Sea of Flowers

MT 5.01 - A Sea of Flowers

2010-03-22T16:00:00Z

I haven't been writing much. The blog was working fine for the most part, but was acting oddly. A few weeks ago I was unable to write or edit entries in Opera, which was probably more related to the way Opera handles Java scripts than anything in MT. That seems to have gone away with an Opera upgrade and a reinstall of Java.

I began some MT upgrades a coupe of weeks and got stalled on the upgrade path. I refeshed MT templates, which lost some of the features in the sidebars on the blog pages. Then I tried to install MT 5.01 and found that I had to run a clean install. At that point I got lost on the upgrade path until I remembered - basically learned again - some of the server side file structure. Once I figured out which folder was my Web Root, I got the uploaded files in the right directories and CHMOD-ed and got the mt-configure.cgi file reading right. I have to go back and edit some templates to get some content back on line but it's on track again.

Rosa - A Sea of Flowers

2010-02-25T05:00:00Z

My mother died last Friday. She was 82 years old. She has had Alzeimer for several years and has been in a care home since June 2008. She had asthma for many years and she had been having increasing difficulty breathing, late stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. I visited Winnipeg in October last year and at the end of January this year. Considering the course that her illnesses were taking, and her pain, confusion, and distress, the end of her life was inevitable, painless and not too soon.

My sisters and brothers in Winnipeg have managed to cope with the issues of my mother's terminal illness and my father's decline and psychological collapse with much hard work and many tears. Dad is in the care home. In the last couple of months before mother died, he was failing in self care and unable to change the course of mother's illness. He was getting disconnected with reality, although I think his love and affection never wavered.

He seems to have become more lucid, but much sadder after the funeral today.

He has mentioned some old stories that I had never heard before, and would not have understood when I had less lines on my face.

His mother had visited from Holland in the early or mid 1960's. My father had not gone back to Holland when his father had died, and he had tried never to look back on his decision to move to Canada. His mother had told him, he remembered, that his mother had reservations about Rosa. She was older than him and "bossy" which was probably a way of saying what we might call needy, as she was always emotionally expressive, and defensive of her self-regard. He said that his mother had tried to say that she was surprised at how well Rosa was doing as a wife and mother, but he had found the remark hurtful and always resented it.

With his memory of his response to his own father's death, he is reconciled to the fact that I am not being demonstrative in my grief and that my grief is quite different than his own.

My brother in law Joe accepted the task of delivering a eulogy at the funeral. I did not myself to get through it without tears or without hinting at family secrets. He spoke well, emphasizing on the positive elements of her last few years. She became a happier person, more "in the moment" more content to take and give a smile and thumbs up and to wish anyone well with "keep up the good fight". I told him that he had found the right picture and captured her strength as a mother.

Appliances - A Sea of Flowers

2009-09-06T17:59:20Z

Since my move to Victoria, I have tried out and adopted some appliances and discarded others.

I started with a new set of Paderno stainless steel pots - purchased cheaply in 2006 when Canadian Tire dropped the Royale sets. I have added another sauce pan and the steamer and double boiler (not Royale but who cares). Capital Iron carries Paderno in Victoria. I expect the saucepans and the dutch oven to last for a while. The coated frying pans are standing up well although I think the coating in those pans will break down long before the pans wear out.

I bought a larger enameled cast iron dutch oven at Capital Iron which has become one of my favorite pots.

I started with some decent knives - some with the Superstore house brand and some of the midrange Wusthof Tridents.. I bought a couple new knives last year - I went to Mac for a 6 and a half inch Santoku and a 10 inch chef's knife. The steel is superb - it stays sharp enough for ripe tomatoes with a few strokes of a chef's steel.

]]> When I started to bak, I bought a heavy Kitchen Aid stand mixer. It has enought power to knead bread, and power take-off to run some nifty accessories to shred cheese and carrots and little jobs like that.

I have a pressure cooker, which is a useful appliance. It is a good way to cook dried legumes, saving on the consumption of canned goods, and good for braising and steaming tougher produce. My first pressure cooker was a Lagostina and I wouldn't recommend them. They sell some lines of low-pressure devices which is annoying because a low pressure pot doesn't perform as the recipe books assume. They have some quality issues too, in my experience. I had a problem with the dual pressure fitting which were also the pressure release. I was not impressed. I bought a Presto which was cheaper and better for my goals.

I bought a small cheap Black and Decker rice cooker last fall and a bigger Cuisinart model this spring. It's handy because it delivers the right heat, and turns itself off. This saves playing with the heat on the stove elements and setting timers and watching the pot to make sure it doesn't boil over or cook too long.

When my dad went into the nursing home and gave away things from the house, I took his bread machine. I had been making bread, off and on, for a couple of years but found that making one loaf at a time was just too much effort, and making large recipes led to things going into the freezer - and then they just weren't as good. The machine machine puts out a fresh loaf that last for a couple of day - just about ideal for my needs.

I had a food processor but I never figured out what it was good for. I keep my knives sharp and I found that the machine overdid the onions or garlic - and was a huge mess to clean up, as opposed to watching a knife and a cutting board. Likewise, those slicing and shredding discs don't do anything that a knife or a grater or the attachment on the mixer won't do.

Paddling and Cycling - A Sea of Flowers

2009-08-01T19:00:00Z

This year I broke off with dragon-boating. It was initially a conflict with the manager of the Club program over a protocol and has become a longer break. Some paddlers paddle dragon boats every summer from May to August. I have enjoyed the evening practices and the frantic transformation of couch potatoes into weekend warriors, but I have let it go.

I paddled Outrigger canoes (OC) through the winter, one or twice a week. In the spring, I paddled in some spring races and some longer races. It has helped me to stay active but I have not trained enough to consider myself a fit or strong paddler. I had hoped to paddle more this summer but many paddlers give up OC for dragon boat or to take canoe or kayak trips. There are a few diehards so we have been getting out about once a week. Dragon boat is winding up and there are going to be some races this fall, so I might get on a team and get into some tougher training.

I have been cycling more this year than last year. I haven't done many evening rides, but I have been getting some long rides in on weekends. I have had some work done on one of my bikes. I had upgraded some components on the Giant in 2004 but made the serious mistake of putting on 175 mm cranks. This may have been contributing to strain on joints, pain and fatigue. It may play a part in the stiffness in my right hip. We will see.

Age and Illness - A Sea of Flowers

2009-07-01T19:15:00Z

In December last year I agreed to travel to Winnipeg to accompany my dad to the hospital for his surgery for hernia. He had the operation in January. It disrupted his routine of visiting mother in the nursing home for a few days, but he was back at it. He realized that his needs to visit and be with her had been putting a strain on his family - specifically my sisters, who had been picking him or taking him home. He agreed to apply to be placed in a nursing home - on strict condition that it would be the same home as mother. He was surprised when his application was approved quickly. He had been underestimating his frailties.

He moved when a room became available. He is on the same floor in a different wing. He visits mother and tries to anticipate her needs and wants, and to provide care that the staff can't provide. This tires him out, because his ideas of what she needs and deserves are not the same as everyone else's, and he reacts to her smallest gestures. As her behavior is impulsive, this can be frustrating for him.

He says he is happy. He is busy with his efforts to help mother. He turned 80 in June. I visited at the end of June.

2008 is over, Hallelujah - A Sea of Flowers

2009-01-01T09:00:00Z

My story about my musical year starts with a short term obsession about a song.

The CBC broadcast a story about the popularity of Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah in Britain on the National (TV news) on the Friday night before Christmas. The CBC was interested because the writer was a Canadian. The story was that two different versions of the song were topping the British charts in the week before Christmas. For the last few years, some kind of Christmas themed piece has topped the charts. There is no Christmas list as such, and the charts continue to track the popularity of modern popular music in Britain, on sales.

]]> The only connection between Hallelujah and Christmas is that the word is used in Christian prayers and songs, including a few traditional Christmas songs and hymns. There is a Hallelujah Chorus in Handel's Messiah, which has become a Christmas concert favorite for choral performances. The oratorio is more of an Easter piece, and the Hallelujah chorus alludes to passages in the Apocalypse (Revelations as English speaking Protestants call it) rather than to King David, King Solomon, or Samson and Delilah. I found one artist, Allison Crowe, who had recorded the song on a Christmas album.

I listened to clips of the Alexandra Burke version that topped the British charts. I listened to several versions, including Cohen's and Crowe's. Wikipedia has a clip of a cover by John Cale. I found a cover - vaguely techo - by Bono on a Cohen tribute album. I thought Allison Crowe did well, but Jeff Buckley's version was better, perhaps the best. That young man was a great performer. Jeff Buckley understood what Cohen was writing about when he said that the song was dedicated to the orgasm, which one of the few things that provokes serious (as opposed to profane and vulgar) religious exclamations, and the closest thing to mystical ecstasy that people can credibly claim to have had.

Cohen sings the song as a song of memory and regret, sung by lovers who have exhausted the physical potential of their relationship without finding a way to stay in love. When Cohen sings it, you can smell the Scotch and cigarettes, and visualize the books by Camus and Sartre on the bedside table. Cohen celebrates and preserves the memory of the sexual relationship within the context of rationalizing the fact that the emotional intensity of relationship has changed, and that the ecstasy was temporary.

I heard a Victoria group, the Gruff, sing their cover at Spinnaker's Brewpub last spring, and then a few more times at other venues in Victoria and at the Mission Folk Festival in July. For some reason, their version is less worldly and more optimistic and anticipatory.

My year in music was pretty quiet. I listened to Cohen, and some performers who covered him including Jeff Buckley. I bought some old classic Fairport Convention. The high point of my year was travelling to Vancouver to hear the Oysterband at St. James Hall - the Rogue Folk Club's principal venue . They were touring to promote their newest album. Their concert was amazing, and the new album is pretty good.

I wasn't happy about the Vancouver Island Festival in Comox-Courtenay this year. It was hot, and the camping is crowded, leaving the hardy party folk drinking and carousing amid the families and people trying to sleep. I recall a couple of good workshops about calypso and Indian music, but the festival was disappointing. Michael Wrycraft was one of the hosts on the main stage. He was trying to pay a tribute to the great musician Oliver Schroer, who had died a few days earlier. The crowd was indifferent, which struck me as very sad. Folk fans like to fancy themselves as true patrons of the arts, bonded with the artists by love of the genre, but they are just fussy consumers. They know what they like, and they like what they have been groomed to listen to. The best that I can say about them is that they have stretched their tastes beyond mass culture to be listening to folk at all. I will stay away from negativity.

The Mission Folk Festival was small, quiet and well programmed. I enjoyed the Gruff, and Moira Smiley and Voco, Rani Arbo and Daisy Mayhem, and Nathan Rogers. I have caught Rogers at different stages in his career. His stage manner is respectful but a little manic. He performs fine covers of his father's songs - some imitative of the canonical performances, others innovative. He has experimented with a song with throat singing. He caught me with a good cover of Into White, a song by Cat Stevens. I could have done without the all the extra stage time lavished on a Tibetan singing nun.

Over the rest of the year, I began to listen to Billy Bragg more carefully. I also have appreciated Richard Shindell, Richard Thompson, Joan Osborne. I went to Sheryl Crow's concert at the Memorial Arena in Victoria with some of my friends from my Dragon Boat team. I know most of the songs, the production overwhelmed the music, and I realized that I didn't have a clue about the way women from 15 to 50 felt about her songs.

I have been tending to read with the TV on, tuned to news, or soccer, or a bad movie, and not listening to music. That has started to change. So ends the year.

End of Summer - A Sea of Flowers

2008-08-21T14:06:39Z

The milestones of life ...

]]> My mother stayed in hospital from last October to June 2008. After health care advocacy by my sisters, a surgeon assessed the prolapse and performed a procedure that retracted it. This removed a health risk, and gave her better control of bowel function. In June, we were offered a care home placement at Calvary Place. The call came the day I arrived in Winnipeg for a holiday. Dad was anxious about the decision, but made it. The change has allowed more appropriate care, without the noise and distractions of a hospital ward. Dad visits daily. My brothers, sisters and their spouses are heroic in supporting his visits. Dad has multiple health issues. He has given up driving, which restricts his self-sufficiency but keeps him safer.

Jan has become my ex-wife. After a prolonged exercise in living a delicious life by imagining a career in alternative employment, she got a job. She had a web site at http://www.abundanceofchoice.net/home/ last year but its gone. Her name shows up in a blog post on a site about self-help and inspirational books about persistence and wishful thinking to attract wealth, friends and happiness. She finally got a real job - accepting some adversity in her life. She signed a separation agreement in May and applied for a divorce judgment which was signed by a judge on August 11, 2008.

Claire graduated with the Gold medal in her Honours program at the University of Winnipeg. She has just moved to Toronto to start her MA program in Social Anthropology at York University, and she has a SSHRC scholarship to start. She visited Victoria in June. I learned that she had been doing some wall climbing and still likes to climb trees, and that she was experimenting with a low maintenance hair style.

David is in Halifax. We are friends on Facebook. He updates intermittently. He is working steadily, but may be frustrated with many of the routines of his working life. He likes to party and be with his friends.

I have put on some weight over the winter. I have not been cycling as much as I thought when I moved here, and Victoria has brew pubs and micro-breweries, so there a lot of yummy beer within easy reach I am going to have to work out regularly, work out those anxieties with exercise instead of beer, wine, snacks and books.

My dragon boat team reorganized itself and carried on this year. We had three racing festivals in Victoria this year. Some of us are going to a festival in Portland in September - which pushed me to finally get a passport. My teammates have caught me in pictures where I am looking tanned and drunk or relaxed.

Toshiba Satellite A200 without Vista - A Sea of Flowers

2008-05-19T13:33:01Z

Over the last 6 weeks I spent more time than I want to think about trying to get a new Satellite (Model A200, or A200-03V, specifically PSAE3C-03V08C) to run an alternative OS to its pre-installed Windows Vista. The laptop was attractively priced, perhaps because it was pre-loaded with Vista, as much as the fact that it was being cleared out for newer models. I think these models were engineered for XP and thrown on to the market with Vista drivers when Microsoft terminated its OEM licencing for XP installations, forcing computer manufactures to pre-install Vista.

Given the resources of the system - processor and memory - it falls short of what it seems to take to run Vista, and running Vista has other drawbacks.I wasn't sure about changing to XP although that is the route I took in the end. One problem, for me and many users is having to buy XP off the shelf. There is a cost factor, and even if I had owned a valid working copy of XP, I needed to get working drivers for the hardware in the Satellite to complement the install set and complete the installation. Another potential problem is losing the recovery functions that Toshiba builds in with its HDD Recovery Utility.

]]> My first move was to run the HDD Utility "make Toshiba Recovery Discs" from Vista. The recovery files - a complete disc image of the hard disc, with Vista, out of the box, are on the hard drive. This allows restoration after many kinds of screw-ups and failures, but but not useful for hard drive failures and partition errors. So I burned the recovery discs and I made sure not to touch the hidden partition at the beginning of the drive.

I tried out a few things in Vista, enough to convince me that it started slow and that its security advantage seems to consist of asking the user to manually reapprove things the user has already started. Configfee (a Toshiba program for networking) ran slowly under Vista (I decided later this extra did not add to Windows networking anyway).

I installed Ubuntu Linux at Gutsy Gibbon (7.10). This required me to give up an existing primary partition and resize partitions. I was able to give up the partition that had held the Toshiba restore image and installation files (NB - the image I had burned to DVD, not the hidden partitions that have the restore system). I upgraded Ubuntu to Hardy a couple weeks later.

I discovered that Ubuntu (or any other Linux) has problems with some devices, and some good solutions. The Satellite has built in Wireless card that uses Atheros 5007EG. The Atheros hardware drivers down run this card under Linux. There are two Linux work arounds, ndiswrapper and MadWifi. I used the latter. That seemed to work, although between the Gnome network utility and MadWifi, the graphic display didn't give the signal strength for detected WiFi signals accurately. The network connections were good. The Gnome Network manager displayed information about wired or wireless connections and supported changing connections from wired to wireless or back. Samba supported reading Windows shared files over a network.

I had problems with getting all the things necessary to make the browser and browser plugins work - finding the right packages for standard addons like Acrobat Flash, Acrobat Reader, and multimedia streaming audio and video. I was able to find and install all the packages and get the right settings. I think the Linux world is keeping up, but there are gaps between the introduction of a new codec or player in the market and getting these changes into Linux. This part is handled well by Mozilla in the brower, but it depends on some of the media too and MPlayer, Totem and the rest are not handling all the Real Time and WMP streams.

However, the lack of device drivers is major limitation on Linux. The hardware manufacturers don't have them. So, in a situation in which I might connect to a network with a printer, could I print? Would I need to get Internet access to find a package, if any, with more printer drivers?

My reservations about Linux were reinforced when I tried to get updates and found that the update manager and the synaptic package manager were dependent on gksu which appeared to have problems with some hardware. At that point I gave up. I don't want to have to install a few dozen new packages a week, and I don't want to keep having to engineer routes around problems that Windows users don't have.

I ran into immediate problems when I removed the Linux GRUB bootloader. I was able to get around this by running the Toshiba Recovery disc. Time consuming but it got me back to square one. I probably could have fixed the boot manager another way and then run a partition utility but I didn't try that.

My next move was to install XP in a dual boot situation. This introduced me to the problems of an XP installation on a Vista system. The first basic problem is that the XP installation disc does not recognize a hard drive on a Satellite A200. The XP installation disc needs to load a driver. The missing driver for this Toshiba model and series is the Intel Matrix driver. There are two ways of supplying the driver. One is to download it to a floppy. This means having, borrowing or buying a USB floppy, and having it plugged into a USB port on the Satellite on boot, hitting F6 when prompted, and then loading the driver from the floppy during the XP installation. This is the method I used. I found the driver on the Canadian Toshiba downloads site. It is available on Toshiba's Euro site too. The other method (also see here) involves slipstreaming the driver into a custom XP install disc using NLite to assemble an image and burning a custom install disc. Interesting, but this involved learning to build the image and use it properly.

After that, things went smoothly. I followed some good advice from the Web about naming the drives and installing a Vista dual boot manager. I also followed advice about getting XP drivers and the XP version of Toshiba utilities from Toshiba, and running them in a particular order. One issue noted in a few forums is that the sound driver should be loaded at the end. It all worked. I made a point, having downloaded and decompressed all the files, of burning them to a CD in case of problems.

Things moved sideways when I was preparing to save a new backup image. I was going to defrag the C: drive (Vista) after removing a ton of junk (60 day trial MS Office). The system appeared to go to sleep during the defrag and I powered it off. I had lost data in the master boot record and the C: drive.

I reconsidered my plans. The dual boot system involved an extra step on start up, slowing down the XP start. I wasn't planning to use Vista that much - and I had the ultimate option of restoring it from DVD if I ever wanted to "upgrade". And, as I had discovered, this configuration was vulnerable to various changes.

I formatted over the Vista and XP partitions. I installed XP to the C: drive, using the USB floppy to supply the missing driver. I got XP running, then loaded all the Toshiba XP drivers. I had a new problem. I couldn't get the Ethernet card (it is a motherboard or internal Realtek card) to run. XP device manager reported I had installed the driver, but the LED wasn't lighting and XP Network connections said the device was not plugged to a network. I fixed that after installing the Toshiba hardware controls (Toshiba Hardware Settings changes device settings. I ran it and made sure the setting for internal Ethernet card was "on", rebooted, reinstalled the Ethernet card driver, and it was all good.

After that I had wired and wireless networking, video, sound etc. Toshiba doesn't supply the free Nero burning utility, like other manufacturers. It has its own Disc Creator which appears to have a good interface and to run well.

It seems that Toshiba Canada and Europe are providing resources that supporting the move to XP for these systems. Toshiba isn't completely friendly to XP conversions. There are some utilities or programs available only in Vista for the Windows Media Center. Since there was no DVD player for XP I downloaded the Toshiba "Vista only" DVD player - which seems to run under XP.

Toshiba has a Bios upgrade for this model running for XP. I haven't run that yet.

MT 4.1 - A Sea of Flowers

2008-05-19T13:16:06Z

Back in January, I ran the upgrade to Movable Type 4.1. The developers made a number of moves to make MT more attractive to personal users including changes to let personal users migrate from Word Press and to port Word Press Styles to MT. The management of pictures and content has become easier with the ability to upload and manage "assets" and then use the assets in the blog.

I haven't used it much. I have been busy at work, and spent more my personal time reading and pursuing other things.

Ribbons are Nice - A Sea of Flowers

2008-04-04T13:03:50Z

Jennie Bristow, reviewing Sarah Moore's Ribbon Culture for Spiked, nails the self-obsessed culture of advertising one's moral quality by fashion accessories. Her review is called Untying the 'ribbon culture'. The moral virtue of wearing ribbons is to show awareness or solidarity with a group of victims. Being a victim has become a way of attracting attention, building political support, explaining the lack of joy in one's life, and selling media product. Cry, cry, cry. Frank Furedi's column about faked victim memoirs, History-as-Therapy, complements the ribbon piece.

Corn is not a Vegetable - A Sea of Flowers

2008-02-27T15:14:18Z

Reuters Science News has a new story today reporting that the genome of maize has been sequenced, which reminds me that corn is a grain. It is a starchy carbohydrate. Like rice and wheat it could be cultivated to produce an abundant harvest that would feed villages and cities. It was a miracle food. It has been developed into a fertile, abundant and cheap, food resource. This has presented a business dilemma and challenge for farmers, food processors, distillers, and business people. How much corn can people be led to purchase and consume?

It turns up as an ingredient in processed goods. Michael Pollan provides an interesting and informative explanation of modern corn, corn farming and industrial food processing in The Omnivore's Dilemna.

In the grocery store, it is presented identifiably in ground corn flour (grits, meal, polenta), as the main ingredient in corn chips, and as a fresh, frozen or canned product. In its raw forms, it is a nutritious and tasty item. It is a starchy grain, though, not a vegetable. Corn chips are fried or baked flat breads or croutons, made of starch and fat, just like potato chips.

A meal of meat, potatoes or rice, and corn, has protein and two kinds of carbs. I was looking at the labels on the (Green Giant) frozen foods in my freezer. Corn has over 150 calories in a 3/4 cup serving. Peas have about 90 calories for that size serving. Beans have about 35 calories. Mixed vegetables with corn, peas, beans and carrots are marked at about 70 calories.

I like corn. I plan to keep using corn as a occasional treat - corn on the cob is wonderful. I think it is a staple, but I have to think of it as a starch course like bread, pasta, potatoes and rice.

In Defence of Food - A Sea of Flowers

2008-01-30T02:35:48Z

In Defence of Food: An Eater's Manifesto has received favourable reviews in the LA Times and the Sunday Times (of London), and is a bestseller at this point in time.

Michael Pollan is an experienced journalist and writer. He reviews a fair amount of history and science in a short book. He tries to talk about food from a common sense perspective. He is cautious about food science, which is often bad science. He is skeptical about anything the food industry, nutritionists and journalists say about food. All too often, claims about food are made to sell new kinds of processed foods, or to sell books, diet plans, supplements and fads.

His advice for eating well, to avoid malnutrition and obesity is: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." His idea of food is something pretty close to the original plant or animal - fresh, dried, frozen - cooked at home, not processed at a factory. Don't buy or eat processed and packaged things that claim to produce health benefits or weight loss. If you want to avoid obesity, eat less.

Pollan is an advocate of a natural diet, organic produce and Slow Food. He described the Western diet as a disaster, and cites the studies of people who return to a traditional diet from a Western diet. He says that there are many traditional diets incorporating indigenous resources and cultural traditions - and all of them are healthier than the Western diet, which manages to produce malnutrition and obesity at the same time.

]]> Many of the themes of In Defence of Foods were developed in his previous book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. In Defence of Food summarizes those themes and adds a discussion of the research into traditional diets - many of which are high in fats - and why people who stick to those diets don't have the same problems with obsesity, diabetes and heart disease as people who eat a high-carb Western diet.

His main criticisms of the Western diet are that it is based on a handful of plants and animals raised under industrial conditions, heavily processed, mixed with chemicals that are not food, and served in gargantuan portions. He suggests that refined white flour, processed in mills with steel rollers is probably the first true fast food. It was the first food processed to the point that vitamins have been added back in to avoid contributing to vitamin deficiency diseases.

Throughout the book, he flirts with the French paradox. The French diet, like the Italian diet features wheat flour, carbs, meat, fat, sugar and alcohol, but it doesn't seem to produce as much heart disease or other health problems. The French eat small portions at long meals, and to some degree they invest in diverse fresh ingredients.

The problem with food in America is that it is cheap, and served in large portions. North Americans don't know when they are full or when to stop. The food processing industry has succeeded in securing a supply of cheap ingredients - partly because of government agricultural subsidies, and it sells lots, cheap, with the full force of modern marketing. Medicine, science and journalism don't provide eaters with valid information, because science is too fond of trying to refine the idea of food into the idea of essential ingredients. The problem is that the science never gets it right. Science has not identified all the key nutrients and the idea of adding vitamins back in to make food healthy is, in his view, ridiculous. It isn't completely ridiculous, but he makes a very good point about the marketing of processed food on the basis of health claims. Food should be nutritious - nutrition shouldn't have to be a marketing point.

The history of food science has been blotted by disasters. Margerine was marketed as a healthy alternative to butter - it has been easier and cheaper to make, but the hydrogenation of vegetable oils has produced a toxic chemical. There is a long history of processed baby foods that prove to be nutritionally deficient. Nothing has come close to mother's milk.

He doesn't think that buying fresh food is the answer, because the food industry has already colonized the production of fresh produce. Intensive production and specialized fertilizers grow large vegetables full of water and fertilizer. I was a little surprized - I thought that the people who said that fresh produce was lacking in nutrients were trying to sell vitamin supplements, but it turns out that there is something to that claim. He doesn't push vitamin supplements though - he suggests finding organic vegetables grown in healthy soil, and he encourages home gardening.

In large part, he encourages investing more money in good real food, more effort in cooking it, and more time enjoying it, eaten slowly, in the company of family and friends, and savored.

My main criticism of the book is that his recommendations are aimed at affluent Westerners who can afford to purchase organic produce. He ignores the green revolution - the genetic programs that produced healthy high yield grains and other scientific advances, in favour of a rather Arcadian view of life. He does, in the end, align himself with the organic food snobs, as Rob Lyons's review in Spiked agrees. But he makes a lot of sense.

Yummy - A Sea of Flowers

2007-12-28T04:00:00Z

The National Post has been publishing a series of articles titled "Beyond Belief". A piece by Charles Lewis or Charlie Lewis (not the Charles Lewis of 60 Minutes and the Center for Public Integrity) titled "The Trouble with Mary", featured at AL Daily, discussed the psychology and semantics of "belief" and "faith". Lewis found a psychologist who was said that faith in miracles and faith in the future are equally valid because they are equivalent subjective events. He found some theologians and Churchmen to explain the meaningfulness of belief in miracles. This was good journalism. Religion is a hard topic for the news industry to configure as marketable news. The political and criminal acts of people who belong to a religious group are news but their inner lives, including their beliefs, are beyond description in a news story. The philosophical rationalizations for religious belief are like book reviews - the justifications offered for people's likes and tastes are usually meaningless outside the circle of people who care about those things.

]]> The title of the story was clever. It was an obvious play on the title of the movie "There's Something about Mary", a satirical comedy of manners about sexual obsession and narcissism in modern romance. In the movie, Mary (Cameron Diaz), was an innocent and an idealist, although it may be more accurate to say that she was gullible and vapid. She had values relating to her own sexuality, dignity, honour and the good life, but her ideas of sexual purity were more Mary Magdalene than Mary Mother of God.

The discussions with conservative Protestant theologians were funny too. They were offering biblical excuses for ignoring the mother of Christ and the doctrine of the Virgin birth in modern sermons and religious discourse - it's not biblical enough, it's too RC. The quote from the liberal Episcopalian writer John Shelby Spong that "the story around Mary was a pure construct of a patriarchal Church that wanted to keep women passive and pure" is simplistic and historically wrong, but probably closer to the modern social truth. I think the story has lost its resonance, and that modern men and woman will not stay around a church that can't get down to the business of affirming their identify, life-style and beliefs. Liberal Christianity affirms modern liberal beliefs. Conservative Christianity affirms modern conservative beliefs. The difference between liberal and conservative on feminist issues, is not that significant. Women do not learn about how to live as women by reading the bible or the catechism, and they don't consciously model their lives on those stories - although some say they do.

The Virgin Mary was a powerful cultural symbol. It mythically separated the role of women as the objects of male sexual desire from fertility and motherhood. It celebrated the importance of fertile women for their fertility and for their social importance as mothers. It made femininity mysterious and powerful, in much the same way as the Goddess stories favoured by Wiccans and assorted New Age feminists. It gave women a degree of contol over sex and fertility, within the structures of societies in which sex usually led to pregnancy and dependency. It privileged women to require men to submit to many of their needs. And the virginity bit was, after all, as story about one woman. Nobody expected other women to permanently abstain from sex and motherhood.

The symbol has evolved. Wiccans and the New Age have embraced the Goddess, and for the rest of us, the modern ideal of fertile femininity is the Yummy Mummy, delightfully portrayed by Lizzy Ratner in the New York Observer, Epater le Bebe. Baby? Sure, everyone is having them. The Yummy Mummy not necessarily a MILF. The Yummy Mummy is focussed on her role as parent, but her sense of poise and self-possession is dependent on being able to present herself as having it all - looks, sexuality, security, competence - as well as being a devoted and loving parent. The Yummy Mummy's sinister counterpart is the preening celebrity mother, captured by Judith Newman Moms gone Wild: Fame & Scandal in Vanity Fair.

Spinning the Golden Compass - A Sea of Flowers

2007-12-14T16:00:00Z

The Golden Compass has been criticized for its negative presentation of organized religion. Its principal critic its the American Catholic League, a conservative body that speaks for conservative and traditional elements in the Catholic Church in America. The League says that the movie, like the books, promotes atheism, but their grievance appears to me to is that Pullman presents the history and traditions of Catholicism in a negative way. The criticism is a defensive reaction to Pullman's presentation of the belief system and power structure of the Church as repressive, exploitative, manipulative, cynical, and dishonest. The League's campaign brings to mind its reaction to Kevin Smith's Dogma. It is incongruous for parents to take their children to this movie on Saturday, and then make them to Church and Sunday school. If you believe the Church is benevolent, why challenge your child or pay someone to insult your belief?

The shoe was on the other foot when the Christian churches in America were promoting the movie version of C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories and defending Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

The challenge for self-professed faithful Christians is whether to deny their kids the experience of consuming the latest must-see fantasy product from the movie industry in the hope of consolidating their belief in the conservative Christian version of reality. It seems to me that parents who think they are insulating their children from secular ideology and popular culture by not taking them to one particular semi-animated fantasy film based on a coming of age novel are a little confused.

]]> That's not to say that a child will not come away from a movie with memories, impressions and ideas. The point of art and literature is to create a convincing illusion. People know that the stories are made up, but they identify with the characters, track the story, and try to find the meaning . We trust part of what we have read, seen and heard in fiction as a description of places and events framing the lives of fictional characters. Our judgments of truth in matters of geography and history are often bad. People who have seen movies are not inclined to verify the facts or to examine their response to the movie. This which leave children and adults walking away from movies with impressions and ideas that will influence their future choices.

Adults have more power to tune out things we don't want to think about as noted in an interesting piece by Cass Sunstein in the Chronicle of Higher Education - The Polarization of Extremes. Adults have a greater ability to rationalize and reconcile tastes, likes and beliefs. If someone likes the movie or the movie's presentation of personal identity, autonomy and destiny, and likes the idea of being a Christian, she can easily reconcile those two tastes and attitudes. Donna Freitas, an academic theologian worked it out in God in the Dust, a piece published in the Boston Globe. Her accommodation will not please conservative Christians, but it is no more improbable than the accommodations conservative Christians make between work and life in a modern economy based on science and technology, and identity as believers in a religion invented by Iron Age peasants, refined by feudal oligarchs, hammered by capitalism, and sold by modern marketing.

Children may have a harder time in processing the large images and symbols in a movie than adults, but adults are inclined to overestimate our capabilities and intelligence.

It has been a season for atheists in the publishing industry, with Dawkins, Harris, Dennett and Hitchens holding forth on the intellectual failings of religious ideas and the social failings of people who tie up their actions to religious belief. These books haven't added much to the arguments against the existence in God or the arguments in favor of attempting to live by the principles of Science, Reason and Humanism. In spite of the fervour and passion of some of the writers, Humanism, Evolution, Meme and selfish genes are simply not emotionally fulfilling, and therefore cannot displace religion as a social reality, as Theordore Dalrymple, writing in City Magazine - "What the New Atheists Don't See" - John Cornwell, writing in the Times - Book reviews - and Jaron Lanier, writing in Discover Magazine - "Peace through God" - have pointed out.

The Catholic League wants to solidify religion - its religion - in dangerous age. It's an interesting project. It seems to me that religion itself doesn't need any help, because people are going to be religious and crazy on their own. On the other hand, the collective interests of any particular gang of apes always have to be protected.

In the end, I think that avoiding the anti-Christian message of one particular movie is like trying to avoid getting wet in an ocean of emotional and intellectual content - education, media, art, entertainment and culture.

Old Age - A Sea of Flowers

2007-11-04T02:00:00Z

My parents are getting old, and old age is not pretty.

My mother has had Alzheimer disease or another form of progressive denile dementia for about 5 or 6 years, although it took some time for her physician to learn all the symptoms - my mother thought that it was in her interest to minimize her symptoms. She has been a mistress of denial, and my father was a co-dependent in her efforts to resist interventions.

I visited Winnipeg from October 3 to October 12. My father was tired, my sisters were concerned. Her needs were beyond my father's capability and have been for some time. My father has tried to enjoy the good moments, and has been concerned that if her demented behavior was admitted, she would have to be monitored closely and sedated and restrained. He has kept home care out and aided her in her efforts to fool the people who might arrange for care - under conditions that he does not think are good enough. His judgments have been loving, but risky.

The week after I returned, my sisters realized that her complaints about some bowel trouble were serious and had her admitted to hospital. She had developed a rectal prolapse. The prolapse itself is apparently inoperable. Over the first few days of November, my father thought another doctor thought that there might be partial blockage of the lower large intestine, which has been causing the straining that causes the prolapse. This presented the possibility of surgery for the blockage and some relief for the prolapse. The idea that she might have surgery has energized my father. He hopes she might come home. He accepted the idea that they might accept some home care though. [Updated - Nov. 10/07. My father misunderstood the medical information. The hospital had ordered a colonoscopy to assess the damage, not to look for blockages. There was no prospect of any relief of the prolapse].

My mother also had pneumonia when she went to hospital. She has had asthma for decades and she has become accustomed to using an inhaler when she is short of breath. She gets short of breath when she is anxious, then used the puffer. This accelerates her heart, which make her anxious, which lead to more use of the puffer - especially since she doesn't remember she has been using it or realize that she is overdosing. The hospital has tried to restrict her use of the puffer. My father apparently gives it to her when the nurses are not around to relieve her distress.

The prolapse cannot be managed by an Alzheimer patient who doesn't remember why she is in pain. She has been in hospital, and can't go home again. She is calm most of the time, but becomes agitated and wants to go home. My father is full of anxiety. Over the last few weeks he has been occupied with worrying about my mother. My sisters and sister in law have been working hard to arrange transportation to the hospital and get meals delivered to him at the hospital, and to take care of him during this stage.

My sisters and brothers are doing their best to help him make the decisions that will let him know that she is getting care, and to let go of the idea that he can protect her independence. We can hope for decency, dignity and respect.

[Updated Sat. Nov. 10/07. On Friday (Nov. 9), my father agreed to sign the forms to admit my mother to a nursing home and to get some home care services for himself, to let him stay at home before his own health deteriorates further].