Culinary cowboy fails to impress
What’s worse than eating veal?
Eating cuddly puppies raised on veal, perhaps?
A small bowl of ginger-grapefruit sorbet is brought to each of us as a palate-cleanser, and then in turn a plate of four meat medallions atop a port reduction with a streak of saffron-parsnip purée to the side. The meat in question? Our comely hostess enlightens us with a warm and knowing countenance: “Tenderloin of Bichon Frise, medium rare.” I have to say, the flesh of this best friend of man is extraordinarily soft and savory, and though I loathe using the cliché, it literally melts in my mouth.
Apparently, this toy breed is favored over other breeds for rather practical reasons. Its lap-dog affability toward humans renders it easy to raise and ultimately to butcher, and the fact that Bichons are small and do not shed their fur also appeals to those who will eventually harvest them for consumption. The diminutive animal is plumped up on cream and chunks of veal for seven months, then slaughtered while still a puppy to ensure its flavor and tenderness. The taboo we Westerners have regarding the consumption of canines aside, I now understand why dog flesh is regarded so highly to this day in many Asian cultures. Like some odd cross between pork and beef, there’s nothing quite like it. Can’t think of a lovelier way to celebrate the Chinese Year of the Dog.
I hate to think how he celebrated the International Year of the Homeless.
Actually, the puppy dish is pretty mild compared to the chimpanzees, rhinos and hippos that Chef Yamamoto from Arizona likes to serve up. When he’s not listing the endangered species on his menu, he’s listing the celebrities who have come to his oh-so-private, oh-so-exclusive, oh-so-tittilatingly-illegal functions. Something tells me that Yamamoto’s appeal has nothing to do with the way the food tastes. Read the whole review if you have a strong stomach - if the ickiness of the meals doesn’t get you, the arrogantly destructive wankery surely will.
Via megnut.
Blogging Backwards
That last post references an older post that I’m sure that I wrote, but I had a search and couldn’t find it. In the process of scratching my head, though, I wondered whether some old posts that I originally published with Blogger might be still gathering dust on the interwebs somewhere. It took a catalogue of my old passwords to access it, but sure enough, there it all was, six months of posts from when I first arrived in Melbourne, which could qualify as my first attempts at blogging. (I was actually publishing stuff before that, when I was overseas, but I was hand-coding it and uploading it via FTP from dodgy internet cafes, the more godforsaken the better. It was blog-like, but it lacked a lot of the recognisable characteristics of what we have come to call blogging.) The bad news is that I coudln’t find the post I was looking for, but the good news is that WordPress 2.0 has a delightfully easy mechanism for importing Blogger posts, so I figured what the hey. So my archive list is a bit longer, albeit no more contiguous.
Zero tolerance
Anti-drink-driving groups have reacted with shock to revelations that Victorian drivers are given a 20 per cent leeway on initial blood-alcohol tests.
What the Age article doesn’t mention, and what the television news did, is that the “tolerance” is actually just allowing for the margin of error in the testing equipment. The article says that the tolerance is “needed to prevent challenges to blood alcohol readings in court”, without pointing out that there might be a very good reason why a court challenge might succeed. There’s also no mention of the fact that, without the margin of error being taken into account, innocent people would certainly end up being prosecuted.
Donald Cameron from People Against Drink Driving believes that there should be a .02% blood alcohol limit. That’s fine, if there’s good science to support it. But that has nothing to do with the need to allow for the accuracy level of the testing equipment. Allowing this 20% “tolerance” above .05 is not the same thing as raising the limit by 20%, as much of the commentary has implied. If the gear’s only accurate to +/- 20%, then a measurement of .0625 can actually be read as “somewhere between .05 and .075″. Someone reading just under might actually be just over, and someone reading just over might be well over, but it’s quite reasonable to expect that a successful prosecution would require certainty.
Apparently the secondary test has a margin of 10%. According to Mr Cameron, “it adds up to 30 per cent (tolerance) if you add the two (tests) together.” Umm, no. If your BAC is 20.01% over the limit, you can expect to be nailed by both tests. If it’s .01% over the limit, there’s still a chance that you’re going to get done, depending on the luck that you have with the vagaries of the meter. If we could get more accurate meters, then that would be tremendous.
What we do have, I guess, is blood tests, which I’d think would be pretty accurate. If my memory is right, a driver has the right to request a blood test if he fails the secondary breath test, but they’re not given as a matter of course. Maybe it would be better to rely on blood tests instead of breath tests to prosecute cases. The breath test would just be a basic screening mechanism, and it would mean that you’d be detaining quite a lot of drivers who would subsequently prove to be legal until they could have a blood test, but it would be a more consistent way of enforcing the law.
Then again, blood tests are pretty invasive as a compulsory measure. Maybe we’d be better off doing what Mr Cameron suggests, and just lowering the limit.
It’s odd, thinking about it, that this issue has presented (in the two or three media reports that I’ve seen so far) from the point of view of the anti-drink driving lobby. Reports on speed cameras, by contrast, always seem to take the side of the speeding motorists. I remember (in fact, I think I even blogged about it) a discussion about what would be a fair tolerance for police to apply to speed camera readings. After all, everyone speeds every now and then, and people shouldn’t be punished for these innocent little breaches. I haven’t heard anyone suggest, in relation to drink-driving, that we should allow for these little human failures. It’s always my view that the police should allow for the accuracy of speed cameras, just as they should for breath testers, but that there’s no other argument for leniency. If you’re a driver who is incapable of staying below the speed limit, then you shouldn’t be on the road. If you just can’t be bothered, then you have no-one to blame but yourself if you wind up with a fine.
John Q on advertising
Given the
public good properties of financing broadcast TV, it’s possible to make a second-best argument that this social arrangement improves welfare on balance (I still need to work through this one, but for me at least, the price is too high, and I hardly ever watch ad-inclusive TV).
Billboards, though, are an unmitigated bad. If we wanted to look at them, we would pay to go and see them as with movies and concerts. And given that we are selling our attention to advertisers on TV and radio, those who force billboards into our field of view are taking that attention without payment, just like telemarketers making reverse charges calls.
An immediate policy conclusion, the exact obverse of the one about TV viewers watching ads, is that users of billboard advertising should be required to pay everyone who goes past. Given the transactions costs of implementing this, they should be taxed at rates comparable to the advertising charges of TV stations.
Yes, or possibly more, because we have a choice about whether or not to watch TV, whereas viewing billboards is more or less compulsory.
In Australia, because the television advertising market is so dominated by the three commerical free-to-air networks, the possibility exists for product manufacturers to effectively buy their way into a monopoly position. The cost of TV advertising is high because the supply is so restricted, so any company with sufficient capital to afford a TV campaign can easily exclude any competitor who can’t front up similar amounts of cash. So TV advertising can be seen as a public bad, because it creates this barrier to entry and prevents marketplace diversity. In the case of supermarket products, the consumers are hit with a double whammy. Even if a manufacturer might otherwise be able to work its way around the TV oligopoly somehow, it is then faced with the Coles/Woolworths supermarket duopoly (the two chains between them account for 80c in every dollar spent on groceries in Australia). With some imagination and some innovative marketing techniques, it might be possible for a product to compete for public attention, particularly in niche markets, despite the lack of a television ad campaign. But if selling a product means being a preferred wholesaler to one of only two retail giants, then only the hardest-hitting mainstream promotion is going to cut the mustard, and that means television. Ben Bagdikian’s arguments about advertising and media monopoly seem to have a particularly sharp edge here - the two oligopolies function as adjacent slices of swiss cheese, and a competitor unable to melt his way through both through sheer spending power is unlikely to thread his way through a hole in each.
And you’re paying for it!
Sorry to sound like Today Tonight, but does this sound incredibly dodgy to you?
ANZ has just bought the right to be the sole provider of ATMs at Flinders Street, Flagstaff, Parliament and Richmond stations in Melbourne. “It’s probably the clearest indication of banks viewing this as a pretty lucrative source of revenue, the fact that they are willing to enter into these exclusive contracts to tap into a captive market,” Ms Wolthuizen said.
Isn’t there something not right about the (private) owners managers of a (previously public) railway station colluding with a bank to reduce the choice that is available to consumers, particularly when reduced choice is linked to increased price through the foreign ATM transaction fee ($1 per transaction). Once you slap on the extra cost that the “home” bank adds on at their end for no particular reason (another $1 in the case of Westpac, 50c from other banks), it means that a commuter who needs to visit the ATM before they buy a ticket will end up paying half as much or more for the privilege of withdrawing their money as they will pay for the ticket itself. Particularly in evening rush hour, the option of fighting your way back out of the station to visit a different ATM isn’t an attractive one. What’s the law on these sorts of exclusivity agreements? Would it be illegal for Coles to come to an agreement with the owners of a shopping centre to exclude Woolworths from opening a store in that space? It seems like this sort of anti-competitive conduct was the sort of thing the ACCC was created to prevent.
Money for Babies
WHEN politicians say they want to “help families”, it is difficult to object. After all, families are the single most important institution in the community, and when families fail it is the community that picks up the financial and social costs. The federal budget has further increased welfare to families with children and so far there appear to be few objections.
The fact that welfare is now being handed out to middle-class families who once upon a time would neither have wanted nor accepted such assistance has passed without much comment.
I think there’s a bit more to this cult of the family than John acknowledges. As I disclaimer, I guess I should point out that I’m one of those low income singles getting royally shafted by the emphasis on funding other people’s sprogs instead of things like public transport and communications infrastructure and a more generous tax-free threshold, things which seem to me a bit more worthwhile than propping up the share price of Osh Kosh b’Gosh. But I digress.
John seems to take the claimed justification for the baby benefits at face value, arguing that though the intentions might be good, the implementation is bad. Paying more money to poorer families and less to richer ones wll have more marginal benefit, and result in more babies in the long run (he doesn’t seem to question that this is a worthy state priority - I’m waiting to be convinced). What’s more, it’s a mistake to channel all your funds into those families that are actually having children, because by neglecting singles you’re impoverishing them to the point where they might pre-emptively opt out of conception. (Doesn’t that argument cut both ways, though? Maybe if things get bad enough for me, I’ll want to reproduce just to get my hands on some sweeet baby bonus action).
What fails to get a mention in John’s piece is the cultural and political dimension that underlies this avalanche of public money. Those middle class families are not just an field being sowed with today’s tax dollars in the hope that they will yield tomorrow’s taxpayers. They are also an attractive political constituency. You’ll notice that the terms “family” and “battlers” get linked together regularly by both sides of politics. Families, we are constantly told, are hurting, struggling, suffering. Petrol prices, interest rates, childcare places, blah blah blah. There’s Kim Beazley today rabitting on about the “double drop off”, for Chrissake, as if this is some big national issue. It’s not. It’s an issue for middle class outer suburbia - for a tasty bunch of marginal electorates, in other words. Those of us in the inner-city, and particularly particularly those of us on low incomes, are much more likely to be renting which insulates us somewhat against interest rate increases (especially if the landlord’s got the place paid off, which I’m pretty sure is the case with my place). We’re more likely to cycle or use public transport, or to drive smaller distances, so petrol’s not such a big deal. And we’re more likely to be childless. Oh, and we’re more likely to live in safe electorates. The rhetoric of “easing the squeeze on families”, then, belongs in the same basket as “keeping interest rates lower”, or, dare I say it “We will decide who comes to this country”. It’s not a question of good public policy, fairness, justice or preparedness for the future. It’s a question of getting to the large slice of Australians who are wealthy but consider themselves poor, who largely couldn’t give a fuck about politics and politicians, whose vote can be bought by a quarter of an interest rate basis point or the promise of a cheque to beat the baby home from hospital, and who, as a result of all those things and some fortuitous geographical clustering, enjoy such a monopoly over politicians’ attention that they more or less determine the nation’s political agenda. The babies themselves, it seems to me, are actually secondary.
How High Can You Try
I came across this selection of Game & Watch emulators. They’re incredibly realistic, right down to the pattern of scratches that used to appear on the casing after the thing had been kicked around the school playground for half a semester. They were extremely portable, relatively cheap (ranking some orders of magnitude below today’s PSP in terms of Razz Purchasing Parity), tough as nails, and a pair of watch batteries would last for months on end (even if the liquid crystals would become a tad equivocal towards the end of the battery life). There was something about the self-contained design, each game having its own unique graphics on the cover and preprinted on the screen itself, and its own unique layout of buttons, which gave each of these games its own identity, as distinct from the generic GameBoy with interchangeable cartridges. The LCD graphics were primitive but much more visually pleasing than the 8-bit video graphics which were current on the Atari consoles of the time. It’s odd to think, when modern-day gamers spend hours and fortunes cooling their CPUs with liquid nitrogen in order to achieve the next level of immersion, that I could once have spent a solid six hours (home sick from school) reaching oneness with Turtle Bridge, a game where the player has two buttons with which to manipulate his character into one of seven possible positions.
I did not play until I won. I played until I could not lose. It was the pinnacle of a computer gaming career which barely outlived the Game & Watch itself. Sure, my sister went on to get Donkey Kong, the Rolls Royce of Game & Watches with its double-screened opulence and unprecedentedly complex gameplay. But a part of me will always be sitting in that slightly overheated loungeroom, choking back phlegm and seeing fundamental truths revealed in patterns of incrementally ascending fish.
Tangents and heatwaves
A decade-and-a-bit after I started using the internet, the novelty of being able to find the information that I’m looking for quickly has started to wear off a bit. When I decided to start poaching eggs, and found that my first attempt resulted in cirrus clouds of white proteins floating freely through the boiling water, completely independent of their grey-looking partially-collapsed yolks and defying all attempts at being consolidated onto a piece of toast, it was only natural that the internet should provide the answers (vinegar, salt, and less heat, in that order). When, as a follow-up to a discussion with a friend, I wanted to find out which Edwinas had been involved in affairs with heads of state, a few clicks sufficed (Mountbatten and Currie, although the latter a few years before John Major ascended to the Prime Ministership).
What still strikes me, though, and what is perhaps more unique to the internet (after all, it was always possible to find out stuff that you were interested in if you were sufficiently interested to wander into a library), are the bits of information that jump out of nowhere when you’re not looking.
For example, one minute I’m having my weekly chuckle at Ms Fits’ agony aunt column, and up pops a letter from Anonymous:
I met a boy online, he seemed nice, reasonably sane and a bit cute. We met in person, we got drunk, we rooted out little minds out.
Next morning he tells me he’s been involved in Ananda Marga, I can’t hide the slightly shocked look on my face and he proceeds to defend them (albeit without mentioning the Hilton bombing).
“Ananda Marga”, thinks I, “what the bloody hell’s that, and what does it have to do with the Hilton bombing?” A couple of Wikipedia articles later, I have some kind of answers to those questions (a possibly-Hindu sect of nutters from India, and quite probably not much, respectively), and I’m clicking in a ghoulishly interested way on a link to a list of disasters in Australia by death toll.
Where I find, nestled amongst cyclones and rail disasters and massacres of Aborigines, that the startling number of 2166 people (I was suprised enough to count them) have died in heatwaves in Australia since the 437 who sweated off their mortal coils in 1895. It is not recorded how many of the victims died of apoplexy having been asked the question “Hot enough for ya?” Also not recorded are any victims of the heat pre-1895 which, global warming notwithstanding, was probably just as punishing. 1939 was a particularly bad year - the 550 expiries probably made the weather seem a bigger deal than Hitler, at the time.
The numbers dwindled as the air conditioners multiplied, but there were still 22 people in 2000 who didn’t manage to cool off enough to survive. Surprising in the time of air-conditioned food courts (although surviving the salmonella is another challenge).
None of which I started out thinking about, or even particularly wanting to know about. Pre-internet, if I’d been wandering through a library and a book on the Hilton bombing happened to fall on my head, I probably still wouldn’t have ended up knowing that the great heatwave of 1939 killed more Australians than seven Cyclone Tracys, more than double the air raids on Darwin, seven times the Granville railway disaster, rivalled only in the death-by-disaster stakes by the Spanish flu in 1918 (about 12,000), polio after WWII (1,013) and the bubonic plague (!) in the first decade of last century (550).
Anyway, in case you’re wondering, MsFits advises Anonymous that it’s quite okay to dump this guy by text message.
Caring Carnivorism
Meg Hourihan clearly likes her food, and good on her. She seems to want a bet each way on animal welfare, though - seen to be caring without going so far as to actually abstain. Last week she was quoting an article by Jeffrey Steingarten about foie gras (made by force feeding liquid nutrients to a duck via a tube stuck down its throat until its liver becomes engorged). He argues that we shouldn’t mentally anthropomorphise the experience of the duck:
How would we feel having to paddle all day on cold New England rivers and among the sodden marshes? I wouldn’t be able to take it. Think of all the bugs and crawling things.
Personally I think I’d go the crawling things over the tube any day. But regardless, I think it’s hardly the point. This seems to me a variation on the argument that because animals go through all sorts of suffering in the wild without our intervention, it doesn’t really matter what we do to them. He goes on to discuss various bits of research about actual pain levels in ducks. Apparently there’s a stress hormone which doesn’t increase during tube feeding. They show “minor signs of avoidance, but not aversion” to the feeder (I’m not sure how the distinction is drawn). There was “possibly some pain in the final days of feeding, probably caused by inflammation of the crop.” Steingarten’s conclusion was that “though it seems unnecessary to stop eating foie gras altogether, the data is not unambiguous enough to encourage unbridled gorging”. Meg seems to more-or-less concur: “After the reading I’ve done, I won’t go so far as to say the weight on my consci[ence] is entirely lifted, but I will continue to eat foie gras.”
Okay, so Meg and Jeffrey both claim to be concerned about animal welfare, and both seem to believe that there’s at least a decent chance that these birds are suffering. Personally, I don’t need that much convincing that a bird having a tube forced down its throat is having a bad time, but whatever. It seems to me that if you’re actually concerned about the suffering of the animal, and you think that production of a certain kind of food may be causing suffering, then the question should not be “Do I need to stop eating this food?” The question should be “Do I need to continue eating this food?” In the case of an expensive luxury food like foie gras, which is not a necessary part of anyone’s diet (regardless of how much the odd foodie might try to convince you that it is) the answer is clearly no.
Then yesterday Meg was discussing a barbeque hosted by a farmer, where a live pig was slaughtered and butchered on the spot:
I wanted to witness where the food came from. That said, it was a bit disconcerting to arrive at an apartment the night before the BBQ and discover a pig in a large metal crate on the front porch. He was killed the next day and we all learned how to skin him from the farmer hosting the roast. Hours and hours later, we ate the pig and I found it to be the tastiest pork I’d ever eaten.
It was definitely disturbing and I’m not sure I want to do anything like that again, but I’m glad it did it. It’s important to know the animal behind the meal and to understand where our food comes from.
Jamie Oliver showed his actually-killing-the-animal-himself-experience (a lamb, I think) during his Italian Escape series that screened here recently. He was obviously disturbed by it, too. The thing I don’t understand is this: Having been disturbed by seeing the animal slaughtered, to the extent that you’ve decided not to repeat the experience, how can you then go and buy pre-slaughtered meat over and over again without being similarly disturbed? I’m supposing that the disturbing nature of the experience had something to do with witnessing the actual suffering of the animal, rather than just the blood and guts. If there is a moral disquiet about watching an animal being killed, shouldn’t that disquiet also exist when the killing is happening on your behalf, but in your absence?
Stranger Still
From the Monash Journal:
Monash Council has reviewed the Monash Aquatic and Recreation Centre’s procedures for dealing with sex offenders after patrons complained of staff inaction during an incident in February.
A patron says the centre’s staff were dismissive of complaints by five women about an alleged sexual offence involving a man with his primary school-aged daughter on February 25 at the pool.
[…]
Cr Gerry Kottek said up to 2500 children attended MARC’s learn-to-swim program each week and the incident illustrated the need for staff to have Stranger Danger training.
Was this girl’s father a stranger?
Some mandatory reporting training might be in order, although I’d be surprised if they don’t already do that. It would be nice (in an odd sense of ‘nice’) if this sort of danger actually tended to come from strangers, because it would be much easier to deal with. Unfortunately, it generally doesn’t.