UFOs, Pooh, and Webster’s

Encounters: Experiences With Nonhuman Intelligences. D.W. Pasulka, St. Martin’s, 2023. 248 pages.

This book didn’t do it for me. Because I’m a UFO witness (seeing is believing!), I understand UFOs as material phenomena that should be investigated by the material sciences. D.W. Pasulka, who is a religion professor, sees UFOs as the focus of some kind of new religion. That’s an interesting angle, especially for those who think there is nothing real about UFOs. To many of us, though, it’s a kind of insult.

I’ve written here previously about the UFO I saw, so there’s no need to go into that now. I certainly don’t deny that there is something religionlike about UFOs for those who have never seen one and to whom their existence is a matter of faith. And it is certainly true that, if you’ve ever had a good look at a UFO (as opposed to mere lights in the sky), then that changes you forever, in the same way that Pasulka describes quite well, using the testimony of, say, astronauts who have seen the earth as a globe silently suspended in a vast but starry emptiness. Some of those astronauts have seen things out there that oughtn’t to be out there.

We UFO Truthers are still waiting for the truth. It would be ever so nice if it happened in my lifetime. The question, to me, isn’t whether UFOs exist. It’s who they are, where they come from, why they’re here, and what they can tell us about the universe beyond our solar system.

It’s very strange that I never read Winnie the Pooh as a child. School libraries certainly had copies of it. My guess is that I was a snob reader as a boy and that I considered Winnie the Pooh as beneath my grade level. But every home library should have a copy of Winnie the Pooh. I bought this copy on eBay. It’s the 1961 reprint edition, with the same illustrations (by Ernest H. Shepard) as the 1926 first edition. My copy has a charming bookplate, inscribed in a child’s hand as belonging to a boy named Gabriel. On the title page is a note to Gabriel that shows that the book was a Christmas gift in 1971. The book has some stains and is a bit frazzled around the edges, as a Winnie the Pooh book ought to be.

Winnie the Pooh, by the way, has been in the public domain in the U.S. since 2022.

My second book rebinding job was a worn-out Webster’s dictionary. Eggheaded nerds like me don’t often make things with our hands. But it’s a rewarding (and useful) activity. I can’t rescue cats, because Lily would never tolerate another cat in her house. But I can rescue old books.

It would have been ever so nice, when I built my house 15 years ago, if I had been able to afford a proper chimney. But a brick chimney on a house that is more than 30 feet tall would have cost a fortune. Not having a chimney foreclosed on the possibility of ever having wood heat (though I do have a propane fireplace that vents to the outside). Heating with wood would be very bad for air quality if everybody did it. And not everybody lives down in the woods as I do. But I have enough hardwood trees on my land to heat with wood without ever having to sacrifice a live tree. Elderly trees regularly fall over, especially in storms. Plus, my neighbors all own more woodland than I do. A nice thing about rural culture here is that downed trees are still seen as a kind of commons. If a tree falls, someone can always be found who needs the firewood. If a tree falls on a public road (as often happens), someone will quickly get it out of the way and turn it into firewood.

As a liberal prepper, one of the things I’m required to worry about is what I would do if the electric grid ever went down. Except for my propane fireplace, my heat sources rely on electricity. In a place this rural and dense with forests, power failures are common, though I’ve never had one here that lasted more than a day. Plus the propane fireplace does not have the capacity to heat the whole house in really cold weather. For a long time I had wanted a good wood stove to stash in the basement. If it was ever needed, it would be possible to make a makeshift but safe chimney out of metal pipe. I finally got my wood stove, and it’s a beauty, several years old but never used. It’s enormous, made from heavy steel plate (with a cast iron door). The stove was locally made by a welder who either died or went out of business before all the stoves he’d made had been sold. A neighbor of mine bought four of the surplus stoves at a steep discount, and I was able to get one of them. Its flat top is plenty big enough to cook on.

Wood stoves would not be practical in lots of places. But here in the woods, where everybody has chain saws and hydraulic wood splitters, wood stoves are eminently practical — as long as you have a chimney.

A big win for Trump?? Who says?


Trump in New Hampshire. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Do the American political media actually believe their own delusional spin — that Trump is so powerful that he may actually get back into the White House? Or is it, as not a few people on the left (including me) see it, that the media have a strong — and dangerously perverse — self-interest in keeping the Trump era going, because Trump has been a bonanza in delivering clicks and eyeballs to an industry desperate for clicks and eyeballs?

“Trump gains speed with win over Haley,” writes the Washington Post this morning. Trump “crushed” Haley’s momentum, the Post writes. That’s the theme that dominates the New York Times’ New Hampshire coverage as well.

I am increasingly worried about what is happening at the Washington Post. At the Post, it seems that Trump was what made the difference between profit and loss. The “Trump bump” made a lot of money for the Post. But the Post lost 20 percent of its subscribers after Trump left office and may now be losing money. Pretty much all the mainstream media including the New York Times rode the Trump bump.

The Washington Post got a new publisher on January 3. That’s Sir William Lewis, who is British and who comes to the Post from the Murdoch media empire. The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, of course doesn’t want to lose money. How can reasonable people not suspect that Bezos thinks that the Murdochification of the Washington Post is the way to make money?

Who am I do disagree with the Washington Post’s elite political team? No one; I’m just an obscure blogger and veteran of the newspaper business whose personal politics don’t accord very well with the media elite. But at least none of my salary or job security (I’m retired) ever came from the Trump bump.

I see the present political situation very differently. The media elite see New Hampshire as a huge win for Trump and a dead end for Nikki Haley. Not I. No one, it seems, expected Haley to get 44 percent vs. Trump’s 55. That means that surprisingly close to half of the Republicans who voted in the New Hampshire primary do not support Trump. That seems to have spooked Trump, and Marjorie Taylor Greene said that Haley’s numbers are “fake“.

The Republican Party is headed for a civil war that can only be vicious. It is impossible to imagine a united Republican Party in November. They will turn their guns on each other, and no matter what Republican is on the ballot in November, half of Republican voters will be motivated to stay home.

As always, the stories about Trump “crushing” his opposition conveniently forget that Trump is going to be crushed by the law — convicted by the criminal courts and financially ruined by the civil courts. And yes, that’s going to happen before the Republican National Convention, which starts on July 15. It is all too likely that the internal warfare that we’ll see at that convention will be a televised riot like nothing the world has ever seen before. The mainstream media are still afraid to touch the growing evidence that Trump’s cognitive impairments are getting worse. The Biden campaign, though, is posting videos drawing attention to Trump’s slurring of words, confusing one person with another, and not understanding what’s what or who’s who or where is where. Trump is one big gaffe away from being caught on video with a gaffe so shocking that the mainstream media won’t be able to ignore it anymore. Even Fox News is acknowledging that Trump is “increasingly confused on the campaign trail.” Trump’s handlers are in a bind. They have to put him out there, if he’s to be seen as a real candidate, but the more they put him out there the more they risk the gaffe that will put an end to him.

It seems all too likely that, when the history of the presidential campaign of 2024 is written, that history will be as much about media as about politics. The rightwing media will be all-lies and all-gaslighting all the time, as always. The mainstream media is compromised with conflicts of interest, addicted to Trump. And we are unprepared for the “tsunami of misinformation” that AI will pour into the media including social media.

The wages of neoliberalism


A Boeing 737 Max: Why isn’t there a mass movement to refuse to fly on them? Source: Wikimedia Commons.

This morning in the news, we learned that a front wheel fell off of a Boeing 757 as the jet was preparing to take off from Atlanta for Bogotá. The FAA is investigating. Also this morning in the news, we learned that the CEO of Alaska Airlines is angry after loose bolts were found on “many” of the airline’s Boeing 737 Max 9 jets.

Since photographs showed the the big hole in the fuselage after a door blew out of an Alaska Airlines jet (and the missing door was later found in someone’s backyard), and since the wheel that fell off the Boeing jet in Atlanta was seen rolling down a hill, it would be hard even for Fox News’ expertise in lying to gaslight us on such plain facts. But there’s still a lot of disinformation and propaganda to be milked out of such plain facts. The right-wing media have milked it to the max.

The problem with Boeing, the right-wing media say, is workforce diversity! If your blood pressure can take it, here’s an article from the Guardian, “Worried about airline safety? Blame diversity, say deranged rightwingers.” Elon Musk, of course, has endorsed and amplified that idea.

In the real world, the understanding of what happened at Boeing is very different. Boeing was once a company run by engineers. Brilliant design and careful manufacturing were the highest values. But Wall Street and rich stockholders see Boeing only as a money machine, and the theology of neoliberalism blessed a takeover. Keep in mind that, though ordinary Americans hold modest shares of stock, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans own 89 percent of all American stocks. Once upon a time, McDonnell Douglas and Boeing were competitors. But in 1997, McDonnell Douglas took over Boeing and — knowingly and intentionally — made Boeing’s engineers subordinate to the money people.

The other factor in Boeing’s ruin was self-regulation, as a consequence of neoliberalism’s glorification of the market and demonization of government. Internal Boeing emails that came to light after two 737 Max crashes show that people inside of Boeing understood what was going on, but that they had no power to do anything about it. In one such email, an employee wrote: “This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys.” Another employee wrote, describing the incompetence of regulators who were watching a Boeing presentation, that the regulators were “like dogs watching TV,” because they couldn’t understand the presentation. I can only imagine the bitterness and hostility that must now define Boeing’s company culture. And, of course, many engineers left and took their expertise with them.

Why is it always ordinary people, crammed into Boeing jets like cattle, who’re on board when these things happen? In 2022, there were 10,000 to 15,000 flights of private jets every day. According to this article, “Just 1% of air travelers account for 50% of global aviation emissions.” And yet how often do we read about billionaires’ jets going down? The private-jet industry claims that private jets are safer than commercial jets. If that’s true, it’s not hard to understand why.

Once again, I’d like to argue that Boeing is just one case of a great many in the global struggle that is behind almost every important thing happening in the world today. It’s the super-rich against the rest of us. Ninety percent of us are nothing more than just another natural resource to be exploited, lied to, and kept divided so that the 90 percent can’t organize the power to challenge the 10 percent. One of the things that blows my mind is that they’ve figured out how to make even their disinformation profitable. Fox News has net income of about $1.25 billion a year. The propaganda is so effective that society’s worst losers can be passionately and angrily convinced that what’s good for billionaires and dictators is good for them.

Minority rule can’t be easy, nor can it be stable. This is the overarching political struggle of our time — taking back wealth and power from a tiny minority who already own almost everything but who want everything, including unchallengeable power.

Tomato pudding

I rarely make tomato pudding. But, when I do, I wonder why I don’t make it more often. It’s a comfort food.

Irma Rombauer’s recipe from the 1943 The Joy of Cooking is very basic. It’s canned tomatoes, bread crumbs tossed in melted butter, and brown sugar. The pudding goes into the oven for 25 minutes, tightly covered to keep it moist.

The pudding in the photo is dark, because I used dark bread and roasted tomatoes. The Joy of Cooking is a white-bread sort of cookbook, so its recipe calls for white bread crumbs.

I have never made bread pudding, but the tomato pudding made me think of what a fine winter comfort food bread pudding could be. Irma Rombauer offers multiple versions of bread pudding — bread pudding with meringue, caramel bread pudding, chocolate bread pudding, lemon bread pudding, pineapple bread pudding, bread pudding with spices and dates, apple bread pudding, and rhubarb bread pudding.

The bread pudding with spices and dates sounds pretty good. The recipe uses milk, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, pineapple juice, chopped dates, nut meats, egg, and day old bread. It’s comforting just to read the recipe.

Can this old book be saved?


The 1943 wartime edition of The Joy of Cooking, worn out.

It takes a lot to wear out a book, but I wore out my copy of The Joy of Cooking that I had bought back in the 1970s. Even when I bought it it wasn’t a young book. It’s the 1943 wartime edition, probably the most collectible of this cookbook’s many editions. I bought it in an antique shop. When it fell apart, I saved the pieces, tucked the book into a safe place in the back of a bookshelf, and ordered a new copy of the same 1943 edition on eBay.

Then some neighbors had a need for a recipe for homemade butterscotch. I suspected that The Joy of Cooking would have a recipe for making a butterscotch concoction from scratch, and it did. The neighbors were fascinated by the cookbook and its old-fashioned cook-from-scratch charm. I had been curious about bookbinding and book repair. But it was my wounded old cookbook that led me to watch a bunch of YouTube videos on bookbinding and then to order (from Amazon) what one needs to rebind books.

The material for rebinding a single book doesn’t cost that much — two dollars or less. But the materials can’t be ordered in one-book quantities, so the cost of getting started in bookbinding adds up. One needs boards for the covers, heavy paper for the spines and end sheets, fabric for the covers, “headband” material, the gauze-like material that reinforces the spines, lots of the right kind of glue, some brushes, a cutting board, a sharp cutting instrument, a “bone folder,” and, most expensive of all, a book press.

There are many good videos on rebinding book. I found this one particularly helpful. The job is mostly about measuring and cutting accurately and doing a good job of glueing without making a mess.

I’d now argue that every serious booklover, and in particular anyone interested in antique and collectible books, should rebind at least one book. That way one learns how books are put together. It’s an old guild craft that hasn’t changed that much since Gutenberg. The construction of most hardback books is actually pretty good, but there are some details that are found only in higher quality books, such as a well-made spine with an “Oxford hollow.” In rebinding a cookbook, I wanted to be sure that the rebound book would stay open and all the pages lie flat, as with the original binding. You’ll find information on what an “Oxford hollow” is in the video I linked to above, and the video explains why an Oxford hollow makes a more relaxed but just-as-strong binding. An Oxford hollow is easy to make, which makes me wonder why all books don’t have them.

The 1943 edition of The Joy of Cooking, I would say, is the most complete reference on standard American cooking ever published. People know what they are now, and the 1943 edition has gotten fairly expensive on eBay. You may remember a scene in “Julia” in which Julia Child meets Irma Rombauer in a publisher’s office. Rombauer is depicted as very dowdy, while Julia Child was sophisticated. The Joy of Cooking is a dowdy cookbook, but because it’s so complete, and because it was published in 1943, before Americans started subsisting on ultra-processed foods, you’ll find a scratch recipe for just about any American dish that you might want to make.

My next rebinding project will be a 1974 edition of a Webster’s dictionary that I wore out. As with the cookbook, I bought a new copy. But books that you’ve had for a long time and have worn out are like old friends. You’d almost think that there are tiny ghosts inside old books.


All done. That’s the book press on the left.

Those outer leaves of cabbage

A good head of cabbage is almost two separate vegetables. There are the dark green outer leaves that are difficult to shred for slaw. And there is the cabbage head after the outer leaves are removed. It’s easy to waste the outer leaves, but it’s a shame to waste that intense green.

A solution is to wash each of the outer leaves separately, then roll each leaf into the tightest cigar-shape possible and cut it into strips. The cabbage above is going to be sautéed for egg foo yung.

Lucky for me, I live in good cabbage country. Cabbage grows well in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Also lucky for me is that whoever buys produce for Lowe’s Foods, which has lots of stores in this area, knows what good cabbage is like. Whole Foods, however, almost always has sorry-looking cabbage — white and with no outer leaves. A proper head of cabbage should be loosely contained in a lot of intense green outer leaves, and the head itself should be as heavy and hard as a ball of marble. The green color fades into pale green as you get closer to the stalk, but cabbage should never be white inside (except for the stalk).

Yes, someone still writes rags

I haven’t had a musical post for a while…

If you do a YouTube survey of ragtime playing, I think you’ll find that, like country music, ragtime playing is an area in which a great many poorly trained musicians are in it a for a good time and wearing bowties and funny hats. I’m all for a good time and funny hats, and yet ragtime is a serious enough musical genre that there’s room in it for highly talented and superbly trained musicians.

One such such musician and ragtime composer is Damon Carmona, whom I first met back in the 1970s when he was a music student. He composed the Gargoyles Rag in 2020, I believe.

Christina Pepper has a popular channel on YouTube. While we’re at it, here’s a John Philip Sousa:

Kenilworth

I just finished Kenilworth. It’s the ninth of Sir Walter Scott’s twenty-six Waverley novels that I have read. What stands out is his treatment of Elizabeth I. Scott’s Elizabeth I must surely be one of the most terrifying characters in English literature — absolute power and the willingness to use it. I found myself often almost trembling along with her courtiers, down on their knees in terror of losing their heads.

Robert Dudley, the 1st Earl of Leicester, managed to keep his head, though he came close to losing it. It’s not a piece of English history that I am particularly interested in, but the Wikipedia article on Robert Dudley suggests that more recent scholarship sees Dudley as less a fool and toy of Elizabeth and more as one of Elizabeth’s most important advisers. Scott, it would seem, was no great fan of Dudley.

Kenilworth is set in Berkshire and Warwickshire. There are not even any Scottish characters. I’m eager to get back to Scott’s Scotland in whatever I decide to read next.


Kenilworth castle today. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Two parts snobbery per eight parts coffee


An imaginary 1938 espresso machine, in Italy. Image created by DALL-E 3. I could not find an image of a classic espresso machine that was in the public domain. But if you search for something like “classic Bezzera” you can see what they look like.

Given any good thing — wine, Scotch, or coffee — there are those who will happily settle for merely good and those who are willing to spend a great deal more for something better. But where does good taste end and snobbery begin? With espresso, my guess would be that the price of real espresso snobbery starts at about $2,000. But merely good can be had for considerably less.

Judged by the shockingly low American standard for coffee, I suppose I have been a coffee snob for many years. I make my morning coffee with the simplest possible method — hot water poured from a kettle into a cone filter, with the coffee going into an insulated decanter. My niece, who has an expensive coffee machine, said, “Wow. You’re old school.” But she liked my coffee. I would argue that the most important factor with coffee is the quality of the coffee itself. The machinery that one uses is less important, as long as one does not use one of those dreadful, ubiquitous coffee machines with which most Americans ruin their coffee by heating it — and thereby scorching it — after the coffee is brewed.

But not until recently did I start to think about how nice it would be to make espresso. Espresso requires a machine, something that can heat the water and send it through the coffee grounds under pressure.

Anyone who likes espresso or who wants to make it at home should read this excellent piece in Smithsonian Magazine — “The Long History of the Espresso Machine.” There are several things in the article that are important to know. First, that the earliest espresso machines were for making coffee, and that they were invented only for the purpose of making lots of good coffee, fast, in European coffee shops. Second, before too long it was discovered that coffee made under pressure was particularly good for some reason. The foamy “crema” that a pressure machine produced was soon seen as a virtue, not merely as scum that was some sort of byproduct of pressure brewing. Third, as snobs went to work and started searching for perfection no matter what it cost, it was discovered that more pressure was better, and that a pump was required, because the amount of pressure that could be safely produced inside a boiler was not enough.

Pressure can be measured in “bars.” One bar is the everyday atmospheric pressure. Two bars is about 28 pounds per square inch. Two to three bars of pressure was all the first espresso machines were capable of. The current consensus of espresso snobs seems to be that nine bars of pressure is ideal for espresso. That’s 130 pounds per square inch, an amount of pressure that is more than sufficient to cause the tires on your car to explode. Espresso snobs love to write about what makes a perfect espresso, and there are many factors beyond nine bars of pressure. But those are the factors that make the difference between espresso machines that cost a mere $400 versus the machines that cost from $2,000 up.

Because I’m perfectly happy with my morning coffee brewed in a cone, I’m not sure that I want to spend even $400 on a machine. There’s also the issue of counter space. As I Googled to educate myself on the snobberies of espresso, I learned that there are simple machines that can make coffee using boiler pressure. Espresso snobs will be quick to point out that, if it’s not made with nine bars of pressure, then it’s coffee, not espresso. Fine. But two to three bars of pressure will make a very fine shot of espresso-like coffee and a respectable amount of crema. Plus you get the ability to steam milk for cappuccino. My little Bellman coffee maker cost about $25, used, on eBay.

For what it’s worth, for years I’ve bought my coffee at Whole Foods from the bulk coffee dispensers. It’s an organic Italian roast and costs $10.99 a pound. I use the same coffee both for morning coffee and for low-pressure espresso. The word “espresso” means only that the coffee is made using pressure. Espresso can be made with any coffee, roasted light, medium, or dark, as long as the beans are ground fine enough to work properly in the pressure-brewing process.


⬆︎ My bare-bones Bellman coffee maker


⬆︎ Espresso snobs would find many faults with this cup of cappuccino — that there’s not enough crema, that the microfoam isn’t micro enough, and that my artwork is primitive. It no doubt will take years, and a good many hundreds of dollars, to make a real espresso snob out of me. For now, merely very good is good enough.

Hot and sour soup


Next time: More mushrooms!

I’m pretty sure that I had never made hot and sour soup before. I’m not sure what made me think of it. But the soup was so easy, and so good, that I’ll do it again soon.

As usual, I use recipes only to get the concept, then I improvise. I almost never measure. There are many recipes for hot and sour soup on the web, and if you look at a bunch of them you’ll see that they vary quite a lot. My take on it is that hot and sour soup is a kitchen sink sort of thing. Some elements are necessary, and other elements are left to your imagination and what’s available in your kitchen.

I’d say that the essential elements are a savory stock, vinegar, tamari, a little thickener, toasted sesame oil, a pepper paste, mushrooms, tofu, and the egg (added last). Then deploy whatever vegetables are handy. Carrots are good. I don’t think I’ve seen recipes that called for cabbage, but cabbage works well. I think that Quorn would make a good substitute for chicken. Color and crunch in the vegetables are to be desired. Shitake mushrooms are the usual rule, but I think any brown mushrooms would work.

It’s a quick soup. And it will definitely knock the chill off on a winter day. Unless you live in a city with an excellent Chinatown, you can surely make a better, and a healthier, hot and sour soup at home.