How I Learned to Not Burn My Roast

I like to eat. Quite a bit, actually. Whenever Pattie and I talk about taking a trip, one of the top items on the agenda is, “Where are we going to eat?” Going to restaurants has always been one of our preferred forms of recreation. As much as I like food, though, for a long time I wasn’t particularly comfortable in the kitchen; I knew how to make a few basic meals, and that was pretty much it. I didn’t have a whole lot of variety, and I didn’t have the basic knowledge to vary the recipes I did know and have much confidence in the results. I mean, yeah, I could whip up some mean English muffin pizzas and pork roll-egg-and-cheese sandwiches, but man can not live on these alone. Not without significant cholesterol-lowering medication, anyway.

My limited knowledge was sufficient during my college years, and even during the one year I spent in New York after graduation. I didn’t have a lot of time or money to put into cookware or ingredients; in college I was sharing a fridge with five other guys and whichever of their girlfriends were living in the apartment at the time, and when I graduated I had a kitchen roughly the size of my desk with equipment that almost certainly posed a fire hazard to myself and neighboring counties. But once I moved back to Philly, into an apartment with a ridiculously nice kitchen for a rental apartment, I knew it was time for change. I had to learn to really cook. Continue reading “How I Learned to Not Burn My Roast”

From That Kid to Tough Pig – Part 1

Soon after my daughter was born, she started watching the 6:30 AM showing of Sesame Street on our local PBS station. The combination of colorful, frenetic characters and music was, unsurprisingly, a big hit. It was soon clear we would need more Muppet material, and as we’ve discussed before here, Pattie and I are nothing if not big on the research. So I started checking out Muppet websites, and eventually found my way to Tough Pigs. The essays and reviews on the site combined insightful analysis with the irreverent humor you’d want to see in a site devoted to the Muppets. And I soon discovered that the site’s webmaster, Danny Horn, lives right in my back yard. Danny is the Education Director at the Mazzoni Center, Philadelphia’s gay/lesbian/bi/trans health center, working with the staff at Philadelphia public schools on GLBT health and safety issues. (He and his boyfriend Ed live in the suburbs with three cats and a house full of Muppet toys.) I thought it would be neighborly to chat with Danny about the Muppets, his site, and fandom, so we got together for an IM chat.

So, ladies and gentlemen, let’s have a big welcome for Danny Horn! YEEAAHHHHH! (Waves arms wildly while leaving the stage . . .)

DT: We might as well start at the beginning. How’d you become a Muppet fan in the first place?

DH: How did I become a Muppet fan. I don’t think people become Muppet fans. I think it just happens before you’re even conscious of it. I was born in 1971, which was two years into Sesame Street. So I was watching Sesame since before I can remember; it was just always there. Then I was five when The Muppet Show started in 1976. I remember seeing commercials for the show over the summer, and I watched the first episode that aired on the New York station. It was Rita Moreno, and it ended with the sketch that had Rita trying to sing “Fever” while Animal interrupted with crazy drum riffs, and at the end, Rita comes up behind Animal and crashes his head with cymbals. It was so obviously the best thing ever. So that was pretty much it. Continue reading “From That Kid to Tough Pig – Part 1”

From That Kid to Tough Pig – Part 2

More of Dave’s conversation with Tough Pigs editor Danny Horn:

DT: Well, I was going to ask you what motivated you to attach a forum to your webzine, but I think you already answered that one.

DH: Well, there have been some other places for people to gather over the years, but I wasn’t happy with any of them. I was on the Muppet newsgroup for a long time, that’s where I first met a lot of the people that I still hang out with. But newsgroups were kind of the Wild West; they were the lawless frontier. Full of trolls and crazies and cattle rustlers.

DT: Yeah, I’ve generally steered clear of unmoderated newsgroups for a while. And even with moderated groups and message boards, finding the right tone can be a challenge.

DH: Well, you have to be able to moderate well. It’s a skill, and it’s not easy to do it well. But in my opinion, you need some rules to make a group work well. Unless you want to keep fighting the cattle rustlers forever, and that gets old.

DT: In a hurry. It also helps to have that core group of people who feel comfortable with the tone you’re going for, and can keep things moving in that direction.

DH: Yeah. That happens naturally in a group, I think, that it develops in a particular direction.

DT: The Tough Pigs forum seems to reflect the same tone you go for in the webzine itself, so I imagine there’s some symbiosis there.

DH: To some degree. The site pulls in the kind of people who like the site. But it’s also because I run the forum with the same kind of attitude that I run the site.

DT: It works because it works.

DH: I guess. Yeah.

DT: Getting back into the way back machine for a second . . did the fanzine have the same tone and approach as the website, or did that evolve? Continue reading “From That Kid to Tough Pig – Part 2”

The Naval Arms Race Between the World Wars

(In light of the current focus on international arms races and disarmament efforts, it may be worthwhile to look for some historical perspective on the competing forces that drive these efforts and the often unintended consequences of well-meaning decisions.)

After World War I the United States, Great Britain and Japan were the world’s leading naval powers, and each country continued a rapid buildup of forces in order to maintain dominance over their local sea waters and protect their overseas interests. America was particularly concerned with maintaining the Open Door policy in China and in defending – as much as possible – its possessions in the Philippines while maintaining coastal defenses. In 1918, the Navy General Board set as its goal the establishment of a navy superior or equal to every other navy on Earth – a departure from its previous policy, which was content to be second to Great Britain. The Wilson Administration presented a naval building plan to Congress that would result in the United States’ possessing a fleet of 39 battleships and 12 battle cruisers, a force that would far exceed Great Britain’s. The high costs of such construction, along with the growing spirit of pacifism and isolationism in Congress and the American public, eventually led President Harding to call the 1920 Washington Naval Conference, which established a number of treaties to govern the conduct of nations in the Pacific. The Washington Treaty, probably the most significant of these agreements, established limits on the total tonnage of ships each nation could build, along with limits on particular classes of ships such as heavy cruisers and battleships. These limits were set according to a ratio of 5/5/3 among the United States, Great Britain, and Japan, respectively, a compromise which formed the basis of American naval policy for over a decade and had the seemingly-beneficial effect of pleasing no one, as no side achieved the clear advantage it sought. Continue reading “The Naval Arms Race Between the World Wars”

Off in My Own Little World

One of the things I remember hearing – and thinking – as the Internet, DVDs, and other new technology came to the fore in the Nineties was that all of these new gadgets would help spread the word on new artists; stuff that previously would have flown under the radar would get an all-new visibility. I remember signing up with the Firefly service and entering, in fairly extensive detail, my musical and other preferences; the idea was that my custom designed Firefly “agent� program would flit about the system and find other users with tastes similar to mine and let me know what other stuff they liked. The technology never quite lived up to the potential, but the Net was young, and I was pretty sure it would get better.

Today, old and new technology alike has made the situation better. I’m a member of one of the best public radio stations around, WXPN in Philadelphia. I have a Netflix account that delivers my selections from a vast library of DVDs right to my mailbox. I have digital cable that not only gives me dozens more channels, it lets me access many programs at a time of my choosing through its On Demand service. Over the years I’ve developed a huge profile at Amazon that informs their recommendation lists, and my Internet access lets me peruse message boards to see what new acts I might be missing. There should be a never-ending stream of Cool New Stuff making its way into my cranial space. Continue reading “Off in My Own Little World”

Love Conquers: San Francisco and Marriage

Just when I thought that this election year was guaranteed to make me bitter and cynical beyond belief, I have a new hero: San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom. Newsom recently concluded that California’s laws prohibiting marriages between two people of the same sex violate the state constitution’s protections of equal rights for all citizens. Furthermore, he decided to do something about it, and ordered city officials to start granting marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples.

Now, apart from the fact that I completely agree with Newsom’s stance on same sex marriages, I find his actions inspiring because he saw a situation where he felt the state wasn’t living up to its best ideals and to its obligations, and – let me repeat this for emphasis – he decided to actually do something about it. He took a stand and pressed the issue, forcing Californians and Americans to confront the matter head on. (A recent Salon article suggests that’s par for the course with Newsom.) He did it despite members of his own cabinet – including some of his gay advisors – telling him that Californians weren’t ready for this, that it would cause too much political damage. I am well aware that the rules of the game mean that you have to be cautious with the accumulation and spending of political capital in order to get anything good done, but it feels good, even once in a while, to hear an elected official say “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”

In doing so, Newsom has accelerated the debate on marriage rights, perhaps even more than Massachusetts’ Supreme Court did with its recent decision that a ban on same sex marriages violates that state’s Constitution; it will be several more weeks before Massachusetts starts issuing licenses. I hold nothing against the Massachusetts Court there – I think an elected executive has much firmer ground to stand on in taking such actions than a judiciary. Both decisions are examples of political courage in a cause that I believe future generations will recognize as just, and they have already inspired other officials to follow suit. Continue reading “Love Conquers: San Francisco and Marriage”

Be Reasonable – Part 3

“We’ll wrap this whole conversation up next time with some further discussion of inductive logic and the fallacies sometimes associated with it, and exactly how we should treat these rules of logic.�

OK, I have no idea what I was smoking when I wrote that last time. I could probably stretch the topics in that sentence into another three essays. Well, that just gives us fodder for the discussion, I suppose.

As I mentioned in the first article in this series, inductive reasoning differs from the deductive logic we’ve been focusing by being less formal and less absolute. Deductive logic is like a math problem. You take your inputs, you follow the procedure dictated by the operations, you get your output. Inductive reasoning is more like writing an interpretative essay for English or history class. You try and pull all your evidence together to support your conclusion, but you have to deal with the fact that no matter how much support you have, it’s always possible that the truth lies elsewhere.

That said, there are good and bad ways to go about making an inductive argument. So let’s look at some of the fallacies one might slip into. (These and a host of other common reasoning problems are discussed in a book called Critical Thinking and Communication: The Use of Reason in Argument. It’s a little dry, but not too technical, and can be a useful resource.)
Continue reading “Be Reasonable – Part 3”

Be Reasonable – Part 2

Picking up on our discussion of deductive logic, the five basic operations we discussed last time have certain properties that make one statement identical to another – there are multiple ways to express the same basic idea. This is important because one way of phrasing a statement might suggest or make clear a way of developing the argument that a perfectly equivalent phrasing might not. Some of these are very basic, such as the property of commutation – ‘p v q’ is the same thing as ‘q v p.’ Others are obvious, like the rule of double negation: ‘~~p’ is the same thing as ‘p.’ But others are slightly more complicated.
Continue reading “Be Reasonable – Part 2”

All Natural Is Not Always All Good

Though some might not agree, it cannot be a coincidence that less than a year after the death of Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler, the Food and Drug Administration finally succeeded in doing what it had been trying to do for ten years – getting the herbal supplement ephedra off the market. Bechler’s death from heatstroke in 2003 was linked to his use of the diet pills containing ephedra. Though doctors had known for years that the active ingredient in ephedra supplements could cause dangerous increases in both heart rate and blood pressure, putting users at increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and related ailments, Bechler’s death gave the media a high profile casualty to link with the drug.

Some might say that it is too cynical to presume that without a martyr, the FDA ‘s case against ephedra might never have made it this far, but history tells a different story. In fact, due to the double standard in how supplements and drugs are regulated, it might actually be surprising that the ban has happened at all. Continue reading “All Natural Is Not Always All Good”

Profit and Loss in the Marketplace of Ideas

When Dr. Laura Schlessinger made comments that many claimed denigrated and disrespected homosexuals, offended individuals quickly boycotted the show and its advertisers.

When Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines made comments that many claimed denigrated and disrespected President George W. Bush, offended individuals quickly boycotted the band, its albums and its concerts.

These and other boycotts just as quickly spawned a backlash of their own. By threatening media figures with a loss of income, boycotters attempt to stifle the expression of certain unpopular ideas, and thus deprive these figures of their right to free speech. Author Peter David, for example, has repeatedly criticized such efforts on his blog, including one entry where he writes: “I’m talking about pure, simple, appropriate, proportional response. If you disagree with someone, say it with words, because saying it with punitive, retaliatory measures proves nothing except that you are petty and intolerant.”

I applaud the sentiment behind David’s position, but as I have thought about it, I can’t help but feel he’s not quite on the right track here. In certain situations in a market-based economy, boycotts and economic pressure are a wholly legitimate method of political and social discourse. Continue reading “Profit and Loss in the Marketplace of Ideas”