Posts (page 2)
M pointed me to an interesting article about the Wall Street fiasco, how it happened, but also who saw the signs and bet against Wall Street. The article is written by the author of Liar's Poker, a book about Wall Street in the 1980's, and this article talks about how the author sees the current crash as the end of that order.
Well, happiness is many things but one of them is a good big bowl of noodles on a cold night.
M and I are still kitchenless and were not in the mood to cook from our garage last night, so we tried a ramen shop that I've heard about for years but never got a chance to try. It's a cramped little shop called Ramen Halu and there was a wait list at 8pm on a Monday night although we got seats no problem. It was not cheap ramen as ramen goes ($24 for two people including drinks) but we enjoyed the ramen.
The bowls arrived. We bent over our bowls to taste the broth and a little noodle, and then we inhaled it all without speaking for the next few minutes. Our server was very happy with us.
It's been a long time since I've had ramen.
We will go back again.
In case you're not too tired of the election, Newsweek is publishing stories about what happened behind the scenes at the Obama and McCain campaigns: http://www.newsweek.com/id/167581/page/2. They had a special team of reporters who were detached from the rest of the magazine and who kept what they learned confidential until the day after the election.
I took a walk in PA after my doctor's appointment and saw a rolled up $10 bill lying on the sidewalk. Another girl walking in the opposite direction, dressed in posh high heels and trendy clothing, stepped on it and kicked it aside, so I picked it up and felt no qualms about finding free money and using it to buy gelato for myself.
At the gelato store, the owner was watching Fox news. The only other customer in the store was an older dissatisfied looking gentleman with a thick salt and pepper beard and mustache. He was sitting quietly at his table when I entered but then started following the owner around the store as he shut the doors against the evening chill, urgently telling the owner about how there is a lawsuit to bar Obama from running because he was born in Kenya and doesn't have the right to run for president but that the democratic media was shutting the story out. I listened dubiously as I ate my gelato, wanting to say something but not having the facts off the top of my head, and listening to the other customer chide the owner about watching liberal media.
Fox news = Liberal media?
I wonder but am a little afraid of what the other customer would think is Republican or conservative media.....
Anyway, I did look up where Obama was born and he was born in Hawaii.
I am studiously avoiding packing up our kitchen today, so I'll write about the commercials below, paid for by the Corn Refiners Association to push a more positive image of high fructose corn syrup. I don't have broadcast or cable tv - I watch DVDs - so maybe these commercials are old news but I just found out about them today.
Ok. This is the US. We like quick, cheap food.
I wouldn't be rude to someone just because they had HFCS products on their table but I wouldn't consider it a healthy food. The commercials don't actually say HFCS is healthy, just encourages you to partake. Anyway, as you probably know, if you avoid HFCS products (although it's hard to avoid since it can be found in most products sold at the supermarket), you can avoid eating a lot of empty calories.
Some reasons to not consume products with high fructose corn syrup: HFCS is loaded in large amounts in processed foods, which generally aren't very healthy for you. HFCS may be linked to the obesity epidemic, diabetes, and high cholesterol. It's manufacture has serious adverse environmental impacts for the planet; it's grown in large monoculture crops which require the heavy use of fertilizers, whose run off washes out into and pollutes our waters, and HFCS is also very energy intensive to make. It's probably not as bad as sugar if taken "in moderation" as the commercial notes, but I would think it would be hard to moderate since HFCS is dumped into a lot of food that you wouldn't expect because it's cheap and helps extend food shelf life.
If you want to read about food, I would recommend The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's one take on the subject and talks about the differences between conventional and organic farming and also touches on the slow food and local food movements. He talks a lot about corn: it's growth, harvesting, transport, processing, and follows it down the food stream. If you don't want to read a book, the author Michael Pollan has also published a few articles as well.
I've been meaning to read The Mysteries of Udolpho for a long time - ever since I found it that it and Matthew Lewis' The Monk are the two seminal works of English Gothic literature - and I'm glad that I finally read it. While The Monk immerses its story deep into the fantastic throughout, I was a little surprised at how much less than expected the supernatural featured in Udolpho. There are flickerings of the supernatural which prey on the mind of the characters as they either succomb to their fears or try to rationalize the eerie events around them, but there are a lot of very real dangers that the heroine encounters in the story. It's a long rambling novel about the heroine's coming of age, but I enjoyed the journey - even though the heroine was a little too impeccable for my tastes aside from a tendency to faint - since Radcliffe did a nice job of showing how the relationships between the characters develop and evolve over the course of the journey. Some of the romantic developments made me laugh - perhaps because I'm a little mean-spirited - because I hadn't quite expected it to unravel the way it did from the beginning of the book. And in the end, it was refreshing that the hero did not save the heroine and that she could stand on her own by the novel's end.
Jane Austen parodies Udolpho in Northanger Abbey, which I read too long ago to remember accurately, but it was interesting to see how some of the common themes in, say, Pride and Prejudice, have a different take in Udolpho, such as money and how she treats the male characters.
