So Much To Be Pissed About

“In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.” (“The Caging of America”, Adam Gopnik. THE NEW YORKER, 1/30/12). I read that piece of information two days ago and I’m still fuming about it, and that is just the start.

There is just so much to be pissed about. In a bunch of letters to the public editor of THE NEW YORK TIMES, the writers consistently blasted the rather strange position of the paper that it is somehow biased and even unethical for an editor to fact check political statements. From there I went deeper into the Perspective section and read Obama’s piece (“An America built to last”) which was basically a summing up of his State of the Union address, and to me at least, every bit as disappointing in its populist assertion that--”Gosh Darn It”--anything is possible for the American people if they just put their heads together.

Right next to that was a vacuous essay by William McKenzie of THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS entitled “What makes good teachers effective?” In it, McKenzie breathlessly announces that researchers at Harvard and Columbia have “set the education world abuzz” with their discovery that quality teachers impact their students over a lifetime! I’m sorry but I’m not all abuzz with this stale reiteration.

Then, below the fold, was perhaps the most evilly misleading essay I’ve seen in a newspaper that wasn’t written by Mike Rosen. In approximately 800 detail free words, Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, launches an attack on Obama that manages to cloak any semblance of the truth in a morass of ad hominem name calling and glaring errors of omission.

This has combined to make me flee to my keyboard where I can spill my guts about the one topic that really matters to me:

J. Starkey’s Top Ten Things To Eat In Denver When You Are Dead Or Alive

1. Steamed Buns - Bones (7th and Grant). Thick and sticky buns filled with either pork belly or fat back. Choose the belly. They come in orders of three, but if you are dining with a friend, ask for a fourth bun. If you don’t, you will end up wresting over the odd bun. Oh, and tied for first are the Shishito Peppers from Bones. Long and thin skinned. Flash fried, they come to your table simply presented on a long white plate, salts clinging to the skin. Best of all, the heat varies with each pepper. Some are HOT. Others with just a little kick. A constant surprise.
2. Pineapple Upside Down Pancakes - Snooze (Park Avenue and Larimer). We go to Snooze every Saturday morning for breakfast. We get there right at seven because we are early risers, but mostly because any later and we would be facing an hour wait. You see people like the food and the vibe at Snooze. An order of these pancakes is, well, huge. Two large pancakes falling over the edges of the plate, with creme anglais and crowned with a nice dollop of a flavorful butter melting on top. Ask for a Bloody Mary and a great cup of Guatemalan coffee (you can buy the coffee beans and ask them to be ground for you for $11 a pound), and hang out. Be sure to check out the seasonal murals on the outside facing Park Avenue.
3. Huevos Rancheros - Snooze. The best huevos I’ve had anywhere, period. I have them add pulled pork and substitute their terrific green chili for the ranchero sauce. Like all dishes here, it is too large, but I’m not going to complain.
4. Calamari - Luca d’Italia (7th, across Grant from Benny’s). Here is another Bonanno restaurant. We don’t go to Luca as much as the other Bonanno venues because we do a pretty good job on Italian at home, if I say so myself, but when we do go I always start with the Calamari. Tender, not chewy. Lots of spice. Beautiful to look at. Oh, and as long as you are at Luca, if they have rabbit on the menu, get it!
5. Burrata - Osteria Marco (Larimer Square, a couple of doors down from The Market.) This is one Italian place we do frequent, especially in the summer. There are few things nicer than sitting at the bar at Marco drinking great house wine and nibbling on house made cheeses and house cured salumi. But the burrata is a revelation. We took a cheese making class once and learned two things: One, how to make burrata; two, the certainty that the next time we wanted burrata we would gladly let a paid professional do it. Burrata is homemade mozzarella wrapped around home made ricotta. It is served with grilled bread. When you cut into the cheesy ball you find the smooth mozzarella cupping the creamy ricotta. The only challenge is making the slices of bread and clumps of cheese come out even.
6. Hamburger - Park Burger (South Pearl Street a few blocks North of Evans and across from the Folklore Center). Last year, USA TODAY ranked Park Burger’s hamburger the best in Colorado. I see no reason to disagree. Never frozen. Always cooked as requested. Cherry Cricket? Elways? Brothers Bar? They aren’t even close.
7. Fries with the works - Park Burger. You know how when you order something like chili fries or nachos, you end up with a basket full of chips with a layer of all the goodies sitting on top. Once you get through that top layer you are left with just chips, or fries. Not at Park Burger. You get a huge basket of fries with cheeses and scallions and real bacon bits swimming around in every bite.
8. Whole Colorado Trout - Lola (1575 Boulder Street). I love trout and the only trout I’ve ever had better than the trout at Lola was once up in the Tetons when the chef at Jenny Lake cooked up a few trout that a fellow guest had just caught. He, bless his heart, gave me bites. Wonderful, wonderful. In addition to the trout being great, the view of downtown Denver from its Highlands perch is probably the best in the city. Arrange to call a cab and partake of their alarmingly long list of tequilas.
9. Lobster Mac’ Cheese - Mizuna (around the corner from Luca at 7th and Grant). Mizuna always has the best things to eat in Denver, but they never stay the same. So, where I might go to Lola just to have the trout, I just go to Mizuna to have whatever the boys in the kitchen have cooked up for me, so to speak. However, the mac ‘n cheese has been a permanent fixture on the menu ever since Frank Bonanno opened it ten years ago. When people first start frequenting Mizuna, they always order the mac ‘n cheese, but Kathie and I have out grown that phase and are more experimental. On the other hand, this is probably the best dish in Denver. It won the Food Network Challenge on the strength of its pure decadence alone.

I think I’m ready to face the day now.

24 January 2012

3:30 pm

I couldn’t help,

When seeing a boy pull up to the house across the street,

That nagging feeling of lost youth.

The rusty fastback sputtered by the curb.

He opened the door,

Grabbed her books,

Held her hand,

Ushered her up the steps,

Another day at school on the books,

The semester speeding to a close.

I recall that heady surety,

The license that my license bought,

But only one image comes to mind:

Cruising, smoking,

Burning rubber at Lincoln and Main.

The back seat suddenly in smoke.

They picked her up at the station

While I feigned interest in my mother's smoldering car.

I remembered her framed in the back window,

As I noticed the couple’s lingering touch.

Floating toward his grumbling car

He blew her a kiss as he peeled off.

HOW TO BE GOOD

Nick Hornby

Here is another terrific Hornby novel, but from earlier in his career somewhere after High Fidelity and before Juliet Naked. It is about Katie and David Carr, a married couple in Holloway, England with two fairly demanding kids, Tom and Molly. Katie is a general practitioner and a little smug about her profession. David is "The Angriest Man in Holloway," an acerbic columnist for the local paper. His naked hatred of everything has worn Katie down and at the onset of the novel she is seeking solace with Stephen and feeling quite guilty about it.

David also suffers from a bad back for which his physician wife can do nothing. It seems that Katie has quite a few patients for whom she can do nothing and this performance deficit is another thing driving Katie to have an affair. But David ends up going to a grungy street healer type named D. J. Good News who only has to touch David's back to make it all better. And just for good measure, he cures Molly's eczema, another condition for which Katie could do nothing.

It seems that Good News has not only cured David's back, but has also cured him of his rotten disposition. He is no longer "The Angriest Man in Holloway;" instead, he has become a cross between a Fuller Brush salesman and a Hare Krishna. His transformation is more than Katie bargained for, especially since Good News has moved in with the family and she is slowly going crazy and suppressing an urge to murder someone, anyone.

If you have been clever enough to have read other works by Hornby, you will recognize the trope on display in its formative stages here. A central character has to navigate the shoals of all these relationships while trying to find meaning in a life filled with lots of hot air and precious little substance. The characters coalesce around some focal point, D. J. Good News in this instance, and they manage to help one another out of their malaise by discovering some underlying truth. Then they all wander off to their respective worlds until the next existential crisis forces their hands.

Sounds dreary, but under the influence of Hornby's prose it is a hilarious trip. It also provides a few profundities along the way for those of us who need more than simple hilarity.

The title of the novel supplies the theme. How is it possible to do good without simultaneously being a "do-gooder?" Until she met D. J. Good News, Katie never thought about this question. She was, after all, a doctor. Of course she did good, notwithstanding her numerous failures with her patients and her deplorable habit of assigning cruel nicknames to some of her more notable cases.

But Good News and the transformation of her husband give her pause. Katie doesn't want to give away half of the children's toys to those less fortunate. She doesn't want a homeless boy moving in with them. She doesn't want to go door to door proselytizing and alienating her neighbors. She doesn't want to bring home any of her weirder patients for a chicken dinner. But she doesn't have good arguments for her position. In her gut she feels selfish; however, her mind tells her it is Good News and David who are being selfish. How to do good in this situation?

More to the point, what is fair and what isn't What is our obligation to others? What is our obligation to ourselves? Our families? I have four televisions. There are only two of us in the house. We spend a lot of money at expensive restaurants and we travel quite a bit. I drive an Infiniti. Do I need to start throwing things overboard so I can fit through the eye of a needle?

How to be good?

There is a nice, albeit overly didactic, metaphor at the end of the novel that states all this in a nutshell.

For the last three days, it has been raining, and raining, and raining. . . . The last time it rained like this was in 1947, according to the news, but back then it was just a fluke, a freak of nature; this time around, they say, we are drowning because we have abused our planet, kicked and starved it until it has changed its nature and turned nasty. It feels like the end of the world. And our homes, homes which cost some of us a quarter of a million pounds or more, do not offer the kind of sanctuary that enables us to ignore what is going on out there; they are all too old, and at night the lights flicker and the windows rattle. I'm sure that I am not the only one in this house who wonders where Monkey and his friends are tonight.

Nick Hornby! Sometimes he makes you put both hands on top of your head to keep from floating away.

A Brief Outburst

Or Breaking My Promise To Avoid Political Discussions At All Costs

One of the nicest things about Franny no longer being part of the White House senior staff is that I no longer feel compelled to live and breathe politics. This has been especially helpful at the Y, that bastion of Fox News Republicans. Instead of politics, I've been talking to nice Bob about bee keeping, and grumpy Bob about the theater scene in Littleton, to Huns about refinishing basements, and to everyone else about the Broncos or the Nuggets. It has been refreshing and tension free.

But I couldn't resist a momentary plunge into politics today when I walked into my part of the locker room and heard Irv (a perfect name for this guy I might add) proclaim that Bloomberg News was a liberal rag. Bloomberg! Liberal rag? It seems that my friend Doug, devout Democrat and erstwhile president of the Aurora Teachers Association, was brandishing a recent report by Bloomberg comparing the deficit spending of presidents from Reagan to Obama as a percentage of GDP. Much to Irv's chagrin, the numbers showed that Obama has been less profligate than Bush II and especially Reagan. Irv, speaking for all his naked republican friends in the locker room, reached the only conclusion that made sense to him: Bloomberg is a liberal rag.

I quickly informed him that the term "liberal rag" was an oxymoron and the expression he was searching for was actually "conservative rag." (By the way Bloomberg is neither). He yelled something unintelligible that I ignored. How do you argue with someone who is that completely delusional?

Wait it gets worse. Doug, the liberal instigator of this whole thing, sidled over to me and mentioned that he was talking to some folks the other day about the state of the economy (what a fun conversation) and they "mentioned something about this thing called Keynesian economics." He then went on to explain John Maynard Keynes to me as if this was completely new information. C'mon man! Doug was a science teacher for forty years. He presumably went to college. He has been involved in Democratic politics for as long as he can remember. And he is passionate about today's issues. How is it possible that he had never heard of Keynes?

I know that I have something of a reputation as an intellectual snob, but this has nothing to do with snobbery. There are things an informed electorate should know. I think the crucial debate between the followers of Keynes and the followers of Milton Friedman is one of those things.

Ignorance like that has no excuse as far as I am concerned. The world would be a better place if the chronically uninformed would just keep their liberal or conservative mouths shut and their minds open.

Have a nice day.

"Deal Breakers":

A brief reaction.

I enjoyed the 33 comment dialogue Katherine started on Facebook yesterday with her comment about Ron Paul and the people who somehow manage to support him. The dialogue started with most of us agreeing that Paul was a dangerous nutjob and that Libertarianism is at best an incomplete way of approaching governance; it ended with a kind of referendum on Obama vis a vis some of his recent bill signings--some would say cave-ins--over SOPA and NDAA.

The comment I've been stewing over the most belongs to Ashley, my beloved daughter-in-law. She said that Obama's signings of SOPA and NDAA were "deal breakers." She would probably end up voting for Obama anyway, but only because the alternatives are unthinkable.

It is the"deal breaker" phrase that has given me pause. I never heard anything about a deal. If we vote for him he has to decide every issue as we would decide. Is that the deal?

When I voted for Obama, I voted for a smart, articulate, inexperienced pragmatist who seemed to believe the right things. I have to say that Obama has turned out exactly as I expected. The only "deal" I heard him make was that he was going to try and change the culture in Washington. He has valiantly made that bipartisan attempt and gotten bashed from both sides for it. It is a noble fight and I hope he keeps fighting it. As far as I can see, there is no one else out there of any political persuasion who has the courage to wage this battle.

When I considered my vote, I never deluded myself that all those Hope and Change promises would come to pass. Clear out Gitmo? Come on! Get all provisions of Health Care passed? Please! (Do Paul supporters really believe he will abolish four Departments, eliminate the income tax and the IRS, over turn health care, and cut 20% of the government work force in the first week as he has promised?)

I get frustrated when Obama seems to be willing to meet Republicans more than half way and to no avail. I would like to see more examples of toughness like his out of session appointment made just today. But in all those instances where he "caved," what would be the current state of the country if he held firm and waited for the Republicans to compromise?

In Obama I got what I bargained for. There are things he does that I don't like--almost anything he has to say about Education, for example--but "deal breakers?"

I don't think so.

AT HOME

-Bill Bryson

I really like Bill Bryson's work. A Walk in the Woods struck all the right chords about my favorite pastime, hiking. Although it did focus a little too morbidly on the various ways one might be killed by a bear. A lady at Jenny one year had just finished A Walk in the Woods before arriving and, convinced she would be mauled by a crazed bear, refused to take any hikes at all. Her husband was lucky to get her out of their cabin. That was also the year Kathie and I hiked over Paintbrush Divide and were greeted by lots of relieved guests and employees when we returned. It seemed that a mother Grisly and her cub were seen hanging out on the trail we took that morning. Katherine swears she heard a growl.

My favorite Bryson book is The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. It is a memoir of Bryson's growing up years in Des Moines, a city I have come to know and like. But mostly it is a clever exploration of the changing values of our culture and a kind of lament for the lazy midwestern days of yore.

I also loved The Short History of Nearly Everything because I love getting to the bottom of things and that is what Bryson is about. At Home continues in that vein. It starts when Bryson goes up to the attic in his cool old British house that used to be a clergyman's home in a Victorian era parsonage. In that attic he stumbles upon various artifacts that provide insight not only to the family that once lived in that manse, but also into the culture that surrounded and informed them. So, Bryson decides to go for a room by room tour of his old house and discover the history lurking behind each. A visit to the kitchen, for example, is an excuse to explore the history of cooking and nutrition. A visit to the bathroom becomes an exploration into the evolution of hygiene.

His historical focus here is on the 19th century and Victorian England and this reader is grateful. There is a beautiful paragraph at the end of the book discussing the astonishing developments of that period and this terrific little book is a pleasant enumeration of those developments and the people who were largely responsible.

The book starts its journey outside the house and looks at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the building of The Crystal Palace. It is the perfect place to begin because it emphasizes the feeling of Plenty that is beginning to arise for the first time in history. There just seemed to plenty of everything, at least for the people who were keeping track. The Crystal Palace even had flushing toilets, something unheard of up till that time.

We then move into the house and begin a discussion of the Hall. We learn that the first large structures after Rome left the British Isles were large one room buildings called Halls. These one room Halls resulted in a fairly egalitarian society where servants slept right next to masters as they huddled around the central fire. But then architects figured out how to channel the smoke from the fire through a chimney and thus second floors could be added. This not only created privacy for the first time, but it also accentuated class distinctions between the servants, who now stayed downstairs, and masters who got to hang out in the still pretty sooty upstairs chambers.

All of the chapters similarly trace the evolution of various aspects of culture.

If you, like me, love to discover obscure little facts that compel you to laugh, shake your head, and underline the passage in question, you will love this book.

I like the idea, for instance, that ice was America's biggest crop in 1844.

Or that cans were around for 100 years before someone in 1925 invented the can opener.

I didn't know that Thomas Jefferson was the first person clever enough to cut a potato lengthwise in order to make french fries. Of course, the validity of that assertion is hard to prove.

Amazing that 1.5 million people died of starvation in Ireland's Potato Famine of 1845, yet Ireland was exporting plenty of eggs, cereal, meat, and seafood. No one had to die! No wonder James Joyce had problems with his native land.

In the quest to find the perfect lighting solution Drummond discovered you could get an enormously bright light by burning chunks of lime. These lights were used as spotlights in the theater, thus the term "being in the limelight."

That, by the way, is why there were so many theater fires in Victorian times.

Joseph Swann was the first creator of the light bulb. In fact, he illuminated his entire house with electric lights before Edison even managed an effective demonstration. However, Edison was much better at publicity and marketing. Edison thought big. Swann hung out at home.

The term "middle class" is coined in 1745 and by the time the Victorian era is in full swing the emerging middle class creates the modern world as we know it.

Tea is mentioned by Samuel Pepys in 1660. This is the first mention of tea in England.

Edison was a lot like the crazy inventor in Back to the Future ( I can't remember his name.). He invented hundreds of hare brained ideas that failed, but got VERY lucky a few times.

When Jefferson died he was $100,000 in debt. In today's money that makes Newt Gingrich look like a penny pincher.

In the 15th and 16th centuries the average marriage lasted just 10 years before one or the other partner died.

I suppose I should already know this, but the main impetus for the onset of the Industrial Revolution was the effort to find cheap ways to make cotton.

Interesting that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded 60 years before a similar society was created for children!

This book is a gold mine of cool information. I would encourage you to pick it up. Just think how it will enliven dinner conversations.

Republican Doublethink

Kathie and I have been taking a lot of pleasure in the fact that the opposing lead counsels for the Republicans and Democrats in the recent redistricting fight were Scott Martinez and Mario Nicolais, two former star students. We are happy that the court found with the Democrats' plan. We are even happier that the plan will create more competitive districts even if that means that Andy Kerr might face some difficulty. What is fair is fair.

In the wake of the decision, Mario became a prominent source on the front pages of the Post as he decried the unscrupulous machinations of the Democrats. A few weeks later Scott'a appointment to the Mayor's cabinet became front page news and his role in the redistricting drama came to the surface. State Republicans expressed relief that Scott would be safely buried in the Mayor's office, unable to inflict any more damage on the Republican party.

It was fun to read that because both Scott and Mario had well developed instincts for the jugular as high school students. I can only guess what some of those meetings were like.

I would love to sit down with those two sometime so they could help answer all the questions I'm having about politics lately. They might be able to make sense out of two articles in today's Denver Post (1/3/12).

In the lead story on page 1 (GOP gains on gay issues) we discover that a new GOP group called Coloradans for Freedom is working for the passage of civil unions. As it turns out, Mario is the group's spokesman and a major source in the article. Mario, who describes himself as " hard-core partisan Republican," says that joining in civil unions is a matter of personal freedom consistent with conservative values.

Here is where I start to get confused. It seems to me that conservatives have usurped this whole "personal freedom" issue. Wasn't the cry for freedom over the oppression of government a liberal cause in 1776 in America, 1876 in France, and the 1960's back in America? Don't get me wrong. I applaud Mario and his group, even though I think civil unions a poor and dishonest substitute for same sex marriage. I just wish Republicans would be more consistent in what they believe.

Later, on page 9 (Bill seeks cooling-off period before divorce), we find that a Republican senator from Berthoud, Kevin Lundberg, has proposed legislation asking the state to intercede in divorce cases where children are involved in order to make a separation more difficult. Is it just me, or does this seem an imposition on personal freedom by state government?

To make it even more confusing, we discover that Lundberg got the idea for his divorce bill while attending a legislative conference for conservative lawmakers. It seems that Chris Gersten, chair of the Coalition for Divorce Reform gave a presentation on ways to slow down divorce through legislation. How does that line up with Mario's call for civil unions and personal freedom.

Is this what Orwell meant by Doublethink?