4 October 2015 by lalmon

Jasper White’s Lobster and Corn Chowder

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Each year that I make this, usually just once toward the end of the sweetcorn season in late September, I become more firm in my belief that this is my favourite savoury dish of all time. When you taste just the stock portion of this recipe, properly reduced, you’ll understand immediately why I’m so enthusiastic about it. You may even float off the floor slightly.

Willard Farm, Harvard, Massachusetts

This is where I get the corn – and it’s the best corn I’ve ever had. That’s Paul Willard on the right. I believe one branch or another of the Willard family has been farming in Harvard since the 1600s. Twelve or so generations ago, Simon Willard was one of the founders of the town of Concord, and ancestor Phineas Willard, a Revolutionary War Lieutenant (American side) who was said to be a wiseacre, contributed agricultural articles to the annual almanac that was printed in the local Shaker village in Harvard.

Here’s this year’s result, with freshly-squeezed lemon-limeade instead of iced tea this time.

Click for a larger size

Click for a 1920×1080 HD version

I would suggest reading both of these recipes fully before starting so you know how they merge and fit together, mainly so you don’t forget to get the stripped corn cobs into the stock early for maximum flavor extraction.

When I took the photographs here, I was making a double recipe of the chowder, so bear that in mind throughout.

Lobster and Corn Chowder – Jasper White

Ingredients

· 3 live hard-shell lobsters (1 and 1/4 pounds each)
· 3 medium ears yellow or bi-color corn
· 4 ounces slab (unsliced) bacon or saltpork, rind removed and cut into 1/3-inch dice
· 4 tablespoons unsalted butter
· 1 large onion (10 ounces) cut into 3/4-inch dices
· 2 to 3 sprigs fresh thyme, leaves removed and chopped (1 teaspoon)
· 2 teaspoons Hungarian paprika
· 4 cups lobster stock (recipe below)
· 1 1/2 pounds Yukon Gold, Prince Edward Island, or other all-purpose potatoes, peeled and cut into 3/4-inch dice
· 1 1/2 cups heavy cream (or up to 2 cups if desired)
· Kosher or sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

For garnish:

· 2 tablespoons chopped fresh Italian parsley
· 2 tablespoons minced fresh chives

Directions

1. Fill an 8 to 10-quart stockpot two-thirds full with ocean water or tap water that is heavily salted. Bring to a rolling boil. One at a time, holding each lobster by the carapace (the protective shell), carefully drop it into the water. Cook for exactly four minutes from the last time the lobster went in. Using a pair of long tongs, remove the lobsters from the pot and let them cool to room temperature.

2. Pick all the meat from the tails, knuckles and claws. Remove the intestinal tract from the tail and the cartilage from the claws. Dice the meat into 3/4-inch cubes. Cover and refrigerate until ready to use. Using the carcasses (bodies), and leftover shells, make a lobster stock (Recipe is below). The stock will take about 1 1/2 hours to cook. Strain the stock; you should have 4 cups.

3. Meanwhile, husk the corn. Carefully remove most of the silk by hand and then rub each ear with a dry towel to finish the job. Cut the kernels from the cobs and reserve. You should get about 2 cups. Break the cobs in half and add them to the simmering stock.

4. Heat a 4 to 6-quart heavy pot over low heat and add the bacon. Once it has rendered a few tablespoons of fat, increase the heat to medium and cook until the bacon is crisp golden brown. Pour off all but 1 tablespoon of the fat, leaving the bacon in the pot.

5. Add the butter, onion and thyme and sauté, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon, for about 8 minutes, until the onion is softened but not browned. Add the paprika and cook 1 minute longer, stirring frequently.

6. Add the potatoes, corn kernels, and the reserved lobster stock. The stock should just barely cover the potatoes; if it doesn’t, add enough water to cover. Turn up the heat and bring to a boil. Cover the pot and cook the potatoes vigorously for about 12 minutes, until they are soft on the outside but still firm in the center. If the broth hasn’t thickened lightly, smash a few potatoes against the side of the pot and cook a minute or two longer to release their starch.

7. Remove the pot from the heat; stir in the lobster meat and cream, and season to taste with salt and pepper. If you are not serving the chowder within the hour, let it cool a bit, then refrigerate; cover the chowder after it is chilled completely. Otherwise, let it sit at room temperature for up to an hour, allowing the flavors to meld.

8. When ready to serve, reheat the chowder over low heat; don’t let it boil. Use a slotted spoon to mound the lobster, onions, potatoes, and corn in the center of large soup plates or shallow bowls, making sure they are evenly divided, and ladle the creamy broth around. Sprinkle with the chopped parsley and minced chives.

Makes about 10 cups; serves 10 as a first course or five or six as a main course.

Lobster Stock – Jasper White

Ingredients

· 2 pounds lobster carcasses and shells
· 2 quarts water
· 1 cup dry-white wine
· 1 cup chopped tomatoes with their juice (fresh or canned)
· 2 medium onions, thinly sliced
· 2 stalks celery, thinly sliced
· 2 small carrots, thinly sliced
· 4 cloves garlic, crushed
· 4 sprigs fresh thyme
· 2 dried bay leaves
· 1/4 teaspoon fennel seeds
· 1 teaspoon black peppercorns
· Kosher or sea salt

Directions for Lobster Stock

1. Split the lobster carcasses lengthwise and remove the head sac from each one. Place the carcasses, shells and tomalley (lobster’s liver) in a 6 to 8-quart stockpot, cover with the water, and bring to a boil, skimming the white scum from the surface of the stock. (Using a ladle and a circular motion, push the foam from the center of the outside of the pot, where it is easy to remove.) Reduce the heat so the stock is cooking at a fast, steady simmer.

2. Add the wine, tomatoes, onions, celery, carrots, garlic, thyme, bay leaves, fennel seeds and peppercorns, and let the stock simmer and cook down for about 1 hour. Add a little water if the stock falls below the lobster shells.

3. Season the stock lightly with salt. Taste for a rich flavor. If it seems light, simmer for about 20 minutes longer. Strain the stock with a fine-mesh strainer. If you are not going to be using it within the hour, chill it as quickly as possible. Cover the broth after it has completely cooled and keep refrigerated for up to three days, or freeze for up to two months. Makes about 1 quart.

All of the ingredients for a double recipe on my kitchen island, including seven lobsters, one of which I steamed separately for a lobster roll.

Lobster rolls: Warm the lobster meat in butter with chopped tarragon and serve on toasted top-sliced hot dog buns

This is the meat of six parboiled 1.25 to 1.4 pound lobsters, along with a few intact claw meats that I left unchopped for presentation purposes. Three of the six lobsters were female, so I used the roe – the red masses you find in female lobsters. The roe are the little coral-colored bits strewn throughout the meat below. You usually need to chop them up a little.

The parboiling in the recipe is important because the lobster’s final cooking is done in the assembled chowder. If you go much over the four minutes he specifies, your resulting chowder will end up with chewy lobster.

Most of the pictures herein are from 2013 before my kitchen was rebuilt (the new one is above), but I updated a couple with nicer looking 2014 and 2015 photos and added this one to show how much extra meat you can get out of the fiddly tiny legs of six lobsters. This is Jasper White’s trick to get those out easily and intact: use a rolling pin starting from the claw end of each little leg. Five seconds a leg is all it takes.

When you cut the shells in half to prepare them for the stock, you remove and discard from each side the head sac, which is a one-inch or so bit inside the head that contains…well, gunk is the best way to put it. You’ll find it pretty quickly. You don’t want its flavor in the chowder. Also, if there’s a lot of tomalley – the green-grey liver of the lobster – discard some of it. A little is good, but too much tomalley will make the chowder a bit pungent.

Here are all the unprepped stock ingredients:

jfix

The lobster shells and water are in the pot now, and here are the other stock ingredients after prep, including stripping the corn, whose now broken-in-half cobs are in the bowl at upper left. To strip the corn, I use a large half-sheet pan, hold the corn upright by the pointy end, and run the knife down the kernels, rotating the cob about eight times to get it all. The pan catches all the kernels and it’s the only thing you have to clean afterward.

8brs

All the stock ingredients are in the stockpot here. The ears are actually stripped — it’s just the pointy ends where I held them that still have a few kernels on them.

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The stock after about two-and-a-half hours of slow simmering. My timing is a bit longer than White’s because I tend to make stocks at barely a bubble, low and slow. Because I do that, you can see not much liquid is gone at the point when I took it off the stove and strained it, and it’s still somewhat translucent:

x8xw

That’s good in one sense, because I never had to add water and everything remained submerged in the simmering water the whole time. However, for a single recipe, you’re supposed to end up with about four cups at the end, and you need to adhere to that instruction. What I did was strain the stock and then reduce it at a rolling boil for about fifty minutes to end up with eight cups for my double recipe, setting a timer for fifteen-minute intervals to check on it and make sure it wasn’t boiling away to nothing. You can see on the side of the pan how far down the level’s gone in that fifty minutes:

ucxo

And this is what your stock will look like when it’s at the right strength and now opaque — you’ll have half this amount in a single recipe, of course:

mgrd

Final assembly about to proceed. Note that the potatoes are just peeled and in water here. White advises in this program on fish chowder that you not dice the potatoes ahead of time and store in water to prevent discoloration because you lose all the starch exuding out of the cubes. You want that starch in the chowder to help thicken it, so dice them up at assembly time and toss them in the pot immediately along with any potato juice on the cutting board. White also demonstrates in that program how to get the claw meats out intact as I did.

Diced salt pork (pork belly) fried up crisp and golden:

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Onions sweating. As the onions were sweating, I whipped up a batch of cornbread, which takes about five minutes of prep, and got it in the oven. See the recipe at the end here.

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In go the potatoes and corn.

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And then the stock. At this point, before the lobster and cream are added, you boil it heavily to both cook and rough up the potatoes a bit so you get more starch out of them. Check the potatoes every minute or two after his specified cooking time. When they’re done, the corners of the diced potatoes will be softened and the inside creamy but still somewhat firm.

Finally, the pot’s taken off the heat, the lobster and cream are added, and you taste and carefully adjust the seasoning. In this case, I needed to add a few pinches of salt and plenty of freshly-ground pepper, adding them in moderate amounts and retasting several times. I use the full two cups of cream per recipe, by the way. If you have presentation claw meats like I did, put those in with the rest of the lobster meat so they’ll cook the rest of the way through. Stir carefully so you don’t break up the claw meats, and remember to fish them out when you’re ready to serve.

to2t

It’s also important that you follow to the letter his instruction on letting the finished chowder cool for an hour to allow the flavors to, as Julia Child might have said, insinuate themselves upon each other. Once you’ve done that, then you reheat — carefully, no boiling — and serve.

Cornbread out of the oven, with one piece mysteriously missing before service:

lnbx

Et voilà!

2015

2014

2013

When reheating leftovers later, make sure you follow his instruction not to let it boil, or you’ll split the cream. I find that stirring frequently over a medium-low heat for about ten or twelve minutes gets it to the steaming but not bubbling point that you want.

One thing you may find as any leftover chowder sits in the fridge is that the flavor actually intensifies, almost unbelievably so. I actually had to dilute the latest two bowls I reheated with a couple tablespoons of milk because it was too rich, too intense, even for me.

Jasper White - Genius

This is my variation of…

Bob’s Red Mill Golden Cornbread

Ingredients

1 cup cornmeal, medium grind
1 cup cake/pastry flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons baking powder (not baking soda)
1/4 cup sugar for slightly sweet cornbread, less or none if you prefer
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter, softened
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 cup milk

Directions

Preheat oven to 425F and grease/spray an 8-inch square pan well for easy removal of the cornbread.

Whisk together dry the ingredients in a medium-sized bowl.

Cut the half-stick of softened butter in small pieces into the dry ingredients and use your fingertips to work it into the dry mix. It doesn’t have to be completely worked in as in, say, a biscuit dough; this is just to more evenly distribute the butter than brute mixing of butter in a big chunk would do.

Add the beaten egg and milk, and beat just until mostly smooth, about one minute. Don’t overbeat or you’ll end up with tough cornbread.

Immediately pour the mix, which will be quite thick, into the greased pan and bake at 425F for 20-25 minutes until golden brown on top.

Cut into nine squares and serve warm with butter.

Another thing I’ll bet would go well with the chowder is White’s sweet corn fritters, which he demonstrates in this program. You can find his recipe here.

4 October 2015 by lalmon

Podcasts I like

This is my current BeyondPod subscription list. I listen – mostly in the car over Bluetooth – to every episode from about two-thirds of these and selected episodes from the rest.

99% Invisible

Food Programme

Fresh Air

From Our Own Correspondent

Futility Closet

Invisibilia

Kitchen Cabinet

More or Less: Behind the Stats

NPR: Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR: Car Talk

NPR: Planet Money

NPR: Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!

Radio Diaries

Radiolab

Reply All

Science Weekly

The Allusionist

The Bugle

The Gist

The Infinite Monkey Cage

the memory palace

The Mountain Stage

The News Quiz Extra There is no podcast for the Extra version, so I record this from iPlayer with Cool Edit when it’s published Mondays at about 8pm ET.

This American Life

Witness

You folks must know some great ones I’m not aware of, so feel free to note them in the comments.

3 October 2015 by lalmon

Compare and contrast

Compare this article: Why Millennials Can’t Grow Up

To this story from SBS 2 Australia:

I don’t think that Japan is fundamentally different. In fact, the segment brought to mind my own childhood, during which I was on my own or with pals most of the day – no parents in sight 90% of the time from the age of six.

I think the chief difference is an overarching paranoia in the West that has developed over the last thirty to forty years, where now, most people are convinced that child abduction by strangers is a lot rifer than, for instance, the 110 or so actual occurrences per year in the US. A recent episode of 99% Invisible – one of several podcasts I consider essential – explored how the milk carton missing kids of the 1980s contributed to that paranoia in this country.

Each morning on the drive to work, I shudder a little when I see parents waiting at school bus stops with their children. Why? Because I can easily imagine the abject shame and embarrassment kids would have felt had parents hovered like that just a handful of decades ago. “No, that is not my mother! I don’t know who it is! Gawd!”

Invisibilia, another good podcast, recently examined a 1970s study Roger Hart did at a rural town in Vermont to discover where kids spent their time and what sort of secrets they kept from their parents. Returning to that town in 2004 revealed astonishing contrasts in attitudes – from the very kids in the original study, now adults. This Atlantic article goes into more depth on Hart’s return to the town thirty years on.

Afterthought: While ruminating on these ideas, it occurred to me that endless selfies may have their roots in the overprotective, overpraising, “You are the most special and precious snowflake in the world and nothing untoward must ever happen to you” style of parenting. If you grow up believing you’re that special, you might actually feel it imperative to take pictures of yourself several times a day, if only to provide documentation for future historians and biographers.

22 September 2015 by lalmon

Left-handedness isn’t evil but some people are

My jaw dropped on reading this story today. The same thing happened to me in grade school, I think in 1st grade, but that was some decades ago. I figured perhaps we had advanced a bit. Silly me.

I was shocked enough by the teacher grabbing the pencil out of my left hand and forcing it angrily into my right hand that I told my mother about it that afternoon. The next day she was in school to have a little chat with the teacher, who never tried that again. I found Mrs. Douglas in the 2nd grade much pleasanter – and funnier, particularly when she would loudly sigh and lament, “Oh, what’s the point?“ at least once a day.

Had that left-is-wrong idiocy continued, would I have ever in my life attempted artwork like this – or any artwork at all, for that matter? Seems questionable.

Thanks, Mom.

Click any of these images for a larger version

Inspired by the 401st Bomb Group jacket below (click for a larger version). My research turned up the George Petty painting that jacket was based on, and I found an original Life magazine where it appeared in a full-page ad and used that as the basis for my version.

Rita Hayworth and the 452nd Bomb Group B-17G “Mon Tete Rouge”

Ginger Rogers and a 1942 model Daffy Duck

14 September 2015 by lalmon

Chips Ahoy

Parislights, in the My Inspiration post, asked:

my god daughter has started at Tufts and she is hopping to start a little cchip cookie business for her fellow students. She has had access to really delicious chocolate chips thanks to a local chocolatier in Normandy ( yeah…I know! France! He makes his own ! )

Hershey just doesn’t cut it for her. What do you suggest? Feel like making a cchip post ? – p’lights

Hershey’s or Baker’s or the more ubiquitous Nestle chips definitely don’t cut it. For delicious but still affordable chips, I switched years ago to Ghirardelli’s 60% bittersweet chips, which are about halfway between a chip and a disc. This photo of mine from 2010, one of about 600 rotating desktop backgrounds I have, shows the wider spread of chocolate you get from that shape:

Click for HD size

The Ghirardelli site’s price seems rather high. I think Market Basket sells them for US$3.49, maybe even as low as $2.99, but as you know, they have the lowest prices around. In the Northeast US, these are in maybe one out of three supermarket chains.

You may recall that I switched allegiance to the salted chocolate chip cookie recipe published in the New York Times some years ago. It’s definitely the best I’ve tried, but you may also remember that I found through my own blind taste testing that their 24-36 hour “curing” step is unnecessary. Any perceived difference is imaginary – or perhaps the result of people unconsciously baking for a minute or two longer to produce a darker, more caramelised cookie, thereby fulfilling the aged dough fantasy.

Other than dropping their waiting period, which seems like cruel and unusual punishment given my testing, my only change to their recipe is to add a boatload of pecans that have been toasted for ten minutes in a 300F oven – an overflowing cup worth for this recipe. After toasting, I break each half into four pieces so they’re on the chunky side and let them cool so they don’t melt the dough.

I was recently delighted to find that Costco sells two pounds of unsalted pecans for US$9.99, much cheaper than any other place I’ve found; others charge about double that. If you buy in that quantity but don’t use them at a fast clip, it’s best to freeze them to stop them going rancid. They thaw quickly.

8 September 2015 by lalmon

The confluence of the Helicopter Parent and Antisocial Media rivers

The Atlantic examines the whirlpool formed by this inevitable meeting.

8 September 2015 by lalmon

“Gas…Market Basket…veg…Dingleface. Wait, what?”

See if you can spot the fraudulent transactions on my debit card:

dcu

On submitting the dispute just now, I said:

I’m not a member of Facebook or any of the other ultimately antisocial media sites (case in point).

I’ll stop by the credit union tomorrow for a replacement card – for the third time in a little over a year.

I thought it unusual when a friend told me recently that she routinely cancels her debit card and gets a new one every six months. I no longer think that unusual.

20 July 2015 by lalmon

My Inspiration

Eight-and-a-half years ago, in a forum thread requesting people’s “Favourite Cookery Programme of All Time”, I answered:

“The French Chef” with Julia Child. As a kid, I watched in rapt attention her obvious joy while making baguettes on that show: flinging the dough onto the counter, raising clouds of flour, and warbling her detailed instructions, cracking jokes all the while. The memory of that is what, years later, got me started baking and cooking myself. I have every one of her cookbooks (and use them regularly), about a hundred episodes of her various shows, and I think of her every day. She was one of my few heroes.

The specific episode that I remembered years later when I finally began to bake and cook for myself is on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iH3hjDUhWw

December 2023 update: That YouTube video has since been taken down but the episode is on Dailymotion here:

From the time I watched this episode as a kid to the time I did something about it was about eighteen years, so while I may have been a slow starter, I did have a long and impressionable memory. The very first thing I made was French bread, using the first cookbook I ever owned, From Julia Child’s Kitchen. Why? Because I remembered that she made it look pretty straightforward.

Tonight, I thoroughly enjoyed making it again, raising clouds of flour as I kneaded and smiling at the memory of Julia doing the same. Because I’ve concentrated on sourdoughs in recent years – mainly boules because they’re great for sandwiches – I haven’t made this recipe in quite a while, but I found I remembered the ingredients exactly: a pound of flour, 1¼ cup tepid water, 2¼ teaspoons salt, and a packet of yeast – or 2¼ teaspoons out of a large jar in my case – dissolved in 1/3 cup tepid water. I did have to read her instructions on the multiple steps to form the loaves, though. They were clear as a bell, as usual.

Cooling with air circulation all around. Click for a larger version.

These aren’t true baguettes as they lack a few inches of length; my biggest baking sheet, just a few inches narrower than the oven itself, will accommodate loaves of 22″ if I angle them slightly.

Click for a larger version

2 July 2015 by lalmon

Connections

In the midst of reading As Always: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto by Joan Reardon, and while separately reading of Mark Twain’s two-week experience as an amateur and eventually too-reluctant Confederate soldier, I discovered an interesting connection.

Avis DeVoto’s husband, Bernard DeVoto, had written an article in Harper’s on the difficulty of finding good kitchen knives in the US – this was in the early 1950s. That article is what prompted Julia to write; he was fairly busy at the time, so his wife answered instead with a four-page letter.

Thus began a long correspondence and friendship, and something else that was momentous. Avis had connections in the publishing world that eventually led to the release of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Knopf in 1961, nine years after Julia and Avis first exchanged letters in 1952.

Click to view a larger version

The unusual connection I wasn’t aware of until just now – or, rather, for which I hadn’t yet connected the dots – is that Bernard, a historian, was an authority on Mark Twain who curated and edited Twain’s papers. He edited a few books of Twain’s work, including the still in print The Portable Mark Twain, one of the first Twain volumes I read many years ago. Before I knew of the Child connection, I only recently bought DeVoto’s Mark Twain’s America, originally published in 1932, to get a better sense of what the country was like at the times of Twain’s travels.

The final connection is a mention of a particular type of cooking in Virginia City, Nevada, where Twain lived in the early 1860s, from just that volume:

They came to Virginia City as soon as the true value of the Comstock was perceived. They constituted, no doubt, a deplorable source of gambling, pleasure and embroilment. They were not soft-spoken women, their desire was not visibly separate from the main chance, and they would have beheld Mr. Harte’s portrayal of them at Poker Flat with ribald mirth. But let them have a moment of respect. They civilized the Comstock. They drove through its streets reclining in lacquered broughams, displaying to male eyes fashions as close to Paris as any then current in New York. They were, in brick houses hung with tapestries, a glamour and a romance, after the superheated caverns of the mines. They enforced a code of behavior: one might be a hard-rock man outside their curtains but in their presence one was punctilious or one was hustled away. They brought Parisian cooking to the sagebrush of Sun Mountain and they taught the West to distinguish between tarantula juice* and the bouquet of wines. An elegy for their passing. The West has neglected to mention them in bronze and its genealogies avoid comment on their marriages, conspicuous or obscure, but it owes them a here acknowledged debt for civilization.

*Tarantula juice was one of the many names for bastardised whisky in that corner of Nevada, cut with rather novel ingredients. According to J. Ross Browne in the January 1861 edition of Harper’s, “The whisky contained strychnine, oil of tobacco, tarantula juice, and various effective poisons of the same general nature, including a dash of corrosive sublimate; and the gin was manufactured out of turpentine and whisky, with a sprinkling of Prussic acid to give it flavor.”

Apparently, strychnine, deadly in higher quantities, would, in smaller quantities, produce effects not unlike those of methamphetamine. In 1864, Twain wrote of the Dashaway Association, a temperance group started by a group of San Francisco volunteer firemen in 1859. He said its ranks were increasing because the new adherents “fear strychnine more than inebriation.”

2 July 2015 by lalmon

TransAsia Taipei crash update

Following up on my February post on the TransAsia crash in Taipei, this is from part 4 of the interim report just released. I’ve highlighted the key phrase here. I had thought something like this would likely be revealed by the CVR, but I still said, “Oh, no” on reading it.

Click for a larger version

This interim report did not specify the cause, but powering down the only good engine at a few hundred feet with an airspeed of 105 knots cannot end well. Had they not made that mistake, there’s every chance it would not have been an accident, but an incident resulting in a return to the airport.

The final report is expected next April with a draft of that due in November.

6 June 2015 by lalmon

“Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”

Mark Twain wrote that in No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger, and it was the first thing I thought of after catching my breath from the longest, guffawingest belly laugh I’ve had in months, possibly years.

And that was just day one of the competition.

Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them — and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon — laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution — these can lift at a colossal humbug — push it a little — crowd it a little — weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.

1 May 2015 by lalmon

“If we can send a man to the Moon…”

The best history of Apollo from the perspective of the astronauts is Andrew Chaikin’s 1994 masterpiece, A Man on the Moon. The best one from the point of view of the people on the ground is Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox, which I’m rereading at the moment. On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the book’s 1989 release, Murray said this:

“One of the lessons that people tried to take away from the Apollo story was wrong – ‘If we can send a man to the Moon, we can end poverty.’ Or do whatever else is your favorite cause. Engineering challenges are different from social challenges, and a lot of money has been wasted on programs that were rationalized by the ‘If we can send a man to the Moon…’ analogy. Maybe that suggests the real lesson: Apollo, like the Manhattan Project, proved that humans are capable of extraordinary feats in unbelievably short periods of time, but only if five conditions are met: The people doing the work have to have a concrete goal. They must have a sense of urgency – because of a specific calendar deadline in the case of Apollo, or beating the Germans in the case of the Manhattan Project. The concrete goal has to be technological, not social; we just don’t know how to change human behavior on a large scale. The people paying for the work must be willing to spend lavishly. And, most importantly, the people paying for the work must get the hell out of the way of the people doing the work.”

I’ll take this opportunity to point out that for the duration of the Apollo programme, the amount of money American women spent on cosmetics each year easily exceeded NASA’s budget. As Einstein once said about something else, that’s relativity.

An hour-long interview with the authors in 1989 is on C-SPAN here.

An excerpt from Apollo: The Race to the Moon, whose most recent reprint is titled simply Apollo:

In 1946, the N.A.C.A. had sent a young Langley engineer named Walt Williams out to the Mojave Desert to open a facility for testing the X-1, the plane in which Chuck Yeager would break the sound barrier. It was called the High-Speed Flight Station, using the Air Force facilities that would later become known as Edwards Air Force Base. On July 30, 1959, Williams’s fortieth birthday, Abe Silverstein called Williams to Washington and persuaded him to return to Langley to work for the Space Task Group. On September 15, Williams reported to Langley as Gilruth’s associate director for Operations.

Williams was indeed the “very tough kind of guy” that the gentlemanly engineers of Langley needed to deal with the Air Force’s brand of bureaucratic infighting. By 1959, Williams was already known in the flight-test business as a man who could work, carouse, cuss, or fight as prodigiously as any test pilot at Edwards. He was also tough in the other ways that Operations needed. “He had the ability to walk up to the problem of putting a man on top of one of these Atlas vehicles, which are really just big metal balloons, and not be cowed by it,” said Lunney of Williams. (“Big metal balloons”: The walls of the Atlas were so thin that they would collapse unless the vehicle was pressurized.) “Williams just walked up and said ‘Goddammit this’ and ‘Goddammit that,’ and got everybody saluting and doing what they should do.” He was a genius of sorts, Lunney reflected, “though if you had to go up against him, he didn’t seem like a genius. He seemed like a bull.”

In those days, he even looked like a bull—over 200 pounds, a powerful man with a square head, dark, close-cropped hair, and heavy brows. Gene Kranz, who himself would scare a few people in his time, never forgot his first encounter with Williams. It happened in 1960, just a few weeks after Kranz had arrived at the Space Task Group. Kranz had been sent over to brief Williams on some work he’d been doing. Kranz, who knew Williams only by reputation, got there early and slipped into a seat in Williams’s office while another briefing concluded. Williams, who was slouched behind his desk chain-smoking Winstons, looked a little like Broderick Crawford in “Highway Patrol”—big, rumpled, and knowing.

The men briefing Williams were not having a good day. Williams sat behind his desk, scowling at the hapless briefers, and “whipsawed them,” Kranz remembered. “Just cut them up. Sliced them off at the ankles, mid-calf, knees, mid-thigh. They went down the tubes and the thing was over.” The objects of these attentions put away their papers and filed out of the office, leaving Kranz and Williams alone. Kranz began his report.

Walt Williams had a curious habit of appearing to fall asleep in the middle of meetings. Williams himself said that it was a device: “I listen to the guy’s voice,” he explained. “If the guy’s trying to bullshit you, or is uncertain, you can hear it in his voice. I don’t want to see his bright blue eyes or anything else.” Did he ever really fall asleep? There were, after all, reports of the occasional snore. Well, Williams said ambiguously, when people had given him a briefing paper in advance, he didn’t “bother even listening to the buildup,” but waited until the guy got to the good part.

Kranz knew nothing of this. After a few minutes, he was getting into his material when he realized that Williams was starting to nod off. His head was slumped on his chest, his eyes were closed. Unbelievable as it seemed, Kranz decided, Williams had gone to sleep.

“In a one-on-one session with a legend, who you have just seen completely assassinate somebody, what the hell do you do?” Kranz would ask later. He decided that the safest course was to pretend nothing had happened and keep on talking. So he did, feeling more confident now that it seemed no one was listening to him. In fact, he was feeling confident enough to sidestep a small issue that he wasn’t absolutely sure about. But what the hell, the man was asleep.

Williams always kept a roll of Necco mints nearby to soothe his smoker’s throat. As Kranz breezed on, Williams’s hand reached out, groping slowly for the roll of Neccos. Williams shook out two of them—eyes still closed—and chomped on them for a while. “And then he proceeded to ask exactly that question that I thought I had skated through very cleanly,” Kranz recalled. “It was just absolutely intimidating.”

1 May 2015 by lalmon

15. Cashing-in period still active

Here’s a list I put together detailing the claims for the positive health aspects and even curative powers of bone broth. It took no more than five minutes to gather these from the first two pages of Amazon book search results for bone broth (more on the fingernails-on-blackboard sound of that phrase in a moment):

“It is packed with amino acids which are known to improve various areas of health”
“Use it for curing several medical conditions”
“Reverse grey hair”
“Bring back morning wood”
“Improves quality of sleep”
“Assists with the joints, the skin, hair, nails, and more”
“Fight aging”
“Boost beauty”
“Reduce acne-causing inflammation”
“Fight infections”
“Prevent degenerative diseases”
“Heal a ‘leaky’ gut”
“Natural cure for tooth decay”+
“Provides benefits for gas and bloating; reflux, heartburn, and GERD [um, GERD is reflux]; maldigestion of protein and carbohydrates; arthritis and joint pain; muscle aches and spasms; osteoporosis and osteopenia; allergies and food sensitivities; autoimmune diseases such as celiac, diabetes, Crohn’s, and multiple sclerosis”*

Gosh, from the looks of it, maybe bone broth is miraculous. Well, you can’t deny that to certain people’s bank accounts, it is.

Some of the supposed health benefits are related to problems that can occur in the malnourished, which is most decidedly not a problem many of their cash-heavy target audience have ever experienced.

Besides driving me to to the verge of irritation – which a lot of things do, so that’s nothing special – the chief problem I have with this trend is that I’ve always known broth to be prepared with meat and stock to be produced from bones. These books are talking bones, not flesh. Saying ‘bone broth’ is like saying ‘flaky cake crust’. Make up your mind: Call it stock, already a wonderful thing, or make it differently and call it broth. People who say it’s not the same as stock because it’s a lengthier process or adds seasoning haven’t read many stock recipes. Peddle your poorly-rationalised neologisms elsewhere.

+A fine of not less than US$5,000 for this author if I ran things because you cannot cure tooth decay by eating more calcium any more than you can cure a broken leg by not falling out of a tree again after you’ve fallen out of a tree and broken your leg. The world doesn’t work that way. Lotteries would be pointless if it did.

*Six months jail time for this author, with a two-year probationary period after release wearing an “I take advantage of the weak and infirm” signboard for sixteen hours each weekend at a local mall or other crowded venue. He’s still one level better than some, though.

Postscript: It just occurred to me that this post reads something like a Mike Pesca spiel. I don’t think my writing’s changed, but since Pesca was featured on This American Life several months ago, I have listened to every one of The Gist podcasts all the way back to the beginning and through last night. So maybe he has influenced me; that’s not a bad thing.

25 April 2015 by lalmon

It’s like having Big Ben on your wrist

You know how whenever you hear Big Ben, you count even when you know how many bongs it’s going to be? In a similar vein, I did not make this up:

Follow directions. After you tap Start and head off on your first leg, Apple Watch uses taps to let you know when to turn. A steady series of 12 taps means turn right at the intersection you’re approaching; three pairs of two taps means turn left. Not sure what your destination looks like? You’ll feel a vibration when you’re on the last leg, and again when you arrive.

This makes me idly wonder what eight and ten taps might mean, or indeed if another series of signals might be two sets of four taps followed by a single pair of taps for ‘stay in the left lane looking at your monthly calendar until you glance up and see the left turn only arrow, at which time rapidly cut off the car to your right’ followed by a light stroking of the wrist to indicate you should ignore any blasting horns or shouted epithets because who the hell are they to judge?

I wonder even more idly whether those twelve taps – deemed by someone in the know to be handier than a voice saying ‘in a quarter mile, turn right’ – proceed in a stately, Big Ben-like manner forty-seven seconds before your turn, or are they more like, say, a tiny jackhammer, as in yuddayuddayuddayuddayududud – in which case, can you count that fast? This brings to mind the further question as to what sort of tapping might be done for something more urgent than ‘take the next right’?

Finally, when you absentmindedly miss your turn and need to make a U-turn because you were busy snoozing a reminder to read the safety section of the manual, is that when an eighth-inch hypo comes out and jabs you, or, in spite of the battery life, might there be a light electrical shock applied?

20 April 2015 by lalmon

Tonight on “It’s the Mind”…

…we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu, that strange feeling we sometimes get that we’ve lived through something before, that what is happening now has already happened.

Parislights pointed out this new underrun accident in Hiroshima – once again Asiana, where one might get the idea there is an ongoing epidemic of some depth perception-sapping visual syndrome if one hadn’t already read – with eyes wide as saucers – how it’s “very stressful, very difficult to perform a visual approach with a heavy airplane, always”, according to the 19-year, 10,000-hour veteran pilot flying the San Francisco accident aircraft. Baffling is too mild a word for such an attitude.

This seems vaguely familiar somehow. Shouldn’t there be snow or something? I dunno.

Looks like this one bounced two or three times at least. They did seem to do a tad bit better than the Air Canada flight in Halifax, though: beat ’em by 18 feet, touching down only 1,082 feet short instead of 1,100.