Tales from the Shark Tank

A friend of mine has an Amazon Kindle e-book reader, which she absolutely adores.  This being only the last in a string of folks I know who have fallen in love with ebook readers of various descriptions, I went to look into them.  I also looked at readers that work on standard laptops, and at netbooks, which look to be about the same size as a dedicated reader.

So here’s my question, for those more clueful in matters techie-toy related:  what are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

This is pure curiousity.  At the moment, I don’t know that I need either one.  In fact, I have a more than sneaking suspicion that I need neither, having as I do a perfectly good laptop.   But then again, so do those of my friends who actually have e-readers, so now I’m curious.

I just had two Purveyors of Religion (aka missionaries) appear at my door.  I was polite; I try always to be polite, even when I consider what they’re doing to be the height (shouldn’t that be depth?) of rudeness.  I told them it was a Jewish household, and when they didn’t take that hint, added one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes on religion.  That confused them, and they left.

People who knock on my door trying to bring me the One True Faith(tm) have always bothered me.  What, all others are counterfeit, like the Canterville Ghost? (If you haven’t read the short story, do so.  It’s fabulous.)  It’s the implicit arrogance of it that I find most disturbing.  I mean really.  To claim that they have the One True Way – and not just “Christianity” but their particular sect and flavor of Christianity requires that they claim that they, and only they, know the mind of the $DEITY.  I’ve always thought the whole point of any deity was to be beyond human, and beyond our comprehension.  We’re mortal, limited in our perceptions and ability to conceptualize; the Creator of the Universe(s) by definition is not.  So how can they, or anyone, say that not only are there a finite number of ways to approach that Infinite, there is only one, and they alone know it?

What unmitigated gall, and they themselves don’t perceive it.  And they think they’re doing me a favor?

Part of our son’s bedtime delaying tactics ritual is the Catching of a Cat.  He says they purr him to sleep.  Their opinion of the proceeding is clear in the fact that as soon as he says “I need to catch a cat”, Sophia disappears under the couch, Cloud finds an elsewhere to be, and Tornado curls up in a dark closet corner, where her black fur conceals her in the shadows.

Our Boy remains undaunted.  Denied easy opportunity by the cats themselves, he enlists parental assistance.  Addressing the living room at large, he asks “would someone call a cat please?”  This is supposed to be my cue, but last night my husband was feeling impish.  So he sat in his chair, saying “cats?  Any cat come here?  Oh, ca-ats!” in the blandest tone imaginable, while grinning at His Boyness.  J. and I both cracked up, as Dad continued his “calling”.  Then it was my turn, as recognized champion Cat Caller.

As J. stood watching in the middle of the living room, I trilled.  Once.  Not another word, hadn’t picked up the treat jar, didn’t move.  Each cat responded according to her personality and cattitude.  Sophia came out from under the couch and gave a ladylike mew from just behind the corner of my chair, like a dignified young woman responding “here” to roll call.  Tornado came out and sauntered over, pausing to stretch when she was about three feet away before strolling the remaining distance to me.  “I just happened to be wandering this direction, and thought I would pay my regards”, she tells me as she jumps up on the arm of my chair.

The award for speed and theatricality went to Cloud.  She’d gone upstairs.  She came thundering down the stairs (she is not light on her feet), and dashed through the kitchen and living room, nearly knocking the Big Noisy Boy-kitten down in her enthusiasm.  She skidded to a stop (a neat trick on carpet), to jump up on the couch and walk around the back to get to me.

They all got treats and pettings, and Tornado permitted J. to pick her up and take her with him to bed.  Sophia, having gotten her treat and affection first, went back under the couch as he approached.  Cloud settled down to purr nearby.  And my position as cat-caller supreme remains secure.

A couple of days ago, I said I’d be trying cookies made from chocolate peanut butter.  They are cooling on the rack as I speak.  I believe the technical term is YUM!  The texture is sort of fudgy-brownie when they’re still warm, and slightly crisp when cool.  The taste is like what a peanut butter cup would be if it were made with really really good chocolate. They’re wonderful with either tea or milk.  This one’s a definite keeper.

CHOCOLATE PEANUT BUTTER OATMEAL COOKIES

• 2 cups (1 16 oz. jar) natural peanut butter with chocolate  (The kind with peanuts, salt, chocolate, cane sugar, and nothing else.)
• 3 eggs
• 1 1/2 cups dark brown sugar, firmly packed (You know the drill, right?)
• 2 cups oatmeal

Heat oven to 350^o F.

Blend all ingredients together.  Put in the refrigerator and chill until it is no longer sticky.  (Overnight is good.)  Scoop up teaspoonsful and put on a cookie sheet.  (I line mine with non-stick foil – wonderful stuff!)  Flatten in the traditional peanut-butter cookie pattern with a fork dipped in granulated sugar.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, or until firm enough that they don’t crumble when you take them off the cookie sheet and put them on the cooling rack.

Enjoy!

Prep time: 5 minutes
Chilling time: at least 4 hours
Yield: 4 1/2 dozen cookies

Good cop Bad cop is a time-honored method for getting cooperation out of someone.  Works with kids, works even better with cats.  With the cat, the “bad cop” needn’t even be sentient.  I have a tape-festooned chair that Miss Cloud is certain is the Meanest Creature in the Galaxy.  Why, it thwarts her every attempt to scratch it, most unpleasantly, and doesn’t even seem to notice her discomfiture!

I have a chair that she has decided is the Best. Scratching. Surface. EVER.  The problem is that I don’t want that chair shredded.  It’s one of my good ones.  I tried putting something called “Sticky Paws” on it, to no avail.  That’s basically wide double-faced tape, and the theory is that they won’t like the feel of the adhesive on their paws.  Problem is, one of my cats figured out how to hook one end with a claw and strip it off, and another how to scratch without touching with her pads.  The stuff was useless.

But I am at least as stubborn as my cats, so I tried a variant.  I got regular package tape (much cheaper, as well) and stuck it to the chair in spiral loops, kind of like the way you twist crepe paper streamers.  Catching an end only tangles the stuff on the offender’s paws; likewise scratching with just the claws, because it’s loose.  And each time putty-tat tries to move to a different area of chair, I put more tape on it.  That vicious chair grabs her paw, and then when she tries to use the other paw to brace and pull away, it grabs that paw too!  How manifestly unfair!  To make matters worse, Mommy doesn’t even help her disengage, because she’s sitting there laughing.  Laughing! It’s cruel and unusual punishment, abuse of dignity and an offense against the Kitty Constitution.  Bad chair.  Mean nasty cruel rotten vicious chair!  You can just see her trying to figure out how to report that chair to the Kitty Legal Defense Fund.

At the same time, every time she jumps up on that chair, I call her to “come”.  She’s learned that command thoroughly, although of course in her walnut sized brain, “Cloud, come!” translates to “treat time!”  She comes at a gallop, as do the other two cats.   That gets her off the chair, and by the time she’s had her treat her kitty attention span has been exceeded, and she forgets to jump back up.  Good Mommy!  Wonderful Mommy!  Mommy assuages the offended dignity with treats and pettings.  Cloud doesn’t need to bother with that mean old chair; she has better things to do, like purr in Mommy’s lap.  So runs the feline “logic”.

When my son was very small, I played the same game, putting his toys in time out if they couldn’t play nicely and then doing something fun with him.  My friend Lee refers to cats as “kids you don’t have to send to college”.  The longer I have both, the more I see the truth in that.

This afternoon at the grocery, I found natural peanut butter blended with dark chocolate.  Peanut buter and dark chocolate – what’s not to like?

I promised cookies for an after-school program my son is participating in next Tuesday.  I have a kickin’ peanut butter oatmeal cookie recipe, and that’s what I’d planned to make.  So having succumbed to impulse, I’ll be making it with the dark chocolate peanut butter.  I’ll report on the success (or not) of the experiment in a couple of days.

I have just read an article that makes me absolutely furious.

In summary, it seems the doctor whose study ignited the scare that the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine might have a correlation with autism falsified his data. Someone went back and looked at the patient records his findings were supposedly based on, and they didn’t match up at all.

For years I’ve sidestepped this controversy, telling people who tried to drag me and my advocacy abilities into the dispute about whether or not to vaccinate, and whether the vaccines might be causing autism, that I would leave that to others; my concern was to figure out what would help our children now, and how to make sure that they got it regardless of their parents’ income or educational level. It didn’t make sense to me, and I didn’t want to be dragged into the arguments. But a lot of parents have swallowed this hook, line and sinker. It feeds into fears of a technology most do not fully understand, and of not doing what is best for our children. And once internalized, that fear doesn’t go away easily. It’s like a virus itself, one for which there is no inoculation. This doctor has played on those fears. The article that started all of this came out 10 years ago, but it will take far longer to undo the damage it’s done. I won’t be surprised if it takes a full generation, and I’m sure it will never disappear entirely. Meanwhile children have been and will continue be put at needless risk of entirely preventable diseases by parents worried that the consequences of prevention will be worse than the diseases themselves.

Articles expire, so the text follows:

The doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found. (emphasis mine)

Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.

The research was published in February 1998 in an article in The Lancet medical journal. It claimed that the families of eight out of 12 children attending a routine clinic at the hospital had blamed MMR for their autism, and said that problems came on within days of the jab. The team also claimed to have discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease underlying the children’s conditions.

However, our investigation, confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council (GMC), reveals that: In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal. Despite involving just a dozen children, the 1998 paper’s impact was extraordinary. After its publication, rates of inoculation fell from 92% to below 80%. Populations acquire “herd immunity” from measles when more than 95% of people have been vaccinated.

Last week official figures showed that 1,348 confirmed cases of measles in England and Wales were reported last year, compared with 56 in 1998. Two children have died of the disease.

With two professors, John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch, Wakefield is defending himself against allegations of serious professional misconduct brought by the GMC. The charges relate to ethical aspects of the project, not its findings. All three men deny any misconduct.

Through his lawyers, Wakefield this weekend denied the issues raised by our investigation, but declined to comment further.
(by Brian Deer, Times Online UK edition, Feb 8, 2009)

As if we hadn’t had enough to worry about.

I just found this quoted on another blog, and must pass it along.  It’s by Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone.

Service Outage:

Dear World,

The United States of America, your quality supplier of ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for its 2001-2008 service outage. The technical fault that led to this eight-year service interruption has been located. Replacement components were ordered Tuesday, November 4th, 2008, and have begun arriving. Early test of the new equipment indicate that it is functioning correctly and we expect it to be fully operational by mid-January. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage and we look forward to resuming full service and hopefully even improving it in years to come.

Thank you for your patience and understanding,

The USA

I just had my 2-year follow-up visit with the oncologist.  Everything is fine.  Evidently she’s using me as an example for her residents of just how effective early detection and surgery can be.

When I was done, I went outside into the 70 degree, sun-shiney day and spent two hours walking around the University of Chicago campus.  It’s been a Good Day.

It was above 50^o F. today, so I took advantage of the relative warmth and sunshine to take a walk. I hoped it would improve the mood, and indeed it did.

But I was not walking quickly, and noticed details I don’t always perceive. A small marsh-willow (non-weeping) had a nest in the fork where three tiny branches met. It was a neat, perfectly woven cup, perhaps two and a half inches in diameter, and I found myself wondering how small a bird must be to occupy such a nest along with her hatchlings. It’s untenanted now, of course, but so well built and anchored that all the winds and storms this winter has presented so far have neither torn nor dislodged it.

A few feet further on I found a young locust. It too had a nest, though not as whole as the first. What intrigued me was that the second nest was braced by a small branch and a thorn long enough that had it not been sharp, it would have qualified as a twig in its own right. The tree itself was part of the bird’s defense, in a way more direct than the usual cloaking leaves. When I was a little girl, I read about thorns being used as pins, but I couldn’t imagine how that worked. The only thorns I’d ever seen were rose or berry thorns, and while those certainly could tear unwary arms, they were too short to fasten anything. But locust thorns make sense. They’re incredibly sharp, easily thin enough to pass through hand-woven fabric, and longer than my quilting pins. Looking at them, I thought that if one drilled a small hole in the flared end that attaches it to the tree, it could serve as quite a serviceable needle as well. I think I’d be more surprised to learn they hadn’t been used so than that they had.

Around the corner, there was an oak in my landlady’s yard. It would have been easy to take the brown bits at the tips of the twigs for a few last leaves the wind had left behind, had they not taken wing in a fluttering whirl. It may be winter, but the tree is still good camouflage for the small brown chirpy birds that brave the cold and snow and wind. Instead of hiding in the leaves, they look very like brown leaves themselves.

And home again, to my boychick on the computer. “Mom, look at this!” It was a picture of a large tornado he’d found on Wikipedia. The things I found outside were smaller and less dramatic. They’ve been there all along. I just wasn’t looking.