A neighbor ran over a sanglier, the local wild pig, and saved the carcass. So I made roadkill stew.
It tasted good, although it took two days of cooking to get it tender.
Michael the sitcom neighbor approved of the stew, as did the Dita von Teese bottle of Perrier.
The worst thing about the stew was that it gave Jean an excuse to sing ‘wild boar’ to this song for both days of cooking.
Each week Jean answers a poll sent out to her high school clique. They share stories about good times. It brings them together. This has been going on for years. In the last couple of years she has been recycling this poll by sending it out to me and a bunch of other folk more recent in her life.
The answer to this week’s poll had so many links I put it up here since someone’s email server is going to screw it up. So here it is:
1. What’s the best TV theme song?
I have to take this question seriously. To give you some idea, A-Ha spent more on the Take On Me video than on the album, and more on the Take On Me song than the rest of the album put together. I am putting a Take On Me video’s worth of effort into question 1. Fuck the rest of the questions.
There are the commonly accepted great themes, like Suicide is Painless from M*A*S*H. It even has a Manic Street Preachers cover. Or the Greatest American Hero theme. They don’t do it for me.
There are great American themes from days gone by. The Rockford Files theme is just outstanding. Similarly with Starsky and Hutch and Hawaii Five-O. One of the coolest bands of all time did a tribute to Hawaii Five-O – Radio Birdman.
The kids do great. The Muppets are awesome. And the kid theme that nearly won this was from Dastardly and Muttley. If we have a boy and call him Torsten, he might be known as TC. Top Cat.
Moving up to the 90s, South Park has a theme by Primus! It is hard to beat that. Twin Peaks has a great theme, too.
Aussie themes include Wonder World and the Late Show (about 1.20 in, it is James Brown’s Turn me Loose, I’m Dr Feelgood).
Moving to the Zeroes, The theme song I have heard the most is probably this one. Thank you, Jean. No, really, thank you.
I will also share more pain. While researching, I came up with some truly offensive themes. Like the Smurfs Theme. You can thank me later.
I was going to mention the Dr Who theme but I’ll leave that to Kevin, who is still asleep. I’ll link to the Bill Bailey 60s Belgian Jazz Dr Qui version instead. In a similar vein this theme from The Tomorrow People is totally sinister.
But there can only be one answer to the question of Brent’s best TV theme. The show we watch through every couple of years (it seems to coincide with the birth of a child). The Professionals.
[I will point out that in a small house in rural France three kids are wondering why their parents are singing the theme to The Love Boat.]
2. Do you Skype with anyone? Who?
Anyone who answers. That’s usually only Kevin.
3. At breakfast — white, wheat, rye, sourdough, English muffin or something else?
If we have bread, it is sourdough pan fried in duck fat or bacon fat. We go several weeks without it, then we buy a sourdough loaf (pain a levain, or in the Gascon accent paing a leving) for foie gras and the leftovers get pan fried for the kids.
4. What single song can you not get enough of right now?
I sang Is That Love about six times on the way home from the farm yesterday. It is in the wrong key for me, so that sucks. Britney sings an octave above me, so I can sing this without switching octaves.
5. BTTW/WTTW (best thing this week, worst thing this week)
BTTW: letter from the Notaire that we sign for the farm next Tuesday. After 18 months we’ll be unblocked and overcome with work.
WTTW: Waiting until Tuesday, when we’re confronted with the reality of fixing up a crappy old Gascon farmhouse.
Seth Roberts pointed to a The Globe and Mail (a Canadian newspaper) article on unschooling. It’s a touchy topic: the government spends a huge amount of money on schools and your kids spend thirteen years of their lives in them. Thirteen years!
There are a few things in the article that annoyed me enough to write this up. I’m not defending anyone’s idea of unschooling or homeschooling since I don’t know much about them, but I do want to point out some of the crap that people talk about regular schools since I know a bucketload about those.
Kate Hammer’s article is good overall, well worth reading, but it has a few quotes that bug me. First, she gets this right:
Some children thrive in the classroom and others don’t…
This contains a lot of wisdom. A population has people of diverse personality. What works for some might not work for others. Anyone with at least two kids knows this. Our two big kids are now old enough that we can compare styles. Otto (5) is learning in a very different way to Lucy Jean (7). Otto sits at a desk and works on drawing for hours on end, showing his results to us only when he makes something he is proud of. Lucy Jean likes to discuss every step the whole way through. The differences between them are evident across many facets of their lives.
So given that a population of kids has plenty of diversity, it isn’t much of a stretch to say that there are some kids that thrive better in schools and others that thrive better learning at home. There’s plenty of variation in quality for both forms of education, too. Rather than have a central authority mandating a one-size-fits-all education, parents can choose the best system of learning for their own kids. Then they can work on getting the best out of whatever system they choose. They might not get the same answer for each of their children.
The sentence goes on:
…and, despite the best of intentions, the system sorts them into winners and losers. […] Unschooling’s underlying idea is that all kids are winners.
I hate this politically correct ‘everyone is a winner’ idea. I buy that unschooling rejects the relentless grading and ranking of the education system, but calling it ‘all kids are winners’ makes them sound like hippies and makes it easier to dismiss anything interesting they are doing.
But that doesn’t annoy me as much as this quote from Christopher Lubienski:
Another concern more specific to unschooling is if children’s education is formed by their own interests, or solely by those of their parents, there are likely to be gaps.
“Individual children might be happy, but it’s not clear that this makes for an autonomous or well-rounded adult, or for a better community,” Christopher Lubienski, an associate professor at the University of Illinois, writes by e-mail.
Reading the above we have the following areas highlighted:
There’s an implication here – when Lubienski says “it’s not clear this makes for an autonomous or well-rounded adult, or for a better community,” he’s not comparing it to anything. He’s implying that regular schooling does a better job at this, but he doesn’t call it out in any way we can look at. Was there more to the interview that could have helped us learn more? Any data?
It is plausible that these are areas of concern, but for all systems of education and not just unschooling. Does he think my high school education left me autonomous and well-rounded and part of the community? What a load of garbage. Did he go to a special school?
The bit that makes me laugh the most is the idea of well-roundedness. How do you define a well-rounded individual? I’m sure it doesn’t include the knowledge of calculus and the ability to spout Avogadro’s constant. What about my inability to build trust, fix a flat tyre, cook a steak or finish a project?
Structured learning, with external direction, “can force people to experience things that they wouldn’t otherwise, and quite often find new interests. … Ones that may also have some wider social value.”
This is Lubienski again. Smart answers kept popping into my mind as I read this. 3) I tried to think of ‘new interests’ discovered at school but all I could think of were things I learned from my fellow school inmates to deal with the boredom, things like shoplifting, joyriding, alcohol abuse and drugs. 2) I railed against the notion that a centralized committee can force my kids to ‘experience’ new things. 1) But the thought that dominated was that even if there are good things on offer, it wasn’t worth thirteen years in scholastic prison. I spent those thirteen years being hounded, graded, ranked, controlled and bored.
Mr. Day, an engineer who holds graduate degrees from Oxford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, lets his daughter’s interests drive most of her learning. That may mean writing Artemis Fowl fan fiction, watching the pop science program Mythbusters or a trip to the Ontario Science Centre.
Thank you, Mr. Day! I never thought of Mythbusters as educational, but now I’m thinking their system of forming hypotheses and testing them is some of the best learning you can get. This is my biggest takeaway from the article – buy some Mythbusters.
… university professors.
This is Ken Robinson’s talk at TED back in 2006. I’d come across this video many times but never sat down to watch it. Maybe I hate sitting still for twenty minutes listening to someone else. I was surprised how little content was in the talk, but I found this worth watching for a couple of reasons. Firstly Ken Robinson is just hilarious. I liked the talk about the childhood of the choreographer and the comments on ADHD, although this is a bad example since it suffers from survivor bias – if you’re going to mention that she’s a multi-millionaire you have to balance the choreographer of Cats with the thousands of choreographers that don’t make enough money to pay income tax.
For me the biggest take-away was the description that the point of schooling was to create university professors. For the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about what was wrong with schooling and other mechanisms that could provide what school was missing, but this is the first time I’ve seen something that says what schooling does. I’ve read John Taylor Gatto before and I’ve heard the lines about schools existing to provide obedient workers to industry but that didn’t match well with my own childhood. I never fitted in the ‘trained for industry’ bucket. For me, Ken’s line that schools were designed to select university professors worked better. Looked at in that light, schools do a reasonable job. I certainly felt pushed that way at every stage.
This reminds me of when I went to a barbecue with the Maths department at Macquarie University where some the professors were talking to me about becoming a mathematician. It was in the summer holidays between second year and third year. But how did I get invited to a Maths staff barbecue? I was the only undergrad there. I think it was because I’d just won the Maths prize and the CompSci prize and they wanted me to think about studying for a PhD with them and not those evil CompSci folk.
That leaves me with the question of how to use this education system for university professors. At what point do your kids step off the conveyor belt? Do they even step on in the first place?
At Amazon I worked with a very smart man called Brent. He ran the Similarities team in Personalization – the ‘Customers who bought this item also bought…’ and the ‘Frequently Bought Together’ parts. They are important pieces of the detail page, showing up above the fold. If you’ve looked at any item on Amazon, you would have seen Sims.
Everyone now and then, someone would have a review with the CEO and then use that as a hammer to get their requests forced onto other teams. They would come up to Brent and say, “We need to put X up high on the detail page because Bezos said so.”
His answer would be, “Show me where Bezos said to reduce revenues by moving Similarities.”
This was a great answer. It points out that when someone says to do X, there are a whole lot of unspoken caveats – those are supposed to guide teams, not be used as direct orders. It says I’m going to look at what the original speaker wanted, not at what you want. It says use your brain. It says the Prison Guard Defense (“I was just following orders.”) doesn’t work.
I was reminded of this when I read this blog post on Velvet Glove, Iron Fist:
It may be fallacious to claim that because we are forced to wear seat-belts, we should be forced not to smoke or eat fatty foods, but campaigners who call it ‘the next logical step’ are not wholly wrong. Those who opposed seat-belt laws in the 1970s did indeed warn of a slippery slope and, what’s more, they turned out to be right. One needs to look no further than ‘Healthy Nudges’ to see the truth of this. It refers to seat-belts no fewer than six times in eight pages. The message is clear—it was for your own good then and it’s for your own good now.
[… see link to read context from Nudge]
Did politicians of the 1970s intend compulsory seat-belts to be used as a precedent for smoking bans and tax rises? Surely not. Would they have passed the legislation had they known what it would lead to? Probably not. Saying ‘we did that therefore we must do this’ might be fallacious, but people are susceptible to fallacious arguments. Since Nudge revolves around the idea that human beings are fallible, this point could have been more thoroughly explored.
In this case you have a situation that says “Because they made seatbelts compulsory we need to ban smoking in cars.” Brent’s answer would have been, “Show me in the seatbelt law where it says you can extend it to cigarette smoking.”
It was early 1987 and I was thinking of going back to university after two years working on farms, in bars, wrapping surf skis, as a roof tiler and getting spat out of a Law degree. My confidence was low – I was unemployed and my previous good job was picking up glasses in a bar, a job I got more for looks than any intellectual ability. It didn’t hurt that my Mum ran the cleaning staff of the hotel and asked the bar manager to hire me.
The degree I was considering was in Actuarial Studies. Later I heard that it was like accounting but without the personality, or maybe for accountants who couldn’t hack the pace. I had read an article about it in the Sydney Morning Herald and it looked like it combined mathematics and business and it was a long way from Law. The trouble was I didn’t know anything about what actuaries did apart from the little I read in the article. But in the text was the name of a company that had actuaries – Towers, Perrin, Forster and Crosby, or TPF&C.
I called them up and asked to speak to one of their actuaries. The lady who answered the phone asked why I would want to do that, and I told her I was curious about the field and wanted to learn more. She thought it over, put me on hold then patched me through to a male voice who asked if I could come in to the office and talk to him. Sure, I said, why not?
I rode my motorbike in to downtown Sydney and parked in front. That’s one of the good things about motorcycles – you can park pretty much anywhere. If you can’t find a spot on the road you can park on the sidewalk. I scanned for the company name on the building directory and caught the elevator up. It was a short building among taller ones, just a few stories of people in suits. The receptionist showed me to the waiting room of a plush office, where I waited for the actuary.
I had never been in a business-district office in the hours of daylight before so I was taking it all in. I had snuck into the offices of Vichy (cosmetics) and Shell (oil) after hours to play Trek on their mini-computers back when we lived in London and my Dad programmed RPG-II, but this place was nicer than the rooms they gave the programmers in those offices. There were wood panels on the wall and plants in the corners. There was a water machine and a coffee machine with its cup paraphernalia. This wasn’t the shared factory coffee spot I had seen in previous jobs, with instant coffee scattered over the table, but a machine just for this single office dweller and any lucky guests. There were china cups and steel teaspoons. It made a change from polystyrene and plastic.
The man came out and shook my hand. He was one of the older men in the office, well dressed, and he showed me in to the lovely inner office. The desk was expensive and the office had a view. I put my bike helmet on his desk but he indicated that I should sit at the conference table nearby. It was a big office. I figured he was borrowing from someone so we could talk without interruptions. He called for someone to bring us in some coffee and an assistant came in with the nice cups and spoons.
We chatted away. I did my usual pain-in-the-arse trick of asking endless questions, trying to get into the depths of what it was that he actually did in the hours of his day, where the challenge was, what he was looking at doing in the future. He told me about many interesting things that he had done in the past but that he wasn’t doing much of that any more, that his job had changed a lot. I remember wondering what in the hell had happened to him that he stopped doing all these fun things? Was he assigned to recruitment? I looked into his eyes and asked him if he enjoyed his job. Did he get the things he needed by working here. Was he happy with his decision to join the company. Yes, he said, this was a great place to work. Sitting in the borrowed office, I believed him.
He spoke about how they had ‘cadets’ at Macquarie University, the only place in Sydney that you could study to be an actuary at. I guessed that a cadet was a student that was somehow aligned with TPF&C. It sounding good.
Do the cadets work with you?
Yes, in the summer holidays and after their degree is over.
Does that involve a scholarship?
Why yes. It pays monthly. We have the best scholarship in the industry.
How do I get one?
You apply and come in for an interview, but you’ve had the interview already.
I have? [silence] I can wear shoes other than motorbike boots.
I’m sure you can.
As I left his borrowed office I shook his hand. He smiled and gave me his business card. It was like finding out what Rosebud was. He was the Managing Director and, duh, that was his real office. Of course his job changed – he became the boss and stopped doing all the individual contributor work. I had treated him like one of the peon actuaries.
Shortly after, Macquarie University accepted me to their actuarial studies course and TPF&C gave me their cadetship. There was a drinks gathering for all of TPF&C’s cadets so the new cadets could meet everyone. The other new cadets were two years younger and looked much more clean and eager. They were comparing their high school certificate scores. They asked about mine – I had the lowest by a fair distance. These were the kids who studied very hard all the time rather than the slacker/crammer type of which I was a prime example. The Managing Director was there and the actuaries in the room treated him with the sort of respect that I hadn’t shown him a few weeks earlier.
OK, so how do I teach English reading to American kids who go to French school?
First I looked through Aretae’s big three posts on homeschooling:
This led me to many pages and sites, the most interesting of which was the Psychology Today Freedom to Learn blog. I came to the conclusion, aided by those folk, that motivation was the high-order bit. In the past when Lucy (7) showed an interest in reading I’d jump in and assist, figuring that anything I can do to push the reading further would help. I was maximising short-term skill acquisition, which was not helping with motivation.
Today when Otto (5) grabbed a book and started reading it, I left him to it. He had picked up a lot of phonemes from joining in when I played word games with Lucy, so he had enough skill to read some of the simple Bob books lying around. After twenty minutes of reading, Lucy joined in. As always with those two they got competitive, fighting over who got to read specific books. Some of it was very positive. I stayed out of the way.
I’m not sure if sibling rivalry is a good way to teach reading, but I made sure I didn’t harm Otto’s motivation. The challenge for us is to have enough stimulus around to generate interest in the kids without controlling them. We’re Idle Parents anyway so this has been an easy transition so far. I ignore them, make sure I don’t feel guilty about it and pour another glass of ‘ten litres for 12€ ’ red.
I have some excellent cookbooks. For example, I love my Nigel Slater books; everyone who leaves home needs a copy of Appetite to start them off. I also like books that are the sort that someone’s grandmother would cook from. I have a copy of Cocina Mexicana in both English and Spanish, with each recipe in both languages so I can cook from it and Jean can show off her Spanish. The awesome Fannie Farmer Cookbook represents for America. But today I was thinking of making a simple beef bourgignon so I consulted Mapie.
The book is Good French Cooking by Mapie, Comtesse Guy de Toulouse-Lautrec. I borrowed a 1960s translation from friend Sharon and it was so good I had to order a copy for myself. I hunted through Amazon and found many modern editions, but I wanted the one I had. The one copy I found was too expensive, so I contacted the seller and made him an offer. He agreed so long as I shipped it to a UK address. I’d never tried bargaining with a second-hand bookseller before. It worked well for me – he lowered the price and I shipped to Nick’s Mum’s house in Hampshire.
As I looked through the variations on braised beef, it struck me that I need to spend more time with this cookbook. The recipes in there are short and simple, because Mapie assumes you know how to cook. The recipe for Boeuf Bourgignon is four lines long. She doesn’t mention oven temperatures. If she says ‘simmer’, you simmer.
Every time I cook a standard meal there’s an opportunity to perfect something interesting, or to explore something new. So I am going to declare August my Mapie month and cook a few things from her cookbook.
The recipe is so simple it has to be a worldwide standard, only differentiated by the wine you pick. Putting in a liter of Gascon red costs me about 1€20 since I buy some amazingly good and cheap red from a secret location in the Gers. It comes in a 10L box. If I return the box I get a euro back. Since I’m braising in a Côte de Gascogne, am I cooking a Gascognon rather than a Bourgignon? By that reasoning, if I’d used a WA red it would be a Washingtognon.
[Note: Jean commented that I chose this picture purely because it showed off my G-Shock, an old school MRG-1200T Revman, with the T standing for Titanium. Of course, Jean just said ‘watch’.]
I came across this article on ESPN about Edgar Martinez belonging in the Hall of Fame. It contains this quote line about his performance for the Mariners in the 1995 playoffs, and his amazing Game 4:
“…he had one of the greatest single-game playoff performances ever: 3-for-4 with a walk, a three-run homer and an eighth-inning grand slam off John Wetteland as the Mariners rallied from a 5-0 deficit.”
That was the first baseball game I ever saw. I was in Seattle that day on my first ever visit. I wanted to see a football game, and was directed to a husband-of-a-friend-of-a-friend to take me to one. When we spoke on the phone he said, “You don’t want football now, you want baseball. The Mariners are in the playoffs.”
We met up in downtown Seattle, wandered to the Kingdome and bought some nosebleed seats off a scalper. Since I hadn’t seen a baseball game before, I asked endless questions to figure out the game strategy. My host, whose name I do not remember, was fantastic at educating me.
Edgar hit a home run, bringing Seattle back from a defecit to the Yankees. They let off fireworks inside the dome, and since we were up high they were exploding in front of us. Everyone screamed.
Later on the game was tied and Edgar hit another ball high into the air. I couldn’t see the flight of the ball so I watched the outfielder to see where he was running. I saw the padding just behind the fence dent in as the ball went over. He had scored a grand slam. The noise of fans was so loud that it distorted in my ears. My ears couldn’t register anything. I can still see the padding, feel my ears switch off with the distortion and remember the sight of the fireworks detonating in front of me. Seattle went on to win the game.
Boxscore from Retrosheet.
Wikipedia‘s discussion on the game.
It took us about thirty minutes to walk with the crowd down the stairs to get out. The whole time the crowd chanted “Ed-gar, Ed-gar.” That was a surreal first baseball game. Apparently they aren’t all like that.
–EDIT–
Another article that talks about Game 4 from Dave Cameron of Fangraphs.com.
There’s a game I play when watching movies. I’m sure others play it too. I rewrite bad scenes to make them better. I wonder how they could have been made more exciting. Some scenes are better than I ever could have imagined. I like it when that happens.
Cinerama is an upmarket Seattle movie theater. It has a huge screen, comfortable seats and a top shelf sound system. If there’s a movie of dubious quality in release but playing at Cinerama then I might go and see it because, hey, at least I went to Cinerama and sat in the nice seats.
Once I found myself in Cinerama watching an awful movie about a mountain rescue in the Himalayas. It had lots of snow, heart throb actors and expensive helicopter shots to indicate high production values. It also had Izabella Scorupco to indicate high babe values.
[Looking up that Google link for Izabella led me to her IMDB page which had the name of the awful movie – Vertical Limit. I added it into the title for the one person who is looking for information on that movie.]
I sat in my comfy chair and watched it to the end. [I have never mastered the ability to walk out on a movie partway through, although hindsight tells me I should have done this to Vertical Limit. The only movie I remember walking out of was Alexander, where Jean and I left after three hours, having spent the previous two going, “It got to end soon. Please.” We skipped the last half hour. Take that, credits.]
I’m going to talk about the ending of Vertical Limit, but it isn’t really a spoiler because there’s nothing fresh to go off. But in the interests of supporting a good system, here is my warning:
============ SPOILER ALERT! ============
The ending goes something like this.
1) The Young Hero, is hanging on a rope down a crevasse. If he lets go he drops down to the bottom and dies a cold and flat death. Complicating things, he has the life of two others in his hands.
2) Hanging off a rope that is hanging off the Young Hero are the Old Hero (played by crusty Scott Glenn) and below him on the same rope is the Bad Guy (smarmy Bill Paxton).
3) The audience remembers the opening scene of the movie, where the Dad of the Young Hero was in a similar situation, dangling off a rope hanging on his son on some cliff face in Yosemite. Back then the Dad cut his own rope, dropping to the valley floor but saving his son. It flashes through the Young Hero’s mind. You know he can’t support the weight of these two people for for long. Someone’s rope is going to get cut.
4) The Old Hero gets out his knife and cuts his rope, saving the Young Hero and condemning himself to death, but he takes the Bad Guy with him. Isn’t that uplifting! I think somewhere the Sister of the Young Hero was saved but she didn’t leave much of an impression in my memory. I conclude that Izabella didn’t play the Sister.
At this, I was bouncing with frustration and only saved from injury by the extensive padding of my chair. With only one tiny pause the ending would have been so much better! All you need to do is change step four.
4) The Old Hero gets out his knife and cuts the rope below him, watching the Bad Guy fall to the crevasse floor. He hangs there and smiles, and in that beat he feels the illegal and immoral joy of killing the Bad Guy. He could say some cool one-liner but I’d keep it simple with a half smile and a last sweet breath fogging the air. Then he cuts his own rope and falls to nothingness.
For me, that would have saved the movie from its own fall to nothingness. He would only have lived an extra three seconds of life, but what a three seconds! The joy of retribution; murder unpunished; the death of your enemy before your eyes. Surely the Young Hero could have hung on long enough to grant the Old Hero some murderous bliss?
