My Own Stumble Upon List

Recent finds on the Interweb:

A new blog, whatImeanttosay.squarespace.com -- just launched this week, covering a range of interesting topics. A new daily stop for Daughter Number Three!

The Heavy Table, a Twin Cities local food and foodie site, has been turning out fun and tasty stories every day for months now. It's always worth a stop to see what restaurant or cookbook they've reviewed, but it's also full of great stories about food people like Bonnie Dehn of Dehn's herb farm and David Page, a local television producer whose show "Diners, Drive-ins and Dives" runs on the Food Network.

A great article by Sharon Parker of Minneapolis Observer Quarterly called Everybody's a Beekeeper, via the tcdailyplanet.net. Beyond honeybees to the native bumblebee, Sharon fills us in on the why and how of bees in our yards and gardens. Neatest fact: Bumblebees are best for pollinating tomatoes because of their "robust vibrations, known as 'buzz pollination.' "

Health Care Thoughts, Part 2

Following up from my recent post on the national health care situation...

The July issue of the Minnesota Women's Press carried a wrenching story about a young woman's death at the hands of our de facto policy of uninsurance. Nora's Story should be read by everyone in Congress and a special highlighted copy should be slipped under Tim Pawlenty's door. What happens when you're just post-college, in jobs that offer only underinsurance or no insurance, and you develop cancer? This could be my daughter in 10 years if things don't change.

And tonight's Daily Show was dedicated to the health care issue (I'll post links to clips tomorrow when the videos go live on the Daily Show site).

Stewart provided a classic skewering of all the hysterical, anti-public-option ads and talking heads. Despite the satirical spin he put on it, though, it was pretty depressing to get a glimpse of how much disinformation is out there.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Drag Me to Health
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Joke of the Day

The sequence featured this brilliant background graphic...


...and was followed by a three-pronged standup by Canadian Samantha Bee, Brit Jon Oliver and American Wyatt Cenac, each riffing on the exaggerated horror stories they have experienced at the hands of their countries' medical systems.

Finally, the show concluded with a two-part interview with Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius (part 1 here, part 2 here), which touched on many of the thorny issues involved. She was very clear about the fact that doing nothing is not an option, which I liked, and she acknowledged that part of the solution is our own behaviors, which lead to chronic conditions that drive up cost.

Americans need to accept some personal responsibility for their health, she said. To which Stewart responded, "Good luck selling that. I've been an American all my life, and we like sitting. And things that taste good."

Unconventional Mushrooms

Like many a long-time natural food co-op shopper, I became accustomed long ago to seeing the word organic used in contrast to conventional when describing various methods for growing fruits and vegetables.

I don't know who came up with conventional as a one-word descriptor for the chemical-based farming methods that became predominant in the last half of the 20th century, but I'm afraid it's here to stay, for lack of a better term (some possible alternatives... nonorganic? inorganic? You see the difficulty.)

However, I am always slightly bemused by this use of conventional because I know that for the uninitiated, the opposite of conventional is not organic, but rather unconventional.

In celebration and gentle ridicule of the way insiders speak without thinking too much about how their words are understood by outsiders, I bring you this photo gallery of unconventional mushrooms:

From craftycrafty.tv:



From ky-festivals.org (that's ky as in Kentucky -- get your mind out of the gutter! And yes, that really is a mushroom in the photo):



The cartoon-like but all-too-real psychedelic mushroom Amanita muscaria (via tokyomango.com):



As well as this somewhat disturbing children's mushroom tent, clearly based on Amanita muscaria:



A walking character mushroom, not quite ready for Disney World. I can almost hear the theme song... "Do you know the mushroom man, the mushroom man, the mushroom man?"



And, finally, this nirvana photo for morel hunters:

A Little Piece of the Real Wales

Last Friday was Scrabble night, and while we were playing, I discovered that one friend shared my teenaged obsession with Wales. I mentioned that I had even bought a little Welsh-English dictionary. She topped that by saying she went to Brigham Young University because they were the only school in the U.S. that taught Welsh!

Anyway, it reminded me of reading How Green Was My Valley a few years ago (another one of those classic books I avoided while young). What a great book.

I read it partly in preparation for a short visit to Wales, which included a stop at Big Pit, the National Coal Museum, located in the town of Blaenafon, southeastern Wales, close to where HGWMV is set.


If you're ever anywhere near Wales, the museum is worth going out of your way to see. The people who conduct the tours were all miners there (the mine has been closed for about 20 years), and they take you down into the mine on the same elevator that carried them to work. Before going down, you have to hand over anything electronic in your possession, since it could cause a spark and blow everyone up.


This is the winding house, which controls the elevator as it descends into the mine.

The shower and locker room building has been turned into a display area, with information on both the labor history of mining and its environmental impact.


In the showers there was this surprise -- a naked man (with strategically placed towel) painted on a mirror. The showers were added in the mid-20th century. Before that, the men went home each night caked in coal dust and the women had a bath ready for them, laboriously prepared by heating water on the stove.

I hope I get the chance to go back to Wales for a longer visit. It's so much more interesting than the romantic, fantasy-land image I had of it as a young person.

Comparing Oranges to Oranges

The Star Tribune's John Ewoldt ran a valuable, consumer-oriented column in Sunday's paper. Writing about a book called Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice, he reported that orange juice sold as "not from concentrate" (NFC) is not only more expensive than other orange juice, it is actually more processed and artificial, not less.

If you're like me, you assumed that NFC meant something close to fresh squeezed, right? Wrong.

NFC juice is "often a heavily pasteurized product. In the pasteurization process, it's heated, stripped of oxygen and flavor chemicals, then put in huge storage vats for up to a year. When it's ready for packaging, flavor derived from orange essence and oils is added to make it taste fresh." Orange "flavor" doesn't have to be listed on the ingredients because it is "natural" in some sense of the word.

Where did the NFC usage come from? Well, Tropicana was using the process, which is more expensive than concentrating and reconstituting, and it needed a way to get consumers to pay more to cover its costs. So someone at the company (or at their ad agency, I suspect) came up with the phrase. And consumers (including me, occasionally) have been coughing up the bigger bucks ever since.

Clearly, if you can't do fresh squeezed, the best bet is frozen concentrate -- the cheapest price for probably the next best product.

Here's a photo I found via Google of some NFC juice ready for shipping in China:


Not quite how I pictured it, based on the packaging shown in the photo at the top of this post. How about you?

Health Care Thoughts

I have no solutions for our health care mess, but I'm sure of these two things:

• Health care costs run the risk of ruining small businesses that provide health insurance for employees.
• The cost of individual insurance not only hurts self-employed people, including farmers -- it suppresses innovation by keeping people at their day job when they have every ability to go off and create the next great business idea.

Several interesting things I've seen on health care in the last few days:

Garrison Keillor's op-ed in today's Star Tribune:

In the past two weeks, I've attended two benefit concerts to raise money for musicians to pay their medical bills, and that is just ridiculous. Why should anyone, least of all a valuable contributing member of society, have to pass the hat to pay the doctor? But there I was, watching one of America's few true-blue cowboy singers hoist himself on crutches onto the stage to since "The Old Chisholm Tail" as we put our twenties the pot to pay for his pelvis, broken when a horse threw him. A cowboy singer can only afford the $10,000 deductible health plan and that means he must sell Old Paint or become a charity case.

And my response to Garrison was, It's good the cowboy singer even had the $10,000 deductible plan, because I know of many musicians and other self-employed people who don't have anything who are approaching late middle age.

A friend posted this short clip of a Congressional hearing on Twitter. It's an exchange between Dennis Kucinich and Dr. David Gratzer, a Canadian who advocates privatizing Canada's health care system:



Dr. Gratzer is part of the Manhattan Institute, a think tank advocating free enterprise solutions, funded by conservative foundations like the Koch and Walton Family Foundations and corporations like Cigna and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

I've heard or read a lot of comparisons of the Canadian vs. American systems. One op-ed from the Denver Post listed eight myths about the Canadian health care system. Its author, a Canadian clinical psychologist living it the U.S. for close to two decades, declared that the following are myths:

• Myth: Taxes in Canada are extremely high, mostly because of national health care.
• Myth: Canada's health care system is a cumbersome bureaucracy.
• Myth: The Canadian system is significantly more expensive than that of the U.S.
• Myth: Canada's government decides who gets health care and when they get it.
• Myth: There are long waits for care, which compromise access to care.
• Myth: Canadians are paying out of pocket to come to the U.S. for medical care.
• Myth: Canada is a socialized health care system in which the government runs hospitals and where doctors work for the government.
• Myth: There aren't enough doctors in Canada.

I also just read this interesting piece on Snopes. It's a point-by-point examination of the claims made in an email that's circulating, supposedly written by a regular Canadian citizen. The email makes claims such as "I am personally in the 55% income tax bracket" and the "Government allots [only] so many operations per year" and "Forget getting a second opinion, what you see is what you get." The Snopes response is very measured and fair minded, often pointing out that the claims made -- such as "Shirley's cousin was diagnosed with a heart blockage. Put on a waiting list. Died before he could get treatment" -- are unverifiable and so vague that anything could have caused the death [even if "Shirley's cousin" isn't a complete fabrication -- DN3].

Today's Pioneer Press included an op-ed by Michael Tanner of the libertarian Cato Institute called Obama's Right -- We Need Health Care Reform But He's Wrong about What Kind. In it, he proposes unmooring health insurance from employment. As he points out, it is unfair that employed, insured people get their care tax free while someone who pays for insurance from self-employed income has to pay taxes on her/his benefits. Instead, people would pay taxes on their benefits and both employed and self-employed people would receive either a tax deduction or a tax credit to compensate.

At first I thought this sounded more fair than the current system, but then I remembered that self-employed people are able to deduct their health costs from their taxes. While it is not equivalent to the tax break employees receive, it does cover part of the difference. What self-employed people don't have is access to affordable plans, since they aren't part of a group that spreads out the risk. So unless they can get access to care through a spouse's company (even if they have to pay for the plan), the price is outrageous or has a a very high deductible, as in the case of Garrison's friend, the cowboy singer -- or both. I heard an NPR story that told of a farm couple whose only health insurance options cost between $12,000 and $20,000 per year for the two of them, with a $2,000 deductible!

Tanner also called for removing the interstate ban on health coverage. As it stands, you can only purchase health insurance within your state, and each state has its own list of benefits that companies must cover. As with any op-ed, Tanner picked the two extremes: New Jersey, which requires coverage of in vitro fertilization and coverage of children to age 25 (and costs $5,580 a year for a healthy 25-year-old male) vs. Kentucky, which costs $960 per year (no mention of what they do or don't cover). Tanner thinks that a young guy in New Jersey should be able to buy the Kentucky plan, and a bill sponsored by Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., would do just that.

What's wrong with that? Health policy specialist Bob Laszewski writes, "In the end, the young and healthy would get much more affordable policies and the old and/or sick would be worse off." (Kind of like how privatizing Social Security would probably work for the young and financially fit, but not too well for anyone else, or how giving school vouchers would leave all the kids with the most needs in the public schools.) Laszewski writes:

So what exactly does the Shadegg bill get us?

Well it would get Mr. Mathews' insurance company trade association, the “Council for Affordable Care” a wild-west market environment to go find all of those young healthy people and sign them up for really cheap coverage.

Young and healthy people would pay a lot less and older and/or sicker people would pay a lot more if coverage were even available to them.

New Jersey is a dysfunctional health insurance market. But fixing that state, and others like it, is a lot more complicated than putting the “cherry pickers” back in charge.

No one would argue that (in a market-based system) a young person's or a healthier person's insurance shouldn't be cheaper than that of an older person or a unhealthy person -- but allowing purchases across state lines will clearly have unintended consequences that are likely to affect the sickest and poorest the most.

That's all I've got to say on the subject of health care reform for now. But if we don't make some substantial improvements in our health system in the next few years, I'm going to be one disappointed voter. The only question is who'll get the blame.

LATE ADDITION: Via BoingBoing, I just read a Bill Moyers interview with Wendell Potter, former head of communications at Cigna. This is the guy who wrote the talking points for opposing the Clinton health reforms, as well as for quashing Michael Moore's movie Sicko. You may have heard about Potter's more recent change of heart -- he testified before Congress to say that insurance companies purposely let people onto their roles despite knowing they have undeclared preexisting conditions, take their premium payments for a while, but then as soon as the person seeks treatment for the condition, the company disallows it and drops the person from the rolls.

How did someone who had worked in the industry for so long come to have such a change of heart? This is what he told Bill Moyers:

WENDELL POTTER: I went home, to visit relatives [in 2007]. And I picked up the local newspaper and I saw that a health care expedition was being held a few miles up the road, in Wise, Virginia. And I was intrigued....

It was being held at a Wise County Fairground. I took my camera. I took some pictures. It was a very cloudy, misty day, it was raining that day, and I walked through the fairground gates. And I didn't know what to expect. I just assumed that it would be, you know, like a health-- booths set up and people just getting their blood pressure checked and things like that.

But what I saw were doctors who were set up to provide care in animal stalls. Or they'd erected tents, to care for people. I mean, there was no privacy. In some cases-- and I've got some pictures of people being treated on gurneys, on rain-soaked pavement.

And I saw people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care. People drove from South Carolina and Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee-- all over the region, because they knew that this was being done. A lot of them heard about it from word of mouth.

There could have been people and probably were people that I had grown up with. They could have been people who grew up at the house down the road, in the house down the road from me. And that made it real to me.

BILL MOYERS: What did you think?

WENDELL POTTER: It was absolutely stunning. It was like being hit by lightning. It was almost-- what country am I in? I just-- it just didn't seem to be a possibility that I was in the United States. It was like a lightning bolt had hit me....

Just a few weeks later though, I was back in Philadelphia and I would often fly on a corporate aircraft to go to meetings.

And I just thought that was a great way to travel. It is a great way to travel. You're sitting in a luxurious corporate jet, leather seats, very spacious. And I was served my lunch by a flight attendant who brought my lunch on a gold-rimmed plate. And she handed me gold-plated silverware to eat it with. And then I remembered the people that I had seen in Wise County. Undoubtedly, they had no idea that this went on, at the corporate levels of health insurance companies....

I was trying to process all this, and trying to figure out what I should do.... One of the books I read as I was trying to make up my mind here was President Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage."

And in the forward, Robert Kennedy said that one of the president's, one of his favorite quotes was a Dante quote that, "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain a neutrality." And when I read that, I said, "Oh, jeez, I-- you know. I'm headed for that hottest place in hell, unless I say something."

Yes, It Is Possible to Share Letters

I have a tendency to rant about logos that are designed to share one initial capital letter among two or more words (see past posts here, here and here).

A friend pointed me to this rail road photo on Flickr, which shows that back in the day of the professional lettering artist, it was indeed possible to make shared initial letters work in a readable way.

The photo is by a Flickr user named Julia, and you can see her photo stream here. She has shot a lot of cool signs and buildings. Some of the categories on her photo stream are:

• Route 66
• Signs
• Vintage Kids (these aren't photos -- they're scans from printed materials)
  
• Cinemas
• Diners and lunch counters
• Country stores, groceries and drugstores
  
• Rural Decay
• Mid-century in print (again, not photos, but scans from printed materials)
  

Hundreds of photos on these topics. Wow. I have to go spend some time looking through Julia's photos!

Another example of the wonderful things you can find while wandering around the Interweb.

She Did What???!?

Yesterday, I caught another Huffington Post headline anomaly (see other examples here and here from my past posts).

There's nothing quite like a badly broken headline when you've been laughter deprived.

But even without the bad break, the headline writer was just asking for trouble by putting the word "kills" right next to "Michael Jackson."

Really now, can't we all agree this is one thing that can't be blamed on Nancy Pelosi?

Taxing Soda Pop?

I'm not sure if this belongs in my "part of the solution" category or not, but did anyone else hear about Michael Jacobson's idea to tax soda pop?

Jacobson, head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), has a history of making headline-grabbing pronouncements about nutrition. I believe he's the one who coined the term "heart attack on a plate" when describing fettuccine alfredo.

Depending on how Jacobson's tax was implemented (two possibilities he listed were 1 cent per container or 1 cent per ounce), it would raise between $1.5 billion and $16 billion. In theory -- especially at the steeper end of the tax scale -- it would begin to cut consumption. And the revenue would go to funding increased health care access (price tag for that, so far: $1.2 trillion).

Of course, any tax on consumption (i.e, a sales tax) is inherently regressive. But as Jacobson points out,

That's true as far it goes, but don't look for this argument from anti-poverty advocates. If we're using soda tax revenues to help pay for expanded health care coverage and for prevention, lower-income Americans will enjoy the biggest share of the benefit.

I'm not so sure either amount of taxation would have a big effect on consumption. Like gas prices, I think it will take a pretty big change in the price to alter people's behavior. So doubling the price would have a noticeable effect, but increasing it by a cent an ounce probably wouldn't. Although, since the proposed tax would not apply to diet sodas, some people might switch (rather than stop drinking it altogether).

CSPI's report on Liquid Candy includes a lot of stats on how much soda teens, in particular, consume. My favorite takeaway is this graph, comparing the change in milk vs. soda consumption in just 20 years:


Can you say "marketing"?

Do Not Go Directly to Jail

Star Tribune veteran writer Jean Hopfensperger had a great article in yesterday's paper, titled Troubled Teens Take Route Around Jail.

She tells us that Ramsey, Dakota and Hennepin counties are part of an experiment to divert teens who would normally be sent to juvenile detention into counseling and lifestyle change sessions instead.

It's "based on research showing that most young offenders don't need to be jailed to get them to show up in court or keep the streets safe," especially "for lower-risk offenders who enter detention because of truancy, curfew violations and fifth-degree assault."

Before entering the program, each kid is assessed on a sliding scale. From zero to nine, the kid is sent home; a score from 10 to 15 means something more stringent, but less than detention -- house arrest, day treatment or another community-based service. Those with scores 16 and over go into detention.

The counties have been using these assessments for three years, and they report no increase in court no-shows, crimes committed while awaiting hearings, or even later. The sessions described by Hopfensperger combine group discussions and motivational talks with job hunting techniques.

The story ends with a quote from Melvin Carter, a former St. Paul cop who has worked with at-risk teenagers: "We used to think that a boy who came from poverty, a broken home, had been in a gang or used a weapon -- that they were most likely to be the repeat offenders. But if you peel back the onion, the biggest single factor is whether they spent one day in jail."

Ellen Raskin Speaks About The Westing Game

A note on Peter Sieruta's Collecting Children's Books blog pointed me to an amazing find -- an audio recording of Ellen Raskin discussing her manuscripts and process for creating the Newbery-winning novel The Westing Game.

Raskin donated the materials to the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (her alma mater) in May 1978, about a year before she accepted the Newbery Medal.

In addition to the audio, the CCBC has posted a substantial number of sample pages of the first, second, and final drafts, plus Raskin's layouts for the book and illustrations for the cover and title page. (Because she was an illustrator before she was a writer, Raskin was always involved in every detail of her books' appearance.)

There doesn't appear to be a transcription of the audio, but here are some notes of what stood out most to me. Anything not in quotes is my paraphrase of Raskin's words.

How Ellen Raskin got started writing

"I'm not sure I really am a writer as such. I write as an illustrator."

In the early 1970s, she was asked by editor Ann Durell of E.P. Dutton to write a long book. Raskin's usual publisher (for picture books) was Atheneum. When she expressed reticence at the idea of writing a long book, Durell urged her to write about her childhood in Milwaukee during the Depression -- and that effort became The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel).

"As far fetched as that book is, it has much that is autobiographical. My daughter and my husband both said everything about you is in that book. In fact my husband said, that's going to be your first and last book, you have nothing left to write about."

Raskin next traces how each of her subsequent books began from a personal angle:

• Her second book, Figgs & Phantoms, began from the fact that she was a book collector. However, she goes on to say, "The first idea doesn't have to be the end idea. It's a starting point."
• The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues came from her experience as an art student, and its setting was very much based on her own house in New York City.

Finally, she began The Westing Game in 1976 as an idea related to the Bicentennial. But it was also inspired by the city of Sheboygan, north of Raskin's native Milwaukee. (I don't know why, but I've always assumed the book was set in Chicago. Shame on me, since I am such a fan of Sheboygan!) Sheboygan is a factory town, dominated by Kohler Company, and in her talk Raskin says that Sam Westing is intentionally based on "Old Man Kohler." Then, when she was already she was immersed in the book, the reclusive Howard Hughes died, and there was a brouhaha over his will -- and the story grew from there.

Her process of creating the story

Raskin says in the audio that she doesn't do story outlines. She lets the characters lead her. But she had to submit 50 pages to get a contract and therefore half her advance, so the 50-page first draft is part of the collection. Her comment on the manuscript pages: "I'm a very messy worker."

As an illustrator, Raskin had maintained a "swipe file" for 30 years -- since art school. Before the age of the Internet, if an illustrator needed a reference image of a cow, she was out of luck unless she happened to have one nearby. (According to Raskin, all illustrators have a swipe file. Her theory for why that is? They're more home bound than writers, who go to the library. "Or more squirrelish.") As an illustrator-turned-writer, she still relied upon her swipe file for inspiration in creating her characters, and so dug through her two drawers of people pictures to look for images of young people. She picked out one of Turtle and one of Angela.


Designing the book

One of the most interesting parts of the audio is listening to Raskin talk about how she designed the book itself. She was thinking about the design all the time while writing. "I've watched children read... and my books are complicated. They aren't as complicated to children as they are to adults, because children read more slowly and they aren't ashamed to stop and go back to read something again... I want the look of the book to appeal to them. I know that when they take it off the shelf, and if they have to make a report, I know they go to the back of the book to see how many pages it is. So I insist that my books be under 200 pages."

She always tried to break up the page -- every spread in the book has at least one excerpted block of copy, or row of bullet lines, or chapter heading -- some typographic element to interrupt the continuous body of text. The chapters run continuously into the text instead of starting on new pages, because she wanted to keep the length to 192 pages.

As an example of Raskin's exacting nature, she noted that 15,000 copies of the first printing had to be shredded because the bindery trimmed them 1/4" too narrow. Her standard: The margins must be wide enough for the average child's thumb to fit without covering up any of the type.

Raskin used heavy black bullets as decorative elements throughout the book because they were coherent with the idea of fireworks and explosions -- she didn't want to use asterisks, because those had been a key element in the design of her earlier book Leon.


The cover illustration and title design were an effort all their own. Raskin drew the $1,000 bill and reproduced copies of it with a stat camera (oh, the good old days!) in order to build the house made out of money. She did all the color separations herself, and those, too, are posted to the CCBC site.

On her previous projects, Raskin didn't keep the drafts or editor's notes, being embarrassed about how bad they were (!).

Because of this, The Westing Game is the only one of her books that has such as thorough collection of historical artifacts.

Thanks to the CCBC for making these fantastic objects available to everyone through their website. It's a fine example of how the Internet really can make pieces of history more accessible.

SSN Chickens Come Home to Roost

As I've written before, I was a Social Security number resister as long as I could be -- until I finally got my first job after graduating from high school.

Today's Washington Post reminds me of another reason why using SSNs as de facto national ID numbers is not such a good idea. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that it is not too hard to guess someone's complete SSN from public information, particularly if the person was born after 1988 and is from a smaller state.

Why? Because the first three numbers are assigned based on the zip code provided with the application, while the fourth and fifth are the same for all the people in the same region over a period of time. The last four digits are consecutively assigned as the applications come in.

And starting in 1988 the IRS required every taxpayer to provide an SSN for all claimed dependents (i.e., children), so numbers are now applied for at birth -- so all the records of who was born where and when are available to the public to use in guessing SSNs.

As I suspected -- even before it was confirmed by an expert at the end of the article -- the increasingly common practice of unmasking the last four numbers of the SSN on web forms and paperwork is completely stupid, since those four numbers are actually the part that is most worth protecting, since they are the hardest to guess.

But I suppose it's not fair to blame the chickens.

_________

Note: The full study can be downloaded here.