Marzipan is a sweetened almond paste. It is very delicious.

Marzipan is now considered something like candy, but historically it was invented as a way to make almonds keep longer since sugar acts as a preservative. Marzipan is a great traveling food in the past since it has high protein and vitamins in the almonds, and energy in the sugar. Marzipan has a good energy to it and just a small amount can refresh you.

Most Americans have never had marzipan, even those who think they have. Occasionally a cake shop will make a cake with a marzipan topping, or a croissant stuffed with marzipan, but this too sugery stuff is not real marzipan any more than the drink that comes out of the machine at the gas station is real cappuccino.

When I was young, one of my mother's German business associates gave her a round pie shaped box with a half kilo piece of marzipan upon which was impressed a three dimensional bas relief of the German town where the client's business was based. This was the first time I had marzipan and it was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. I ate it slowly, only a pinch a month or even less frequently. It was so delicious that a single pinch could be savored for an hour. I managed to make that pie of solid marzipan last about 5 or 10 years.

Mom mentioned to another German friend that I liked Marzipan and he began a tradition of buying me a bar each year when he was in Germany. These semicylindrical bars were covered in thick semidark chocolate. Some had raisins in them. They also had rum. I felt the chocolate and raisins detracted from the marzipan and would remove the chocolate and eat it separately. The addition of the rum was not objectionable — I think marzipan can be plain or with rum. But covering it with chocolate is a bit too much.

I would make each of these bars last a year. I started looking for domestic marzipan but could not find any of adequate quality. The closest was that See's Candy shops had a marzipan covered with chocolate that was fairly good, but it did come covered with chocolate, which was an impediment to full enjoyment. You could select your own pound of chocolate there, so I would get these and candied ginger in a box every few years, it was an expensive treat.

Where I live now there is no real marzipan available at all, and even the cake shop style marzipan isn't easy to find.

It occurred to me the other day that it had been over a decade since I last had marzipan, which is one of my favorite things of all time.

I read up on marzipan, got some almonds, and did some experiments. And now I am able to make real marzipan that is exactly the same as the best german marzipan. Perhaps you'd like to try as well.

The key is that you'll use an egg white to bind the almonds and sugar together. One egg white will correctly do about 6-8 ounces of almonds and an equal amount of powdered sugar. If you try to use less than 6 ounces of almonds, you'll end up with a sticky paste and not the firm solid malleable substance you really want.

Note that you will be using raw egg whites and there is no cooking involved, so if you don't have a safe source of raw eggs free from salmonella, you should probably just skip this whole project. There are other ways to bind the almonds and sugar together, but I think you should do it right or not at all, otherwise just get the fake stuff at the cake shop or candy store.

I bought a 12 ounce tray of unsalted almonds. I used half of them. I put them in the blender in two batches and blended them down as fine as I could go. The powder got stuck on the sides of the blender, so I kept stopping it, pushing the powder down off the sides with a chopstick, then putting the cover on and doing it again. I think it's best to only do 3 ounces at a time, otherwise you get too much powder in the blender.

You can then add the powdered sugar to the blender if it was clumpy, or mix it in a bowl with the almond paste if not. I did this step to taste, using my memory of the correct sweetness, which is not very sweet. Really fine marzipan should be half sugar and half almonds. Commercial Marzipan can go down to only 1/4 almonds and 3/4 sugar to save on costs since almonds are rather expensive, but that mixture is way too sweet. Don't use granulated sugar, use powdered.

Now with the sugar and almond powder in a bowl, I added about a 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla extract. Real vanilla, not fake. It's getting hard to find real vanilla due to civil upheaval problems in Madagascar. Most real vanilla comes from northeastern Madagascar. I read recently that the age of consent in Madagascar is 21, and that is the oldest age of consent in any country. That seems so strange. Madagascar has lots of adorable ring tailed lemurs and those weird Baobob trees. My best friend growing up is now a renowned expert in the Malagasy language that is spoken in Madagascar. He spends time there on occasion. I should ask him next time I talk to him about the vanilla situation. In any case, if you don't want to use real vanilla, stop right now! Just get the cheap marzipan at the cake store. We are making real marzipan here. Let's proceed.

Toss in a bit of lemon juice as well. Not too much, maybe a teaspoon or a half teaspoon. We don't want this too wet. Oh, and that egg white. Put that in now.

Stir and stir and stir. It should seem like you don't have enough liquid, but keep mixing. I do this by hand with a fork, not by any electro-mechanical device. You're going for a consistency kind of like bread dough. Once it gets to be pretty well mixed, you can fold and knead it, and dip back down to pick up that stray powder that didn't mix in yet. Kneading and folding helps the almond oils release into the sugar. Then roll it up into a ball. My marzipan ball was about 5 inches across or so. Now, stick this in a container in the refrigerator for a day or so, and then you can cut of slices pretty thin about 1/8 inch thick. Eat with strawberries and or serve with brandy or something. Not sure about the brandy, it seems a good idea but I don't have any brandy. Let me know if you try and it seems a good pairing. I tried it with beer since beer is also German and I found that beer isn't the right thing to have with marzipan, it clashes.

Very high end pastry shops in big cities might have marzipan sculptures in the display case. These will be little apples or oranges or such things that are sculpted out of marzipan which can be sort of like edible Play Doh to a baker. They paint the outsides with food colors and glaze them to make them shiney. These little treats are probably just like real marzipan, but I wouldn't know since I would never pay $55 for a half size marzipan apple.

In any case, this will introduce you to the delights of genuine marzipan. Don't eat a lot of it at once. Good marzipan is something you just eat a tiny bit of at a time.

There's a study that just came out that took a real detailed look at high school graduation rates across the entire US, and broke it down by Urban, Suburb, Country, Race and Gender. Here's a summary of the results:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080401/ts_alt_afp/useducationsociety_080401184532

The institute that put it together has more details about the study here:

http://www.americaspromise.org/APAPage.aspx?id=10354

And that page has a link to the pdf file of the actual report if you're interested.

So here is the big summary. Rural areas have better graduation rates than Urban. Well that's not surprising, I think? And Suburban does best of all, but is close to Rural.

But the rates are much lower than I would have guessed if you asked. Lacking data, I would have guessed 90% of students graduate high school. But it turns out that nationally, only 69.9 of students graduate, but 74.9 percent in the suburbs and 73.2 percent in rural areas do.

Looking at the numbers where it is broken down by race, you can see that the whole rural/urban/suburban thing has nothing to do with location, but is really just a projection of racial distribution. Minorities are more concentrated in urban areas and not so much in rural and suburban. It turns out that only 50% of American Indians and African Americans who start high school ever graduate, 57% of Hispanics, 76% of whites, and 80% of Asians. So if you just look at the racial distribution of a school, you can account for the urban vs rural rates without even knowing it is rural or urban.

This is interesting since Tennessee has this bill up where they want to ban people from getting a drivers license until age 21 if they don't have a diploma. What that bill is basically saying is that 50% of the African Americans and American Indians, like Cherokees, in our state will be banned from having a driver's license. Clearly this will make it impossible for them to get a job, and will drag them even further down into the cycle of poverty. I have to wonder if that is the real goal of the bill since there's no doubt that the legislators are aware of the racial component to graduation rates.

People reading this might start to get some ideas in their heads about racial intelligence, but I'll tell you that graduation rates have little to do with how smart someone is. People who get expelled are more likely to drop out. In many schools, minorities are more likely to be expelled, and are punished more harshly for the same things that white kids do. Minority students are also more likely to have to drop out of school to support their families who are more likely to be poor. A high achieving minority youth is far less likely to be hired for a job than a similar white one. I know many brilliant and creative people who are black and hispanic and indian, and I know plenty of white folks that can't convert a fraction to a percentage.

Here is my controversial angle on this. Most everyone assumes that high drop out rates are a bad thing, and society must do anything it can to get graduation rates up — by force if necessary. For example, the bill I mentioned. Come down hard, like the Gestapo. Either you graduate, or we will destroy your life. But wait — what if a good portion of the 30.1% who didn't graduate are the lucky ones? What if they are the ones who escaped destruction?

Could this be? I happen to have professional experience tutoring and teaching college students from well regarded school districts, so I know how things really are. Folks, regardless of what the line is the school systems are feeding you, you need to know that most high school graduates are not qualified to do much. Basic, rudimentary literacy can be assumed, yes, but many graduates do not have enough functional literacy in either math or reading to be able to properly participate in a system of representative government, which requires an educated and thoughtful populace. If our freedoms are going to be kept, they have to be understood and defended. For the most part, that is not happening right now. Our educational system is not to blame here, but rather should be accredited: for this is not an accidental plan, but rather one conceived by the power brokers in society who can only thrive with their wicked schemes as long as the population remains ignorant of the foundations of democracy. When people place a higher value to spend their evenings watching sitcoms instead of reading, when people pop a prozac and press the close button rather than show up at a school board meeting and demand accountability when a 12 year old girl is strip searched by school officials looking for a government unauthorized ibuprofen tablet, oh horrors.

You see, perhaps the real issue here is that the smart people are the ones who drop out of high school and move on with their lives and their education. Education is something you earn for yourself, not something someone programs you with, and the sooner you escape the system, the sooner you can get on with a real education. One involving working for yourself, thinking for yourself, and putting together a fine library of those classics that are no longer taught. The foundations and values of civilization have been set aside to make way for sex education, nuclear education, commercialized holiday education, brand name education, and field trips to the movie theatre.

In addition to the free minds issue, High Schools in this country are not exactly known for being a wholesome educational environment.

I've got kids, and at this time, all things considered, I don't think it would be in their best interests to attend any of our local high schools. This has nothing to do with the teachers or administration though! It has to do with the system and the values that schools have taken on nationally for whatever reason.

Like almost all american high schools, the high schools here expose kids to drugs and violence. You learn more about conforming to fit into a clique than you do about learning to think for yourself or be your own person. There are also the issues of zero tolerance punishment, over the top expulsions for being tardy too many times, for using a cell phone or an aspirin. It's not that kids should be allowed to run wild, but these are minor things that in the past either would not have been issues, or would have resulted in suspensions. There is also general culture of trying to instill an ethic of unquestioning obedience to all authority.

I find all these things contrary to the educational ideals that Thomas Jefferson promoted.

I would prefer to have children educated to always question orders to see if they are the right thing, to ask if they are just, to see if they promote freedom. To contemplate themselves what is right and moral, and not to merely conform to systems of rules and facts that have to be memorized. I would prefer for them to learn to be free people, to be able to think for themselves, to be the captain of their own destiny rather than cogs in the machine that are just following orders. To me, the individual free in both actions and words is the highest expression of the ideals held by Jefferson.

We have a family friend, Glen, who was an important NASA scientist on the Apollo project. As a mathematician, he invented the idea of using a Fourier Transform to filter data on a digital computer. This was used to filter out signals coming back from in-flight rocket sensors and reduced the data processing time and increased the volume of usable data substantially. Reducing data processing time meant more flights could be scheduled and more adjustments could be done per flight and more things learned from each flight. Processing turnaround was the main bottleneck in the moon program at the time and solving it was the key element in not only winning the race to the moon, but doing it far more safely than would otherwise have been possible.

Glen built his own computer from TTL logic chips back in the early 70s. You programmed it initially by flipping nice thick metal toggle switches. He toggled in an assembler to bootstrap it, and eventually worked his way up to a keyboard and CRT for it. While visiting him one summer, I played an adventure game on it.

Today I read about a teacher in Portland who built a computer not out of TTL logic chips, but out of physical relay switches. He teaches computer architecture and if you want to understand that topic, watch his 1 hr video.

Then visit the web ring of homemade CPUs, linked from the bottom of that page. What fun!

Among the links is this web page:

http://www.magic-1.org/

Yes, that web page is being served to you by a webserver running in Minix, a small Unix, on a computer designed and built by hand using discrete logic units wirewrapped together.

Details of that computer and a photo:

http://www.homebrewcpu.com/

My favorite punctuation mark right now is the two-em dash. There is very little information about this mark on the web, and all of it is incorrect, claiming that the two-em dash is only used to indicate letters that have been left out of a word. I am here to set the record straight.

First, recall how the ellipsis is often misused;— and mis-kerned;— nowadays. A typical misuse is to indicate a pause in voiced or unvoiced conversation:

“I am not sure . . . let me think about it.”

This is unequivocally an complete violation of the proper use of an ellipsis. The ellipsis is correctly used to indicate when part of a quoted text has been left out. Using it for this other purpose leaves us wondering “Is he pausing in speech or is there something he said that the author is not revealing for some reason?” We often can't tell.

Some sort of dash should have been used in the above example instead. One possibility is the two-em dash:

“I am not sure —— let me think about it,” he said reluctantly.

If the person’s pause was not quite so long, the standard em-dash would have been sufficient:

“I am not sure — let me think about it,” he said sincerely.

The two-em dash is for long pauses that exceed the length of a standard em-dash pause. It is also used when you are hiding a person's identity by abbreviating their name, such as,— “During our expedition to Kathmandu, we encountered a Mr. Q——, a former barrister of London, tending mountain goats in a remote valley of the Himalayas.”

Here are some things I've been reading lately:

The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
Naturalis Historia by Caius Plinius Secundus
Two Treatises of Government by John Locke
Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse

I looked in our cookbooks for a gravy recipe, but they all involved drippings from meat. What if you don't have any of that around? I made up the following recipe and it turned out real nice.

1/3 lb turkey sausage (1/3 of a frozen roll)
3 tbsp oil
1/4 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp fennel seeds
1 1/2 cup milk
6 tbsp flour
1/2 tsp fresh ground black pepper
1 tsp salt

1. Defrost turkey and chop into small fragments
2. Fry in pan in oil with cumin and fennel seeds until cooked.
3. Shake milk, flour, salt, pepper in large jar to dissolve flour, get rid of lumps.
4. Add to turkey in the pan.
5. Cook, stirring, until of right consistency.

I sometimes forget why I am shunning certain products. This is a new category to keep track of food rants so I remember.

The rule is that if I have a problem with a food source even once, I will never buy it again. Likewise, a single incidence of food poisoning at a restaurant is enough to never return. It doesn't matter if they 'fix' things; if their process allows customers to get poisoned, they can never be trusted again.

Tyson Boneless Skinless Chicken Breasts

I do not like store bought chicken at all and that is why I raise my own chickens. But I have problems getting cooperation regarding killing, plucking and dressing the chickens. As a result, most of the chickens I have raised for meat end up living so long they get eaten by dogs, possums, and chicken hawks, discouraging. Somehow store bought factory chicken product appears in the freezer. Organic free range is considered less valuable than the corporate product by society.

This is a 2.5 lb sack of processed white chicken meat. Mostly it is water. The bag indicates that the chickens are 'fifteen percent' injection filled with a 'broth', that consists of salt and 'natural flavorings'. (What is that? Beef and pork juice? Turpentine extract?), and then 'water glazed' before being 'flash frozen'. So the meat is not only injected 15% full of water, but it is covered in ice, which is in addition to the 15%. So defrosting it you lose a substantial amount of the supposed 2.5 lbs. Now that's just a rip off really, and what is with adding flavors to chicken? Is that to mask the flavor of rotten meat, or meat so filled with antibiotics that it is bitter? Probably.

Frying this frozen stuff you find a pan that is actually filled with water with chicken floating around in it. That's how much water was added to it before freezing! The problem is that in addition to this, there is this very foamy stuff foaming all over the place and making foamy noises. Where is this foam coming from? From inside the chicken, the chicken is exuding some chemical that is creating foam. So we finished cooking this batch and gave it to the dog. I hope he doesn't die from eating this Tyson 'chicken', which is obviously unfit for human consumption.

Food Club Extra Long Grain Enriched Rice

Then we made rice. This is a 2 lb bag of Food Club (generic brand of Food City) Extra Long Grain Enriched Rice, distributed by Topco and a "Product of USA". Just plain rice, but with the usual vitamins added: Ferric Phosphate (Iron), Niacin (B-2), Thiamine Mononitrate (B-1), Folic Acid (B-9). The rice had a very noticeable chemical flavor that I would compare to the base of some cheap perfume. It left a weird pasty feeling on the top of my mouth. Shortly after eating a few spoons of it my stomach was hurting and the rest of the family is now complaining of stomach aches.

Now I think the USA sourced rice is fine here, what I worry about is the "vitamins", which are undoubtedly sourced from China. I used to work in the vitamin importing business and by far the cheapest chemicals are for China and for good reason. The drums you get are filthy and the chemicals will be filled with dirt, mouse droppings and not be the right color. Assaying the chemicals almost always would should that the chemical was not the right amount specified. Sometimes you'd have to send the chemical out to be reprocessed. Sometimes it would be the wrong chemical. Lately, chinese chemicals have been in the news, where chinese companies will substitute rat poison or antifreeze for things like additives to baby food or animal feed. This is very common and is the way the chinese do things. Most American import companies do not re-assay the chemicals though, and so the "vitamins" you are taking to improve your health are often actually poison or worse.

Our national food supply is not safe. Not safe at all. This is a systematic problem and as such, is a far greater threat to our lives than so-called terrorists taking pot shots at buildings and dams.

Sometimes I think about my old friend Pete. He was a real friendly guy, very tall, was a great person to have fun with. I think I met him in 7th grade or so, and last saw him when he was 22 or around there and he was doing pretty well at that time.

One day when he was around 21, he asked me to read to him a letter he had gotten, and so I did, and then he thanked me and admitted he didn't know how to read. I thought that was pretty interesting since he had graduated from high school without any problems and asked wow, how did you do that. He said it wasn't really an issue, it was never necessary to know how to read. This was an astonishing claim and I wondered if there was some exaggeration about his lack of skill. Some brief questions revealed that he was totally illiterate. He couldn't read at all.

How did he manage to pass tests, I asked. He said that he was just able to do it.

Why didn't any of his teachers have special classes for him or anything? The answer was that in 13 years of schooling, none of his teachers had noticed he was illiterate. He certainly would have been glad to get some help in this, but the topic never came up in school and he didn't even think such extra help was possible in any case. This was a top rated school in a very well regarded district.

I found the situation very interesting for two points.

First, it appeared that reading was not a necessary skill in schools, and perhaps in life.

Secondly, I found it very enlightening to know that a student could make it through 13 grades, which is 1+6+6*6 = 43 separate teachers, and none of them had noticed in any fashion that he was completely illiterate, and all passed him. He never repeated a grade or a class.

A few years later, I worked as a math and physics tutor at a community college. I was only one of tutors in the program able to tutor in calculus. Which worked out because most of the demand in the program was not for calculus but for very basic skills. How basic? I had access to placement statistics. Around like 70% of students needed remedial math. About 50% of students placed only for the bottom most class for math. This class, which was called Concepts of Numbers or some such, how to count to 100, which number is bigger than the other, and what is an integer. The second class after that got into addition and subtraction, fractions and powers of ten. I would say these classes corresponded to kindergarten and first or second grade respectively. I was not able to teach these classes because I would not know where to start with this when dealing with an adult college student, but I did observe and interact with those that did, as well as hundreds of students in the student body and most students genuinely did not know how to divide numbers or what fractions were. Most could actually count and do addition and subtraction given paper and time, but they made mistakes. This was a pretty good community college in a good area.

A few years later, when I was at the state university, I observed similar levels of math competency, though the numbers that were at this level were smaller, more like 20% of admitted students did not know fractions or how to divide. But that was an exclusive school that only took the 5% of top high school graduates, and required high SAT scores for admission.

Years after that, I tutored in a program for homeless people and saw similar levels of competence, which led me to realize that lack of education was not a problem for homeless people since their skills level was average for the population.

From these and other experiences over the years, I realized that the normal situation in the US for the majority of graduates is that they know how to add and subtract and count, and can do multiplication. But they do not understand fractions at all, and can not do long division at all. Algebra is completely beyond most high school graduates, even though they took two years of it and passed.

I could see that people probably had abilities only that were necessary, and knowing how to divide is simply not something people do. Fractions are only understood to the extent that if you need 1/2 cup of flour, you fill the cup up to the mark that says 1/2. Dividing a recipe in two or doubling it is not possible, except to measure that 1/2 cup out twice.

I was not sure how students could pass algebra though and not have any ability or understanding of it a couple years later. Had they simply forgotten?

The answer came when I worked teaching high school math and computers. My math students had completed "advanced algebra" and were prepared for a challenging textbook in geometry. The results were disasterous. It took me a half semester before I figured that the reason most of the students could not solve the problems or understand things is they knew no algebra at all, but believed that they did since they had passed, often with high grades. In asking them in detail about how things worked, I discovered that algebra was taught by the teacher assigning problems, then giving the answers, then guaranteeing that only the homework questions would be on the test and only as multiple choice questions.

Students were shown:
y + 2 = 6, y = ?
The next day, they were told:
y + 2 = 6, y = 4
was the answer. They memorized it and picked c from a list with their #2 pencils:
a) y=0
b) y=2
c) y=4
d) y=6

If you asked them instead to solve this problem:
y + 2 = 5, y = ?
... they could not solve it. They were completely stumped. They complained the question was unfair to have on a test because that was not one that they were 'taught' in class.

This was the only way for the students to 'learn', other teachers told me. In this case, 'learn' meant to pass the multiple choice test. And how they did that was not by learning concepts of algebra, but by memorizing the correct answers, and then being able to recognize them from a list of multiple choice. Students had developed excellent abilities to memorize useless and arbitrary data in order to succeed, and their teachers were happy with these results.

So at last I understood how my buddy Pete had managed to pass all those tests.

The coffee machine broke down some time ago and I couldn't find a replacement that was the type I like that was not expensive.

Brewed coffee is ruined by warming it on a burner as the aromatic oils that give coffee its earthy character quickly evaporate. So I wanted something with a thermal carafe aka thermos, which keeps the coffee warm through vacuum insulation rather than the dreaded externally applied heat. The problem with carafes though I found out from my last machine — Silurian Coffee Slugs! OK, not Silurian, I just made that adjective up to make it seem more exciting. But slugs nonetheless. Weird, weird slugs. I found that the carafe had all these slugs living in the innards of the complicated screw on cover, and when the coffee was done, they would slide out of their hidey-hole in the cap and crawl around in the carafe, consuming coffee, then return to the secret slug dwelling place. These were not normal slugs like any entomologist would recognize, but some freaky space alien slugs that would give anyone the screaming heebie jeebies, or at least it did to me. My goodness, it was creepy.

I tried to sterilize the whole thing by boiling the cap and the cap warped out of shape and wouldn't go back in and I couldn't fit the carafe under the filter anymore and there were no replacements and the machine was ruined. At that point I switched to an old French Press, which is a glass tumbler with a metal filter disk on a stick that you use to press the coffee grounds down to the bottom after letting the hot water steep in the grounds for a bit. Makes a real nutty tasting coffee, but it cools quickly. This press was decades old, and I was sad when it disintegrated after a few months of use, leaving me coffee-less.

Besides the carafe, another criteria in looking for a pot was that it use a funnel shaped filter and not a flat bottomed one. Coffee made with a funnel shaped filter tastes better as the hot water goes more evenly through the grounds.

The problem is that the pots I could find with both these characteristics start at $60, which was outside my budget possibilities.

It's been far too long without coffee though and so today I resolved — even if I had to think outside the carafe and funnel box — to purchase the least expensive device I could find that wasn't out and out unacceptable.

And after an hour in the coffee machine aisle, that happened to be a $24 cappuccino machine.

I've long been curious about these, but I've avoided them because I had heard that they are hard to use, complicated to clean, and it takes a lot of skill to get the foam just right. But hey this was the cheapest thing, and I love good cappuccino, although I was skeptical I had the skills to make it myself. I figured with practice I'll could probably figure it out, but didn't have hopes it would be as good as restaurant stuff.

For those who have not had it, real Cappuccino is not the stuff you get at the gas station or hospital from the automated machine that says "Cappuccino". That stuff is just cheap instant coffee with lots of artificial flavors added. Kinda decent if in the mood for that sort of thing, but it's not the same thing at all and the difference is like the difference between Champagne and 7-Up. Both have their place.

Real Cappuccino is a cup with espresso, steamed milk, and milk foam on top. The milk foam acts as an insulator and keeps the coffee warm longer. The steamed milk goes through a chemical transformation from the brief scalding and has a really different flavor from just adding warm milk to coffee. And espresso is an intense coffee made by driving steam under high pressure through a small canister of dark roasted coffee. The coffee is made from freshly roasted beans which are ground immediately before making the espresso, grinding to a particular sand-like texture. This takes more time and trouble than pouring from a pot: each serving must be made individually and takes many steps. For this reason, cappuccino can be very expensive at a restaurant or coffee shop, running $4 and up at most places.

Cappuccino was invented a long time ago in Italy by someone who tried every possible way he could think of to make the most delicious coffee possible, that captures and transfers all of the subtleties, details and highlights of the beans. In the end, brewing by high pressure steam extracted the most oils and flavor without damaging them, while leaving the headache-inducing toxins behind. The steamed heated milk was the nicest way to complement and tame the flavors of the espresso with milk and the foam was just an extra to keep it hotter a bit longer.

Italy is one of my favorite countries. I've been to lots of places and like to meander about without any plans and take things in. Italy is just one of the most pleasant places to live in the world. There is a wide variety of Italians and each region is like its own country, but on the whole Italians are passionate, fun, friendly and approachable people. Food is very important in Italy and even the worst of the food is fantastic. Things are made from fresh ingredients and the American value of doing everything on the cheapest way possible is simply not done. You don't compromise on the food, for food is life. In Italy, I cried and had visions after eating ice cream in Rome, which was so utterly brilliant that I could not eat ice cream for a year after returning, not even Hagen Dazs or any of the premium brands. There was no comparison. Italian ice cream was genuine and the best of the american ice creams was nothing more than a complete and obvious forgery sharing almost no qualities with the original. Coffee was also the same. Italian cappuccino was perfect in every way. It made you sleepy. It made you see coffee for the first time in your life.

Back in the US, I tried to find coffee like this, even visiting an Italian restaurant founded by recent immigrants who meticulously tried to do everything they could to duplicate the coffee of their homeland. It was quite excellent, but something was still missing. Over the years, I realized some things. You couldn't use tap water because that has chlorine. And you couldn't use bottled water because that is missing certain trace minerals that effect the chemistry of the coffee making process. It had to be unprocessed spring or well water, and the source of the water affected the taste a lot. Water was the most important factor, more so than the beans. Beans should be 100% Arabica, but not the cheapest stuff. You couldn't buy pre-ground, you have to grind the beans yourself. And you should be cautious about who roasted the beans, and make sure they are relatively fresh. Better yet, buy raw coffee beans and roast them yourself, though this is a nasty dirty business that must be done outside due to the smoke.

Anyway, I unpack the machine, grind up some beans that a close friend brought me back from a trip out of state, pour milk in my big coffee mug as a milk pitcher, pour the water in, snap in the coffee handle and turn the pressure cavity cap, and turn the thing on. It starts flowing after a few minutes, I switch the control to steam and swish around the steam nozzle in the milk. It seems to be frothing pretty good. Dip the nozzle down in the milk mug to heat and not just froth, and now the espresso is done. Pour into a 12 oz coffee mug 1/3 full, then 1/3 of milk, then spoon the froth on. This was the first time doing this in my life and didn't bother to read the instructions but it just seems kind of obvious, though I have seen them do this at coffee shops.

So, will this first batch suck, or will it be barely acceptable?

And here goes.... Hm, well now. This tastes 100% exactly like the cappuccino I would get in Italy.

Wow.

And that is something I have never had in the US at any restaurant, no matter how expensive. I think the well water is part of it, plus my intuition for the right size of bean grind. And I guess I'm a natural for the foamy step.

Yay!

Just then the oven beeped and my date-nut-raisin bread made completely from my own scratch recipe was ready, so took it out and made a slice, and put real butter on it. And after years of failing at the most basic baking attempts, somehow last year I got it together and now I have this whole bread thing down and this date-nut-raisin is better than any bread I have had in any bakery anywhere.

So I am standing about, feeling pretty mellow and quietly stunned and appreciative of my good fortune at having somehow done this right, and having discovered some great secret that I was searching for for years.

And I have three cappuccinos from that first batch.

I don't know if you've ever heard this, but great Cappuccino is a hallucinogen. I realized that in Italy. You feel really super mellow. It's not like the harsh caffeine in coffee at all. It's exactly like the difference between $100/bottle wine and Thunderbird wine that is aged in the bottle for 20 minutes on the assembly line before the screw-on cap is attached. One is harsh and nasty and gives you a headache and nausea, and the other is smooth and mellow and makes you relaxed and giddy.

Then the mind wanders and the visions come and colors are brighter. You might need to take a nap.

At the end, all you can think about is getting that next Cappuccino. But I know that if I make another one, I won't be able to stop and I will be making them all night long, until I run out of beans. Or until I start to get bad scary trips from excessive Cappuccino induced psychedelia. So it's just one pot for now.

Self-sufficiency is an important goal to me, and I value knowing how to do things for myself. However, sometimes I just don't know how do to basic things that everybody once knew how to do.

When I was looking for a farm, it was important that it have its own water supply, a spring or well. So I have a well and a pond and a lake here.

The house came with a modern wood stove, the WonderCoal 6000. This is an efficient wood stove that also runs on coal. But winters haven't been so bad and the baseboard heaters are easy to deal with and you can just turn them on in the rooms you are using so that the bill is less than if you had efficient central heating. The WonderCoal turned into a surface to stack things on top of, and although I had the chimney swept, I hadn't used the wood stove at all in the eight years I have been here.

During this last season, the tomatoes suffered from blossom rot. This is a brown spot that starts on the far end of the tomato. It is caused by a calcium deficiency in the soil.

I could also tell from the sorts of weeds that were growing, like broombrush, and blackberries, that the soil was becoming acidic, which is what happens after adding fertilizer to it for some years (in this case, organic on-farm goat manure.)

The most common solution is to add calcium carbonate, crushed oyster shells, or the like. These involve transporting sacks of stuff by truck and crushing oysters in factories and things that, while organic, are not sustainable, and also costs a lot.

One of the better solutions to both these problems is the one used in the old days: use wood or coal ash. The coal plant used to give away free piles of coal ash, but because of the high mercury content, they stopped this policy. Many farmers in this area replenish their fields by doing burning directly to the fields, but the slash and burn solution tends to only work for a single season and is mainly reserved for handling large grazing areas.

Three years ago, a huge lightning strike hit our beloved ancient tulip poplar and killed the top of the tree. This year, the top 40 feet of the tree fell off one day, leaving an enormous trunk of very dry and seasoned hardwood, and dozens of large branches blocking the gravel driveway. I dragged the branches off and then used the jeep and a rope to tow the trunk into the field.

This convergence of events made me start thinking about that wood stove again.

It took a while to unpile the wood stove, and move the things stacked behind it away. As I piddled at this, the days grew colder.

I didn't like running the baseboards in this very cold weather because they are not efficient at heating things from a very cold temperature. Also, it seemed wasteful to be burning coal in the coal plant to make steam, which turns the steam turbines, which turn the giant generators to make electricity, which is stepped up in voltage, transmitted to our power pole, stepped down to 220V, and then used in the baseboard to create heat which is like the coal originally gave off.

It makes much more sense and is more efficient to burn the coal in the house and skip all those conversion steps, each of which has an energy loss. Or to burn wood, if you have it conveniently lying around and you actually really need the wood ash that would be created from burning it. Obviously this was the Right Thing to Do. Also, I was freezing in the house and noticed that dishwater was starting to ice over at night.

I knew what to do, but was not sure I knew all the tricks. I put some discarded cardboard and crumpled paper and trash at the bottom, then put a bunch of small twigs that I had been gathering from the yard and simply throwing into a pile to rot, then put some logs on top of that. Light the paper, and the paper lights the cardboard which lights the twigs which burns long enough to get the logs started. It actually worked. It took a few hours to get going though and I was concerned the stove was too efficient at burning things slowly, but it finally started giving off some real heat just as it started getting cold this evening. I then placed a large pan of water on the grating on top of the stove which is for this purpose and that will prevent the air from getting too dry.

Now I have something to do with the dead wood, I have a place to put the twigs that continually fall from the trees when the wind blows, I no longer have to throw away paper packaging, I have a supply of mercury free ash for the garden which is entirely produced on my own land and requires no fossil fuels to bag or to deliver, and I can even boil water for spaghetti without having to use any electricity. It seems the right thing to do.

Trog now knows how to make fire. Grunt!

Enantiodromia means the tendency of things to turn into their opposite. It is one of my favorite words because it is so useful. For example:

A government established to protect freedom will tend to become a government that rules by slavery.
An anti-drug policy will tend to increase the use of drugs.

Both of these are examples of enantiodromia in action.

Otiose means "serving no practical purpose". I ran into this word in a computer science article where the author casually dropped it into the flow, causing me to go "iuh?!"

Etymology:
Otiosus is Latin for idle.
Otium is Latin for leisure.

Callipygian is a Greek word which historically was first used to describe this statue:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_de_Milo

Etymology (Greek):
kallos = beautiful
puge = butt

A tiger team is a group of highly trained commando types that try to break the security of a secure installation, in order to stress test the security.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_team

Scott Adams made fun of management's prediliction to inappropriately use terms by doing some Dilbert strips in which the boss started rambling about "Tiger Teams" but in inappropriate context.

Today's STS-121 shuttle launch brought this subject to mind as they were referring to the "External Tank Tiger Team", which is a group of engineers who are charged with designing a safer system in which foam doesn't fall off the space shuttle at bad times during launch. Here's references to the ET tiger team:

http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2005/10/executive_summa.html
http://www.aviationnow.com/avnow/news/channel_space_story.jsp?id=news/JUL06206.xml

Arg! Use the term correctly! A External Tank Tiger Team would be a team that is launching the shuttle in the middle of a freezing rainstorm, to see if a new foam design falls off under these conditions. It's not the right term for the guys actually trying to improve the design, it's for the people who try to break the design.

You want to know about something that's freaking awesome? Well I'm gonna tell youns all about something that's freaking awesome. And when I say it's freaking awesome, it's not just so freaking awesome, it's so SO SOOOOO freaking awesome, let me tell you dudes I ain't a messin' with you man, this is some deep, some awesomely deligioomousious sassalilicaly yum yum freakin wow wow. Yeah. Burp. Hey there.

Dangit I HATE Corn Syrup and all it represents. Down with the Man and Down with his lousy Corn Syrup and his stoopid lobbiests that write junk articles about how it is the wonder wonder yum. That junk ain't no wonder wonder yum yum, my friends, that junk is some stuff that is baaaaaaad for you and ho. And it tastes like gunky sticky crud.

You needs some real nutrition, some real food, my friends.

BLAAAAAACK berry. That's right, it is **BlaCkBeRRy*8 season right now!!! You go get some, we need 2 or 3 cups of them right now, go pick them. And stop by the store and get some fresh ginger root while you at it. I wait.

Back yet? Good. A treat awaits.

Lay out this stuff on your counter:

3/4 cup sugar
2 tbsp finely grated ginger
1/4 tsp yeast
3 cups fresh blackberries
water to fill 2 liter bottle
Funnel
2 liter soda bottle, empty and clean
Balloon

OK, now dump the sugar in bottle and with the yeast using the funnel.
Grind blackberries with some water in blender to create blackberry slurry.
Fine grate the ginger - really fine.
Pour slurry into bottle on top of ginger.
Fill the rest of the bottle through the funnel with cold water.
Place balloon over bottle neck - this captures the CO2 while maintaining pressure and keeping gnats out.

Leave on counter at room temperature for *72* hours (3 days)
Then refrigerate it for 12 hours.

It's gonna look like a big poop is stuck in the neck, but that is just the blackberry crud, don't worry you can eat it if you want it's not as bad as it looks. But the stuff at the very top, maybe gentle squeeze that out a bit, let's call it 'decanting'. By that time, the rest of the crud will have fallen into the bottle and be mixed around and there's no doing about that, just don't worry, it don't taste bad at all, no sir.

Pour this into a mason jar with some ice.

Put the original screw cap on the 2 liter bottle and back in the fridge.

Now, drink that mason jar, even the sludge at the bottom, go ahead, it's gooooooood. (yum)

You drink! You like! Frickeen-Awesome!!! This is the best hootch you ever drank ! Woo hoo! Dang boy, you need to make more bottles of this right pronto yee haw!!!!!!!!!!! And 100% natural and that's no lie.

Did I mention that it is rather alcoholic? You may have inferred that already.

This is the most delicious thing EVAR. I call it "Red Barn's Wickedly Delicious Blackberry Ginger Brew" and it is my own invention!!!

Try!! It will change your life!

Note: Please be aware that although delicious, this recipe makes very poor quality spirits. They are not aged and thus have byproducts of the fermentation process that will give you headaches and a hangover. Don't drink the half gallon all at once or you will end up sick as a dog.