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Big Baby Shoes

Mon, 8 Mar 2010 10:10:42 -0800

Lawrence bought a pair of Keene Kelowna’s off an REI online sale for about 60 percent off.

They’re walking shoes, which he needed after a Hemet cobbler did a shoddy job of resoling a venerable pair of Rockports. Lawrence keeps threatening to fix the awful glue job connecting the new Rockport soles to the old, but he hasn’t gotten around to it.

The new Kelownas had a very stiff tongue flap on the right shoe that threatened to leave blisters, but it has broken in nicely and the shoes are comfortable. They are well padded and cut to go higher up his foot than most shoes, which reminded Lawrence of some long-ago shoe he owned. He has tried Earth shoes, hiking boots, work boots, combat boots, all kinds of running shoe, Teva sandals and has had a pair of penny loafers since the 1960’s, though not the same pair (the current Florsheims have lasted at least 15 years, however), so it didn’t dawn on him at first.

Last night he did something he hadn’t done in years; he watched some of the Oscar awards broadcast. He was impressed, as usual, by what big babies actors are, and he was wearing his Kelownas at the time — so it came to him. They were like big baby shoes.

These days baby shoes are just miniature versions of adult shoes and come in amazing variety. There are baby running shoes, baby Mary Janes, and even baby Sperry Topsiders, I kid you not.

When Lawrence was a toddler, the big brand was probably Stride-rite, which amazingly is around today. But toddler shoes used to look different than the shoes we wear later.

The old baby shoes looked a lot like the photo to the left of the NMS Cruiser, which sounds more like a warship than a shoe and will set you back $40 at the baby shoe store. They came way up the foot like my Kelownas; the salesman would say that was to give baby’s foot maximum support, but the real appeal of them was that they were well-nigh impossible to kick off. Babies like to play “fetch,” dropping anything they can to get grownups to pick up; it makes them feel powerful, like saying “No!” over and over again when they’re two.

Then, as now, little tiny baby shoes were really expensive compared to kids’ shoes. The idea was that you needed good shoes if you were just learning to walk. What it was really about is that parents will buy just about anything for their kids before the kids learn to talk back. Once the kids get sassy, the wallet closes; by the teen years, there’s a lot of resentment on both sides.

Once Lawrence announced that his Kelownas were actually Big Baby Shoes, he got up and toddled around the living room, his hands flapping loosely away from his body, his head wobbling and his legs stumbling forward the way a toddler walks. Nicole started laughing and had trouble stopping, which made Lawrence’s evening. There are precious few things he enjoys more than the sound of her laughter.

He announced that he was going to buy a Daffy Duck T-shirt, shorts with snaps instead of a zipper, and Depends to complete the outfit, but that was just a joke. He’ll keep wearing his L.L. Bean and REI gear. If he’s lucky, he’ll wear out the Kelownas long before he gets so old that he looks like a baby when he walks.

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Spring Training Psych

Sat, 6 Mar 2010 14:24:18 -0800

The significance of spring training baseball cannot be underestimated, unless the estimator is some Sunbelt soul who has never experienced a northern winter.

The onslaught of northern winter is no big deal; at first it’s bracing, and the first snows are genuinely beautiful, creating an entirely new landscape after the brilliant display of fall colors. The holiday season adds light and delight to the short days around year’s end, a memorable time of year.

But January 1st begins the Slush Festival that seems as if it will never end. In Lawrence’s old stomping grounds of Chicago, it presses on in most years until late March or early April; Lawrence contended for years that February was the longest month of the year, as it is squarely in the middle of the Slush Festival and offers absolutely no hope of spring (thanks to Lake Michigan staying cold well into summer, Chicago has little or no spring — it’s often a pleasant Tuesday in late April or early May, followed the next day by 85 degree weather with matching humidity for the rest of the summer).

March is every bit as bitter up north, but two things change one’s spirits for the better on March 1: the walleye spawn on the Kankakee River just south of Chicago, indicating that something is changing despite the same wintry weather, and television begins to broadcast the first major league baseball games of the year from Arizona and Florida.

Seeing some unknown minor leaguer in a Cubs uniform drawing a walk off a similarly unknown opponent triggers a huge sigh, as if one has unconsciously been holding his breath since before the Super Bowl. This is nothing new for humans; structures as old as Stonehenge are testament to the human longing for warmth and sunshine and a primal fear that just maybe the warm, life-giving sun would not return for another summer. At Stonehenge, the spring solstice sun would shine into a special portal as part of the rejoicing. In 21st century America, we have spring training baseball.

The scores are unimportant, but there are telltale signs to the rest of the season. For example, today the Cubs started Carlos Silva, acquired from the Mariners, against the White Sox; Silva looks awful, completely out of shape. Ballplayers in Babe Ruth’s time used spring training to get into some kind of shape, but today’s players are expected to report in shape, a memo that Silva obviously didn’t get. He will be playing catch-up to the other pitchers as a result. The new faces on the team resulting from the trading, free agency and minor league promotions over the off-season are like tulips and crocuses poking up through the snow.

Sitting in the soggy mess of March — the slush in Chicago is by now a tubercular gray with tinges of blue-green from the chemicals used to clear ice from the streets — one can visualize the bitterly cold breeze of opening day coming in from Lake Michigan over the right centerfield fence of Wrigley Field, a pitcher’s park until June despite its reputation. Opening day is often a mandatory longjohn event, of course, but even that is yearned for today, when it seems that snow, cold and the notorious Hawk wind of Chicago have gone on longer than imaginable.

Sometimes Lawrence will be jogging down some California hill in shorts and T-shirt in February and find himself laughing out loud, which jogging partner Junior T. Dog finds amusing, too. The weather in California is too droll to keep a straight face about.

Yet the first spring training game, amazingly, which Lawrence is listening to as he writes this, brings the same exhilaration it always has — the same strong sensation of exhaling a breath secretly held for months. Spring is here. It’s real, glorious, and rife in California; even the desert can be festooned with flowers. In Chicago it was virtual — the slightest promises of warmth and sunshine brought by the sight of a spring training game applied to the same gray slushscape — but no less real.

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Roy Ashburn Joins the Roy Cohn Parade

Thu, 4 Mar 2010 13:01:12 -0800

The Grand Old Party has a rigid anti-homosexual agenda, which is a sticky wicket for some of its longtime elected officials and big donors who are gay.

This goes all the way back to the truly despicable Roy Cohn, a famous right-wing hitman of the 1950’s who prosecuted people in front of infamous Sen. Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt committee. Both homosexuals and alleged Communists (anyone McCarthy didn’t like) were the targets of Cohn’s venom.

But Cohn himself was gay. The proof came in the 1980’s, when he died of AIDS — denying to the end that he had it or that he was gay.

Big Republican donor Malcolm Forbes, publisher of the eponymous magazine and a married father, also turned out to be quite a gay cruiser, it was revealed after his death.

Orange County Congressman David Dreier has been bombarded with exposes of his longtime relationship with his chief of staff (now there’s a euphemism!) Brad Smith. Dreier hasn’t bothered to do marriage or spawn offspring, and he continues to vote the Republican line against all legislation expanding the rights of homosexuals.

Very recently we have former San Bernardino County Assessor Bill Postmus, also the former county Republican chairman, who is alleged to have appointed his boyfriend as assistant assessor. Postmus, an admitted meth head, has pleaded not guilty to a matched set of felony charges. The alleged boyfriend also was charged, probably in an effort to get him to roll on Postmus.

Hear ye, hear ye, here cometh state Sen. Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield) to join the Roy Cohn parade! Ashburn, a divorced father of four, has been arrested for drunk driving after leaving Faces, a Sacramento gay bar. A male passenger was in Ashburn’s Tahoe when the arrest happened, which Lawrence infers to mean that the man also had been at Faces.

Ashburn has been a vocal critic of all things homosexual and voted against every pro-gay bill in the state legislature.

The standard dodge for a wingnut caught with his pants down — can you say “Larry Craig”? — is to say he was discovered in a den of vice because he was investigating the evil enemy undercover. But taking home a denizen of the joint might make it tough for the down-home folks of Bakersfield, spawning ground of country music stars Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and as red as the Redneck Ring gets, to (you should pardon the expression) swallow.

Lawrence can’t wait for the coverage in the Inland Empire’s conservative print media. Will there be any? Neither the Riverside Press-Enterprise nor the San Bernardino Sun jumped on the story this morning, even though Ashburn represents a good swath of San Bernardino County (his district is a classic mishmash of uninhabited rocks and desert, unwanted by any Democrat, that stretches over three counties; perhaps only Buck McKeon’s Congressional district is more ludicrous in design). Here’s what CBS had on Ashburn’s arrest.

There are a lot of gay people in the Republican Party — why, Lawrence can’t really figure. The holy rollers who insist on the GOP’s rigid moral hypocrisy have plenty of gay men and lesbians in their ranks, too. There is something so powerfully attractive about denial for Protestants; it remains a mystery to Lawrence.

Is Lawrence saying that Ashburn is gay? There isn’t enough information to make that conclusion. So far he waddles, flaps his wings and quacks “AFLAC!” pretty nicely, but his duckness is still to be determined.

One thing for sure — his political star is descending. Ashburn voted for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget, increased taxes and all, which did not endear him the unwashed, monobrowed teabaggers of the Bakersfield barrens (and the men look even worse…). He was already in trouble with his constituents before he got busted playing Studio 54.

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Bread Bread

Tue, 2 Mar 2010 11:33:23 -0800

As promised, Lawrence baked “no-knead” bread on Sunday night.

Why “no-knead” bread? The dough required no kneading (massaging the dough to even out air bubbles and help the yeast, flour, salt and water combine), to be sure, but that isn’t the real reason, which is marketing. To sell cookbooks, every dish has to have adjectives. It can’t be “bacon and eggs,” it has to be “Bill’s low-salt bacon and quick-poach eggs” if that cookbook is to move off of the shelf, because everybody thinks they know how to cook bacon and eggs.

“No-knead” bread was a success, but not because it needed no kneading (don’t try to say that fast 10 times). Lawrence will bake it again, and soon, because it’s bread bread, not because it’s “no-knead.” It turned out to have a very assertive crust, which Lawrence and Nicole like a lot, and the flavor, color and texture they like. A croque monsieur with hand-cut slices of this bread would be a triumph, and it’s perfect for the southern Italian dishes we like to cook. Its strength and charm come from the simplicity of its ingredients and lack of artificial flavorings, shelf extenders, or other tools of the food technologist.

Food technology is an interesting field in which food scientists discuss terms like “mouth feel.” A company like McDonalds strives for a certain mouth feel for its food that its customers have come to count on, however unconsciously. A big key to McDonalds’ success, for example, has been the dryness of its products. The burgers don’t ooze juice when you bite into them; that means that your kids won’t get burger grease all over your new Honda Odyssey every time you take them through the drive-through at Mickey D’s.

Many food technologists would frown at “no-knead” bread. It lacks the fake crust of Wonder Bread, which looks almost painted on, it’s so non-existent. It also lacks the voluminous air of Wonder bread, which means that it probably takes three times as much flour to make no-knead bread — not good for profit margins. There are no chemicals in no-knead to guarantee it could stay on the shelf until Lawrence’s unborn grandchildren are in college — heck, the flour hasn’t even been radiated, that Lawrence knows about.

There’s also that 12-18 hour rising time for the dough, which would make most food technologists faint dead away. Using a tiny amount of yeast, but letting the dough set for a long spell seems to be the key to bringing out the great flavor of the bread (“too much flavor for ‘the American public,’” the food techs might pontificate). A food technologist might say, “While skimping on expensive yeast is a noble proposition, using more yeast would greatly speed the process and save time, which is money.” Food technologists would like bread dough to rest for, oh, 12-18 seconds after some monster kneading machine pumped gobs of air into the dough by treating it like a bookie’s leg breaker visiting a gambling addict who forgot to give him the vigorish.

The no-knead recipe was as easy as Mark Bittman of The New York Times said in his video, but any first cooking of a recipe has its challenges. Lawrence worried about finding a bowl large enough to mix three cups of flour with salt, a quarter teaspoon of yeast and a cup and a half of water. He wound up using a big wooden salad bowl just to be on the safe side, and quite a bit of flour stuck to the bowl instead of the dough — metal, plastic or glass would be much better. Then he fretted that his Dutch oven, an Coubances imitation Calphalon coated cast iron pot that’s only 8 inches across at its bottom and nine at its top, wouldn’t be large enough, which turned out not to be the case.

The final challenge was Lawrence’s convection oven, a sturdy, decade-old Kenmore. Convection ovens tend to cook things very evenly, which is good for baking, but quicker than conventional ovens. Lawrence decided, as he usually does, to stick to Bittman’s original cooking times nevertheless. The result was an overdone crust, almost to the point of burning. Next week’s bread will definitely cook for a shorter time.

Yes, next week’s — instead of paying four bucks for supermarket imitation French bread, Lawrence will continue to make the real thing, paying only for flour, yeast (using a quarter teaspoon at a time, the three packets he bought for less than three bucks should last months), salt and water. The real thing — not so much “no-knead,” “slow rise,” “basic French/Italian bread,” “round loaf” or “country-style” as it is bread bread.

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Mozart Could Have Used More Effect

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 06:33:52 -0800

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a real genius who started writing symphonies at an age when most of us are figuring out how to tie our shoes.

Like most child stars, he was a mess later in his short life, which ended at 38. All the discipline in Mozart’s life seemed reserved for his compositions, which are famous for their lack of corrections. It was as if Mozart had figured out the inverse of the old Jewish saying, “From your lips to God’s ears.”

Hucksters in the child development field, always rife with suckers looking to give their kids a shortcut in school, have come up with The Mozart Effect. They maintain that if you buy their CDs of badly performed Mozart and play them for baby, that your child will fall under Mozart’s spell and learn at a vastly improved rate.

Lawrence can remember a similar study from the 1960’s that claimed cows gave more milk to Mozart (but less to rock ‘n roll). Later studies, however, showed that any new set of sounds this side of Black Sabbath tended to produce stimulation that increased milk production; it was the variety, not the Mozart that did the trick.

Like most cons, The Mozart Effect is based on a smidgen of real science. In 1993, psychologist Frances Rauscher played Mozart for college students, not infants, and reported that they did better at their studies than those who studied without Mozart. Like most positive correlation conclusions, the findings of the study can be interpreted many different ways — and Rauscher never attempted to establish cause and effect the way the hucksters do.

Other studies in the area have established more meaningful insights. Playing music, rather than just listening, really seems to help one’s ability to learn other things, though scientists differ about how much and exactly what areas of the brain are improved by playing music. One generally agreed upon area is the connection between the brain’s left and right spheres, a structure called the corpus callosum. (For more update on The Mozart Effect, read this story in the Los Angeles Times.)

Another study found a small IQ improvement in children who had studied music using the Suzuki method, which is a highly structured approach to playing for very young children. The basic scores for learning the fiddle Suzuki-style are variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” a composition for which Mozart wrote a number of variations.

Think about how you learn to play music — you have to practice frequently, if not every day, to improve; you have to learn how to maintain new physical positions for extended periods of time; you have to listen carefully to what your teacher says and plays. In other words, you have to submit to a discipline, something sorely lacking in Video Game America, where we’d rather instantly pretend to play guitar using Rock Star than spend the years needed to get good on a six-string.

The public education system will no doubt respond to the good news in the completely crappy fashion it has for decades — by continuing to cut music and arts education so that schools have more money for sports teams and security guards. Public schools long ago abandoned the idea that they should train most children for the adult world; they have become strange quasi-penal institutions whose administrators think that when kids turn off on math, that the answer is to force them to take a double dose of it.

The corporate world wants young people who are disciplined and motivated, and the current public education system rewards kids who are — but does almost nothing but punish kids who aren’t. Even worse, some of the most vital roles in society are completely ignored by public education; public schools do nothing to teach kids how to be parents, for example. A driver’s license is key to any decent-paying job, so public schools have completely discontinued driver’s ed, which should be the most mandatory course in the curriculum — writing bad English is unfortunate, but it won’t kill anybody.

The therapeutic benefits of playing music are even better known than its benefits to the brain. But draconian conservative dogma about “the three R’s” and lunatic approaches to public education like No Child Left Behind, which tries to reduce children to mindless parrots in order to make teachers’ job performance more measurable (with the long-term goal of busting the teachers union), have all but eliminated music education from kindergarten-12th grade curricula.

Getting your children to play an instrument, sing or dance is a gift that will reap rewards over their entire lifetime, whether or not Junior turns out to be another Mozart. Getting them to listen to music is a start, but getting them to play is a ticket to a better place.
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Fear of Flouring

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:36:10 -0800

Lawrence has been an enthusiastic cook ever since Mom taught him to scramble eggs and make a hamburger back in the 1950’s.

He bought his first cookbook after getting out of the Army and moving into his first apartment. It is a fine hippie tome entitled The Food Stamp Gourmet by Bay Area poet William Brown, who also drew witty underground comic book-style graphics. Most of the cheap foods it employed to make budget versions of classic French dishes are no longer cheap, and the recipes are a grand collection of high-protein, high-calorie, high-fat dishes. But they tasted good and were a good cooking boot camp; Lawrence trots one out every once in a great while.

A big area of cooking evaded Lawrence, however: baking. For whatever reason, he has avoided it over the years despite being a big fan of good, crusty bread, quiche and chocolate chip cookies. Neither Mom nor Dad, a pretty cook with a limited repertoire of dishes, was a flourmeister, and the supreme baker of the family, Grandma Tillie, was partially paralyzed from several strokes and thus unavailable for mentoring.

To conquer his fear of flouring, Lawrence asked Nicole for a pasta machine as a gift, and she gave him one. He has made fresh pasta twice, having absolutely no trouble the first time. The second time he experimented with combing ingredients in a food processor, and that led to some trouble — but after some serious dough work, Lawrence got his tagliatelle in the end.

The recent popularity of no-knead bread, combined with the lack of good supermarket bread in the Redneck Ring (and $4.50 price tag for a small loaf of what passes for good bread!), is breaking down the rest of Lawrence’s resistance. In 2006, a baker in New York City showed Mark Bittman of The New York Times a way to create nice, crusty bread with a minimum of effort and no kneading. The recipe uses very little yeast and a long resting time of 12-18 hours once the yeast, flour, salt and water are combined, but not kneaded.

After the long rest, the ball of dough is put into a pre-heated pot, covered and baked inside of it at high temperature for 2/3 of its cooking time, about 30 minutes; it’s finished uncovered so that the crust forms and colors up.

Lawrence has resolved to tackle the climb of Mt. No-knead this weekend, if he can figure out a pot of the right kind and size. The absolute worst he could do would be to waste a few cups of flour and some water, salt, yeast and time.
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A $675 Criminal Defense: Worth Every Penny

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:54:15 -0800

The latest stink wafted by the Riverside County Board of Supervisors is over a $6.9 million contract for criminal defenses.

In many cases, the public defender’s office can’t represent all defendants. These cases include those with multiple defendants — the public defender can only represent one and has to farm out the other defendants to a private law firm. To save money, the county hires a private law firm to accept these other cases at a predetermined fee.

This begs the question: if it’s unethical for the public defender to represent more than one defendant, why would it be kosher for a private firm to? And if it can’t, how much money is the county actually saving?

The committee overseeing the awarding of the $6.9 million contract — Presiding Judge Thomas H. Cahraman, Chief Probation Officer Alan Crogan and Court Executive Officer Sherri Carter — had two bidders to choose from — Criminal Defense Lawyers, the current contract holder, and Blumenthal Law Offices, with a bid that just happened to come in $100 higher than CDL’s, a complete coincidence if you believe in the Tooth Fairy and Peter Pan. CDL is the supes’ firm of choice and may have had inside information on the BLO bid; both bids had been revised down after the supervisors at first rejected all bidding. Blumenthal bid last, a week later than CDL.

The BLO bid covers all defenses; if case statistics hold steady, it would amount to $675 a case. Those familiar with the legal system know that an attorney will shake your hand and show you the door for $675, but that’s about it. Affluent folks who defend themselves privately, as in the recent trial of Broadcom whacko co-founder Henry Nicholas III in Orange County — that not only let him off the hook, but reversed his partner Henry Samueli’s conviction after he had admitted guilt! — run into the millions of dollars.

There is an old lawyer’s saying that justice goes to the man who can afford it. By this standard, a $675 defense is almost no justice at all.

But there is absolutely no outrage in the media about what might constitute an egregious erosion of defendants’ rights. The only media stink concerns whether or not the supes gave the contract to their buddies at CDL instead of the Blumenthal firm.

Virginia Blumenthal has sealed that deal, in any case, by accusing the supes of playing favorites. She told the Riverside Press-Enterprise that the decision "smacks of cronyism and collusion."

"I didn't trust the process,” she said. “I know what happens in this county. I have seen it over and over and over again. Yes, I am making those accusations."

And yes, she is right about the supes handing out plums to their political allies, as politicians were doing before Alexander got Great. Why would they give plums to their opponents? It’s a shady deal, but one that will be tough to prove illegal. Just to make sure their tracks are covered, the supes decided to postpone awarding the contract, a small consolation to Blumenthal — but now that she’s sounded off, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in Hell that she’ll get the contract.

And what will defendants get for $675? Can you say, “Plea bargain”?
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