The Definite Article

But not in Washington, D.C.

On Thursday, July 3rd, the older brother I never had, Karl Crandall, is getting married to Danielle Dunn, his girlfriend of seven years (eight years? nine?)

I was supposed to fly home today.

I didn't.

I wish I had.

Chris and I served in the Marine Corps together. We even lived in the same palatial dining/living/bedroom/efficiency (en suite!) for two years.

To say that it sucked would be to grant a certain kind of legitimacy to the period, as if it were soft, round and unpleasant, like finding that you've found a fly in your soup. It didn't suck. It was a heart rending, soul-crushing time. My faith was challenged and abandoned, the love of my life - I can't write about her, because it would open a flood of feelings I never want to have again as long as I live - hurt me, a mockery was made of the principles I held dear by the people charged with their enforcement and a man whom I admire and respect very deeply was hounded, abused, disrespected and humiliated on a daily basis. He never broke. I think it would have been easier to watch if he'd knuckled under. He never did.

That man was Chris Tisdale.

One day, when the despair was washing over us in fetid wave after fetid wave, I bought a number 10 can of fruit salad. I came home and Chris and I made a vow: One day, we were going to get out of that hellhole. And one day, when we'd made it, we were going to go on a road trip in a shiny convertible and we were going to eat that can of fruit salad and look back and joke about how unbelievably shitty our lives had been. And we were going to laugh, at all of it: the incompetence, the callousness, the evil that had tried to take us down and had failed!

That number 10 can of fruit salad sat on a shelf, a totem of survival. It came to symbolize hope.

Chris now lives in Alexandria, Virginia and the number 10 can sits on a shelf in Alexandria.

And when I get home, we're taking that road trip.

We've made it. The triumph is now.

We're gonna take that number 10 can, we're gonna peel it open with a can opener, and we're gonna take big heaping spoonfuls of five year old fruit salad and shovel it down our gullets. And we're gonna laugh like hyenas. We're gonna laugh and laugh and laugh until our stomachs ache - guess what, Despair? You didn't get us! And you never will, you son of a bitch! We're still alive! You ain't killed us yet!

"Ha!" I'm gonna say. "Was that all you had? You ain't nothin'! Ha ha ha!"

That's what we're gonna do when I get back.

I'm looking forward to it.

But it's going to have to wait until tomorrow, because I didn't get to fly today.

Posted by Nate at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I should be in bed.

I should have been in bed hours ago.

I have to go to work tomorrow morning at midnight - sucks to be me.

But I came home and grilled myself some wild boar, leek and apricot sausages. I've slathered them in homemade dijon & tarragon mayonnaise. Norah Jones is singing Turn Me On. It's raining gently.

"Like a flower waiting to bloom
like a lightbulb in a dark room
I'm just sittin' here, waiting for you
to come on home and turn me on."

Norah's voice is chocolate to my pain au; the mellow strains are like melted Normandy butter running down my chin.

I'm a butter snob. I'm a food snob in general, but I'm a butter snob in specific.

I have Fleur de Sel de Mer Buerre de Bretagne butter for my scones. I have cheesy Normandy butter, made by ripening the cream while warm with cheese cultures, for my pain au chocolate. I have Fife Creamery Butter - a sweet cream butter - from across the Firth of Forth, for melting on seafood. I fry in Derrygold (Irish), make noisette and meunière butter from Presidente (French), which I also slide under the skin of a whole chicken before baking. I spread only Stichell butter-with-no-name on my bread.

How can it be both Stichell and butter-with-no-name? I call it Stichell because Mrs. Stichell makes it from the milk of her Jerseys up in Aberdeenshire; I buy it twice monthly at the Edinburgh Farmer's Market. It comes wrapped in cellophane with a paper label with the ingredients: cream, salt.

Butter. Healthier than any other spread - I knew it all along. I always said that butter was better for you; modern science only just recently managed to prove what my body knew all along. Real cream is better for you than Cool Whip®. Butter is better than margarine.

And that's how Norah sounds: like butter.

Posted by Nate at 8:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Nifty, eh?

Okay, you may not see any change. If that's the case, go empty your browser cache and then reload my site.

Why? Well, Rahmat has been teaching me about Cascading Style Sheets - and you'll notice that his Blog looked much, much prettier than the rest of us.

If anyone is interested in figuring out how to make their site look different, drop me a line here and I'll put up instructions.

Posted by Nate at 7:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Last Saturday was the third Saturday in June.

Why is this particular Saturday better than the second or fourth Saturday?

Last Saturday, and also the first Saturday, were the days on which the Edinburgh Farmer's Market is held. I went there with Dave Duffy, his lovely girl Jenny and Helen Harrington.

We bought freshly picked garlic, broad beans, baby spinach, salad greens, lemon curd, hand churned butter, wild boar sausages, free range eggs, unhomogenized, unpasteurized milk, tomatoes (red, green & yellow), razorneck clams, patty pans (yes!), raspberry juice, carrots, a free range chicken, spinach and tons and tons of other stuff. Basically what you see in the pictures from earlier.

I came back and Helen and I baked bread and made mayonnaise. I've become a huge fan of homemade mayonnaise, although I refuse to use a whisk and break out the electric mixer every time.

I've also stopped making my bread by hand. I know, I know, it's just a sham half-existence I'm leading, but I love those dough hooks. Making bread is so much easier with the dough hooks. Five minutes with the electric mixer and no more wooden spoon elbow.

I've been experimenting with temperatures, ingredients and method and have decided a few things:

1. The only ingredient you need to measure is the liquid - which is sometimes water and sometimes milk, depending on the type of bread I want to make. I always use two and one quarter cups and nothing else needs to be measured.

2. The yeast is more important than the flour. Good, hard flour is still vital (ha ha! Get it?) but the good yeast can get amazing results from some tepid, cheap flour and bad yeast will ruin a loaf. Buy fresh cake yeast - it's cheap, it lasts well in the fridge, and the bread is amazing.

3. Never forget the vinegar. Red wine vinegar is best but I'm still partial to cider vinegar, out of nostalgia. Just a capful is all you need.

4. Braided loaves look great.

5. A butter brushed crust on milk bread shortened with butter; an ice cube in the oven (right at the end) for water loaves shortened with vegetable oil.

6. It's all in the wrist. Some people can knead and others cannot and while it can be learned, it really takes patience on the part of the teacher.

Anyway, I would show you some pictures of bread that I made, but we've eaten it all!

Posted by Nate at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

The summer solstice is a strange time in Edinburgh.

The sun doesn't set until about a quarter past eleven and it rises around four thirty. The dogs bark more than usual, the birds are hyperactive, the weather changes rapidly during the day and everyone is out enjoying the nightlife. Going out is the pastime of choice in Edinburgh year round; the summer solstice exaggerates this trend enormously.

Last night was actually the day after the solstice. It was a strange night indeed.

I went for a swim. The Commonwealth Pool in Edinburgh was built to accomodate the Commonwealth Games back in 1976 or so. It's the only 50 meter pool in Edinburgh. I love swimming, and it's worth the three mile walk to get to the pool just to be able to swim in a real 50 meter pool.

The walk there was uneventful and so was the swim.

The walk home started off normally enough: walked home, got to Blockbuster and decided to try and rent Requiem for a Dream and give the movie that has such critical acclaim from family members a viewing. Couldn't find it, picked up The Missing and went to get some food from the new Peckham's that opened on Nicholson Street.

With my Dunsyre Blue and ration of Wiescze in hand, I headed for home.

About fifty yards down the road, I hear an alarm. It's coming from a shop. Peering inside, I can see that the drawers to the cash machine are open. The door doesn't appear to be jimmied so, with a shoulder shrug, I walk on. Two doors down, same thing. "Huh, this is weird." I think. Two doors down, yet another shop is ringing loudly, the door locked and the cash drawers empty and open. That's too weird. I call the cops.

Four policemen arrive, ask me if I'm a tourist (I hate that), ask me where I live and then try to control a snigger when I answer, as if I wasn't well dressed enough to actually live on Fettes Row. Then they sneer every time I adress a police officer as "Sir."

Fine. They take my name and number and say, "We'll call you if we need you." They make a show of looking inside and jiggling the handle and then I left and went home.

On my way home, I pass two more shops with their alarms going off. In one of them, a McColl's, there's a girl talking on a mobile phone inside.

I'm still thinking about the cops and how they really didn't take me seriously when I hear my name. I spin around and see...a homeless guy. Who recognizes me. From three years ago.

Three years ago I was walking home from work and saw him sitting exactly where he's sitting now. I sat down next to him in my suit and power tie and pulled out my laptop and was typing away, chatting occasionally on my mobile phone, sipping a low-fat, no foam, decafe latte and listening to his story, for company, while people stared. It was refreshing.

Anyway, he says: "Come see this picture of my son!" and I wander over.

He reaches into his bag and pulls out...a Nokia Communicator. On it, he's got some full motion video of him playing with his son in a gorgeous house somewhere in Fife. Then he pulls out a laminated wallet-sized picture of his son. He pulls it out of a wallet, not surprisingly. As he does, I catch a glimpse of a gold card.

He doesn't ask me for anything, just tells me more of the story of his life. This guy is better off than I am! He just lives on the streets for some strange reason, and spends a lot of time begging. Very weird.

Anyway, that was my night.

Posted by Nate at 6:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

The sun is up.

Not just a little up, all the way fully up and shining in my bedroom window.

I cannot sleep.

It always gets like this in Edinburgh in the summer - there is maybe an hour or half an hour of real darkness, and the rest of the time is nautical twilight.

I'm getting six or so hours of sleep and it's driving me crazy.

Posted by Nate at 3:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Nate at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Nate at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Nate at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Nate at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

My sister has written on her brilliant and prolific blog about weight, health, cholesterol and appearance.

This set me a-thinkin' and a postin' and this is what I thought.

I'm officially obese!

Yep, that's right. I have a body mass index of something like 30. I'm 6' 4" and 17 1/2 stone.

But recent research See it here shows that stress is far worse than gaining even 40 pounds, so I've elected not to worry about it, or take any guff from anyone about it, although I'm exercising (more on this later).

Furthermore, high blood cholesterol doesn't cause heart attack or ill health. Vulnerable plaques sure do, however, and the current going theory is that a higher blood cholesterol count is more likely to lead to vulnerable plaques - but only because you can induce endothelial dysfunction in rabbits by feeding them twice their body weight a day in pork brains.

I believe that increased blood cholesterol without elevated ketone levels is probably bad for you, but that's only going to come about if you eat fatty foods, then stop because you're worried about weight or cholesterol, then start back up again.

Think about it for a moment: cholesterols, like any other solute, will precipitate out of solution if the solution becomes supersaturate. The solution (your blood) will not be saturated so long as sufficient ketones are present to dissolve the cholesterol. Ketones are produced when you eat fatty foods. Cholesterol is a byproduct of fat metabolisis (and dietary intake of cholesterol). If you know enough to keep your ketones high, then you won't have to worry about your cholesterol. This is probably why Italians and Greeks have such a low rate of heart disease in spite of a high fat diet. Check mortality rates of various countries here.

Also, there is no reasonable morphology connecting elevated blood cholesterol and restenotic inflammation. The existing evidence is based on (admittedly several hundred) studies - but each study is litterally statistically insignificant and can be safely ignored. No study that I found examined more than twenty subjects.

You probably remember that a reasonable population of data is at least three thousand samples.

On the other hand, animal studies involving high-collagen co-factor diets (i.e. high in Vitamin C), show that animals that have high Vitamin C intake don't develop vascular lesions even with high cholesterol diets.

So Cholesterol worship is bad science. This isn't my opinion, really; I'm just stating what the only person to ever win two unshared Nobel Prizes has said: Linus Pauling pointed this out years ago. He's well known both as the author of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty and as the discoverer of vitamins. On this one, I'll let you do your own research.

Anyway, I've thought a lot about cholesterol, and decided that it's utter bunkum to worry about it.

As for weight, though, there's good evidence that being overweight is strongly positively correlated with numerous health problems, not the least of which include heart disease, diabetes and not getting laid. While worrying about it will just kill me quicker, doing something about it won't.

I've been exercising since I got to Edinburgh and have lost a stone and a half through running and calisthenics three times a week, swimming three times a week on the off days and walking eight miles three times a week. I also lift weights three times a week.

At first, I was just tired and still fat, but now I feel great after a workout, especially swimming (swimming is also when I walk; the pool is about four miles away, and I walk there).

I've changed my diet, but I'm watching calories, not cholesterol. That's not to say I don't also watch WHAT I eat, but that means no junk food or fast food. I pay pretty close attention to what my body wants. If it's asking for butter or mayonnaise, it's probably because it needs it, and that's what I give it.

As a side note, I make my own mayonnaise from eggs that I buy at the Farmer's Market, from farmers who feed their chickens corn that they buy from the farmers across the road. I get nearly all my food there: my vegetables, my seafood, my steak, my bread, my butter, my garlic, my herbs - they all come from people that I know, who grow or raise them themselves. The food is organic, but not Organic, if that makes sense. They do the work themselves and grow it the same way that they've been doing it in Scotland for about twenty thousand years.

Is it more expensive? Well, quite a bit, actually. For just me I spend about £100/week. That's almost $200, so I'm spending close to $800/month on food. On the other hand, this is my principle hobby and pastime, and I spend more time thinking about this and planning it than any other activity in my life, including work. I live to eat well.

I moved here in part because I can walk to work, don't need a car, can live healthily with far less stress or planning and have access to a far wider range of good food than anywhere else I've ever lived. It beats the States hands down. My commute is almost as short as last year - and last year I worked from home.

Finally, I've found that I'm happiest when I'm attractive, and this is a completely subjective thing with a self-reinforcing feedback loop. When I think I'm attractive I'm self-confident then other people want to be around me then I feel more attractive and so on. So it's not really connected to weight.

Posted by Nate at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

I hate ants.

It's not a subtle hatred, not a sly, slanderous loathing.

No, this is a violent and disturbing hatred, at leasit if you're from the Family Formicidae, in which case the simple formula:

My hatred = your death

holds.

I hate ants and kill them with extreme prejudice.

I understand that there are some of you out there who also hate ants.

Here are instructions on how to conduct an ant genocide.

First, cackle maniacally. I'm serious about this. Give it a shot.

Think about ants and then throw your head back and let the EVIL COME SCREAMING OUT OF YOU!!

Muahahahahaha! Muahahahaha!

Doesn't that feel good? It should come naturally. If it doesn't, go hire an exterminator who will rip you off for $500, spray deadly chemicals inside your home, tromp dirt all over your Persian rug and still leave a serious ant problem, because if the idea of wiping all ants from the face of God's earth doesn't fill your heart with a black glee, you're not cut out for this job, are you, ya sissy?

Okay, we're going to bend that pure black hatred into a tower of iron will, but first, you'll need to pick a few things up.

What you need:

• Plastic ketchup squeeze bottle (empty)
• Apple jelly
• Cheap, greasy salami. Cheese will also work.
• masking tape
• digital camera
• Ortho's Malathion AND Diazinon
• Boric Acid, in powder form
• patience
• traps of all kinds (more below)
• ant repellent, like Spectracide Bug Stop

I often get asked what kind of ant bait or traps I used. After all, my old flat was utterly overrun with ants and they were completely eradicated!!! Muhahahahaha!

Use several kinds. Frankly, the most effective were the Terro liquid ant baits, and I recommend that you read this:

http://www.pestproducts.com/antbaits.htm

You'll know you have an ant problem because you'll see them. The first one you see, even near your house, is a problem.

Understand this: ants are like The Terminator - they don't feel pain, they don't understand reason and they absolutely will not stop until they have taken over your house.

Prepare to do battle.

Most of what you have to do will come naturally to you if you roleplay yourself as Vlad the Impaler or some such thing. You're here for one purpose and one purpose only: deal death to the six-legged freaks that are ruining your life.

Put all other things from your mind.

We don't want the ants to get wise to our little plot and start using hard to find areas, so don't set up your ant baits right away.

No, no. First, plan.

Take photos of your house, all areas, during different times of the day.

Different ants follow different behaviour patterns, and just 'cause some Pharoah ants are wandering around in your kitchen at night doesn't mean that there aren't also, say, Argentine ants in your living room during the day when you're at work.

So record every ant sighting for about a week. Keep a log, take a picture - but do not disturb the ants and don't clean the floors or your furniture or walls.

What we're doing is causing an End Population Event - essentially a regional extinction, truly genocidal, so we it's important to get everything.

In order to do this, we'll need to let the chemical pathways converge.

See, ants, foul spawn of the devil that they are, communicate with one another using a chemical trail. If you disturb the chemical trails, they have to forge new ones. This makes them unpredictable. We want them to follow a strong pattern so it's easier to kill them all.

So don't disturb the chemical pathways yet. Observe the enemy. Gather information.

After you've observed the patterns and have a pretty good idea where the ants are coming from, we want to see where they're going.

Most ants don't live in the house, but outside in underground nests. Once the chemical pathways are well established, do an external inspection. Find the nests.

Take pictures once you've found them, but do nothing else. Remember, this is total warfare. You are a steely warrior and will leave no insects alive!

Take the apple jelly and mix with a little water and a teaspoon of boric acid powder inside the empty ketchup container.

Run masking tape on every flat surface near the edge of your home. Lay a thin bead of the water/apple jelly/boric acid mixture on the masking tape.

Leave it there and watch the pattern of the ants. This should tell you exactly where the ants are entering from, because for a few days they will only go as far as the apple jelly to get their food. Pay close attention to pipework in bathrooms and air ductwork. Ants use these conduits just like James friggin' Bond.

If you are dealing with Argentines or one of the greasy type of ants (some ants eat sugar water, some eat greasy stuff), then use thin slices of salami and cheese.

Now you know where the ants live, where they're coming into your house and where they go once they're in. Pull up the masking tape.

Time to deploy the ant bait.

I recommend using about six different types of bait.

Place outdoor bait all around your house so that one bait (only one) is on the path from each nest to your house.

Inside the house, use five different types of bait in conjunction. I recommend using a Terro Liquid ant bait trap at each entry point with other types further in and in obscure places for humans - under sinks, in bathrooms, in basements, etc.

Watch and wait.

What you're waiting for is a dramatic decrease in the number of ants, perhaps you'll only see a few - or maybe none in the house at all. This should take about a week - I waited two weeks because I wasn't sure.

Okay, once the infestation appears to have died down, clean the ever-loving shit out of your house. Scrub down every surface, clean up every last scrap of clutter. Wash everything down with ammonia - wear rubber gloves and keep all the windows open. What you want to do is make sure that you don't leave any edible residue, like fingerprints, anywhere. Vaccuum, dust, sweep and scrub like you're Lady MacBeth on speed, only with OCD. And you think that Martha Stewart is about to drop by.

Break out the ant repellent spray. Spray along the base of your home, keeping the spray concentrated in about a one inch wide strip along the base of the wall, both inside and outside.

Use dilute malathion directly on the nests. Shut every window in your house and keep it as tightly sealed as you can. Go back inside and wait.

Within the next three days, it should start: an End Population Event. There will be more winged ants than you can shake a stick at. Many of them will be malformed and unable to fly properly; their wings should fall easily off of their bodies if they are caught in a breeze. They should look starved and confused.

Use Diazinon on the nests - the cross killing profile of Diazinon and Malathion should be enough to finish off the hardy, malathion resistant few that remain.

You may want to move your family or pets somewhere else for the next twelve hours.

For the next half-day, you will stay awake within your pristine house and walk the inside perimeter like a Guantanamo Bay Marine. Everything you see, you kill. Make sure that nothing survives.

If you've been diligent in finding the nests, this will really only take twelve hours - after that, everything that's going to come out of these nests will have come and your home will be ant free for the season.

Cackle with maniacal glee at your prowess.

Follow these instructions without omitting any step. Don't flinch. If it seems excessive, remember, ants are the spawn of Satan. They're crawiling over you as you sleep, pinching your eyelids and stroking your eyelashes with they're front claws, getting up your nose and into your mouth. They are vile, horrible creatures whose sole function is dying by your hand!

Muhahahahahaha!

Posted by Nate at 3:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)