Political Advertisement or Propaganda?

On the eve of next week's LA Festival of Books, which I'm planning on dragging my baby to at USC on the train, I felt like highlighting a trio of books in my library and discussing the differences between political advertisement, religious advertisement/informative literature, and propaganda.

Is it really just the point-of-view of the observer?

During the 2014 mid-term elections, a nasty little battle between liberal Long Beach voters for the right to represent the Democrats in the general election for District 70 in the California State Assembly broke out.

If you're familiar with The Wire, think Carcetti defeating Mayor Royce for the primary. Here in Long Beach one candidate was Suja Lowenthal, a Ph.D.-from-USC-having mother who came to the US in 1977 from Madras, India; and Patrick O'Donnell, about whom I know less.

My memories of the election, and for whom I voted are fuzzy. I remember a conversation I had with a reporter friend who had some unpleasant run-ins with Suja when she was on the Long Beach school board, and this reporter was in support, I believe, of O'Donnell.

In any case, because of Corrie's status as a small-business owner and being a woman, and especially a woman-voter, we got something in the mail in the run-up to the primary:

Of course I kept it. It's essentially a sixty-page manifesto from a politician, printed as a 6" x 9" trade-paperback book with glossy pages. Having printed a few books in my time, I can say that the quality is high, for what amounts to political ad-mail. As a book, it's a little garish, what with the shiny pages, but overall production is nice. Also, what can be said about the name? "Repaying America for All It Is to All of Us."

She didn't win. Kind of a bummer, that the political world was robbed of such am ambitious politician. Obviously the woman who sent this out to business-owning, politically-savvy women had/has bigger goals than California District 70.

If you see the endorsements from that 2014 midterms in this area, you can see it was pretty well split down the middle (I just looked it up on ballotpedia.com).

I guess that would qualify as propaganda, but only in the narrow sense of "cult of personality", and when it involves a candidate who didn't win her primary, even that narrow sense is a stretch.

From the world of religiosity, let me take you back to some fall day in 2014. I was at the university's campus in Carson when a white man (rare already on this campus) with a beard and samurai-like ponytail asked me if I liked books. He was standing next to a box and appeared to be handing things out.

Well, how could I say No, I don't fucking like books, when that's so blatantly against character for me? I do, however, find it distasteful to be handed JESUS! books, so I found myself circumspect in my answer. Before I could fully answer, he handed me a tiny pocketbook-sized publication and said, "It's Eastern. Check it out..."

It was titled "Beyond Birth and Death," and looked to be authored by His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada.

His Divine Grace AC is the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.

The dimensions of my own Robot Crickets, but less than sixty pages, it's a very well put together little book. The cover isn't the same type of material as Robot Crickets, but it looks like they used the same type of printing company. As an artifact, I found it very interesting, and it even pushed me along in trying to finish pulling together some material for myself as a novelty.

Fast-forward to Wondercon 2016, last March, when I was heading back to the convention center after a quick walk around the neighborhood looking for a falafel joint that didn't exist anymore. I was beginning to separate from the crowd of nerds as we crossed the street when, like the campus before, a guy jutted his hand out to me as I passed, able to read me and knowing just what to say: "Hey man, free book."

The title was "The Perfection of Yoga." Holy cow! I thought as I checked it out on the way back through security. I couldn't really believe it. Here they are together:

Of course, at that time in March of '16 I didn't have the first book with me, but the "His Divine Grace" jazz at the bottom is pretty noticeable.

Here are the backs:

Funny thing: I read the very first sentence in "Beyond Birth and Death," took fundamental issue with the basic Cartesian-duality assumption, and didn't read anything more. It turned me off with the very first sentence, and I never returned.

I don't mean it rubbed me the wrong way, I mean I philosophically disagree with the assertion of the first sentence, and if you disagree with that assertion and assumption about the world---you can't convince me of even your premise---you'll be hard pressed to keep my attention for when you finally arrive at your conclusion.

Like I said, as artifacts, I really dig these books. They do seem like religious propaganda, but still, it's a minority religion for the country, and they take their book trust seriously:

Go independent book projects that are propaganda or ads for politics or religiosity!

Brassica Oleracera is a Pynchon Characrter

It's confusing with the capital letters and no italics...it should really be Brassica oleracera. When it started to become clear how splintered the development of the species was, all I could think of was Slothrop fracturing in ruined Europe right after the war with enough time to be many places at once, like appearing on the record cover of one of the great Midwestern kazoo concertos.

Anyway, it all started a few months back. I had wanted to put up a random blog piece, with Internet-supplied photos, about the difference between Broccoli, Broccolini, Chinese Broccoli, and Broccoli Rabe, the four main types of broccoli I worked with through my years in the restaurant industry.

We eat a lot of broccoli in this house, be it blanched, or roasted, or sauteed with other vegetables and meat, or shaved raw into a salad. Good stuff. The name sounds Italian, right?

This version was developed in Italy as it were, so the Italian sounding name fits.

The corporate kitchen gig I had served lots of the next picture, broccolini. When I first started working there I said, "Ooh, broccoli rabe...popular side dish?" thinking it wouldn't be, not in Texas.

They said, "No no, this isn't broccoli rabe, it's broccolini..."

They told me it was a mix between broccoli and kale, but they were only half right. Broccolini is a mix between regular broccoli and Chinese broccoli, also known as kai lan:

We served a ton of kai lan at the first restaurant I worked at in Manhattan. We would blanch it in ocean-salty water and it was great. The greens are more robust than chard but less than kale and the buds resemble broccoli in flavor and look. Chinese broccoli is great.

Next in my memory was one of the reasons I was inspired in the first place last November (or whenever) to start this post idea: broccoli rabe:

It is similar to kai lan in that it's a mix of leaves and broccoli-looking buds, but the leaves are far more dynamic looking, the buds denser, and the color more midnight green and less neon.

And the taste. Holy cow, the flavor. It's, eh, acquired. If done really well, the fiery bitterness is perfectly complemented with salt and garlic and pepper flakes, and it's awesome. If done poorly, it's barely edible.

Those four pictures and the accompanying anecdotes were the basis for this concept---comparing four types of "broccoli"---an idea and plan that languished for months until recently when I started doing some research.

All four plants come from the Brassica genus, one of the two genera of "mustard plants." Oh really?

How interesting...Brassica nupus gives us the rape flower and the rapeseed, of which the world makes and consumed barrels of oil. The Canadian Oil company decided that "rapeseed oil" is not a good name for marketing (or sales) purposes, so they renamed it "canola oil." Brassica rapa gives the very similar rapini plant, otherwise known as raab or rabe, and when the greens are budding, we call it broccoli rabe.

So what? So this: I just wanted to get that part out of the way. Broccoli rabe, radishes, turnips, rutabaga, mustard greens, mustard seed, prepared mustard, and canola oil are all from the same family of plants.

And broccoli...?

This is where my dive down the rabbit hole ended up with me looking at Brassica oleracera as a dude from a lost Pynchon title...

It all started around the fifth century BCE, when humans decided they liked eating the leaves of a plant now called wild cabbage. They selected for plants with the best leaves, using an activity we like to call artificial selection (see the domesticated dog). Pretty soon, these folks had created a cultivar and the culinary kale was introduced to the world.

Thereafter there was a preference selected for the density of the bunched leaves, called the terminal bud, which lead to the cultivar known today as cabbage.

In Germany they selected for thicker stalks and developed kohlrabi (kohl is German for cabbage...). In Belgium they focused on selecting for lateral buds and ended up with Brussels sprouts. In other parts of Europe they focused on the premature buds, which lead them to cauliflower (15 century), and a century later, broccoli.

Do you see all those underlined culinary items: kale, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels and kohlrabi?

THEY ALL COME FROM THE SAME SPECIES.

Add to the list collard greens, romanesco, kai lan, all forms of cabbage, and all forms of kale.

Frankly I wasn't prepared for that result. I thought they were connected, surely, but the exact same specie?

Domestication and selection for specific preferences has led, over the course of less than five thousand years, to a whole slew of vegetables...that many American's revile...

...but this household eats in abundance.

Cruciferous veggies...they're good for you! That's what we tell the boy! And he likes 'em!

Birthday Dinners and Uber Musings

My plan was to take the Boy---just the two of us---out to Avalon on Catalina for my birthday. See, the company that takes people there and back (only 26 miles away!) have a "free birthday ticket" deal going.

Of course, that's "free birthday ticket with purchase of one adult ticket", which for a round trip is nearly eighty bucks.

Also, after staying up ridiculously late the night before after the birthday dinner party, we decided against what would have been the Boy's first boat ride.

The dinner party was nice, even though I under-cooked the salmon and didn't get the skin how I wanted it, and later Corrie told me to just forget about the skin, "We're not in France," she tells me, "you're probably going to have give up on that,"

She's right, of course.

The sea bass was great, the Brussels sprouts grubbin, the tabouli I made the day before (so the flavors would combine perfectly) was excellent, the home-made tzatziki and hummus for appetizers were both fantastic...but you always remember the one thing you'd like to redo. The roasted pear dessert was magnificent.

Corrie set up and planned the whole thing, organizing and shopping and the like. I just cooked the food...and bought the fish at the fish market in San Pedro, my first time visiting it.

Anyway, after the last couple had left---via Uber, just like the other couple a short time earlier---Corrie and I had a discussion of Uber and Lyft.

I was thinking...besides the trip to San Diego last January for Jimmy Berlow's bachelor party, I haven't been in an Uber...or Lyft...

It seemed to me, as we talked about it late Saturday night, that there had been more Uber and Lyft rides to our apartment than either Corrie or I had been a part of anywhere else. Between winter parties and birthday dinner parties, it seemed like an accurate guess.

"I guess that makes us an Uber destination?" I mused.

"I've never been in an Uber," Corrie posited. "Or Lyft. Crazy. I'm sure in this demographic and age group and based on where we live, we're serious outliers."

On NPR it sounded like a city in Orange County needed to cut bus service because of a lack of riders. One line was going to be cut entirely, but for the hundred people who rely on it, the totally rely on it and have no other options. The city has decided to subsidize Lyft rides for those affected passengers.

At those bus stops, instead of a times-table for when the next bus arrives, there are instructions for downloading the Lyft app. The passenger pays only what they would pay the bus company ($2 or $2.25) and the city pays the rest of the tab.

The program is in the pilot stages, but is, as the cliche would have it, outside the box.

Instead of Catalina's biggest city of (sleepy) Avalon, I got to hang out with the Boy and get a nice shot for the last Polaroid we had in house:

Recognition for a Useless Thing

I have a digital smart device, but I definitely don't utilize it's to the maximum abilities. 

In fact, I only really play The Simpsons: Tapped Out.

I don;t have Instagram, Snapchat, or Facebook on my phone. I don't use it for work, pulling off deals as I meander the streets from one meeting to another meeting. I barely even use it for map directions and traffic notifications.

Really, just this video game, and a sims-game at that. This is the first sims-type game I ever played (a "sims" game is a "simulation" game, where you build cities or civilizations, or send characters to do gigs, or both), but this is a Simpsons-sims game, and we get to relive many cool scenes or movies and get many spoken lines by many voice actors from the show.

Anyway, I've been playing since March of 2013 and have set up my city as similar to Venice as I could make it, with waterways everywhere.

I use a website to help out with clarifications every once in a while during events, and have it as a usual destination on my Interwebs travels.

Recently, after a mini-event, the fine, hard-working folks who run the website asked for submissions of screen captures of the gear from the mini-event. For the first time, I submitted a collection of screenshots I put together to show off how I set them up.

After the time was up, they put up thumbnails of their submissions. I perused them, knowing that since I'm a novice with Photoshop and needed to use Powerpoint for my tile job, I should be able to quickly find mine if it were chosen.

Which it was:

I circled it above, and the screen capture shows off some of my personal computer's bookmarks. Anyway, after clicking the thumbnail, I was brought to a familiar-to-me sight: a scene from my own Springfield: Rommelwood Island, the Eliminator obstacle and the barracks:

Like I've told other people, this is as close to the Simpsons as I've been in years, and it's as close to a video game as I've been since Ocarina of Time.

A new event has started and this link is buried deep in the scroll, to be long forgotten. Corrie was funny when I mentioned it. She was being honest and earnest, "Wow! Congratulations on being recognized for...something that...has no meaning and is...pretty much useless... Hey, at least it looks cool!"

She is a fan of my Springfield, mostly...