Where's the pepper?

I think I've uncovered some kind of conspiracy, or at least a mystery.

Except for sweets and desserts, almost every food recipe I've ever followed calls for salt and pepper. And every savory recipe I've ever seen prepared on TV always includes salt and pepper. Along with salt, black pepper is a nearly ubiquitous spice. It's everywhere in what we cook and what we see cooked.

What's weird is that, for the life of me, I cannot remember seeing "black pepper" listed as an ingredient in any packaged food I've purchased from the store. I read a lot of food labels these days, and it just dawned on me that black pepper is never listed as an ingredient.

How can that be? How can black pepper be called for in almost every recipe known to man, yet not included in any foods that we buy?

Something fishy is going on.

Have you ever. . . ?

Have you ever created something new intellectually? I mean have you ever really, seriously advanced thought in some area?

If you think about it, much of what we all do (or at least much of what I do) is derivative, rehashing what has already been done. Certainly in undergraduate school, any "research" that I did was really an exercise in collecting, repackaging and reselling what other "experts" had done. Even in those areas where I was expected to provide a fresh insight into the work of others, I was still not creating anything new. At best, I might have said something slightly original about someone else's work.

In graduate school, it wasn't much better, really. I was expected to have developed an expertise for my area of study, and I was (hopefully) able to make connections and inferences across works and across subject areas that were perhaps a bit more sophisticated than I would have pulled off in undergraduate school. It felt like hard, creative work at the time, but I know better now, all these years later. Even when completing a thesis at the graduate level, it was still more of the same, riffing on more of the same. It was all about what moderately unique twist I could come up with on what others had already done.

Now, in the real world, what do we really create? Certainly I write thousands of words a week and produce original processes, plans and ideas all the time. Or at least it seems like I do. But I think that someone doing a forensic analysis of my work after the fact would conclude that nothing I do is really anything new. I'm still retracing well-worn paths and building familiar structures.

Does anyone truly "create" any more? What about people studying at the PhD level? The requirement for that degree is supposed to be a true, original contribution to the literature in that field of study. . . something that advances the debate and provides primary research for graduate students to rehash and for other professionals to build upon. Are PhDs where the creation in academia happens?

And what about the creative ones among us in the real world? Those artistic ones among us. Surely they create, right? Original fiction and non-fiction. Original illustrations, photographs, paintings, and sculptures.

Is that really who creates? PhDs and artists? What about everyone else?

Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

-- Emily Dickinson

My ISP Sucks

After countless calls to my Internet service provider (ISP) and four visits from various technicians, it appears that our house connection is finally working at reasonable speeds (10 Meg download).

Most infuriating parts of the whole experience so far?

• Realizing that the complicated way I had my modem "bridged" to my wireless router was in fact totally unnecessary and probably negatively impacting my speeds. The only reason it was ever set up that way was because my ISP said to do it that way.
  
• Being told to disconnect my router and recycle my modem EVERY SINGLE TIME I talked to anyone at my ISP (at least 20 times all together), even though I knew the problem wasn't on my end.
• Having the technician show up in the middle of my work day and being surprised when I wasn't cool with just losing my Internet connection for an indeterminate amount of time. Ever heard of "working from home?"
• Being told "Yep, we fixed it on our end; the slow speed problem is on your end" and being forced to dismantle my network for the umpteenth time, only to have the guy interrupt me half way through that process to tell me, "Oh, I just got an IM from [some other guy]. He says that we haven't actually increased your connection speed yet. It'll be fixed by this coming Friday."
• Having it not be fixed by that coming Friday. Or the next Friday. Or the next.
  
• Being told by "tech support" that I should call customer service once this is all over to get my billing straightened out. Excuse me? I thought I was already talking to customer service. I actually said, "So you can't say to me 'I'll make sure that your billing gets straightened out, sir'?" And I was told, "Nope we [tech support] can't call customer service."
  

The most infuriating part of the whole process yet to come? The certainty that I'll be charged for the faster connection for the three weeks between when they said I had it and when I actually got it.

Yes, I know that unfair additional charge for those weeks only amounts to about $10. I'll still probably end up going to jail over it.

Make PDFs

For those of you who want to be able to make .pdf files so that anyone and everyone can reliably view the things you send them, use this.

http://www.pdfforge.org/.

It's free, it's slick, and it allows you to turn your Word docs, Excel spreadsheets and other weird files directly into .pdf files.

Immensely useful.

Who Makes the World's Stuff?

Who makes the world's stuff these days? Not the United States, certainly. We don't make much of anything here in the U.S. anymore. All of our manufacturing jobs have been off-shored and outsourced and shipped overseas to China and Taiwan and other points east, where wages are low, unions are scarce, environmental protection is an afterthought, and billions of people stand in line to do work once done in the U.S. for a fraction of what we used to charge.

The United States, having served as the global manufacturing leader for most of the last 100 years, has let that all slip away and has become a weak, reactive slave to consumerism. . . choosing to buy what we need instead of making it ourselves.

Isn't that right? I mean, that's what we've been led to believe, isn't it?

Wrong. As the the Financial Times pointed out in June of 2010, "The U.S. remained the world's biggest manufacturing nation by output last year."

Not China. Not Taiwan. The United States, thank you very much. We make the world's stuff. Still. For now.

But as that same article points out, the U.S. is poised to relinquish that crown to China in 2011 unless something dramatic happens.

Will that happen? Probably. Powers greater than me will decide that one way or the other. I'm just pleased that we're there, right at the top, vying for the lead. It's like finding out that you're almost as good at something today as you were back in high school. Maybe we're not as far gone as we've been led to believe we are.

And maybe there's hope. There are still things the U.S. does better than anyone else on the planet, I believe.

Canary in the Coal Mine

Have you lost your job in the last year? I really am sorry if you have, and I sincerely hope you have found work since then.

If you're like me and you've been blessed enough not to have lost your job, you probably still know a few people who have. But for many of us who have remained employed during this recession, I think it is all too easy to know emperically that a problem exists but to not really believe it deep down. No amount of hype on TV or in print can really bring home the fact that people are flat out LOOSING THEIR JOBS as a result of the sad state of the economy right now.

I'm not sure one more piece of scary information will help make this whole deal real for anyone else, but I heard a statistic recently that kind of jumped out at me. In my home state of Missouri, tax revenue (resulting from income taxes, corporate taxes and sales taxes) fell 9.1% during the last year.

That's real, and that's not small potatoes, folks. That's up in the low billions of dollars.

That's a real drop in taxes collected from what people earn (7.6%), because so many people aren't working, and many of those who are still employed have seen their incomes flatline or even decline in the last year. That's a real drop in taxes on companies (~5%) that aren't doing as much business as they did in previous years. And that's a real drop in taxes collected at the cash register (~5%) as people spend less of what they earn.

For some reason, knowing that my state's revenues have dropped by close to 10% in the past year somehow makes the recession more real to me. In a weird way, tax revenues are like the canary in the coal mine. . . a second-hand indicator of the health (or sickness) of its surroundings.

I think there's something bad in the air.

http://www.connectmidmissouri.com/news/story.aspx?id=478120

America the Beautiful

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife.
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!

New York and L.A.

What grinds my gears. . .

I read this morning that the last interview with Dennis Hopper, who died recently, is on news stands in New York and Los Angeles and "will be available nationally on July 6."

This, like the practice of opening movies in New York and Los Angeles days or weeks before opening them in the rest of the country, is part of the reason why 90% of the people in the U.S. hate New York and Los Angeles.

And yes, I know that more than 10% of the nation's population lives in New York and Los Angeles. Some of those folks hate themselves.

Elitist shenanigans.

First new post in a while

I haven't posted anything here since December '09, so this is really just a check to see if I can still log in to my blog, post, edit, etc. Seems to be working.