Warther Museum and Knife Factory

This is part one of a three-part series on How to Stuff a Long Weekend which covers the events of the four-day weekend vacation Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, July 7-10 2006. [The other parts are here and here.]Friday was spent in the car, for the most part. My lovely wife and I picked up our daughter from her Chapel Hill apartment at 8 am and we drove straight through to Sugarcreek, Ohio. I managed to make the drive seem shorter by being confused about how long it was supposed to take. I had rememberd that MapQuest had told me it was an eleven-hour drive (the sum of the two legs of our return route) and so, when my error was pointed out the eight-hour driving time seemed easier somehow. We arrived at the Carlisle Inn in Sugarcreek, Ohio at just after 7 pm -- just in time for supper.

Having already bored you with our uneventful trip I will spare you the details of what we ate for supper except to note that the Carlisle is an Amish business and many of the people who work there are Amish. The Amish are a plain, sturdy, wholesome, rather-sweet people and they serve plain, sturdy, wholesome, rather-sweet food about which I will say nothing -- except that "Noodles on Mashed Potatoes" seems an odd main dish and that the next time I go there I must try it, if only to hear Dr. Atkins whirling in his grave.

In the morning, after a tasty, if oxymoronic, sturdy Amish contenential breakfast at the hotel, we were off to the Warther's Carving Museum and Knife Factory in nearby Dover. The Warther Museum is a wonderful place and well worth visiting if you are ever in Ohio (or in Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, D.C., etc. etc. etc..) As a matter of fact, if you have never been there you should drop whatever you are doing, buy a ticket to Cleveland, rent a car and head for Dover right now. Be sure to bookmark this page so you can finish reading when you get back.

Ok, I'm kidding... mostly. But I do think that Warther's is pretty darn cool. Part of this may be because I remember it from when I was a kid. I remember meeting Mooney Warther, who did all the carvings in the museum. (He looked a lot like this when I met him, not long before his death.) He would sit in a rocking chair in the lobby of the museum and carve a pair of working pliers out of a piece of soft wood with ten quick cuts. Even at his advanced age it took about fifteen seconds. Pretty cool when you are a kid. I also remember his carvings (which impress me more as a grown-up than they did then.) But, mostly, I remember the swing.



Mooney Warther had made the swing for his own children and grandchildren but he let tourist children use it, too. It hung from a high branch of a huge Elm tree, suspended by ninty feet of rope (or steel cables?) The arc of the swing followed the hillside up the hill so you could get in at the bottom of the arc and walk yourself up the hill. Then when you picked up your feet you would swing back down the way you came up and then out over the drop-off. I don't know how high you were at the far end of the arc. As a kid it seemed like you were half a mile off the ground but it was probably about 40 feet. It was like flying.

The tree died in the mid seventies from Dutch Elm Disease and the swing is long gone. Its like will not be seen again. It was a part of a different world -- a world where children were protected by the Grace of God, not by Loads of Lawyers. If the tree hadn't been taken out by Dutch Elm Disease, Mooney Warther's insurance company would have called in an air strike before someone fell off and sued them.

The grounds of the museum (the backyard of the old family house) are still pretty neat. They have the nicely restored Dover, Ohio depot and a railroad caboose at the bottom of the hill. The depot is more or less under the path of the old swing. To get a sense of the swing from this photo, imagine a kid's foot dangling into the frame at the upper left corner.



There is also a building dedicated to Freida Warther's button collection. (Freida was Mooney's wife.) Some of my relatives were friends of the Warthers and they were always on the lookout for interesting or unusual buttons for her collection. The button collection is pretty much as shown in this photo -- all four walls covered floor to panels with buttons sewn on and the ceiling is covered with buttons, too. The buttons on the floor are gone, though, as is Mrs. Warther who passed away several years ago after working with her buttons and her garden well into her ninties.

But back to the museum. Ernest "Mooney" Warther was an amazing man. His family business was (still is) making kitchen knives and his hobby was wood carving. Although he was not Amish himself he lived in Amish country in Ohio and he took a lot of pride in the fact that he did his carving using only hand tools. He had an uncanny knack for carving perfectly circular or cylindrical objects without using a lathe. He didn't need machines to do that sort of thing and he didn't use them.

Given his pride in hand work and simple tools it may seem a bit odd that he decided, early in life that his life's work would be to carve The History of the Steam Locomotive in wood. He loved machinery with a passion -- he just didn't hold with using it in his carving. Here are a few photos I took of the trains he carved.







Still pictures don't do the carvings justice since the carvings aren't still. They are working replicas -- the wheels turn, the pistons move in and out, the doors open and close -- and some of them have been running without repair for almost ninety years. The models are driven by electrical motors that he stole from his wife's sewing machine whenever he finished a new train.

When he started carving he used bone instead of ivory for the white pieces and the inlay lettering. He would fish the bones out of the soup pot and throw them on the roof for the sun to bleach. Later, when he was more affluent, he was able to replace the bone parts with ivory and to switch for his new carvings from native woods to exotics such as ebony.

By 1923 his carvings were so well known that the New York Central Railroad built a special car to exhibit them and took them on a tour and Mooney Warther with them. The carvings were then exhibited for two years in Grand Central Station in New York and Mooney and his family lived in the city while they were there. After two years he decided to move himself and his carvings back to Ohio. The railroad offered him a huge amount of money to stay in New York (over a million dollars in today's money) but Mooney told them that he and his wife had talked it over and that it was clear to them that God had not intended for anyone to stay in the city of New York for more than ten days at a time and he turned them down.

The Warther family has been making kitchen knives since 1902 when this photo was taken of their workshop. They still make knives today and it is still largely a family business in the third and fourth generation. Several Mooney's great-grandchilren work in the shop making knives and in the gift shop where visitors can buy them. A set of Warther's knives is an obligatory wedding gift in my family. I have used mine almost every day for almost thirty years.



The thing that makes the Warther museum so inspiring isn't that Mooney Warther had superhuman talent or that he was a genius. He was talented, that is clear, but his talents were entirely human in scale and his genius, if you want to call it that, was in deciding what things were going to be important to him in his life and setting about getting them done in an amazingly purposeful and efficient way.

Motts Reunions

Part two in the How to Stuff a Long Weekend series is the two Motts family reunions in Ohio. [The other parts are here and here.] My paternal grandmother was Mildred Motts before she married my grandfather, L A Haslup, and these are her relatives. Saturday was the 100th anniversary of the Fahl-Motts reunion first held in 1906. Sunday was a smaller, but still sizable, get together for descendents of my great-grandfather, Eli Motts.

The Fahl-Motts Reunion



The invitation shows my great-great-grandfather, Michael Motts, and his wife Mary (Fahl) Motts.

This was the main event of the trip -- the reason we drove all the way to Ohio. The various Mottses, Fahls and Motts-Fahl descendents in the area have been having a family reunion there longer than anyone present has been alive. This year was the hundredth anniversary and it was well attended. The organizers had to rent the adjacent room at the community center to fit all the attendees. In recent years the attendance has run at around forty; this year, because of the hundredth anniversity thing, they had three times that many.

You'd think that having so many relatives in one room would be daunting but it was actually less intimidating than a smaller gathering. When there are one hundred thirty-odd relatives no one expects you to know who they all are. It's sort of a "get out of jail free" card for the forgetful. And who are you? you ask. My sister? Yes, yes, of course I knew that. It't just that there are so many people here to sort out...

My brother was taking pictures at the Fahl-Motts dinner and I left my camera behind so any photos of the event in this blog will come later as an update if at all. There was also an attempt to take a group photo and I will add it in if I get a copy since it will make a nice contrast to the following photo of the reunion in 1909.



This is from a Xerox and the quality is poor. If I get a better copy I will replace it.

The photo came with a typed list of who's who in the photo by the numbers. About half of the people in the photo were unknown but here is my great-grandfather Eli Motts [5] and great-grandmother Annie (Houts) Motts [6].



My Grandmother Mildred Elizabeth Motts [19] was ten years old in the photo...



... and her sister Nadine Motts [11] was a bit older.



This was the first time I have been to a Fahl-Motts reunion but I did once get a copy of the reunion cookbook from a couple of years back. It was one of those spiral-bound things where everyone on the mailing list is asked to contribute a favorite recipe and half of them send in the same thing. That year the most popular recipe was "Cheesy Potato Bake" which was made with frozen hash-brown potatoes, sour cream and schredded cheddar cheese. The 2006 reunion was a covered-dish affair (we took some pies and other pastries from the Hotel restaurant) and I had several opportunities to sample official Fahl-Motts cheesy potato varieties and other sturdy, easily reheated fare. There was a lot of food there. Never has the spectre of starvation seemed farther away -- and the goals of my diet seemed more unattainable.

Apparently, it will also be the last time I attend a Fahl-Motts reunion. There was a brief business meeting after supper where everyone was thanked for coming, people who had worked hard to make the affair a success were recognized, and the decision was confirmed that one hundred years were enough and there were no plans for a next meeting.

There were a number of suggestions made for ways for the reunion to continue -- they mostly came from the Eli Motts descendents -- my group. But of course the encouragement would come from us. We are scattered all over the country, none of us are local to the Canton, Ohio area and there is no way that any of us could volunteer to take over the work -- no one expects us to do it because it can't happen. We'd like for the reunion to go on -- we still have people who'se last name is Motts in our group; but in some of the other families the last Motts ancestor died before the oldest living family member was born and they have other family reunions to plan.

One of the events surrounding this hundredth, and last, reunion of Michael Motts family is the publication of a book of geneaological information which one of my distant Motts cousins has put together for the occasion. I think I'll buy a copy.

The Eli Motts Reunion was a Sunday brunch held at the Atwood Lake Lodge southeast of Canton, Ohio. The event was to start promptly at 9:30 and, the Atwood Lake Lodge being a half-hour drive from the hotel, we had been told we needed to leave no later than 9:00 am to be on time. Since we were going to head on to Arlington from the Lodge we needed to pack bags and car and check out before we could leave. Adding to the sense of urgency was the fact that no-one in our group had any idea how to get to the Lodge so if we missed the 9 am caravan we would be up the creek.

After considerable rushing through our morning rituals, hurrying one another along, and a last-minute realization that we had forgotten to include dad in the rushing and hurrying (because he was staying in another room) we were finally ready to go -- and only ten minutes late. We threw the last few bags in the trusty Subaru and headed to the lobby to look for the other members of the caravan. We had a few nervous minutes when we discovered that there was no-one in the lobby and thought we might have been left behind but we quickly discovered that the reason there was nobody there is that nobody else was ready to go yet (except for Aunt Sue who had already left for the Lodge to reassure them that we were coming.)

This was one of those junctures where your humble proprietor and the Teleospouse take different points of view. Upon finding out that everyone else in the family is running even later than I am I tend to think aahhh, I am off the hook and relax. The wife, on the other hand, is driven half-mad by this sort of family farbling, and on this occasion I worried that she might need to be restrained and sedated for her own good and for the safety of others. But somehow we made it through that extra half-hour that was required for maps to be located and Xeroxed, and for various siblings to finish packing and certain nephews to get out of the shower, and we departed for the Lodge where we arrived without incident.

The Atwood Lake Resort and Conference Center is pleasant, if slightly tired looking place with a lovely view of the Ohio countryside and the lake. Brunch was a very servicable hotel-food buffet and we had a nice private room in which to eat and visit. When everyone was finished eating we headed out to the lawn for the obligatory group picture. I took a number of photos and have put some of them ( <= click to view) online for other family members who have asked for copies (and for you, gentle reader, if you like). Here is the group photo.


Click the photo for other sizes.

This photo is a composite that I have assembled from three different photos. I didn't have a tripod so I couldn't use the self-timer to get into the picture and one of the photos was taken by one of the other people in the picture. I spliced together the part that has him in it (near the left of the photo, squatting) with the part that has me (just right of center in the rear). While I was at it I spliced in a better copy of several figures at the right end and grabbed one head from an individual family group photo for a relative who is only visible as a tuft of hair in any of the overall group shots. The original shots from which I built the composite are all included in the photos in my Flickr.com account that can be accessed using the link above.

Science Club Reunion

I'm a bit vague about the dates here but the story goes that in 1944 my dad, his best friend George and a few other guys in the Woodrow Wilson High School science club fielded a slate of candidates that dominated the student government elections. They accomplished this by developing a strategy for managing the nominations. Whenever a very popular candidate was nominated someone from the science club would pop up and enthusiastically nominate the popular candidate's best friend -- to split the vote. The teacher who was monitoring the nominations caught on right away and was glaring at the science club members, more and more ominously as the nominations proceeded, but the other students never had a clue. By the time the nominations were over the fix was in -- and the science club candidates won almost every seat.

Part three in the "How to Stuff a Long Weekend" series features the events of Monday which was mostly spent in Arlington, Va and Washington DC. [The other parts are here and here.] It started with George and his wife coming over for breakfast with dad, the wife and daughter, and me at our motel restaurant. It was over breakfast that we heard of the electorial victory of the science club sixty-two years ago. They recalled their surprise several years later, after graduating and going their separate ways to find themselves together again in medical school at George Washington University in 1947.



The Science Club Reunion 2006. The original members, dad and George, are in the middle.

It was a wonderful conversation. Dad ang George have been friends forever and there was lots to catch up on -- whatever happened to so-and-so and who wound up marrying whom -- but they are busy guys -- doctors seldom stop working when they "retire" -- and there was lots of new material to talk about as well. Dad is just back from a trip to Haiti with a team of medical missionaries trying to improve the care at a Catholic clinic there and George is on the board of the American Council of Pediatrics which involves quite a bit of traveling. Much of the talk was medical (I will spare you the details of dad's finding the biggest prostate he ever felt in Haiti) but it was all interesting.

One medical bit that is worth mentioning, since it ties in with the occasional satisfactions of being an older doctor, is the problems the team in Haiti had in trying to find a way to treat diabetes. A young doctor said that she suspected that one of the patients she had seen was diabetic but that there was no way that the patient could be diagnosed, much less treated, in an environment with no electricity, no running water and no way to do a blood test for glucose. Dad suggested that when he was a young intern at GW they had successfully treated diabetes with urine samples and dip sticks. This idea was very exciting to the team. Monitoring blood sugar with a urine dip stick is old technology and is not much used any more but it is much better than nothing. They still make the testing dip sticks and it is clearly the right technology for use in rural Haiti. Sometimes you can teach a new doc old tricks.

We paid the bill and a tip and kept on talking until breakfast time was over and the restaurant was setting up for lunch and finally George had to leave for another meeting across town. The rest of us checked out of the motel, verified that it would be OK to leave our car there while we did a bit of sightseeing, and headed for nearby Metro station.

Our first stop was Arlington Cemetery where we visited the graves of my grandparents and of my mother who passed away a few years ago. Grandfather Haslup, who died when I was one year old, was a career Marine officer and had at one time briefly been the military governor of Haiti during the US occupation that started in 1915. Funny how things come back around.

Our family graves are just down the hill from the Tomb of the Unknowns so we hiked up to watch the changing of the guard and then headed back to the Metro station to catch a train downtown.



Since we had a six hour drive back to North Carolina before bed we didn't have a lot of time for sightseeing. We only had time to see part of one of the buildings of the Smithsonian. We thought about seeing one of the new parts -- possibly the American Indian Museum -- but in the end we decided to go to the Natural History building. It was my favorite when I was a kid -- with the dinoraur bones and the huge stuffed elephant in the central hall -- and it's still my favorite. They have a new exhibit for "mammals" to serve as a counterpoint to the dinosaurs and it is well worth seeing but my favorite part has always been the minerals. I love the big crystals and the nickel-iron meteorites. After seeing the mammals we decided that we just had time for the fossil exhibit but I snuck off to walk through the mineral exhibit, just quickly, and to touch the meteorites one more time. I managed to catch up with the family in the fossels after only a few million years and was barely missed.



My lovely daughter on the stairs outside the Imax theater in the Smithsonian Natural History building.

Epilog

We left Arlington a little before seven, after the heavy rush-hour traffic, and started looking for supper when we were well out of town. We weren't particularly hungry so we were rather picky at first. I was tormented by the vague memory of a rather nice place to eat that we had found on a previous trip when we found ourselves in the same situation. On that previous occasion we found a little restaurant in the downtown part of a historic town on a river. We ate in a very nice little restaurant in an older (possibly brick) building. I remember thinking that the place was a "find" and we would have to remember it for future trips. And, of course, I forgot where it was. I remembered that it was on the west side of I-95 shortly after we crossed a river. When we were 20 miles south of Richmond I decided that I had missed it and since it was getting late and we were hungry now we decided to become less picky. We wound up eating in run-down seafood restaurant where my daughter and I both ordered the "crab soup" that turned out to be Campbell's Chunky Cream of Mushroon soup with a few bits of crab (or at least crab shells) thrown in. I rather like mushroom soup so this was ok with me but the daughter wound up going next door to Wendy's for a salad.

A review of the map suggests Petersburg, VA as the most likely place for my lost restaurant. Petersburg is an older town on the Appomattox River and it is much more historic than it is given credit for being. The fall of Petersburg was the point where the south had unarguably lost the war and Southern historians tend to overlook it because the subject is too depressing. Petersburg is a bit further south than I was thinking -- I was looking for something nearer to Arlington -- but the notion of driving all the way through Richmond on the Interstate and still not finding supper seems familiar.

If the little town along the way on that previous trip was Petersburg then the place we ate was most likely on of these: http://www.craterroad.com/restaurants.html and probably this one: http://www.craterroad.com/alexanders.html . The name of the domain for those web pages -- Crater Road -- is a reference to one of the events of the Civil War when union troops tunneled under a southern fort and blew it up. Crater Road runs north and south about two blocks east of I-95.

Update: I found the little lost restaurant, or at least I know the town. The town is Occoquan, Va. (See That Cute Place to Eat I Can Never Find.)

The Magic Feather Diet

Hello, My name is Lee and I am a fat person.

Actually, I'm not that fat right now but I have been for most of my life. Since statistics suggest that the cure rates for obesity are not as good as the cure rate for alcoholism (or for heroin addiction, for that matter) it is entirely appropriate to borrow that famous intro line from Alcoholics Anonymous. Once a fatty, always a fatty (at least potentially.) I may not be fat right now but I know that I am one twinkie away from being a blimp once again.

The good news is that I seems to have found a program of treatment which works to control the problem. It isn't especially unpleasant -- or crushingly expensive -- and it doesn't require me to do weird things with my brain. On my new "diet" I eat pretty much the same stuff as I ate before, when I was fat. I eat in ordinary restaurants and I don't order the flavorless "healthy" foods. I never leave the table hungry and, while I may get a bit peckish, now and then between meals, I am never grindingly hungry. I never obsess about food, counting the seconds -- each and every one -- until my next meal.

The Secret

I enjoy my food because I eat food that I enjoy. In the 22 weeks since I started I have lost 37 pounds at a fairly-constant rate of 1.6 pounds per week. [Update 12/05/2006: Make that 42 weeks and 72 lbs at 1.7 pounds a week.] And it's been fairly easy. What's the secret? Here it is: I don't eat very much any more. I order a small lunch and get a to-go box for half of it. At supper I tend to dine on the appetizer menu. That's where most of the tastiest food is but the portions are really small. For those of you whose eyes just glazed over -- the one's who think that you can no more eat like I eat than you can grow wings and fly -- remember: I am one of you -- a fat person. If I can do it, so can you.

Actually, there is a second half to the secret. I mentioned the first half -- that I no longer eat very much -- so you would know that my weight-loss comes from a non-controversial source: caloric reduction. I'll get to the second half of the secret in a minute but first I will explain the title of this posting: "The Magic Feather Diet." As many of you may have guessed it's a reference to the Walt Disney film Dumbo. In the film, Dumbo, a small elephant, learns to fly using his unnaturally large ears as wings. His friends know he can fly but Dumbo lacks confidence to try. They give him an ordinary feather to hold, telling him it is a magic feather, and with the feather clutched in his trunk he takes flight. This link to a Google image search should bring up images of Dumbo and most of the drawings of Dumbo flying will show the black "magic" feather clutched in his trunk. It will look something like this.

One last note before I get on with my piece. While you are reading please bear in mind that I am neither a doctor nor a researcher. I am a computer jockey by trade and anything that sounds like "science" in the following should be taken with a large grain of salt (this salt crystal the Smithsonian has on display in their mineral exhibit would do fine.)

The Magic Feather

So here is my magic feather. This stuff is a blend of three viscous dietary fibers mixed in just the right ratio to form the thickest possible glop when mixed with water at a pH similar to the environment in the stomach. You can read about it in this flyer [PDF] from one of the guys who invented it. I have tracked down the studies he references and they appear to be legit and I can personally testify to the stuff's helpfulness when one is trying to shed a few pounds.

[Yes, yes, I know. Diet pills are useless, almost by definition, and that's the ones that are not actually dangerous. Hang with me, I'll get back to the diet pills issue.]

A Little Background

Scientists who study obesity and its related health concerns, especially diabetes, have noticed a combination of factors which seem to go together to spell trouble with a capital "T". Well, not a "T" actually, its an "X" -- as in Metabolic Syndrome X. You can read a bit about Metabolic Syndrome X in this brief article from About.com in which the author, Dr. Richard N. Fogoros, M.D, says, in part --

...While there is no drug treatment that directly reverses the insulin resistance that causes syndrome X, there is, in fact, a way to reverse the insulin resistance - diet and exercise. Patients should make every attempt to reduce their body weight to within 20% of the "ideal" body weight calculated for age and height. (The ideal diet for this condition is a low calorie, low-cholesterol diet with plenty of fruits, vegetables, and fiber.) And patients should incorporate aerobic exercise (at least 20 minutes) into their daily lifestyle. If both of these can be accomplished, most of the metabolic abnormalities seen in syndrome X substantially improve.

However, human nature (and human metabolism) being what it is, the majority of patients with syndrome X cannot accomplish these goals. In these cases, each metabolic disorder associated with syndrome X needs to be treated individually, and aggressively. [The highlighting is mine.]

If you have never heard of Metabolic Syndrome X you should read the whole thing. It's quite short and provides a good introduction. I do disagree with him on one point, which I have highlighted. I think that by adhering to the Magic Feather Diet most people will find that it is possible to control their weight.

Healthy Caveman Syndrome

My take on Metabolic Syndrome X is that for most of our evolutionary history it was simply not a problem. In fact, in a society that subsists in large part on hunting, some of the aspects of the metabolic Syndrome can be an advantage. People with the syndrome react quickly to food. After they eat their blood sugar spikes immediately which triggers a similarly fast release of high levels of insulin. The high insulin level causes cells to store the blood sugar as fat and the blood sugar drops causing hunger to return. The stomach efficiently liquefies the food and dumps it into the small intestine. Once the stomach is empty it releases signaling compounds such as ghrellin to indicate that it is ready for more food. Eating sets off a cascade that makes the Metabolic Syndrome X caveman even hungrier and a bit grouchy. The other, non MSX cavemen are unlikely to come between Mr. Hungry and his lunch until he is stuffed for fear of getting hit over the head. This roller-coaster ride of blood sugar and insulin rise and fall is very unhealthy if it happens every day -- but if food is only available occasionally then the person who most efficiently eats when the food is available and stores as much fat as possible will have an advantage.

So, from an evolutionary point of view, there is nothing wrong with having a metabolism that very efficiently converts food into body fat. When your available food consists of about 200 calories a day of twigs, roots and small insects supplemented by an unrefrigerated elk carcas once a month then you better like to eat when there's food around. It is only in today's unnatural world -- a world where we all swim in a sea of food -- that it becomes a problem. Nature doesn't seem to have prepared many of us to survive in Pizza Hut.

The Blame Game

Which brings us to one of the less appealing aspects of the whole obesity thing: deciding who to blame for it. Is Pizza Hut evil? McDonalds? Ben and Jerry's? I don't think so. [Except maybe for that last one... a little bit evil, maybe -- especially since they have "retired" White Russian, my favorite flavor... Where was I? Oh yes...] Fast food places make their money by giving people what they want and people like big, fattening food. McDonald's is not our mom.

And speaking of dear old Mom, other people like to blame being fat on their moms. We were overfed when we were babies, they say, and now we have "fat cells." And if you have "fat cells" you are just screwed, dietetically speaking. When you try to starve your fat cells they release chemicals in your blood that make you hungry. It's not our fault. Our moms made us this way. Not that you have to be fat yourself to play this edition of the blame game; how many times have you seen a fat woman waddling down the street with her fat children waddling after her like baby ducks and thought: "I'll bet she is teaching them terrible eating habits?" You can blame other people's moms, too.

But another explanation for the fat mother with fat children phenomenon is to remember that Metabolic Syndrome X tends to run in families. Maybe it is God who makes us fat! Blame God! Or, if you prefer the scientific to the theological, maybe it is genetics and the reason we need fat jeans is because we have fat genes. Either way, it's not our fault!

Other people call that a cop-out. If fat people would just eat less, exercise more and select more sensible foods then they wouldn't be fat people any more. Studies have shown that people with a genetic tendency to overweight will gain slightly more weight than genetically thin people when eating the same diet -- but not very much more. 95% of the difference in weight is explainable by differences in the number of calories eaten. If overweight people had a bit more willpower they could eat less and be thin. Seen that way overweight is a personality disorder. It's our own fault that we are fat.

But, of course, none of the editions of The Blame Game are at all helpful. Overweight people routinely manage to find the willpower to do other things that require self-control and delayed gratification. They save money to buy houses, they earn advanced degrees, most have good work habits. They do a million things that are hard that some of their thin friends can't manage. It does them no good to beat themselves up about being fat. As for the other factors, the fact of the matter is that Pizza Hut is going to be there and we will just have to deal with it somehow. If our fat cells are keeping us fat it doesn't matter where they came from -- let's leave our moms out of this. What's more, the genes you've got are the genes you've got. Maybe someday genetic research will turn up something really useful -- a magic pill that makes us thin -- but that hasn't happened yet and I wouldn't hold your breath.

As it happens, "holding your breath" is my favorite analogy for a fat person trying to lose weight by willpower alone. Dieting is like holding your breath. Most obese people can do it for a while but it is unnatural and very uncomfortable and sooner or later you gotta come up for air, and the weight all comes back. The usual cliche states that "Diets don't work" which is quite true -- but the cliche continues "Permanent weight loss requires a lifestyle change" which I have never found helpful. It's like saying "Holding your breath doesn't work. To live underwater permanently requires you to become aquatic." When you ask how one goes about becoming aquatic the answer always sounds quite a lot like holding one's breath forever.

I'd love to be aquatic, but I'm not. I haven't grown gills or found a way to do without oxygen. But I do seem to have found a snorkle and I am confident I can stay underwater long enough to get the job done. Or, to unwind my metaphor, I still have the metabolism that gives me a marked tendency to be overweight but I have found a way to deal with it. I still need to consciously diet to lose weight but I have found a way to make dieting sufficiently painless that I can easily see myself doing it on a more-or-less permanent basis.

Diet Pills

I have found the PGx fiber blend quite helpful as I have been losing weight and apparently other people have too. So why isn't there more of a public buzz about it? The problem is that unscrupulous marketers have made the subject of "diet pills" so toxic -- the gap between typical product claims and performance is so huge -- that there is simply no way to get any traction through advertising. And even worse, some of the most egregiously over-hyped pills are closely related to PGx. Remember the magic "Carb Blocker" pills that would make you thin without dieting by blocking absorption of carbohydrates so you would lose weight, no matter what you ate? Remember those? They're still out there. And about half of them contain some glucomannan, the main ingredient in PGx.

In point of fact, studies have shown that glucomannan, when taken with water before meals, can reduce the uptake of carbohydrates. Depending on the dosage the studies have suggested that you can expect glucomannan to "block" between 30 and 130 calories of carbohydrates a day. To put this in perspective, you can accomplish much the same thing by putting an extra ice cube or two in each glass of Coke. In theory those few calories a day can add up to a couple of pounds of lost weight a year but it is scarcely the "magic" pill that people are looking for -- and that the advertisers claim to be selling.

The maddening thing about this is that by siezing on this minor effect of viscous dietary fiber as a weight-loss aid the ham-handed marketeers have muddied the water, totally obscuring a subtler, but more helpful and better documented effects. While the fiber supplements do not totally prevent the absorption of carbohydrates, they do slow it down dramatically. As food enters the stomach it mixes with the gooey, largely-indigestible fiber mix that is already there. Instead of producing an immediate spike in your blood sugar the carbohydrates in the food are absorbed more slowly as your gut sorts out the digestible carbohydrates from the molecularly similar long polysaccharide chains of the fiber. The slower rise in blood sugar produces a muted insulin response. The process of converting glucose to fat doesn't go into high gear and you are less likely to suffer from the "hungry an hour later" phenomenon that people associate with Chinese food (which generally contains such huge amounts of starch and sugar that even people without Metabolic Syndrome X experience a hypoglycemic crash after eating it).

As well as helping to regulate your blood sugar and insulin response the fiber supplements simply tend to fill up your stomach. This is especially true of PGx which is formulated to produce the maximum volume of goo with much smaller doses than with glucomannan alone. This means that when you start your meal your stomach is half full and tends to fill up quickly. This helps you eat less, especially if you eat slowly to give your blood sugar a chance to come up a bit. Your stomach likes to work on the food until it is nicely liquefied and with PGx that tends to take quite a while. The food stays in your stomach longer which delays the release of ghrellin, an appetite causing chemical that your stomach uses to indicate that it is ready for the next meal.

The exact formula for the PGx fiber mix is proprietary but the ingredients list consists of Konjac root extract, Sodium Alginate, Xanthan Gum and Mulberry leaf extract. Konjac flour is made from the root of the "Devil's Tongue" plant. Called Konnyaku in Japanese it has been used to make noodles for thousands of years. (Check out Iron Chef episode IC1A11 -- Konnyaku Battle -- for recipe ideas.) Glucomannan, the main constituent of Konjac root extract, has some very promising research for treatment of obesity as does Sodium Alginate. The Xanthan Gum, another dietary fiber used in salad dressings and petroleum production, is probably there because of this synergistic reaction that makes the Glucomannan even more viscous than it is already when you mix it with Xanthan Gum. And the Mulberry leaves? Well, you have to have something weird in pills like these and some research suggests that Mulberry leaves are helpful for controlling glucose levels.

All of the ingredients are approved food additives and the Konjac flour is not just as an additive but qualifies as a food as well. This suggests that PGx is probably pretty safe to use. There were some pre-packaged fruit jellies from the far east that were withdrawn from the market because the Konjac gel they used was too firm and constituted a choking hazard for small children and the elderly. The problem was confounded by the fact that Konjac/Xanthan gels do not melt at body temperatures like most other gels. (Those Konjac gels have been reformulated and have returned to the US market -- which is good because the Lichee flavor is a family favorite and we missed them.) For similar reasons, people who have difficulty swallowing or have intestinal obstructions should probably avoid PGx in capsule form and look for it in the (less satisfactory but probably still helpful) liquid formula.

So, the science behind PGx is decent, but none-the-less, my magic feather consists of "diet pills." That's just something I'll have to live with. But, unlike other diet pills that claim to be a diet in a bottle, my pills do not include the diet. You have to provide your own. I'll provide a few comments about mine but you can feel free to use the magic feather with Weight Watchers or Southbeach, or any other sensible diet you like (or, more accurately, the one you hate least.)

Advice from the Mouse in your Hat

Here I will offer some random vague advice for losing weight. First, grasp the Magic Feather by taking a few PGx capsules before each meal. I take two of them before breakfast and four before lunch and supper. I also take two capsules of Korean (Panax) Ginseng -- a bit more than a gram -- with my lunch and supper pills. I accompany the pills with at least 16 oz of water and usually more like a quart. Since the fiber mix turns water into stomach-filling goo I try to add plenty of water. During the meal I make it a point to continue to drink water with my food -- more or less normally -- as if I hadn't chugged a quart before the meal.

In a restaurant, ask the waiter to bring you a large glass of room-temerature water (tap water, no ice) and swill it down with the pills before you order. Don't worry about making a fuss about the ice -- it will make people think you are European. Its easier to take a fist-full of pills if the water isn't icy cold and it's easier to drink the whole glass of water. [In hispanic restaurants water without ice is "agua, sin hielo" -- AHwuh Seen eeAYlow -- and if you ask for it in awful Spanish the waiter will almost always remember.] After the first glass you can tell the waiter that ice is OK but 9 our of 10 times it won't work. Drinking warm water with your meal is the price you pay to be thin.

Learn to e-a-t s-l-o-w-l-y. Yes, I know that this is the same hateful advice you have been given all your life, advice which was absolutely no help at all, but give it one more try. Most of the dieting advice in this section is quite conventional; the only difference is that when you take the pills it seems to work, which it never did before. Eat things you like the taste of and enjoy it. But take small bites. Enjoy each one -- the flavor, the mouth-feel, the texture -- and between bites chat with your friends, think about your blog, or find something else to do that involves a bit of time, pleasantly spent. What we are doing here is spreading out the calories and letting your blood sugar come up gradually. You will find that with the fiber in your stomach (so it isn't so echoingly empty) the process will seem a lot like eating. Every now and then take another sip of your water to clear your palate between bites -- it makes your food taste better and continues to fill up your stomach.

Stop eating when you find you are no longer hungry. This one is really hard at first. Most obese people have learned from bitter experience that if they stop eating at the point where they are no longer particularly hungry then they will be hungry an hour later and they will be miserably hungry an hour after that. To avoid that running-out-of-gas between meal experience they continue eating, trying to get enough food in their stomach for there to be something left for them to use a few hours later -- after the initial blood sugar spike from the meal has been processed and stored as fat. This extra food adds to the dangerously high blood sugar spike but the symptoms of too much blood sugar are mostly long term and the symptoms of hypoglycemia are immediate and unpleasant. They have learned how much food they need to eat to feel ok until their next meal -- its too much for long-term health but it gets them through the day.

I promised that the Magic Feather Diet didn't involve doing anything weird with your brain. This business of learning to stop eating when you are not hungry represents my closest approach to breaking that promise. There are a few confidence building techniques that I used which I think will work for other people, but I can't be sure. Here they are:

* In restaurants, order your meal in segments. Pick something small on the menu that you are sure will fit in your diet. And pick out the other item you will order if, after eating the first item, you find that you are still hungry. Order the first item and tell the waiter to check back later. Take your pills with lots of water and when your food comes eat it slowly and enjoy it. Sit for a minute and then, if you are still hungry order the other item.

* To-go boxes are your friend. When you realize that you are no longer hungry stop eating immediately. In restaurants, get a to-go box for the rest of your meal. If you are eating at home go ahead and put that half a pork chop in a plastic container and put it in the fridge. If you have access to a refrigerator at work take the other half of your lunch back to work with you. If you get excessively hungry later go and eat some of it -- but do so a little bit at a time and stop when you are not hungry. Always drink at least 8 oz of water whenever you eat anything.

* Keep some not-particularly exciting food near you at all times but make it something that requires a small amount of preparation to eat. I rather like those 5 oz cans of vegetables -- canned peas are good -- or individual-serving-sized packets of instant cheese-flavored grits. If you get excessively hungry, take a break and eat a little something (I shoot for 100 calorie snacks) and, again, be sure to drink at least 8 oz of water.

* Learn that it's ok to be a little-bit hungry. Most overweight people have learned from experience that being a little bit hungry is a warning sign that they will be insanely hungry and will feel awful in half an hour. Their blood sugar swings between extremes and they have learned that a feeling of moderate hunger is usually a warning of an imminent hypoglycemic episode so they respond to even moderate hunger by eating large amounts of food to head off the problem. PGx really does smooth out the blood sugar peaks and valleys. Sometimes being a little bit hungry means that you are a little bit hungry and that in half an hour you will still be a little bit hungry -- or maybe you'll get over it.

One day, not long after I started using PGx I was getting a bit hungry in the afternoon at work. I promised myself I would hit the breakroom and zap a package of cheese grits just as soon as I reached a stopping point. When I finally found the problem with the program I was debugging, and had a spare minute, I realized that I wasn't hungry any more. I had gotten over it. It was uncanny. I had a cup of tea instead of my snack and, over the course of the next few weeks I experimented by ignoring slight cases of the hungrys and only snacking when I was definitely hungry. I found that one third of the time the hungrys would just go away, one third of the time I would simply continue to be moderately, but not unpleasantly, hungry, and the other third of the time I would get hungrier and go eat something.

The idea of all these confidence-building exercises is to always have enough food available to make it to the next meal even if the magic pills don't work. The difference is that instead of putting it all in your stomach you put some of it in the refrigerator and give yourself permission to eat it later if you get too hungry.

Join a Gym and Exercise You are not trying to "work off" calories. It takes an obscene amount of exercise to work off an extra pound. You are trying to add muscle. A pound of muscle requires more calories every day than a pound of fat. The more muscle mass you have the more you can eat without gaining weight. Aerobics are good, in moderation, but for weight loss you want to add as many pounds of muscle as possible. Tell your trainer that you want muscles like the Governor of California.

If eating alone, bring something to read. This helps you to eat slowly. Read a paragraph between bites. At the bottom of each page ask yourself if you are still hungry and consider that to-go box.

If not eating alone, split a meal with someone. There's a Mexican place my wife and I go for lunch that offers a big burrito as their daily special almost every day. I eat one third of it, my wife eats one quarter of it and five twelfths goes into a to-go box from which she gets two more lunches. [Sorry about all the fractions.] That's four meals for five bucks. The PGx pills aren't free but, when you figure in your savings on food they pretty much pay for themselves. [One note: You may be on a diet but your waiter isn't. What with all the water-no-ice, and the to-go boxes for a five dollar check, you will keep the waiter busy. Be sure to add a couple of extra bucks to your fifteen percent tip.]

Buy the pills online. The list price for a bottle of 180 capsules is over twenty-eight dollars. If you shop around you can find it online for about fifteen (as of the last time I placed an order.) The last few times I have ordered them I have used vitacost.com -- they have good service and seem to have the lowest prices for stuff like this.

Don't step on the scale too often. The amount of weight you lose during a day of sensible weight-loss is much less than the amount of weight you lose during the average pee. The amount you lose in a week may be less than the weight of last night's supper which is still in your gut. If you are female your monthly water-weight fluctuation can exceed the amount of weight you lose in a month. Stepping on the scale every morning is madness. I step on the scale on the first and the fifteenth of each month (which is approximately once every two weeks.)

Side Effects.

About a year ago I posted a humorous piece about dieting called The R Factor Diet. In it I hinted that the best foods to eat when you need to lose weight are the foods that make you flatulent. The "R-Factor" is the letter "R" that changes the word "F-A-T" into "F-A-R-T". To some extent the Magic Feather Diet represents a return the this theme.

The most commonly reported side effects seem to be gas and bloating. The organisms that live in your gut are a bit like the friends you had in college who would hang around the table while you ate, saying are you going to eat that? Just because you can't digest glucomannan doesn't mean that the organisms in your gut can't digest it -- or those 30 calories a day of carbs that the glucomannan "blocked". This results in a bit more methane in your gut than you are used to having. Add to this the extra bulk from the PGx binding water into a gel and you can get some discomfort at first. The discomfort generally goes away after a few days and any remaining changes are generally for the better. I had considered a different name instead of the "Magic Feather Diet" but the "Eat Like a Bird, Crap Like a Pony, Fart Like a Force of Nature - Diet" was rather too long and didn't seem as catchy or persuasive.

Placebo Effect?

But, you may ask, Dumbo didn't really need the magic feather, did he? What are the chances that most of the success I have had with PGx is due to the Placebo Effect? I can't really know. There seems to be quite a bit of encouraging research -- double-blind, placebo-controlled studies that found the fiber blend did better than Placebo, and that is encouraging. But, could my particular experience be all Placebo Effect? Sure, it's possible. I don't think it's likely -- but it's possible. I don't know and, to a certain extent, I don't care. I know I am as thin as I have ever been. I know I have, more or less effortlessly, blown by all the places where previous diets hit plateaus, or failed completely. I guess it could all be self-deception. But if it is, fine. And if you have some weight you need to shed, you might consider letting me delude you, too.

Update: 17 October 2006.

A couple more months have past since I first posted this and I have lost another thirty pounds. A few days ago I reached the goal I had somewhat arbitrarily set for myself when I started. Reviewing the situation, I have decided that I can go a bit farther. According to the Body Mass Index calculations I am still towards the high end of the overweight range. I started my diet at 304 lbs (BMI = 37) and am now at 240 (BMI = 29.2) which is near the high end of the "overweight" category ("obese" starts at a BMI of 30.) The BMI calculations and the ideal weight tables both suggest I lose at least another 30 lbs. I don't plan to lose that much (I think the tables are insane) but I mention it so my readers won't worry that I making myself too thin.

Extra Reading:

Life Extension Magazine: Novel Fiber Limits Sugar Absorption

Journal of the American College of Neutrition: Emerging Alternate Therapies for Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

Konnyaku.com: About Konnyaku (Konjac)

Celebrate Diversity? Bah!

From "SUNBREAK CITY: I don't..."

...understand the word diversity as it is used in the school system, higher ed. and legal circles. The goal of learning institutions is to make us the same not more diverse: delay gratification, study, take care of yourself, pursue attainable goals that lie yet in the future; in short, to make us middle class. The middle class is recognizable all over the world: get to bed at a reasonable hour, be on time for work or school, do your best, save, study, plan for the future, excercise some discipline in your life, try to make wise choices.

A quibble: I think he is just a bit off base on education. The goal is not to make us all the same; the goal is to make us all sensible, reasonable, well-educated and successful. Making us all more nearly the same is a by-product, not the goal.

Tolstoy wrote that "All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Similarly we can observe that there are only a few ways to be sensible but there are countless millions of ways to be a damn fool. Thus the tendency of good education to produce a degree of homogeneity in its students.

It is neither possible nor desirable for that homogeneity to be perfect. If everyone came out of school exactly the same then their experiences in life would be the result of random chance from which no conclusions could be drawn. No one could ever learn anything and no one could ever teach anything. Societal progress would stop.

On the other hand, in a society without a large degree of similarity between its members one also can't draw any conclusions from life experiences. There are too many variables in play. Again, no one could ever learn anything and no one could ever teach anything.

[Jeez, I'm being long-winded today. Zzzzzzzz. Sorry, I'll try to find my way to the end quickly...]

In theory, at least, the notion that diversity should be "celebrated" arose as a reaction to perceptions of intolerance. The problem is that the opposite of intolerance is tolerance, not celebration. There is another word I like much, much better than diversity to capture the need for a degree of experimentation in the way we lead our lives. This other word does not have the open-ended rejection of norms and standards that makes diversity so toxic. In fact it depends on them.

Celebrate eccentricity!

That Placebo Stuff Sounds Good; Where Can I Get Some of That?

If you read the literture of medical research you will find that the very best studies of the effects of drugs and nutritional supplements will always involve comparing the item being tested against the same standard: a "Placebo". Whether the study is to see if the newest, multi-million dollar anti-cancer drug is effective against cancer of the pancreas, or to see if ginger capsules are helpful with motion sickness the treatment given to the control group will be a placebo. If that anti-cancer drug can be shown to be vastly better than the placebo the drug company will be jubilant -- because, in many cases that "placebo" is pretty dang good.

In a nutshell, the Placebo Effect is the tendency of patients and test subjects to have real positive effects when given treatements that they believe might be helpful, even if the treatment given has no direct physical action at all. Study after study after study has shown that pain, for instance, can be aleviated to a large degree by the administration of a placebo. One third of study subjects with moderate pain can be expected to report significantly better pain relief from a placebo when compared to a control group that receives no treatment at all. There is some debate about whether the placebo effect is entirely subjective, or whether it can be demonstrated to show measurable, objective physical improvements. There is decent science on both sides of that debate and I do not particularly have an opinion one way or the other.

What I do know is that the placebo effect can easily be your friend. If you have some sort of a condition which is either not bad enough to justify the possible side effects of a more-effective treatment, or a condition for which no "approved" effective treatment exists, then that 30 percent chance that a placebo will be helpful starts to sound pretty good. All you need to do is find something that is cheap, harmless, and has some anecdotal evidence that it might be helpful for what ails you and there you go. Vitamin C during sniffle and drip season? Peruvian Maca for low (libido*COUGH*) energy? Vick's Vapo-Rub for toenail fungus? Why the hell not?

Of course you have to be careful what you read. Take the case of Saw Palmetto for enlarged prostates. There were years and years of decent, well-designed if rather small studies that suggested that Saw Palmetto extract was helpful with the symptoms of Benign Prostate Hypertrophy. Millions of men about my age took the stuff and many found it helpful. Then along came a group of party poopers who did really big study and found that Saw Palmetto is was no better than placebo. *sigh* In their study something like 30 percent of the participants found Saw Palmetto helpful and another 30 percent liked the placebo. That makes them all 30 percent better off than we all are now. The middle-aged men of the world are now 30 percent less likely to sleep through the night without getting up to pee because a group of meddlesome urologists had nothing better to do than to let the air out of our favorite placebo.

I am not suggesting that we should put a stop to science. (I'm not sure I am suggesting anything and tend to doubt that I am.) But I do tend to question the dog-in-a-manger glee with which some members of the mainstream medical community greet purely negative news about "alternative" therapies. I swill down pills by the handfull every day, trying to delay the enevitabilities of life, and I rather resent the assumption that I do so because I have been hornswoggled by the yayhoos in the nutritional supplements industry. I am fully aware, statistically speaking, that half of what I take consists of harmless-but-useless placebos that will eventually be replaced by something else that new research suggests is better. My "snake oil" isn't free but I try to stay informed and to balance the trade off between science and cost. There are a number of things I might be taking if the science behind them were stronger -- or if they were cheaper. There are other things (Maca*COUGH*) for which the science is, shall we say, dodgy but the product is safe and cheap and the placebo value is large. If someone does a study that shows that something I take is bad for me I am interested. If something else is shown to be better, again I am interested. But if something is shown to be no better than placebo I might just be happier not knowing about it.

On comments at The Belmont Club

Wrechard, the proprietor of The Belmont Club is making changes to his blog. One of the changes he proposes is to only allow comments after a moderator (that would be he) has approved them. He has lots of smart readers who post insightful comments and, sadly, a few who have nothing interesting to say and nothing better to do than to share their nothing-to-say with the world. Reading the comment section of some of Wrechard's postings is a bit like trying to have a church service in the chimpanzee enclosure at the zoo. Lately the chimp to deacon ratio seems to have been climbing and Wrechard has decided to review comments in hopes that some of the chimps will get bored and wander off.

In the comment section for his announcement I offer this advice which I copy here so my loyal readers can let me know where I fall on the chimp-to-deacon scale.

First, it is your blog; do whatever you want with it. Don't feel that you need to do anything for us. Your blog is too good already: we are not worthy.

That said, what I would do if it were my blog would be to put a link to the comments policy in the template and, in that policy, I would state that comments are not only moderated but that only a small number will be approved. Commenters would be advised to regard the comments they enter as personal (but not private) notes to the moderator which may rarely be shared with other readers in the comments section if they are especially insightful. Commenters would be encouraged to post a copy of any long comments in their own blogs, linking to the Belmont Club item, and to look for their comments, and those of other commenters, in the "Links to This Post" section of the Belmont Club posting.

Kodak DX6490

At a party last night I was asked about my camera. The couple I was talking to have a large, heavy digital -- the kind that take great pictures on those few occasions when you are willing to lug ten pounds of camera to the photo-op. They are thinking about a somewhat lighter camera and my Kodak DX6490 caught their attention.

I really like the camera. It isn't the smallest camera in the world or the lightest. There are other cameras that have more features, are more convenient or easier to use. But the DX6490 has been a very good compromise for me. It's a couple of years old and I bought it used on eBay. The newer version of the camera has more megapixels and a few other features I like but is quite similar in most respects.

While we were talking about the camera we took a few sample pictures. While demonstrating the use of the LCD screen as a viewfinder I took this photo of my lovely wife. Click on the photos for other sizes including original

Flash photos taken outside in the dark almost always suck. This one is no exception. The meter seems to have been a bit worried about that white shirt and the photo is a bit darker than perfect.

I handed the camera to the lady I was talking to and she took this one. The camera did a nice job of finding the slightly-off-center subject whose blue shirt was less confusing to the metering system.

Below are a couple of photos I took at the NC Zoo on Memorial Day. The photo of the bear in particular shows off the decent 10x optical zoom lens which is one of the best features of the camera. If you are interested click on this link [large file] to the original size version of the bear. Look at the bear's fur and the texture of its nose. Also notice the typical Kodak colors in all the photos -- a tad warm and saturated.





And finally, a photo of our host and hostess at the western-themed party. I have adjusted the exposure, contrast and saturation on this one on my computer. I was standing a bit too far away for the flash and the original was dark. All the other photos are exactly as they came from the camera.

Crispy Fried Talapia with a Side of Auto Body Repair

For this recipe you will need two fillets of a mildly-flavored fish about 1/2 inch thick, 1 1/2 cups bread machine flour, 3/4 cups water, 1 T vegetable oil, 1 clove garlic, 1 t dried dill, 1 t salt, fresh-ground white pepper and a slightly dented sports car.

Wed 24 May, 2006

Dear Diary,

This morning as I was backing into my parking place at work I got a bit too close to the car on my passenger side and my right side mirror scraped his right rear body-panel. His bumper also scuffed my car right in front of the passenger door, pushing it in slightly. Resisting the temptation to go park somewhere else, I left a card under his wiper and went in to work. He and I chatted later and after a brief discussion with the local police, the exchage of insurance information, etc. he was good to go and get his car fixed on my insurance company's dime. That left my car to deal with.

In general one doesn't want to file a lot of small claims against one's insurance. It's not quite the same as Machiavelli's admonition never to do one's enemies small injuries but the concept is close. If you make your insurance pay for small problems the amount you save is generally less than the increase in your premiums. Since my dent isn't very big I decided to deal with it myself.

The first problem to deal with was that the side of the car was pushed in just enough for the front edge of the door to catch on it when the door was opened and closed. I stopped by an auto parts store on my way home and bought a cheap suction cup dent puller.

When I got home I pulled over the garden hose to wet the car for better suction and had at the dent. I was not wildly successful. The problem was the raised letters "V6" on the dented area that made it difficult to get a proper seal. If I got the car really wet and held down the edges of the suction cup with my other hand I could get a bit of a tug, but not enough. Water would seal the gap briefly but was insufficiently viscous to hold against air pressure long enough to pull out the dent. It seemed clear to me that I needed something thicker -- gooier -- something a bit like polygrip.

I am an uncertain mechanic, to put it as charitably as possible, but I am a pretty good cook. If I can change a problem into a culinary problem I can usually solve it. So, needing some kind of goo, I dashed into the kitchen and made myself some goo. It should be noted that I was under some time pressure here. I was scheduled to do supper that night and the wife would be home in half an hour. If she got home to find that I had dented my car and not fixed supper that would not be good.

I grabbed a small bowl and dumped in about 1 1/2 cups of bread machine flour. I added a bit less than a cup of water and a bit of vegetable oil. I was shooting for a consistancy just a bit thicker than pancake batter. The batter needed to rest for a minute to develop the proper gooey consistancy so I turned my attention to supper. Supper was to be talapia, and with fish I usually like rice which takes twenty minutes to cook. I put a pan of rice on the stove to cook while I continued to struggle with the dent. Back out to the driveway...

I ladled a bit of batter down the side of my car, put a generous teaspoon-full in the middle of the suction cup and splotched it against the dent. A quick pull and the dent was noticably smaller and less pushed in. It was still hard to get a good seal over the letters (next time I'll make the goo a bit thicker) but it worked well enough. After a few minutes there were still a few rumpled bits (which I am still working on) but the side of the car was generally back where it belonged and the dent was getting hard to see. Back to the kitchen...

I had used very little of my batter and I still had the fish to cook. Hmmmm... I grabbed an egg and whipped that into the batter along with a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of dried dill weed, a clove of pressed garlic and a bit of white pepper from the grinder. I put a quarter inch of vegetable oil in a frying pan and heated it quite hot. I poured the batter onto a large plate and layed the tilapia fillets in the batter on each side before dropping them into the hot oil. I poured about a tablespoon of the batter on top of each fillet and, while they cooked, I dashed out to the driveway with wet paper towels to de-goo my car.

I cooked the fish about three minutes a side over high heat to keep the pan hot. That time is approximate, I cooked each side to a medium-brown color. The extra dollop of batter crisped up nicely, giving the fish a hard, definite crunch. I sprinkled the fish with a bit more salt and the juice of half a lemon just before I took it out of the pan and served it with the rice and some tomatoes and eggplant left over from lunch at a favorite local Lebonese restaurant.

I am still working on the dent. The photos above are after photos so it's not quite perfect yet. The dent is much less visible than the pictures suggest -- I chose the angle and lighting to show off the dent and I jazzed the contast a bit to make it easiert to see. I'm currently looking for just the right slim, rigid slightly curved object to poke in from the door opening to pop out those last few bits. I'll keep you posted.

One last word of advice. If you decide to use this technique to fix your car (and, possibly, your supper) be sure to wear old clothes. All the splitching and splotching with a batter-covered suction cup tends to leave one rather splattered. But the fish is really tasty.

A Perfectly-sensible Story About MySpace from Reuters.

I spend quite a bit of time complaining about the biases of the Reuters News Service so it is incumbent on me to mention when they get something right. This has not proven to be an excessive burden since it doesn't happen very often -- but it has happened again. This morning's story by Jill Serjeant, dateline Thu May 11, 8:23 AM ET, gets the MySpace social-networking phenomenon exactly right.

I have quoted the story -- As freedom shrinks, teens seek MySpace to hang out -- in its entirety since links to news stories go stale sometimes, especially stories they are, shall we say, out of line with the editorial direction of the wire service. Here it is:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - They paper their virtual walls with kittens and cartoon characters, give their address as Candyland, their age as 103 and announce they are yearning for true love.

Welcome to the secret, yet very public, world of young teens who are flocking to social-networking Internet sites both to chill with friends and to figure out the timeless adolescent question "Who am I?"

Although originally aimed at 20-somethings interested in independent music, Web sites like MySpace.com, which is owned by News Corp, have attracted an enormous following among middle school students, and cultural theorists say it's not hard to see why.

As the real world is perceived as more dangerous with child abductors lurking on every corner, kids flock online to hang out with friends, express their hopes and dreams and bare their souls with often painful honesty -- mostly unbeknownst to their tech-clumsy parents.

"We have a complete culture of fear," said Danah Boyd, 28, a Ph.D student and social media researcher at the University of California Berkeley. "Kids really have no place where they are not under constant surveillance."

Driven to and from school, chaperoned at parties and often lacking public transport, today's middle-class American kids are no longer free to hang out unsupervised at the park, the bowling alley or to bike around the neighborhood they way they did 20 years ago.

"A lot of that coming-of-age stuff in public is gone. So kids are creating social spaces within all this controlled space," said Boyd.

LIFE SUPPORT

The ranks of Santa Monica, California-based MySpace.com has swollen to more than 73 million members in two years, making it the second-biggest Web domain after Yahoo in terms of page views. Other popular teen sites are Friendster.com, Tagged.com, Xanga.com and Orkut.com.

Most MySpace members live in the United States but a British version was launched this year and Australia will be next.

More than half of 15- to 20-year-olds who are online are using MySpace, according to the company's research. They use the site's design technology to create personal "spaces" that resemble a cross between a high school locker and a secret diary.

Researchers say older teens and 20-somethings use the site more for friendship, sharing music and arranging meetings and parties.

The younger set use it to chill with known friends and work out their own identity. Some construct fantasy lives of vast wages, luxury cars and say they are searching for "live-in pimps." Others confess touchingly to being geeks, loving uncool movies like "The Sound of Music" or list their puppy as their lover.

"Building identity is a lot of what a teen-ager is. The majority feel they don't fit in," said networking consultant Ross Dawson, chairman of Future Exploration Network.

"This is the first generation for which it is entirely natural to socialize in a digital environment. Mobile phones, instant messaging, texting and being online really are their life support," Dawson said.

ADULT ALARM

Under-14s are not supposed to use MySpace but tens of thousands ignore that stipulation, inventing ages and high school careers still beyond their reach, and sometimes posting sexually precocious pictures.

To meet concern over possible sexual exploitation of children, MySpace hired a safety czar in April and requires under-18s to review safety tips before registering. It also restricts the profiles of under-16s to users they know.

It says it has deleted more than 250,000 profiles of under-14-year-olds since 2004 on the basis of tips by parents and algorithms that search the site looking for keywords and phrases that identify very young users.

"We are now deleting something like 5,000 under-age profiles a day," said Shawn Gold, head of marketing for MySpace.

Gold said the dangers should be kept in perspective. "If MySpace were a state it would be twice the size of California, but the crime associated with it would be a five-block area of New York City."

For all the adult alarm over the coarse language and provocative poses often seen on such sites, Boyd said teens are doing just what they have always done.

"Adults are not normally privy to these teen-age expressions. But when teens hang out in public they do these stupid things and they always have.

"Teens are trying to figure out their sexuality for better or worse. It's a problem for parents to pretend like it doesn't exist. If parents have an open mind and can hear their teens expressing themselves in all their ridiculousness, they can make sense of it and it stops being so scary," she said.

Implosion Photoblog

building
Originally uploaded by bigleehimself.

I got up before the sun came up today to go see the demolition company bring down a twelve-story building across the street from Crabtree Mall in Raleigh. I took along the trusty Kodak to do a bit of photo blogging.

It was a cool, rainy Sunday and the implosion was scheduled for 7:30 am. The early hour on a Sunday was chosen because they had to close several major streets for a few minutes to blow the building. Add in the light rain and you get an event where only the most dedicated rubber-neckers were in attendance.


Clicking on the photos will take you to bigger versions in my Flickr.com account.


My plan had been to watch the implosion from the parking deck of the mall but was turned back by a policeman who said the a press pass was needed to get in there. Several people I spoke to had actually come the night before the pick out the best spot in the mall parking lot to watch but when they came back in the morning they couldn't get in.




The spot where I and my fellow rubber-neckers wound up was on a road that runs behind the mall and a bit up the hill. There were a couple of trees in the way but we had a pretty good view of the building (which you can see in the background here.)




I heard some people say that the parking lot of the old Steak and Ale further up the hill had a better view. The people on the hill in this photo are up there. I thought about walking up there but decided that the other location might have worse tree problems that where I was standing -- and I didn't want to lose my spot.




Quite a few people brought their kids. The wet weather held down the crowd and everyone could find a spot where they could see.




This gentleman was sitting in the brush up on the hill taking photos. His camera was a smallish digital of some sort -- too small to show in this photo. His photographer's pose with no camera visible made him look a bit like a mime doing an interpritation of a photographer.
I'd watched quite a few implosions on TV but this was my first opportunity to watch on in person. The "implosion" is handled by blowing out the supports for the middle part of the building first then knocking out the support for the outside once the middle is already falling. That makes all the outside walls fall in towards the center and the whole building falls inside its old footprint.




Those first explosions -- the ones that take out the support for the building's center can't really be seen. You hear them... BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. ... and you think Dang! It's going. I'd better take a picture! but there is nothing to take a picture of...





Then, while you are waiting for your slow-cycling Kodak camera to get ready for the next shot they blow the supports for the outer wall and you miss your chance to get a shot showing the visible explosions. You do have time for exactly one shot as the building collapses in on itself...





...and all the shots you want of the big cloud of dust.





After the implosion the pile of debris is smaller than you expect it to be.



After the explosion I took this shot from the bridge that is in the foreground of my photos of the implosion. These guys arrived on the site amazingly fast. They probably weren't that far away when it came down.

Note to self: The next time you photograph a building being blown up be sure you get a decent "before" picture and don't wind up grabbing a crappy-crop version from the middle of a wide angle frame.

El Stinko de Mayo

I'd like to correct a misconception people have about today's Mexican holiday. Most people think that the idea is to go down to the local cantina on May 5th and get stinking drunk -- and then to add the resulting May 6th hangover to the list of grievances that make us rather cross with Mexico. This is not what el Cinco de Mayo is all about.

according to Wikipedia,

El Cinco de Mayo ("The Fifth of May" in Spanish) is a national celebration in Mexico. It commemorates the victory of Mexican forces led by General Ignacio Zaragoza over the French expeditionary forces in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862.

Historical background

In 1862, in response to Mexico's refusal to pay off its debt, Britain, Spain and France sent troops to Mexico; they arrived in January of 1862. The new democratically-elected government of President Benito Juárez made agreements with the British and the Spanish, who promptly recalled their armies, but the French stayed, thus beginning the period of the French intervention in Mexico. Emperor Napoleon III wanted to secure French dominance in the former Spanish colony, including installing one of his relatives, Archduke Maximillian of Austria, as ruler of Mexico.

Confident of a quick victory, 6,500 French soldiers marched on to Mexico City to seize the capital before the Mexicans could muster a viable defense. Along their march, the French already encountered stiff resistance before Zaragoza struck out to intercept the invaders.

The battle between the French and Mexican armies occurred on May 5 when Zaragoza's ill-equipped militia of 4,500 men encountered the better-armed French force. However, Zaragoza's small and nimble cavalry units were able to prevent French dragoons from taking the field and overwhelming the Mexican infantry. With the dragoons removed from the main attack, the Mexicans routed the remaining French soldiers with a combination of their tenacity, inhospitable terrain, and a stampede of cattle set off by local peasants. The invasion was stopped and crushed.

Zaragoza won the battle but lost the war. The French Emperor, upon learning of the failed invasion, immediately dispatched another force, this time numbering 30,000 soldiers. By 1864, they succeeded in defeating the Mexican army and occupying Mexico City. Archduke Maximillian became Emperor of Mexico.

Maximilian's rule was short-lived. Mexican rebels opposed to his rule resisted, seeking the aid of the United States. Once the American Civil War was over, the U.S. military began supplying Mexicans with weapons and ammunition, and by 1867, the rebels finally defeated the French and deposed their puppet Emperor. The Mexican people then reelected Juárez as president.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with going down to the local cantina for pocas cervezas on el Cinco de Mayo [Note: be sure to squeeze the lime wedge into the beer and poke it down into the bottle. Most Mexican beer doesn't taste right without the lime and Corona has no taste at all.] Just don't blame your hangover on the poor Mexicans who are celebrating their hundred-and-forty-some year-old, temporary victory over the evil and insideous French.

¿ Quien es Juan Galt ?

Today thousands of hispanic immigrants, many of them illegals, took a day off from work to demonstrate for "immigrant "rights". The idea is to have a one-day "strike" to show the US how dependent we are on the work done by hispanic immigrants. It is a somewhat-less-drastic version of Ayn Rand's character John Galt who decided to "stop the engine of the world" by inspiring scientists, engineers and industrialists to drop out of society.

Anyone who has read my blog in recent months knows that I am generally sympathetic to the idea of immigration reforms that would provide our current illegals with an opportunity to continue to work here. (I also support building a wall/fence/whatever to keep more from arriving until we have dealt with the ones we have now.) But, like I said, I am sympathetic to the situation of the illegals, most of whom I see as working very hard, living modestly, and making very little trouble.

Todays demonstrations are a big mistake for the immigrant community. They are doing themselves no good by letting a few ethnicity pimps make them seem Anti-American -- something which they overwhelmingly are not. The average illegal immigrant has come to the US to work hard and try to make a buck -- money which they send back to their families in Mexico by the billions. They have not come here as reconquistadores who want to take back the South West US because it was "stolen" from Mexico. They have come here to mow grass and pick fruit. The whole "re-conquest" thing comes from a few pointy-headed college professors and from a handfull of leftist "activists" who use the issue to grab for the microphone and to claim to represent the marchers.

The fact of the matter is that the hispanic workers aren't important enough to the economy to make much difference by taking a day off -- or by disappearing altogether. Having them around is good for the economy -- but not so good that we couldn't do without them. I support a guest-worker plan of some sort for humanitarian reasons -- not because I think the economy can't get by without one. So the message sent by the demonstrations will not be that the immigrants are necessary -- but that the are ungrateful and demanding. They are less likely, rather than more, to get fair, sensible treatment from the federal government now that they have further alienated the voting public.

Of course this all suits the ethnicity pimps just fine. The more polarized and poisonous the atmosphere of the immigration debate in this country the more power and media attention they will get. Your average low-wage hispanic worker is not particularly savvy, politically speaking. While you watch the news coverage of today's events please bear in mind that most of the people out there marching behind their Mexican flags have no notion what message they are sending.