Babbling Blueberry

Congratulations to all the newly married and newly licensed couples in California! Have long and happy and healthy marriages!

As for those counties in California that have stopped performing ceremonies to protest the legalization of same sex marriages: Shame on you! This is the sort of thing that bratty kids do. Like when I was younger, I was on a swim team and at the end of the season, they gave everyone a blue gym bag. My younger sister wanted the bag and I must have been forced to give it to her. Rather than give it to her, I cut the bag up with a pair of scissors. So she couldn’t use it. Neither could I. I’m more mature now. And I realize now that if I didn’t cut that bag up, I could still use it now. And she could use it as well.

Maybe something positive can come out of these “protests.” Maybe there are some people have not supported same sex marriage in the past, but if they experience more hurdles to getting married themselves, they will understand what it has been like for same sex couples. And what it is still like for same sex couples in most of the U.S. These counties haven’t completely banned marriages or the issuing of licenses, so it may take more for people to come around to realizing what it is like to have rights given to others and then denied to them.

Kudos to those ministers who will show up outside the Kern county clerk’s office and perform marriage ceremonies anyway. That’s awesome!

You’ve probably heard these stats before. From a NYTimes article about division of labor in couples:

“Social scientists know in remarkable detail what goes on in the average American home. And they have calculated with great precision how little has changed in the roles of men and women… break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.

The lopsided ratio holds true however you construct and deconstruct a family. “Working class, middle class, upper class, it stays at two to one,” says Sampson Lee Blair, an associate professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo who studies the division of labor in families.”

And then later on in the same article, there’s this stat that I haven’t seen before:

“Lesbian parents, gay parents and heterosexual fathers all look the same on paper when it comes to cooking and cleaning — they all report doing between 6 and 10 hours a week.”

Assuming these numbers are all based on sound and controlled studies, I can see two possible scenarios for all these conclusions to make sense together.

1. Heterosexual households are cleaner than same sex households because these households see 50% more housework.
2. Heterosexual fathers (I’m using fathers because the stat in the article refers to fathers) contribute more net dirtiness to a household and that negates the extra housecleaning done by heterosexual mothers.

(It’s also possible that heterosexual mothers are less efficient with their housework, but I find that an unlikely explanation for a number of reasons - women probably are trained more from a young age to do housework; lesbian parents and gay parents don’t do different amounts of housework; if women have more time pressures, they’ll likely have more pressure to be more efficient.)

Are there any studies on the relative cleanliness of different households? That would be a way to see which scenario is true. I have a hunch that the prize is behind door #2, but I’m not going to say anything for sure or why I have this hunch until there’s more info. Anybody who knows of such a study or is willing to conduct one?

Is the list of explanations longer than 2?

This is actually a really interesting article with a lot of other interesting points. I’ll probably wind up posting more entries about this article. But if you want to check it out before I get to writing those entries, I highly recommend it.

Last night, I went to a Pakistani/Indian restaurant in the Tenderloin that blew me away in how delicious it was - I haven’t been blown away by Indian/Pakistani food in a long time - there are many good places in San Francisco, but no one stood out from the rest of the pack.  It’s my new and clear favorite Indian/Pakistani restaurant!

The best dish was an eggplant curry dish. Eggplant by itself is magic, but in this dish, it was elevated beyond magical - to godliness and divinity. There’s also this hard to find (according to our C Facilitator, which, in this case, stands for curry facilitator) fish dish that looks like it’s cooked in the tandoor oven. (Is saying “tandoor oven” like saying “The El Camino”?) Others in the group thought this was the best dish, and it is quite good, but it was not even at the same level as the eggplant dish. Some of my companions think that Shalimar, a neighbor to this place, has better naan, but I respectfully disagree. The flavor of the dough was much better, almost sweeter. And the texture was better - chewy but very light at the same time. And there was a good balance of thin crusty parts and thicker, but not too thick parts. And they were very generous with the butter/ghee.

I haven’t revealed the name yet because that’s the best part. No, the eggplant was the best part. This is maybe second place. Lahore, pronounced “La whore.” Full name is actually Lahore Karahi. This extends the fun beyond dinner, both before an after… “I have a craving for Lahore.” After sitting in the fragrant atmosphere of the restaurant during your leisurely meal… “I smell like Lahore.” And so on.

They gave us some kulfi to end our meal. I’m not sure if they do this for everyone or if it was because of our C Facilitator, but it was a nice touch.

If I’ve ever recommended an Indian and/or Pakistani place to you in the past, scratch that. Just go to Lahore.

I’d like to buy a cherry.

If you’re trying to plan for meals that use local and in season produce, it helps to have an idea of what’s in season in your area. But I know I’ve lost touch with my farming roots (what farming roots, you ask? I’m sure I have some ancestors at some point who were involved in farming) and I don’t have a complete picture of how things grow and when they’re ready. But I’m getting better with the help of the SF Bay Area’s local foods wheel. It’s a literal wheel made from cardstock and you can spin the wheel to figure out what’s in season at any point in the year. I love mine and it’s worth the investment of $12 or so, I think. It also makes a great gift. I’m actually planning to give mine to someone when I leave the Bay Area (don’t worry, I’m keeping mine nice and pristine). I haven’t decided who I’ll give it to just yet, but if you’re interested, let me know! Someone should enjoy it when I’m living far from California’s bountiful and fruitful and vegetableful harvests.

The website also has all the information listed as text, but the wheel is a lot more fun with nice hand-drawn pictures of the different foods. And with the text version, it’s not easy to see which foods are in season at a given time during the year. The wheel is good for inspiration when I’m planning a menu or before I go shopping or to the farmers market.

For those of you outside of the Bay Area, there’s also Epicurious’ map. But it’s not as complete as the local foods wheel - California only has 9 things listed as being in season during May! But it’ll do until there are wheels are invented for everyone!

I thought this was a very interesting and telling figure:

That figure says a lot all by itself, but if you’re interested in reading more, here’s the blog post that talks more about this figure and the latest farm bill.

“California State Supreme Court says same-sex couples have right to marry”

Of course they do!  Now if only the rest of the country would realize that as well…  Except for MA… you guys are way ahead of the curve.

Yay!

I hope it doesn’t wind up going to the Supreme Court.  I don’t know how this would fare there.

But in the meantime, Yay!

I would strongly prefer the next president of the United States to be someone who is grounded in reality and makes decisions based on the evidence at hand. I don’t want someone who is delusional or who will lead the country/campaign into debt in pursuit of a fruitless and costly battle because of those delusions. We’ve had enough of that sort of business with our current president and we don’t need more of that.

From Freakonomics: Some guy inherited $70 million and asked some ex-street hustlers/gang members how they think he should donate it. They had very wise and well-spoken words that I should not even try to summarize because I couldn’t do it justice. But I will insert a brief quote, from Shine (but the other quotes are great too!):

“I can’t tell you how many n– -s do stupid shit because they couldn’t get no food. Lot of people rob and steal to put some food in their belly. Make sure people got food. A man stops feeling angry against the world when his belly is full. That’s what I’d tell the brother to do with his money. And, make sure the older folks got food, not just the kids.”

But at the same time, the rate of obesity in the U.S. is skyrocketing! I went to a talk yesterday Steve Schroeder at UCSF. He used to be the President and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and his talk was about how foundations can affect change in the U.S. One of the most striking things that I realized from this talk was how bogged down policy makers are because of corporations and lobbyists and that whole mess. So foundations are often better able to tackle issues that the government is afraid to take on. I’ve been thinking about getting into science and/or education policy, but maybe working with a foundation is the best way to go. I don’t know that the grip that corporations and their lobbyists have will be loosening up anytime soon.

Back to obesity. Another striking thing was a time-lapse series of maps showing obesity rates in the U.S. over time… I actually had seen this speaker give a talk previously and I had seen these same slides before and I remembered that it was striking. But even remembering that, I still couldn’t help but exclaim at how fast obesity is increasing. It’s really an epidemic. And man, things are bad in Mississippi… the speaker said that when he goes to Alabama and Georgia, they always say, “Thank goodness for Mississippi!”

So why are people hungry and getting more obese all at the same time? I think it (at least partially and probably significantly) comes back to the government and Big Agriculture and how the government subsidizes the production of corn that’s going into the production of nutrient-poor foods. And the subsidies are going into the pockets of big corporations rather than the pockets of farmers. How about this suggestion for how to use the $70 million… subsidize fruit and vegetable farmers to help them grow and fresh and nutritious food. By subsidize, I mean bypass the government completely. Then the struggling farmers who are growing actual food can be helped, people will have more affordable nutrient-rich foods, and the obesity epidemic will be slowed.

Or even better, what if we could somehow use the money to stop corporations and their lobbyists from having such an enormous influence on our country’s policies? That would be great and that would solve a lot of other problems too… health, insurance, climate change. Unfortunately, it seems like $70 million is a small drop given how much money is coming from the corporations.

Here’s Stephen Colbert’s (as always, hilarious and so true) recap of the most recent debate. (Sorry, I couldn’t get it to embed properly.)

Colbert: “For moderator, ABC courageously chose George Stephanopoulos, who owes his career to the fact that he was Bill Clinton’s communications director, so he was objective. In the sense that everybody knew his bias.”

Obama: “I think the American people are smarter than that.”
Colbert: “Smarter than that? No, thank you!”

There is also an independent discussion of the six degrees of Adolph Hitler. Or maybe it’s just two degrees.

A Salon article about famine in Africa and how the US is doing everything wrong and how the timing of what little money is sent makes it impossible to prevent famine and put in long-term solutions because you’re too late to treat the causes of famine. Some quotes:

“the cost of the occupation in Iraq is more than $150 million a day. So five days of war, a work week, would feed more than 12 million people for three years. Instead, over the last few months the Bush administration has reneged on about $100 million that it had promised to food aid charities.”

“The Pentagon recently allocated $300 million to fund a propaganda operation to plant news stories favorable to America in the foreign press. Yet if that money had gone to food and development programs, there would be no need for propaganda programs.”

“When asked why they had not given more food aid in the face of the oncoming crisis, American and European officials in Niger say that food aid should only be a last resort. It is far more effective, they said, to give money for long-term development. Unfortunately, this rhetoric does not reflect reality. Foreign aid from rich nations goes almost entirely to military support or disaster relief. Little attention is paid to the aid programs that would help Africans head off catastrophe.”

“While most of the world gives aid agencies cash that they use to buy food locally, 99 percent of the food aid provided by the U.S. is purchased from American farmers at market prices and is then shipped overseas on U.S.-registered vessels…By general consensus, U.S. food aid is inefficient and overpriced, and can be damaging to the African economy. The Financial Times called the American type of assistance ‘a subsidy programme for rich world farmers’…the U.S. would be able to provide twice as much food for the same money because of the savings on transportation alone”

There’s much more info if you read the full article.