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...

RIP Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry passed away over the weekend at 90(!!!!) years young.

Thanks for the Rock'n'Roll, Chuck!

One of the original inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Chuck started as a singer and moved on to guitar. He learned some fundamentals and got a gig as a house player at a St. Louis club where they played blues, calypso, and "jazzy ballads." After a trip to see the blues scene in Chicago, the synthesis was mostly complete.

A hybrid music style was forming. Once the final touches were added---the incorporation of country riffs---the foundation of "rock music" was birthed. Isn't that an Americanism? Country music riffs blended with blues, calypso and jazz gave the world rock music...stolen from black people? You betcha...

Chuck Berry inspired pretty much all of the rock bands my generation called "classic", and those bands have in-turn created entire industries of sub-genres. Berry was inspired by Muddy Waters, who was subsequently ripped off by many of those same "classic" bands, so it seems like they all were onto something.

When Napster was fresh and new I wasn't on it (truthfully, I never was), but when my brother asked me what songs I would like him to find and burn for me (my first burned CD!!) the two I deemed necessary after searching his files/archives/torrents turned out to both be covers:

Jimi Hendrix playing "Johnny B Goode" and Frank Zappa's all percussion "Stairway to Heaven."

Berry's "Johnny B Goode" is the only rock song to have made it to Voyager's Golden Record, and remains the only hardcopy of rock music to have left our solar system. It was captured eloquently in "Back to the Future" as well, in an ultimately regrettable scene with Michael J. Fox introducing Marvin Berry and his cousin Chuck (over the phone) to the piece. Is Zemeckis trying to take rock and roll away from black people in an even more profound way?

Anyway, Maybelline was his first big hit, and I think all rock fans have grown up with Roll Over Beethoven, Rock and Roll Music, and Riding Along in my Automobile. Maybe it was just me.

I do feel like, though, all of those songs are in the cultural consciousness of both America and Western Society in general.

For good measure, here's Chuck's own Johnny B Goode, and for laughs, here're the Sex Pistols not knowing the lyrics so well.

Also, Frank's percussion Stairway. Okay, so it's not all percussion, and during his last tour in '88 he played Stairway at most venues, but this one is a little different sounding...

That should satisfy some YouTube/old-school music itches...

Also also, check out Berry's first albun of mostly new material in 38 years, set to release in a few months: Chuck.

A Day at the Landfill

In my capacity as a "stable adult/surrogate father" for a hundred-and-fifty teenagers, I am occasionally asked if I'd be interested in going---

---"Yes," is the only correct answer, and given before even hearing where the destination may be. It's been that kind of year.

Recently that destination turned out to be the Whittier Landfill. That sounded like an interesting learning experience for our not-quite-'hood kiddos, and we booked the time and bus. I happened to be one of the chaperones.

We left around 8:40, nearly on-time, and headed north-by-east towards Whittier.

We arrived about eighty-five minutes later, after having to pull over and make calls because---I heard---the entrance was blocked by construction. We headed up a large hill to get to the facility, which itself was nestled behind large wrought-iron fences in the crook of the tiny mountain/large hill.

Once on the property, the bus cruised all over looking for the main office, even busting a three- (seventeen-) point turn. Eventually a lady came out to greet us. Skinny, dressed in a mini-skirt and sporting long blond hair, she got onto the bus with a fifties-era microphone and speaker.

After hearing her speak for ten seconds I knew all about her. I attended a university that had a strong engineering program, and I knew what was going on. She was obviously both the "hot engineer" and "people-person engineer" at this landfill operation. These teenagers would never see that, because she doesn't fit their ideas of "hotness," but worldly folks can tell these things.

Anyway, she cracked a few corny jokes as we drove around the remises on a bumpy road and she enlightened us as to the details of the operation of the landfill: at 93% capacity  it's considered "full" and hasn't taken a truck load for the landfill since 2013; the road was so bumpy because the hill is the trash pile and the anaerobic decomposition of the waste causes air pockets which cause depressions in the surface and road above; the plants were all native to the area and the green piping running all over the place was the only marker that we're on a landfill, as it collects the waste gases.

That part was rather ingenious: they collect the waste methane and burn it to boil the waste water that's also collected from the decomposition. That boiling wastewater powers a turbine, an action that results in the landfill being a net-energy plus operation---they add more power to the grid than they need.

This ride lasted about ten minutes as we snaked up a steep part of the hill and back down, bumping all along the way. Much of the information was contained in the poster she gave all of us upon arrival to our bus:

From there we parked and entered the recycling portion of the plant, the material collection department. This is the part of the operation that's still taking truckloads daily. They separate the material for resale to industry, the end-of-the-line in the world of "recycling,"

We were up in a glass-enclosed room high above the floor. To one side you could see masked humans sorting on a conveyor while bulldozers were hard at work. Mist was constantly coming down from the rafters in an ever-losing battle with dust:

The other side of the hangar facility had the big Wall-E type compactors and cubes:

And that was pretty much it.

The blond engineer disappeared and the kids started asking, "What now, mister?"

Forty hungry and restless young people milling about in the lobby of an engineering building, having apparently completed the day's activities in about 25 minutes.

Seriously, it wasn't even a half an hour. It wasn't even 11 am yet.

I guess there was a miscommunication between the plant's liason and our guy: the lady had a meeting and nobody had been chosen as a replacement, and after some awkward phone calls (which I was not a part of), we were off to find a park between Whittier and the South Bay so lunch could be enjoyed and we could try and get some money's worth out of our bus.

The next day we were off to San Luis for Val's memorial. Weird five day stretch, for sure.

The Meme-Sequel

"The Stations of the Beer Baron" 

in the Medium of Meme

The Sequel

I got busy with a gut full of salted beef.

I thought I'd go through and find another fourteen screen captures from The Simpsons Season 8 episode "Homer Versus the Eighteenth Amendment," 

Last year I had a thoughtful dialogue with myself about the medium of meme and how the Simpsons is either the parent of, or built for, the concept of the "meme" (pictures mixed with sentence fragments).

I may like some of these even better than the mandatory ones from last year.

So, with that, I have to say, it's been one of those days:

I thought they had a clearer shot of Nelson's face...the moment everyone sees Bart without green and Lisa's knowing face centering the whole thing:

Marge is so in touch with her emotions. Like "looking:"

More of a meme for a meme's sake:

Quimby and Wiggum are the easiest one-joke characters in the industry (corrupt and stupid/bad respectively), and the diversion is a classic Simpsons joke that they probably took from somewhere else:

The importance of the alcohol itself:

Too easy...

The honesty of the pandering I always loved:

This is one of the best composed scenes in this season:

This is how you come up with ideas, apparently (I should try it...):

I do this kind of thing at the Dollar Bookstore:

Don't tell anyone...

Before...before!

We used to do this kind of thing in the dorms: