeing an agency of doctors and
researchers have in concept killing?

Let’s take one of the words and follow it backward:  fetus.
What is a fetus? It is an agglomeration of cells that under certain
conditions may (or may not) eventually turn into a living being.
 It’s a pretty neutral word.  But if you can’t use it in a budget document
on birth control or abortion, and you need to, what do you call “it?”  

Some possibilities:

-An agglomeration of cells that under certain conditions may eventually
turn into a living being.  That’s pretty awkward.

-A blob of protoplasm.  Too wide a definition.

Oh! I know! How about an “unborn baby?”
 If everyone uses that phrase instead of “fetus,” our whole perspective
on abortion and birth control shifts to a particular political view.
 Maybe your view. But maybe not.

When they take away words, they take away concepts. When they take
away concepts, what’s left behind is mental oatmeal and its cousin
mental packing peanuts.  Don’t let this happen to you.

In Memoriam

Aaron John Oleksa (1983-2017) of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania left us this
weekend after a long series of illnesses.  Behind that winning and sincere
smile was a heart filled with love, courage, generosity and talent.

These last years put him in a motorized wheelchair, a place no one should
have to live. But to Aaron it was just another of the many punches he was
forced to endure.

Now, there will be no films with his name as creator or editor; no
perceptive remarks and notes. No continuation of the dialog that began
a decade ago as we tried to reshape each others’ political views, but
always in the spirit of brotherhood and good will.  Someday, Aaron, e
will continue that ten year discussion.  But it’ll have to wait for now.

Goodbye, good friend. May you rest at last.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WJR 2017