Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
I Googled for a recipe for barley brownies and found quite a good one. The recipe uses apple sauce instead of eggs. It’s a vegan recipe, but I substituted butter for margarine and milk for the water. Pumpkin sauce is not something I have very often, so I substituted more apple sauce for the pumpkin sauce. These are very good brownies. Barley flour’s nutty taste is perfect for brownies. I buy organic hulled barley from Amazon and grind the flour myself.
Months ago, I downloaded the Berlin Philharmonic’s app on my Apple TV. But the slowness of my rural internet connection wouldn’t support it — not even close. Using a cellular hot spot, my download speed typically was about 2 Mbps, though sometimes in the past it was even slower than that. And then suddenly, when I made one of my periodic checks to see if T-Mobile’s home internet service was available to me, I was told that it was. I signed up. T-Mobile sent me a router. That was last week, and I still consider the new setup to be on probation. But now I’m getting real broadband speeds, sometimes as high as 100 Mbps download — somewhat slow by urban standards but a miracle here in the sticks. To celebrate, I splurged on a one-year “season ticket” for the Berlin Philharmonic. It is changing my life.
I would love to know how the economics of their on-line presence is working for the Berlin Philharmonic. It must be one of the richest orchestras in the world, though, like many rich musical institutions including the Metropolitan Opera, the Berlin Philharmonic must have taken a huge hit during the Covid pandemic. The concerts went on, sometimes to an empty house, on line only; and sometimes to a reduced audience, with everyone spaced four seats apart. It would seem, though, as things return to normal, that the orchestra’s “Digital Concert Hall” not only has expanded the orchestra’s audience but also is making money for the orchestra. A one-year subscription costs $150. The quality of the video and audio are superb. The orchestra has a packed schedule, and most concerts are streamed live. With a subscription, there are 733 concerts available in the archive. The quality of the video, the audio, and the production is extremely good.
One of the hardest parts of living in the sticks is the cultural isolation. I am surrounded by deplorables. There is, of course, a strong culture of folk music and country music in the Appalachians and the foothills. But frankly it doesn’t do much for me. Most of the locals who do country music have little or no musical training. There is just no substitute for superbly trained musicians doing the kind of music that superbly trained musicians do.
During my years in San Francisco, I often bought season tickets to the San Francisco Symphony. When I didn’t have season tickets, an old friend who was in the orchestra would give me complimentary tickets. It’s a good thing to support one’s local orchestra. Thanks to the disappointingly slow expansion of broadband into rural areas, an expansion which is finally reaching me, I find that the Berlin Philharmonic is now my local orchestra. Though there is no substitute for the collective experience of actually being in a concert hall, watching (and listening to) a live or recorded concert actually has some advantages. One gets to see the orchestra, the conductor, and the soloists from up close and from many different angles. The Berlin Philharmonic video is so good that you can sometimes read the music on the music stands. The presence of the audience also makes a difference, something that becomes clear if you watch one of the orchestra’s somehow-sad Covid-era concerts in an empty hall. Especially when watching a concert live, as I did last Saturday, one can almost imagine being there.
The Berlin Philharmonic’s “Digital Concert Hall” has apps for most devices. You also can watch in a web browser. Their web site is here.
A little Googling shows that the first cell phones became available in March 1984. I admit that I was fascinated and aspired to own one. It was not until 1995, though, that I first acquired a cell phone. That was when I went to work for the San Francisco Examiner, and they assigned me a phone as a 24/7 tether to the office.
The cell phones of the 1990s actually were quite good, though they were big and heavy. As long as you had a decent signal, the voice quality was as good as land lines. Then cellular service started going digital. We were promised that digital would be much better than analog, but that was a lie. By 2008, cellular providers no longer had to support analog phones. They dropped analog service in no time.
The end of analog service in 2008 was an ugly landmark in the history of the telephone. Voice quality dropped appallingly, as cellular carriers “compressed” the audio in order to be able to support more customers. A telephone conversation became an ordeal.
But another ugly landmark had occurred in 2007. That was when the first iPhone went on the market. The iPhone looked nothing like a telephone. It was flat — an absurdly unsuitable shape for a telephone. The reason it was flat, of course, was because the screen had become the most important thing. Even the old flip phones, which people now make fun of, were better telephones, because they had a bit of curve in them and accorded at least a little attention to the location of the human mouth and ear.
Telephones have fascinated me since I was a child. One’s telephone was one of the most loved objects in the house. In those days, it was the only two-way connection to the outside world. We actually used our telephones to have long talks with our friends in those days, and we enjoyed it. But by 2010, I had come to hate telephones. I wasn’t the only one. I hated them when they rang. I especially hated it when other people’s telephones rang. I hated telephones when I had to talk on them. I hated listening to other people talking on their phones, which was almost impossible to avoid in public places until (what an improvement) texting became more prevalent.
The red phone in the photo was my land line during my years in San Francisco. I love that phone, and I’ll never part with it. Was there ever a design better than the old telephones made by the Bell System and Western Electric? Young people today have probably never talked on such a phone. I will never forget them.
But for years my red telephone went unused. I experimented with services such as Verizon’s fixed cellular service, back around 2018, but that worked very poorly, because Verizon signals were so weak in rural areas.
But rural cellular service here has gradually gotten better. With a T-Mobile hot spot in my attic, I actually can get a data signal strong enough to be able to use cellular over WIFI, which, at least where I am, gives better voice quality than a direct cell phone connection. And I found a device that allows me to dedicate one of my cell phones to sitting on a shelf and imitating a land line, with my old red telephone connected to it.
The device is called a “Cell2Jack.” It costs $39 on Amazon. You can plug an old telephone into it. If your house has telephone wiring, you can connect the Cell2Jack to your house wiring. The device uses Bluetooth to become a telephone client of your cell phone. When I first bought the Cell2Jack, I wasn’t satisfied with its audio quality. But after a firmware update, plus T-Mobile’s recent improvements, the device works remarkably well. Not only can I use my old Bell System phone on those occasions when I can’t avoid a dreaded phone call. I actually can hear without straining my ear and my brain to try to understand the person (or robot) on the other end of the line.
As for talking on a flat, slippery device with a screen, I’d rather be beaten.
Bread casserole doesn’t sound very nutritious or low-ish carb. But it can be.
I used a food processor to coarsely chop the bread. Then, also in the food processor, I minced onion, parsley, spinach, celery, and an apple. The cheese, grated, is part cheddar and part Gruyère. The walnuts are partly pieces and partly halves. I did not add any liquid, though I wish I had used two or more apples instead of one. I moistened it with olive oil. It’s seasoned with sage and rosemary. The darker and heavier the bread the better. This was my barley-whole wheat bread, which was two days old.
It occurred to me that I could make a very good dessert-style bread pudding with minced apples and the same kind of bread, seasoned with cinnamon. I’ll do that next time I have two-day-old barley bread.
Each year on January 1, copyrights that are 95 years old expire. It was 95 years ago, in 1927, when the last Sherlock Holmes stories were published. (Copyright laws vary by country. In the U.S., copyrights expire after 95 years.)
Those who profit from copyrights will attempt all sorts of novel legal arguments to keep the profits going. Think Mickey Mouse and Beatrix Potter, as well as Sherlock Holmes. Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain is one of the few institutions that track the public interest in copyright laws. Here is a link to their post on Public Domain Day 2023, with a list of some of the books, movies, and songs that are in the public domain as of today.
If you still have a gloomy taste in your mouth from The Banshees of Inisherin, then here’s the perfect antidote: Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical.
We had recently been discussing Jane Eyre here, and I couldn’t get Jane Eyre out of my mind as I watched this. But Jane Eyre, of course, is not exactly a musical, whereas Matilda will probably become a classic. It’s a romp, with superb performances, excellent music, and brilliant singing and dancing. How does Britain produce so many talented children? Emma Thompson is so scary that I actually wonder if Matilda should have a PG rating.
Matilda can be streamed on Netflix.
Clearly the risks to the power grid are growing. This is true not just in the United States. Just two days ago, France issued a warning about winter power failure. Whether in summer or winter, power grids can become overloaded (and, these days, often do). For some strange reason, right-wing terrorists seem to be targeting the power grid. The vulnerability of the power grid to cyber-hacking is well known, though no doubt too little has been done about it. Even solar events such as coronal mass ejections could shut down the power grid and damage major components of the grid that would be very difficult to replace.
Being prepared is not necessarily just a matter of comfort and convenience. In some cases, lives depend on it. Everyone needs a plan. In rural areas such as where I live, short power outages (three or four hours) happen many times a year. I’ve never been through an outage that lasted for days, but that’s always possible.
Getting equipped with backup sources of power and heat is not necessarily something that must be done all at once. Being prepared is expensive. And not only are the things you need expensive to buy, they require maintenance, or they won’t work when you need them. Here at the abbey, I’ve gradually built up my ability to weather longer and longer power failures. Each power failure is a kind of test that lets me figure out what my next priority for improvement should be.
The first big question is: Would your heating system operate with the power down? Few systems would these days. I have a heat pump, which is of course all electric. For backup, I have a propane fireplace and a tank that holds 200 gallons of propane. The fireplace provides a helpful amount of heat, but it can’t compare with the house’s main heating system. Kerosene heaters make me nervous. But if you’re careful with them, they can be a safe source of emergency heat.
How would you cook if the power went out? Here at the abbey, though I can boil water in small quantities on generator power, my emergency solution is to cook outdoors using propane. The gas grill, also propane, is always available.
Refrigeration is a biggy. That’s a problem that can be solved only with electricity. My solution at present for refrigeration uses two battery-powered power inverters. The 1000-watt unit can run the refrigerator for five hours or more. I have two such units, so that one can be recharged from the generator while the other is powering the refrigerator.
Lighting is not a big deal. Flashlights and candles are a given, with better light sources if you have the power. You’ll also need to think about water. Even if your water is city water (as opposed to a well, which I have here), frozen pipes could be a problem in extreme cold, especially if the power is out.
For me, communication is a major issue. Cell phones aren’t enough. I also need to be able to keep my computer and WIFI running in a power failure. How I do that is shown in the photographs below. And because I’m an amateur radio operator, I also need to keep all my radios running, if they’re needed. Amateur radio operators are always about community service if a disaster strikes, not only for communication with the outside world but also for providing a means of staying in touch with one’s neighbors.
At least around here, tobacco and “vape” stores seem to be everywhere these days. Normally I would have no reason for going inside of one. But I’ve been picking up my Amazon packages at an Amazon “hub counter” so that trucks don’t have to drive down my unpaved road. The nearest hub counter is a tobacco shop at Madison.
The tobacco shop has a little room that they call the humidor room. That’s where all the cigars are stored. When the cigar boxes are empty, they stack them on the floor and sell them for $5 each. Many of them are quite decently made, of wood. Those are the ones I buy. They’re fantastic for storing all the small items that otherwise would be clutter. They stack nicely. They’re also probably collectible.
I should have known better. When Rotten Tomatoes shows high critic ratings (97 percent in this case) but much lower audience ratings (76 percent), that’s a red flag for me. I almost always agree with the audience.
Why would a filmmaker waste a superb cast and beautiful settings on a meaningless and depressing story that is not worth telling? I’ll answer my own question: It’s because critics are bored. They fall for well-made films with nihilistic themes that can cut through their jaded hides. Critics are rarely in it for the story. They’re in it for the filmmaking.
As long as made-for-critics films like this scoop up the awards, filmmakers will keep making them. What a waste.
The Washington Post has a story about yesterday’s announcement by Amtrak describing the $5 billion worth of new trains that Amtrak is buying. The trains will be named Amtrak Airo, and they’re beautiful.
Yes, the trains will be made in America — Sacramento — though the company is German. Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg is not mentioned in the story, but I suspect that he, and the Biden administration, had more than a little to do with this.
It was interesting to read some of the comments on this article. Train lovers are pointing out that the United States is still far, far behind other countries in its train infrastructure, not least because of the poor condition of our tracks. In Europe, everybody loves trains, and everybody rides them. In the U.S., liberals have never seen a train they didn’t love, and Republicans have never seen a train they didn’t hate. I wonder: Don’t Republicans ever travel abroad and ride the trains?
The recent railway strike that almost happened helped expose just how much fixing our railway system needs, both for freight and for passengers. About 30 years of successive Democratic transportation secretaries might do it.