Isolation Report, Week #53

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

It’s been one year and two days since my personal pandemic began: I count it as having started on the Thursday when I got the message “don’t bother coming in to work; we’re sending everyone home for the foreseeable future.” That was March 12th of last year.  People all over have been “celebrating” this mark; Colbert has dubbed it his “quaranniversay.” At this time, perhaps it would be instructive to look back to our very first isolation report and see how well my thoughts have held up over the year.

• Numbers are flying around right now, and you don’t always know whether you can trust them, but by some estimates as many of 70% of the entire population (worldwide) will get it, and of those who contract it maybe 20% will have severe reactions and perhaps 2% will die.

This is a tough one.  First of all, most reported numbers don’t bother to distinguish between “getting it” and “severe reactions”; secondly, reported numbers likely don’t represent total cases; and finally, the death tolls have varied widely among different countries.  The first thing that should tell us is that how a country reacted to the pandemic really makes a huge difference.  The death tolls we’re seeing are really less about how fatal this disease is and how well equipped our healthcare systems were (or weren’t, in many cases).  But, taking the latest stats from Worldometer, worldwide infection rate has been about 1.5%, and death rate has been 0.03%.  On the other hand, the US infection rate has been closer to 9%, and the death rate more like 0.2%.  That’s a massive difference: only about a dozen countries are higher, and they’re all in Europe.  Many nations which are supposedly less “advanced” than us Western countries are beating the snot out of us in terms of responding to this virus.

So, overall, the rates didn’t live up to the boogeyman numbers that were being spouted, but then again, even at these rates it’s been pretty awful.  So let’s call that one a wash.

• But even on Monday when Christy tried to go to Costco, the toilet paper was all gone.  At this point we won’t even go out there any more: you have to wait in line to get in, apparently.

Oh, the naïvete.  Waiting in line to buy groceries is now just an everyday thing.

• Now, on the one hand, I find this somewhat silly.  It’s a cold, people.  ...  On the other hand, I do understand what the health care people are saying.  There are basically two scenarios here:  In the first one, everyone gets the virus all at once, the number of serious cases spikes insanely, and the health care system is overwhelmed.  With insufficient resources, some people could die not because the virus killed them, but because they couldn’t get the care they needed to weather the sickness.

This is an interesting one.  Was I too dismissive of the danger of overwhelming our healthcare system?  Perhaps.  On the other hand, going back to those breakdowns by country, the death tolls in places like India (~0.01%) and South Korea (~0.003%, a full order of magnitude less than the global numbers) seem to prove that, with the proper response, it really could have been comparable to any other cold or flu.  Even if those nations are radically underreporting to make themselves look better, they still come out way ahead of the US, where an intense lack of leadership, and an unwillingness to infringe on people’s “rights” even so far as to say people must wear masks caused the ultimate situation to be far worse than I ever imagined it would get.

On the other hand, is it possible that less draconian recommendations might have met with less resistance, and therefore would have been, in the end, more effective?  I think it’s possible, but it’s really hard to hypothesize.  We also have zero concept of how many lives were lost by ancillary causes: how many people committed suicide due to isolation? how many lost sleep, depressed their immune system, and ended up getting some completely different fatal disease?  These are unanswerable questions.  My final gut feeling is that if our leaders and health experts had been suggesting even looser restrictions, we probably would have ended up coming out even worse.  But, then again, if there had been looser restrictions, but those restrictions had been messaged with consistency and lived by example by the people actually in charge of the country?  That could have made a real difference.  But we had what we had, so speculation is pointless.

• I’m struck by what Trevor Noah said on The Daily Show one night this past week: COVID-19 has killed somewhere in the ballpark of 5,000 people in the past 3 months, worldwide.  In the U.S., just one country in the world, 3,000 people die in car accidents every day.

Okay, first thing to note is that either I misheard Trevor, or he himself was confused: 3,000 deaths per day is not what we have in the US; that’s closer to a worldwide figure (in fact, according to the WHO, it’s a bit low).  But I think my point was still valid, if a bit over-hyped, for all that—at the time.  So, let’s compare how good COVID turned out to be at killing us vs automobiles.  Worldwide, cars take out around 1.35 million of us per year.  COVID, over the course of the past year, has hit about 2.66 million.  COVID wins, beating out automobiles by about 2 to 1.  So I guess my point didn’t stand the test of time: we really should have been more worried about this virus than about going to work in the morning.  In the US, as always, it’s much worse: traffic deaths have been trending downwards from around 40k per year since 2007; COVID deaths broke half a million a month or so ago.  Overall, looking at the numbers, you were over 15x as likely to die from COVID in 2020 as you were to die in a car wreck in 2019.  So ... yeah.  I biffed that one, for sure.

• Colbert aired a single show with no audience (as did Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me), but that’s it (at least for Colbert; not sure if WWDTM will continue, albeit audience-less).  The Daily Show said at first they would continue to do shows sans audience, but they too gave it up late on Friday.  And here’s where I worry that we’re going too far.

But, dammit, I’m going to stand by this one.  Both Colbert and Noah (as well as many other folks like Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers) did come back, eventually, and I think it’s made all the difference.  That first month or so, without any trusted source for news of what was going on in the world, was what was really isolating for me.  Once those guys came back, the whole sorry sad situation got a lot more bearable.  Nowadays, while I really hope things get back to normal at some point, I’m doing okay.  This is survivable.  It’s not been to much to ask after all, I suppose.

• Because, at the end of the day (or more likely month, in this case), it will be difficult for us to quantify how many lives our choices have saved.  But I worry that the fundamental changes to our way of life will be all too apparent.

Okay, first let us all laugh at the dumb innocence of “more likely month” ... oh, how little I suspected that I would still be writing these crazy-ass isolation reports twelve months later.  Beyond that, I do think it’s impossible for us to quantify how many lives we saved by telling people to sing “Happy Birthday” while washing their hands, or not to touch their face (which I still maintain is essentially unachievable).  I think it’s impossible to quantify how many lives we saved by telling people to wear masks.  But, then again, it’s also impossible to guess how many lives we lost because of people refusing to do these things.  About the only thing I do feel confident in stating is that we could have done better ... because many other countries did.

I do still worry about the fundamental changes to our way of life.  Not in a “I refuse to do these things” sort of way, because I recognize that the things were, in the end, necessary, at least to some extent: those countries where they were more successful at containing the virus were often those places where they really did lock down the populace and force people to comply with the rules.  But more in a wistful, “I’m sad for what we lost” sort of way.  Will I be returning to the office at my company any time soon?  No.  My company no longer has an office: the lease expired over the course of the year, and it didn’t make sense to renew it.  So the working from home is the new normal.  Of course, I’m lucky: there are many businesses that will never recover.  Will we ever go to movie theaters as we once did?  What about museums?  Will in-person learning ever really be the standard way to do it again, or will it just be a fringe thing that only diehard students attempt?  Will we ever sit down in restaurants on a regular basis again, or will all food places just keep on delivering, because all the ones that don’t have fallen by the wayside?  I have no answers for these questions.  Perhaps we’ll know in the coming months.  Perhaps we will only truly understand the extent of the changes in the coming years.  I’ve no doubt that some history class somewhere will be studying this period in our lives as some sort of turning point ... I just don’t know exactly what we’re turning towards.

Well, that about wraps it up for my serious lookback on a year of isolation reports.  Next week, I’m going to attempt to look back on a lighter side, as I try to figure out—and report!—all the television I’ve watched over the past year.  Spoiler alert: it’s a lot.

A Spreadsheet Story

The main reason you won’t get a proper blog post this week is that it’s my middle child’s birthday weekend, and I’m at their beck and call.  But there’s another possibly vaguely (probably not really) interesting reason as well, so I thought I’d share it with you.

For most of my life, I’ve been one of those annoying OCD-but-disorganized people.  All my CDs had to be alphabetized just so, and the bills in my money clip had to be facing the same way, but all my workspaces were a horrible mess and I rarely had any firm concept of what I was supposed to be working on next.  A few years back I made a conscious decision to get myself organized: as we get older, it’s not so much that our brains lose the ability to juggle all those myriad of things we’re supposed to be remembering that we have to do, it’s more that we finally realize how terrible we were at it all along and that it’s only getting worse with age.  So I settled on a Method™ and ran with it.

The one I chose was Getting Things Done (sometimes referred to by its fans as GTD), and I learned a lot from it.  Which is not to say that I embraced it fully: the biggest issue I have with it is that David Allen, being about 20 years older than me (he’s actually about halfway between the ages of my mother and father), loves paper.  There’s lots of writing things on paper and filing paper and moving paper around.  I don’t do paper.  But of course the system can be adapted to computer software, and there are many GTD programs out there.  But part of the issue with being all OCD-y and a programmer is that I can’t adapt my way of working to someone else’s software: I gotta write my own.

So I created a massive Google Sheets spreadsheet with oodles of code macros (in Javascript, which I really don’t like to program in) and, whenever it does something I don’t like, I change it.  I can’t really say that it’s a proper implementation of GTD, but I’m sure that anyone familiar with GTD would recognize most of what’s going on in there.  I didn’t take GTD as a blueprint for exactly how to organize my shit, but I absorbed many of its lessons ... maybe that should be a whole blog post on its own.  But for now, I have to admit one thing.  A fuck up I made.

Back when I was originally designing my GTD-spreadsheet-monstrosity, I made a fateful decision.  When I complete a task, I don’t actually delete it ... I just mark it completed (by adding a date in the “Completed” column) and then it disappears from my “shit you need to do today” view.  But it’s still there.  Partially I did this because, as a programmer who mainly works with databases, I’ve had many years of conditioning that you never delete data because you always regret it later, and partially because I thought it would be cool to have a record of everything I’d accomplished (so now my todo list is also my diary).  Sounded perfectly rational at the time.

Now, I’m not going to go into all the details of how GTD works, but one of its main concepts is that you track everything. EVERYTHING.  This gives you a lot of confidence that you haven’t forgotten anything, because, you know ... you track everything.  I’m coming up on my 4-year anniversary of tracking everything in my spreadsheet and I’ve accumulated over 15 thousand items: tasks, longer blocks of time for projects, things I was waiting on other people to get back to me on, etc etc etc.  It works out to about 4 thousand a year, and I shouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually increasing over time and I’m soon to hit 5 grand.  Now, if you’re a big spreadsheet person (as many people are these days, in many different areas of business) you may have heard technogeeks tell you not to use a spreadsheet as a database.  Being a technogeek myself, I knew this perfectly well ... and I did it anyway.  I did it advisedly, for reasons of expediency.  Because I didn’t want to spend months trying to develop my own application from scratch, putitng me even further behind on getting organized.  The point was to get up and running quickly, which I did.  But now I’m paying the price.

This weekend, while sitting around waiting for my child to inform me of the next videogame I was drafted into playing or the next meal I was conscripted into obtaining, I had a brainstorm about how to make this system way more efficient.  It’s not a proper fix, but it would radically decrease the time I currently spend sitting around waiting for my spreadsheet to respond, so I figured I better do it.  I thought: this won’t be too hard to do.  Of course, it was harder than I thought—it’s always harder than you think—and I haven’t gotten things completely back to normal yet (and I stayed up way too late last night), but I made some really great strides, and I’m seeing an even bigger speed-up than I thought.  So I’m pretty pleased.  Even though I’ll probably be fucking with it for the next several weeks.

So that’s why I have no time to make a proper post.  Except mainly the birthday thing.  Next week will be better, I’m sure.

Isolation Report, Week #51

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Well, our family is heading into the March birthday season, that annual time when we have two birthday weekends of our own, not to mention one of the two birthday recipients’ best friends, who also has a birthday in there.  In happier times, we’ve sometimes combined hers with one of ours and had joint celebrations.  This year, of course, it will be a pandemic birthday.

And, what makes me sad, and angry, and frustrated, is that, being that we live in America and are talking about March birthdays, this will be the first crop of kids now experiencing their second pandemic birthday in a row.  That sucks for them.  It would suck for anyone, but in this case I’m talking about kids celebrating birthdays ranging from their 7th (our youngest child, last year) to their 15th (our middle child and their friend, this year).  I mean, I can’t imagine how hard it would suck to have your 16th birthday, or your 18th, or your 21st, in all this shit, and I know there are people going through that too—I don’t happen to know any, but just stastically there have to be.  But at those ages (yes, I would argue even at 16) you’re starting to develop some maturity.  You’re starting to understand that, while the world is often awash with possibilities, sometimes it just sucks, and you have to learn to start accepting that.  But 7 – 15 ... man, those are your peak years of innocence, I feel.  Those are the times when, unless you’ve had some hard luck or some hard circumstances, you shouldn’t really have to be aware that life sucks sometimes.  You shouldn’t even have to think about it sucking for other people, much less yourself.

But, this is the world we live in, so we make the best of it.  We do Zoom birthday parties, and hold online gaming events, and, if we’re lucky enough to have social bubbles, maybe do very small parties within those.  And we make sure we let our kids know that they are still loved, even if the world is kinda shitting on them right now.  And we keep telling them that this won’t be forever.

Hopefully, we’re not lying.

Tumbledown Flatland I

"I Have Water, I Have Rum"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

In response to a query from Elwood about what kind of music the bar usually has, a charater from The Blues Brothers famously replies “Oh, we got both kinds: we got country and western!” This is meant to be a joke.  The joke is supposed to be that “country and western” is really only one kind of music.  But, perhaps oddly, the real punch line, coming some 15 minutes later or so, is that the Blues Brothers band ends up just playing the theme from Rawhide over and over: a tune which is decidedly western ... but definitely not country.

Because, you see, country music and western music are actually entirely different.  Country music is from the eastern United States: it is mountain music from the Appalachians.  Westeran music is exactly what it says: music derived from the westward expansion.  Country is the music of coal miners (and their daughters); western is the music of cowboys.  But the most important difference between the two is that I hate country music: it’s one of only two kinds of music that I really can’t handle.¹  Western, on the other hand ...

When I was a kid, I had a few albums of my own; they were mostly Disney albums, such as Winnie the Pooh or The Aristocats or The Haunted Mansion.  But, for some weird reason, I also had a hand-me-down copy of this Lorne Green album, which included songs like “Bonanza” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Western music, to me, has always been about cowboys camping on the endless prairie, singing songs with a vaguely lonesome air, as the tumbleweeds go rolling by ...

The genesis of this mix was Chris Isaak’s soft western ballad “Blue Spanish Sky.” I first mentioned Isaak way back on Smokelit Flashback I—the very first entry in this series—and I referred to him as “as close to country as I get.” Truly, Isaak is alt-country at best, and this tune is a brilliant example of a modern take on the western genre.²  The guitar shows that influence of Mexican music which you don’t hear in country, and the verses are truly lonesome rather than lonely, which is the best description I can give for the proper difference between western and country, underscored even more so by the trumpet, which is not upbeat and brassy like you might hear on Salsatic Vibrato, but more sad and, well ... lonesome.³  Really, my only problem with this song is the bridge (it doens’t really have a chorus, just a single bridge before the trumpet breakdown), which I always felt changed the tenor of the song too much.  But, eventually, I came to accept it:⁴ it’s even more referent of the cowboys of the American West, with a touch of the yodeling cowpoke.  And the lyrics, of course, are pitch-perfect:

It’s a slow sad Spanish song;
I knew the words but I sang them wrong.
The one I love has left and gone
Without me ...

Surely there must be other songs out there that I liked in the present, I thought, that would remind me of pleasant times in the past listening to Lorne Green?

At the time, I was deep into True Blood, and its theme song, “Bad Things,” was too slinky and echoey for me to consider it properly country (though Jace Everett is certainly a country singer).  But when Everett isn’t supplying a country twang almost too much for me to bear, he drops into a sultry bass that gives you the shivers.  The electric guitar counterpointed with the steel guitar, combined with the Hammond organ, also gives it a decidedly uncountry feel.  I also thought of Firefly’s opening theme, which is almost country, but with just enough blues and western to rescue it.  Then I thought of the extremely oddball song “Dakota,” from Wire Train’s third album, the one which was such a departure from their early, almost-British-sounding jangle-pop.  And no song moreso than this one, which is lonely and haunted, starting out soft and then bursting forth, but still somehow downbeat.  And then I think I remembered “Underneath the Bunker,” by the absolute masters of jangle-pop, R.E.M.  It’s s bit more upbeat, but still has some of that Latin influence,⁵ and the weird, processed vocals which provide our volume title.  And then ... then I was sort of stuck for a long while.

This mix may have had the longest “stewing” time, from initial idea to being declared sufficiently done.  I’ve added songs here and there, as I found them: “Ghost of a Texas Ladies’ Man” by Concrete Blonde (a bit silly, but fun), or “the sadness of the witch” by Falling You (the rainstick really sells the western angle), or “Parking Lot” by emmet swimming (purely on the strength of the steel-guitar-adjacent stringwork by my friend Erik⁶), or “Ghost song” by hands upon black earth⁷ (more rainstick and other Native American percussion and chanting).  When I finally decided to pick up the ultra-classic Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, I discovered (or perhaps rediscovered) “Gold Dust Woman,” which seems to fit perfectly here.  When I discovered Myles Cochran,⁸ I was quite enamored of “Wait a While,” and I think it spent a bit of time as the potential mix opener.  But then I found “Big Sky” by the Reverend Horton Heat, normally known more for psychobilly, but actually spanning a pretty electic range of styles.⁹  Something about the guitar work in this instrumental really screams western at me, even though it’s almost certainly the fastest song on the volume.

Other not-too-surprising candidates include Meat Puppets, Iron & Wine, House of Freaks, and Mazzy Star.  In the case of the Seattle ostensibly-grunge band, “Roof with a Hole” is one of my favorites of theirs, and the lyrics (e.g. “the roof’s got a hole in it, and everything’s been ruined by the rain”) sell the lonesome vibe.  With the folk-adjacent Sam Beam vehicle, I think it’s the banjo that qualifies it.  The Richmond duo’s amazing album Monkey on a Chain Gang contains several tracks which could work here; after some thought, I went with “Long Black Train,” where Johnny Hott’s fantastic toms give the song a rolling beat that perfectly embodies its title.  Finally, there are many great choices from the Santa-Monica-based shoegazers, but their biggest hit “Fade into You” gives us some great steel guitar, tambourine, and a particularly lonesome vibe.

Tumbledown Flatland I
[ I Have Water, I Have Rum ]

“Big Sky” by Reverend Horton Heat, off Liquor in the Front
“Wait a while” by Myles Cochran, off Marginal Street
“Bad Things” by Jace Everett [Single]
“Gold Dust Woman” by Fleetwood Mac, off Rumours
“Good Times Gone” by Nickelback, off Silver Side Up
“Firefly: Main Title” by Sonny Rhodes [Single]
“Blue Spanish Sky” by Chris Isaak, off Heart Shaped World
“the sadness of the witch” by Falling You, off Touch
“Ghost song” by hands upon black earth, off hands upon black earth
“Passage Three” by Steve Roach, Michael Stearns & Ron Sunsinger, off Kiva
“Dakota” by Wire Train, off Wire Train ¹⁰
“Roof with a Hole” by Meat Puppets, off Too High to Die
“Long Black Train” by House of Freaks, off Monkey on a Chain Gang
“Parking Lot” by emmet swimming, off Arlington to Boston
“Ghost of a Texas Ladies' Man” by Concrete Blonde, off Walking in London
“Underneath the Bunker” by R.E.M., off Lifes Rich Pageant
“Teeth in the Grass” by Iron & Wine, off Our Endless Numbered Days
“Fade into You” by Mazzy Star, off So Tonight That I Might See
“Taqsim” by Stellamara, off Star of the Sea
“Feels Like the End of the World” by Firewater, off The Golden Hour
“Malagueña salerosa (La malagueña)” by Chingón, off Mexican Spaghetti Western

Total:  21 tracks,  78:18

How about the less likely choices?  Well, Nickelback shouldn’t be entirely unexpected: their alt-metal, “post-grunge,”¹¹ style is western-adjacent, and they hail from Alberta, which is Canada’s prairie country (directly north of Montana, in fact).  “Good Times Gone” contains a lot of bendy, echoey guitar work that fits in very nicely here, and Chad Kroeger’s vocals contain just enough twang to sell it without crossing into country territory.  Plus it just rocks.

Kiva, the album by 3 big names in ambient music (Steve Roach, Michael Stearns, and actual Native American Ron Sunsinger), consists of very long Native-American-inspired ambient pieces, separated by shorter bridges named “Passage One” through “Passage Four” (and concluding with “The Center”).  “Passage Three” is a piece that I really felt captured some of the feel of the wind on the wide, flat lands of the American West, and I thought it made a good transition into the whistling, wind-like opening strains of “Dakota.”

And then we have the closing stretch.  After “Fade into You” fades out, I thought that “Taqsim” from the normally Balkan-leaning Stellamara,¹², with its lonely stringed instrument (I believe it’s an oud), made a perfect bridge into Firewater’s “Feels Like the End of the World.” Firewater’s insanely good The Golden Hour was the result of Tod A. spending three years abroad, absorbing the musical styles of Turkey, India, Pakistan, and Indonesia.  The jangly guitars here and the overall melancholy air of the lyrics really cemented its place on this mix, despite being probably the furthest away from properly “western” music on this volume.

And that leads squarely into our closer, “Malagueña salerosa” by Robert Rodruiguez’s Chingón.  This song is one of the most well known mariachi ballads, and it demands that the lead singer (in this case, Alex Ruiz) hold a note for what seems like forever—literally, I can’t even hum the note for as long as Alex continuously sings it.  The lyrics, if translated, are suitably sad for a lonesome western: the singer speaks to a witty, charming woman from Málaga, Spain, noting her beautiful eyes and calling her stunning and bewitching, but then says “If you look down on me for being poor, I concede that you are right” and, in the final verse, pleads “I don’t offer you riches: I offer you my heart ... I offer you my heart in exchange for what I lack.” From Chingón’s excellent album Mexican Spaghetti Western (which, goshdarnit, has the theme right there on the tin), this song always epitomized to me the Latin influence on the western genre, and what depth of emotion it could bring to the music.

Next time, let’s go back to the 80s.  I kinda like it there.

__________

1 The other, as I’ve mentioned before, is opera.

2 As is “Kings of the Highway,” actually, which is the track of his that I used on Smokelit Flashback.

3 More like the sax breaks you might hear on Moonside by Riverlight.

4 Though not to love it, unfortunately.

5 I’m guessing habanera, specifically, though I am no expert on the Latin American musical styles.

6 You may recall that Erik of emmet swimming was the first employee of my software company.

7 Another Magnatune find; I first mentioned them back on Smokelit Flashback IV.

8 First mentioned back on Rose-Coloured Brainpan I.

9 To prove it, note that the good Reverend has appeared thus far on Moonside by Riverlight, Porchwell Firetime, Cantosphere Eversion, and even Yuletidal Pools.

10 Normally I prefer to link to a page where you can give someone money for the music.  However, this album doesn’t appear to be available anywhere in that way, at least in digital form.  If you’re into CDs, you can get it from Amazon, but I suspect I’m in a distinct minority on that score these days.

11 Still find that label meaningless, but it’s common.

12 First encountered on Shadowfall Equinox I but since seen on volumes III and IV of that mix, as well as on Apparently World.

Isolation Report, Week #49

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Well, it’s a been a few weeks since I checked in on the political front, and that means it’s been long enough that the Senate performed exactly as expected and acquitted Trump of inciting the riot that stormed the Capitol and resulted in several deaths.  The majority of the Republicans, of course, had made up their minds beforehand.  If this were an actual trial, such potential jurors would have been dismissed as prejudiced ... in fact, the roots of the word “prejudiced”—meaning to “pre-judge”—are specifically referring to this type of behavior.  There were apparently only seven Republicans who were brave enough to vote to convict someone of doing something they very obviously did (on video, even!), and two of them aren’t running for re-election.  Think about what that means: for 86% of Republicans (or at least 86% of Repulican senators) care more about getting re-elected than about being honest.  Even if you’re a Republican, that should concern you.  Even if you believe Trump that the election was stolen, you can see that he did the thing he’s being accused of, right?  Hell, even if you agree that storming the Capitol was the right thing to do, and even if you believe that the Deep State government has no right at all to hold him accountable for his actions, you still understand that he incited the riot ... right?  Hell, if you were at the riot, you believe that: the Senators were shown footage of rioters chanting “We were invited by the president of the United States!” So he did it.  There isn’t much debate about that.  Senators voting to acquit are lying.  Maybe we could dream up some motives for that lie other than wanting re-election, but sometimes (as William of Occam was wont to say) the simplest explanation is the right one.

To be fair, many Republicans are concerned about this.  So much so that many prominent Republicans met to discuss the possibility of forming a new party.  They eventually rejected that idea, though, because a third party would not be successful.  Which right there ought to tell you that we have a serious problem with our system.  “We have to stay with the crazy people because the system is designed to help them remain in power” is never the position you want to be in.  And, honestly, my problem with this whole plan is partially the Democrats.  Sure, I’m absolutely a progressive and more or less a liberal, but I am not a Democrat.  I don’t want the Democrats to have too much political power and control everything from here on out any more than the more conservative among you do.  Furthermore, the Democrats are half the reason that a third party is not viable.  For all that they tear at each other’s throats, when it comes to shutting out third parties, the Democrats and the Republicans are in lockstep.  And, ironically, they will now pay the price for that decision, because having the Republicans split in two would only help the Democrats.

Ah, but enough about politics.  How’s our pandemic going?  Well, not so great, honestly.  The Mother had to go to the emergency room for severe pain about 3 weeks ago; they completely ignored her advising them that it was probably her gallbladder and said maybe she had some strained muscles in her back, shot her full of a souped up version of ibuprofen and sent her home.  She got an appointment with her doctor, who told her it was probably her gallbladder but she needed an MRI to confirm.  She got the MRI, the results said it was her gallbladder, and shd had a followup appointment with her doctor next week.  But, before that could come around, she was back in the emergency room with even more extreme pain, and this time they had the brains to work out that, hey: maybe it’s her gallbladder.  So, this past Monday, after spending the weekend in the hospital, she had an emergency gallbladder removal.  She’s fine now, and home, and recovering, albeit somewhat slowly.

Now, you may remember we have this little thing called a pandemic going on right now—it’s sort of the basis for this blog post series, in fact.  What’s it like, having to go to the hospital in the middle of the pandemic, even if for a non-pandemic-related cause?  Well, the first thing is, I can’t tell you firsthand: the farthest I ever got into the hospital was the front desk, when I went to drop off some knitting and a cell phone charging plug.  In fact, even taking her to the emergency room meant driving her, dropping her off at the door, then waiting in the parking lot until they let her in.  Yep, that’s right: when you walk up to the emergency room (at least ours), a security guard comes out, asks you what you’re in for, then makes you wait outside while they figure out what to do with you.  Once they did let her in, all I could really do was go home and wait for news.  I didn’t see her again until they wheeled her out to go home.  (And of course that was days and days later, because I dropped her off on a Friday night, and when you need “emergency” surgery on a weekend, that means you wait until Monday.  But that’s probably a whole separate rant.)

But my secondhand report is, the hospital staff is haggard.  They’ve had to see a lot of death lately, and they’re probably being pushed to their limits ... if not beyond.  I could almost forgive the original idiot doctor who misdiagnosed her with “back pain,” except for the extra $400 it’s going to cost me (that’s what it’ll cost me, mind you: it’s going to cost the insurance company much more).  But we’re lucky enough to have a hospital very close to us, and second time was the charm and she got a good doctor, and excellent nursees, and overall we’re pretty happy.  And, even though she’s still in a lot of pain from the surgery itself, the lack of a gallbladder full of gallstones (which the surgeon described as “highly inflamed”) means that she feels a lot better than she did when she went in.  So we can’t complain.  Too much.

Hopefully we’ve exhausted our drama quotient for the year (both personally and politically), and the rest of 2021 will be completely boring.  At this point, I’m looking forward to that.

Saladosity, Part 17: Chef's

[This is the seventeenth post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

(If you need a refresher about my salad-making lingo, go back and review our first salad.)

A good chef’s salad is a thing of beauty.  It is both meat and veggies in a wonderfully balanced presentation, and also it’s delicious.  Now, most people will agree that a chef’s salad must have meat and cheese in addition to the eggs, but there’s a multitude of different opinions on which meat and cheese to use.  This is the recipe that I learned at my first non-fast-food-restaurant job, a college dive bar called the Mason Jar Pub (near my alma mater of George Mason University).  It wasn’t a very good restaurant overall, but the chef’s salad was pretty decent, and that’s where I learned to make it.  I still love eating it today.

The Protein

In my opinion, the absolute best meats to use are turkey and roast beef.  One of the tricks is to find lunch meat that is sliced perfectly: too thick and it’ll be hard to assemble, too thin and it’ll just rip into shreds.  Also, turkey that is sliced into a perfect, large circle is ideal; you can be a little more flexible on the shape of the roast beef.  Now, you can also cut it yourself, but for one thing it’s a pain in the ass, and for another it’s hard to get the slices just right.  Unless you have an industrial meat slicer.  But then you’re likely to cut your fingers off, so that’s not a great solution either.  Just buy good quality meats with no nitrites and you’ll be fine.

The Cheese

Now, you could use any cheese you like.  But I’m going to suggest two criteria to narrow it down:

• You need a cheese with good plasticity.  For this reason, I find that cheddar or Swiss are terrible choices.  When you try to put everything together, those types of cheese just crumble into a big mess

• I personally think that white cheeses just complement lunch meats better.  Sure, a decent Colby could work, but is it going to taste as good as some of your other options?

So the obvious choice is provolone, and it should definitely be your go-to if you have difficulty finding decent choices at your market, or you’re just not adventurous when it comes to cheese.  If you can find sliced mozzarella, that could also work, but I find it a bit bland for this particular application.  Monterey Jack is not bad, and if you wanted to be super fancy, Edam or Jarlsberg would be the way to go (I think Gouda is both not quite plastic enough and just a bit too strong).  But my absolute favorite is havarti.  It’s got a great flavor that is mild but not bland, you can often find it pre-sliced,¹ and it has the perfect amount of flexibility.  If you’ve not yet tried it, definitely give it a go.

The Eggs

The other protein you’ll need is hard-boiled eggs, of course.  There’s not much art to boiling an egg, but still some folks have difficulty getting them to that perfect consistency without the annoying green rings forming on them.²  So here’s how I do it.

Possibly you have an electric kettle for boiling water for tea.  They’re awesome: you fill it with water, push the button, and voilà: it boils, then turns itself off.  They don’t last forever though: after a bit, you’ll find yours starts to look a bit ragged ... maybe it has a few waterspots here and there ... maybe the lid doesn’t fit perfectly any more.  So you just buy a new one, right?  They’re not that expensive, after all.  So what do you do with the old one?  Just throw it away, I guess?

No.  You use it to hard-boil eggs in.

Two eggs is typically enough for a chef’s salad, but I often do 5 or 6 at a time and just keep them in the fridge.³  You lower the eggs gently into the empty kettle, hopefully not cracking any,⁴ just barely cover them with cold water, plug it in and hit that button.  Now walk away.  The water will come to a boil, the kettle turns itself off, then the eggs just sit there as the water slowly cools.  Bam! perfect hard-boiled eggs every time.  Come back once the water is cool, or whenever you like.  Hours later, even—that’s the beauty of this method.  No timers, you can’t possibly overcook them, it just ... works.

Dump the water out and either use the eggs right away or stick ’em in the fridge for later.  For chef’s salad purposes, peel a couple of eggs and crack out that handy dandy egg slicer I told you to buy when we talked about salad equipment.  Open, close, and you have perfect slices; just throw the top and bottom slices out, because they’re all white and no yolk.  Unless, you know, you’re into that sort of thing.  I usually just feed them to the dog.  Or my daughter.

The Dressing

Now, you can put any old sort of dressing on a chef’s salad that you like, but I’m a firm believer that this is the perfect place to break out a lovely Thousand Island dressing.  The problem is, most store-bought TI’s are going to be full of stuff that you may not be too thrilled with, like soybean oil, and preservatives, and unnecessary sugar.  But, you know what?  Thousand Island dressing is one of the simplest things in the world: it’s nothing but mayo, ketchup, and pickle relish.⁵  You could make that yourself.

So let’s do that.

Thousand Island Dressing

Now, first thing I have to warn you is, it’s practically impossible to make a good Thousand Island dressing without any added sugar, because it’s almost impossible to make ketchup without any added sugar.  So this will not be Whole30 compliant, unless you’re dedicated enough to go out and buy Primal ketchup.  But you certainly don’t need any sugar beyond what’s in the ketchup itself, so just get a good quality ketchup and don’t stress too much.  It won’t have very much sugar.

The second thing I’m going to warn you about is, this isn’t a particularly sweet TI.  It’s going to be a bit on the tangy side.  Personally, I consider that a feature, but your mileage may vary.

After a lot of fiddling, I’ve managed to come up with the following, easy-to-remember formula:

• 1 squirt of dijon mustard
• 2 heavy pinches of salt
• 3 big spoonfuls of mayo
• 4 generous squirts of ketchup
• 5 small spoonfuls of pickle relish, or 5 whole pickle slices
• 6 grinds of black pepper

For the mayo, just use the homemade mayo I taught you how to make when we did the autumnal salad.  For the pickles or relish, my preference is to use dill pickles, from which I make my own relish.  You can use sweet relish, or sweet (sometimes called “bread and butter”) pickles, but that’s more sugar, and it’s not necessary.⁶  You could also buy dill pickle relish, but I’ve never found that anywhere other than Whole Foods, and who can afford that?  So just make your own.

If you’re using whole pickles—and let me stress that I’m not talking about a whole pickle spear, but just a slice such as you might find on a hamburger—then you need a food processor, or perhaps a stick blender.  Personally, I just take a whole jar of pickles and dump it into the blender (don’t forget to add half the juice as well!) and make dill pickle relish in bulk.⁷  If you’re using relish, you can literally just put everything in a bowl and stir it with the spoon you used for the mayo.  (If you’re not sure what I mean by “big spoonful” of mayo, I’m talking about a tablespoon—the kind you eat out of, not necessarily the measuring kind.  But they’re probably pretty close to each other.)

You can also add some white vinegar, if you want it even more tangy, but I find that the relish will bring along enough vinegar on its own.  You can also add a small amount of garlic powder, if you want it to have a bit more sharpness.  Or substitute yellow mustard for the dijon if you find it a bit too sharp.  But basically it’s just the ketchup, the mayo, and the pickle relish, and everything thing else is just for flavor.⁸

If you have more than you need for your salad(s), put the rest in a jar and stick it in the fridge.  Use it on your burgers, if you like.

Chef’s salad

Once again, you’re ready, and it’s just assembly.

On your cutting board, put down a slice of turkey.  Put a slice of roast beef on top, or maybe two slices if they’re small, but don’t overlap them too much.  Now lay a slice of cheese over that.  Don’t center the roast beef and the cheese on the turkey; rather, make it closer to the edge that’s closest to you.  Now roll up the turkey, away from you.  The turkey is almost certainly the roundest, and probably the least likely to fall apart, so it’s the best choice for the outside layer.  The rolling up will naturally push the inner layers toward the other edge, but, because you placed them off-center, they won’t move enough to push out past the turkey.  The stiffness of the cheese will help keep it together too, unless you ignored me and used cheddar or Swiss, in which case it’ll just break into bits and make a big mess.  If you do the whole thing right, you get a meat-and-cheese roll-up which will naturally hold itself together.  Cut off the messy bits at either end of the roll-up, because they’re not uniform; either just eat them, or feed them to your dog (or, again: to your daughter).  Take what’s left and cut it into quarters and turn each on its side: you end up with beautifully marbled discs of awesomeness.

Now do that a few more times if you’re making chef’s salad for the whole family (and why wouldn’t you be?).  My general rule of thumb is one roll-up per person and one extra.  Two for an individual salad might be too much, but then again you can just eat the extra discs later.⁹

Put your base veggies in a shallow bowl.  Wikipedia will tell you that you need cucumbers and tomatoes at a minimum, but honestly I don’t care for tomatoes in my chef’s salad.  (Cucumbers, on the other hand, are always a good call.)  But, really, whatever veggies you’ve already got chopped up is fine.  Now put your little meat discs on top of the veggies; I like to put one at each compass point and one in the center, but arrange however seems best to you.  Put one slice of egg on each disc.  Now put a normal amount of the homemade Thousand Island dressing ... maybe even a light amount.  Lean toward the lighter side.  Personally, while I like to eat my salad veggies with a spoon (I despise chasing small veggie bits around my plate with the fork), you really need to eat the egg-topped discs with a fork in a single bite each ... this may be the only salad where a spork is appropriate.  I usually just end up using a fork and a spoon, but you do you.  Delicious, nutritious, and very filling.

Next time, we’ll stretch our definition of what “salad” actually means.

__________

1 For instance, I buy that way from—where else?—Trader Joe’s.

2 Don’t forget: the green rings are unsightly, but they won’t hurt you.  Kind of like when your avocadoes turn brown: you can still eat them safely, they’re just not as pretty.

3 Useful for healthy snacks, and also for other salads.  Natch.

4 If you do crack one, you’ll just get wisps of egg white in your water.  Which isn’t the end of the world, but it does make a big mess in your electric kettle, which is why you only use old ones for this.

5 Interestingly enough, this is also the exact recipe for the “special sauce” that many burger joints use.  Yes, that’s right: your Big Mac basically just has Thousand Island dressing on it.

6 Or, in my opinion, good.

7 If you’ve got an extra pickle jar laying around, you could also do half the jar and save the other half for eating, if you’re into that sort of thing.  I’m not, but my daughter would be irked at me if I didn’t leave her any pickles for snacking on.

8 Okay, the mustard can also help with keeping it from separating in the fridge.  But mostly for flavor.

9 Honestly, sometimes I just make these meat-and-cheese cylinders without the salad and just eat them without even bothering to cut them into discs.

Aye aye skipper ...

Well, I’m up in the game rotation again: time to get back to the Family Campaign.  My littlest one specifically requested it, so that’s a nice feeling.  Plus there’s some family medical issues flying around, and some work stuff ... anyhow, no time for a proper post this week.  So sorry not sorry.

Still: tune in next week.  There’ll probably be something to talk about.  Probably.