Not a Potted Plant

A lot of my recipes are heavy on the seasonings and spices, so I thought to offer something a bit more mild. This one is pretty fast and easy, light, and a nice romantic dinner for two. It goes great with a sweeter white wine. You will need:

• 1 6 oz. salmon fillet
• 1/4 lb. penne pasta
• About thirty fresh peas
• Parmagiano-Reggiano cheese
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 carrot
• 1 stalk celery
• 1 lemon
• finely-chopped chives
• olive oil
• salt
• pepper

Start two pots of water, one larger than the other. Salt both pots of water. Crush the clove under a knife. Peel the carrot, and chop it into about 1″ pieces. Also chop the celery into 1″ pieces. Add the juice of half the lemon, garlic, bay leaf, celery, carrot, and chives into the smaller pot.

When the bots are both at a nice boil, add the pasta to the larger pot and the salmon to the smaller pot. Depending on the size of the pot you’re using to poach, you may need to slice the fillet in half down the middle. Cook both for about ten minutes, stirring the pasta constantly, until the pasta is al dente and the salmon is pink and firm. Drain the pasta, dress with the olive oil and the raw peas. Toss and grate the cheese on the pasta.

Remove the salmon from the poach with a slotted spoon or a fry spider, when it’s just firm all the way through. Place atop of the pasta, sprinkle with salt and pepper and dress with lemon juice to taste. Serve immediately.

You will discard the vegetables from the poach, unless you want to save the poach water for stock. You’ll get a nice, interesting flavor from the flavors in the poach, but it won’t be very spicy. Salmon is famous for not taking a sautée or a grill well because like all fish it’s a bit delicate, but also because it is rich in albumen, the same protein found in egg whites, which can create an unappetizing goo on the outside of your fish before serving as the meat expands under heat if you handle it improperly. Poaching will remove that, and your salmon should come out a nice light pink, with the bright green chives accenting it.

It occurs to me that you’d want to serve a salad first so there’s a vegetable. It also occurs to me that the dual cooking for the pasta and the fish provides a nice opportunity for a couple, say a couple on a dinner date at one of their homes, to cook together as they share a bottle of wine, talk about the food, and stand in proximity to one another. So, maybe that’s a nice date meal for all you single Readers out there, particularly if your date is averse to strong spices.

Experience seems to bear out my faith in the proposition that even if something happens for reasons that are not immediately clear, sufficient investigation will eventually reveal the cause.

Just before Labor Day, my dog became violently ill for no apparent reason. Mrs. Likko and I cancelled a planned trip to visit with our families out of state to tend to her, and the veterinarian rang up the bill on us for a lot more money than we’d have spent had we taken the trip. I was convinced then that had we not done this, our dog would have died, and in a very unpleasant and probably painful way.

What I learned today only affirms that belief, too. Continue Reading →

From the Washington Post, by way of OTB:

Breaking from two decades of tradition, this year’s election exit poll is set to include surveys of voters in 31 states, not all 50 as it has for the past five presidential elections, according to multiple people involved in the planning.

Dan Merkle, director of elections for ABC News, and a member of the consortium that runs the exit poll, confirmed the shift Wednesday. The aim, he said, “is to still deliver a quality product in the most important states,” in the face of mounting survey costs.

The decision by the National Election Pool — a joint venture of the major television networks and The Associated Press — is sure to cause some pain to election watchers across the country. (For a full list of the states that won’t have exit polls scroll to the bottom of this post.)

Voters in the excluded states will still be interviewed as part of a national exit poll, but state-level estimates of the partisan, age or racial makeups of electorates won’t be available as they have been since 1992. The lack of data may hamper election night analyses in some states, and it will almost certainly limit post-election research for years to come.

DC is excluded, in addition to the nineteen states in black on the map (in case you can’t see it, Rhode Island is one of them). Remember when I talked about pseudostates? It appears that the NEP has found them.

This list includes sixteen red states and four blue ones (including DC). They excluded as many of Obama’s states as they included where McCain managed a majority of the vote. This ought to raise some serious alarm bells. I am at a loss as to what, precisely, the methodology here is.

They’re not going for regional balance, as they are excluding the entirety of the south central states and north central great plains. They’re excluding both Mormon states, and both West Virginia and Kentucky.

We could cite diversity, but no Texas.

We could say that “Oh, gosh, those rural states are expensive…” and yet urban/suburban Utah is excluded while Vermont is included.

We could talk about competitive senate or gubernatorial races, but North Dakota is a tossup and was excluded.

Does this matter? I don’t know. But it sure seems to me that exit polls in non-swing states should matter or should not. If they do not matter, I really do not see much reason to include six of Obama’s top ten. If phone polls are good enough for Louisiana, they’re good enough for Maryland. If they’re worried about missing something in Maryland, they ought to be worried about missing something in Louisiana.

I’d like to be able to say “this may discredit exit polls into oblivion” and a part of me wouldn’t mind that for a variety of reasons. The other part of me loves data. Here at the League, we’ve had people sift through it and get some quite interesting tidbits.

So I hope that this is a mistake or misunderstanding or something.

Last night I moderated the LeagueCast to post-mortem the first Presidential debate. If you’re ever asked to moderate or lead a discussion of panelists, I’ve a few thoughts to share. This is how I made my secret sauce, and how I’d make it better next time.

Continue Reading →

First, a bit shout-out to Burt for running a great post-debate discussion.

I am among those that thought, on the whole, Romney turned in a pretty impressive performance and Obama a lackluster one.

There are three hesitations I have, however. First, I have been wrong in the past (I got two of the three Bush-Gore debates wrong, and one of the Obama-McCain ones – twice I overestimated the Democrat and once the Republican). Romney looked positive reptilian when he wasn’t talking. I don’t know how many noticed or cared, but that is one of those minor things that can color future perceptions. Second, Romney’s domineering of Lehrer didn’t come across as good. I was cringing a bit at the beginning. I don’t know if he got better or I just got used to it.

The third thing may have worked in his favor, though. It allowed him to get words in he otherwise wouldn’t have an ultimately change the format of the discussion… for the better, in my view. This debate was made more tolerable by its freewheeling style. The “two minute answers” would have been more a hindrance than a help, viewing-wiser. Lehrer is getting some criticism, but I’m glad he did what he did (or didn’t do what he didn’t do).

Even if I am right about Romney’s performance and Obama’s, I don’t think this is a gamechanger. If the press gives Romney some good headlines, it mostly serves to keep him alive. The progress made in establishing himself as something other than a right-wing caricature has to be capitalized on. I’m not sure how much faith I’d have in Romney not to screw it up.

I placed the odds of an Obama Romney victory at 20% before the debate, and I’d place it the same now. A bad performance, though, would have shifted things possibly irrevocably in the other direction.

A part of me wonders what conversations went on behind closed doors in the Romney campaign. There was some talk at the Leaguecast of whether his apparent shift will hurt him among conservative voters. I actually wonder if the goal of the campaign now is not to convince those voters (or more specifically, the donors) that he’s in their corner, but to convince them that he can win. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were pleased with what they saw, if it pans out.

I had more to say in the Leaguecast, and I’m sure there is more than I am forgetting to mention.

Scotch helps presidential debates go down.

Back in the 90’s and early aughts when I was collecting comics, prices were in pretty rapid rise. The publishers always blamed the increased cost of paper. So when they were $1.25 when I started collecting and $2.25 when I stopped several years later, it was all about the paper. Comics cost upwards of $4 a piece now. Now, you can get an ecomic, and it will cost you… about $4. Dang the rising costs of paper.

Peter Osnios thinks the courts are about to hurt the book business:

To get a sense of where the pricing issue now stands beyond the legal battles, I embarked on this simple exercise: I went to every major on-line retailer and a selection of traditional booksellers to find out what they were charging for Krugman’s End This Depression Now. The title was published last April and reached as high as number 17 on the New York Times bestseller list for printed books. A starred review in Publishers Weekly concluded, “Krugman has consistently called for more liberal economic policies, but his wit and bipartisanship ensure that this book will appeal to a broad swath of readers from the Left to the Right, from the 99% to the 1%.” According to Norton, the book has sold 30,000 copies in print, with e-book sales of 25,000. The list price for the book is $24.95, and every bookstore I called is selling it at that price. You can also order it directly from the publisher’s website, but that comes with a shipping charge and sales tax where required.

Here is where the pricing becomes interesting. Amazon’s hardcover price is $14.71, with no shipping charge for customers who pay an annual fee of $79 for Amazon Prime and two-day delivery. The Kindle edition is $9.48. At BN.com the hardcover is $14.71, but the e-book price is $13.72 (BN.com has free shipping for orders over $25). Moreover, in the Barnes & Noble bookstore, the hardcover is $24.95. On Apple’s iBook, the price is $11.99. The Sony store charges $14.99, and on Kobo, which was recently named the e-book provider in the coming year for independent booksellers, the price was $15.49. Only Google Play matched Amazon at $9.48.

The end result of all of this, Osnios believes, is that cheap will rule the day and that those who are able to sell cheap, like Amazon, will be able to force the price down to the point that everyone but Amazon will be harmed, including the consumer. The consumer, Osnios explains, will be harmed by the publishers because “the result will be fewer books that matter — like [Krugman’s book] — whether in print or digital formats. ”

Well, I can safely predict that he is wrong on Krugman. So wrong, in fact, that it calls the rest of what he has to say into question. Books like Krugman’s will always do well because they’re safe. They might not give him as much of an advance, but I don’t think Krugman is going to forgo writing a book because his advance is $x rather than $2x. The danger, to the extent that there is one, lies in unsafe authors. Any sort of risk-taking.

This may be inevitable in any event. It may ultimately not actually matter insofar as the reader is concerned. With self-publishing becoming increasingly economical, the publishers can essentially force would-be authors to make a name for themselves before signing them anything with an advance. Maybe a tenured professor at George Mason University won’t write a book to be self-published that he otherwise would if he were to get an advance, but… vanity is a pretty powerful thing.

There is a possible concern that quality will drop and we’ll have to start getting used to typos and shoddier editing, but this is not end-of-the-world stuff to me. and honestly, the risk of such is not worth the upcharge the publishers are demanding. The lack of sympathy I feel for publishers who have been trying to keep ebook prices comparable to physical book prices is not insignificant here. It’s not just that Amazon is wanting to sell me the books for less. It’s that Amazon prices actually make sense to me in terms of what I am getting.

Arguments about the increasing costs of paper aren’t going to cut it anymore.

My alma mater (“Southern Tech University”), like many schools, is considering a smoking ban on campus. I was thinking as much as a decade ago that this might be the natural extension of the bans in bars and restaurants. Of course, to voice this back then was to be building up strawmen and making slippery slope fallacies and all that jazz. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure back then. I mean, a bar or a restaurant is one thing, but an entire campus of hundreds of of acres? When office campuses started going entirely smoke free, I stopped feeling that I was perhaps paranoid.

I am against the ban, to what I am sure is nobody’s surprise. So is the Student Association. I find it difficult to believe that on a campus that is nearly 500 acres in size that you cannot find places to accommodate smokers. I feel oddly dispassionate about it, though. It will likely happen at some point, it will likely be ignored. Potential compromises may be passed along the way, but even workable compromises will be deemed insufficient.

In the case of Sotech, there are rumors that it is not entirely the school’s choice and that cancer institutes are threatening to stop giving grants to schools that don’t have smoking bans. Which, if it comes down to losing significant amounts of research dollars, I guess I understand.

Rather than objecting on an ideological level, it’s mostly the sense of loss that nags at me. Not the loss of our freedoms, but that being able to smoke on campus provided extraordinarily good social opportunities for me as an undergraduate. The bans around doorways actually just made it better because it got us all clumped together. No smoking on campus and I never meet Dharla (I mention her, but there were others). This is no thing for a lot of people, who instead of going out to smoke might go to the commons area and meet people there. Me being me, I’d probably have stayed in the dorm and not met anybody. At least, my pre-smoking college experience bears that speculation out.

That’s not exactly a defense of smoking in any logical manner. Which is to say, if there weren’t other issues at stake, my introversion would not be justification for inconveniencing other people. And though I have my objections to a lot of the smoking bans, I can’t at all say that it is an altogether bad thing for smokers to make smoking inconvenient. So it’s not a rational reaction. But dang, man, one of my college experiences is about to be consigned to a period piece.

Is this video awesome of what?