Banana Bread Vacation

I admit that I spend a lot of time writing about the problems of the world. A few respondents to my recent questions expressed their enjoyment of articles about hopeful developments. It sounds as if people need a break. Since I recently took a physical vacation, I’m offering up a written vacation for you.

I’d like to discuss banana bread. Specifically, I’d like to give you my own recipe for banana bread, adapted from the Fannie Farmer cookbook, and my advice on consuming the bread.

Baking banana bread is like cheating or stealing without the moral failure – you get so much for so little. It is absurdly simple. When I eat freshly baked banana bread I feel as if I have gotten away with something. It’s like a slot machine that pays off every time.

Here’s the recipe:

3 ripe bananas
2 eggs, beaten lightly
½ cup honey (or maple syrup)
1 cup white flour
1 cup whole wheat flour (Or ½ cup whole wheat and ½ cup buckwheat – adds texture)
1 teaspoon salt
1 heaping teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 cup coarsely chopped walnuts (or pecans)
2 tablespoons finely chopped crystallized ginger

Mash the bananas with a fork in a big bowl. Add the eggs and honey and mix. Dump the flour, salt, baking powder and spices on top of this and mix them together a bit before stirring it all together. Add the walnuts and ginger and stir until they disappear into the mass. Turn on the oven to 350 F. Grease a loaf pan. I use a glass loaf pan and rub it with a stick of butter – the loaf drops out nicely. Fill the loaf pan and stick it in the oven for an hour, right on the nose.

When the timer goes off, you have reached a critical period in the enjoyment of banana bread. Have two potholders ready, plus a paring knife, a bread knife, a butter knife, a stick of butter, a cutting board, a plate, and your banana bread-compatible beverage of choice.

Many cookbooks will tell you to take out the banana bread a put it on a rack to cool.

This is utter bullshit.

Cooling banana bread is like warming ice cream, or allowing beer to go flat. If one could sue a cookbook writer for malpractice, it would be over this vicious, contemptible lie. The enjoyment of banana bread involves a quick and deft series of operations that start immediately as you remove the sacred loaf from the oven.

Put the loaf pan on top of the stove, where there is a warm environment from the oven. Run the paring knife around in between the loaf and the pan. Grab the loaf pan again and invert it on the cutting board. If you buttered the loaf pan well enough the bread should drop out with a little shake. Turn it upright, grab the bread knife, and immediately saw a ¾” slab off the end. Keep your head right over the operation so you inhale the rising steam from the cut end. Butter it generously and get it in your mouth while standing at the stove. With dexterity and luck you can be eating steaming hot butter-soaked banana bread within 60 seconds of removal. That is culinary nirvana. While you are chewing, slice another piece and butter it. Now you can actually sit down and eat it.

Once you have consumed two or more pieces, go outside for a minute. Come back in and smell the banana bread aroma anew.

There is no parable here, no moral to be derived from this. I have no political or social agenda today. I’m just suggesting that you assemble these ingredients and engage in a hedonistic act. Have a happy summer vacation.

More serious stuff next time.

Barging down the Erie and questioning my readers

For those of you wondering about the essay drought of the past few weeks, the answer is simple: Even minor heretics go on vacation now and then. And we do it in style. Witness the mode of transport – the hybrid vehicle of the future known as the replica 1862-class sailing canal boat Lois McClure.

I call it the hybrid vehicle of the future because 1) it has hybrid propulsion: wind, mule, and diesel tugboat, and 2) canal barges have the lowest total energy expenditures per ton-mile of any inland cargo carrier. The Lois is a 40-ton wooden boat that could, like its predecessors a hundred and fifty years ago, carry upwards of 120 tons. That 160-ton gross load could be moved at a walking pace by two or three mules, perhaps three horsepower. Imagine three tractor-trailers being moved by an electric trolling motor and you have the idea. It isn’t the speediest vehicle ever developed, but as the prices of oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium knock a hole in the shingles, speed will be less important than fuel economy.

I recently read an article about the resurgence of rail cargo carriers. As the price of diesel hovers around $3.00 a gallon, more businesses are deciding to put cargo on rails instead of roads. 2006 was a record year for cargo rail. Rail volume has dipped in 2007, apparently due to a slowing economy rather than transfer back to trucks.

The history of the canal boat losing out to rail is instructive. In the first half of the 1800’s, canals were the way to go. The building of the Champlain and Erie canals dropped shipping costs by 95%. It created an economic boom that populated the Midwest and made New York the premier city of America. As rail lines spread across the country and rail service became more regular, the canal boats started losing out on shipments of manufactured goods. These shipments paid the best per ton. Canal boats started slipping down the cargo food chain. Eventually bulk fuel and stone products were their primary cargoes. Rail ruled for a while, and then with the creation of the interstate highway system, trucks started skimming the cream off of the rail business. In the eastern U.S. today barge traffic is almost nonexistent, rail carries bulk cargo, and trucks carry the finished goods. This is an over generalization, but accurate enough for this argument.

As the price of transportation fuel increases, I can see this scenario shifting into reverse. More and more cargo will shift to rail, cutting into trucking volume from below. Eventually, the bottom end of the rail cargo will start shifting back to the canals, the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence Seaway, and the Mississippi, where possible. The inconvenience of intermodal transportation will be trumped by energy costs. The canal barge will rise again.

On a completely different subject, I’d like to solicit a response from my readership. I send out a notification of new essays to about a hundred friends, acquaintances, and friends of friends. I have estimated from my website statistics that something like 450 people regularly and deliberately visit my site. Another 10-15% find it through searches or come in through links from other sites. I’d like to address a few questions to those few hundred regular readers:

Where are you from?

How did you find my site?

(If you are on my list then of course there’s no need to answer the first two)

Why do you keep coming back?

What would you like to read about in the future?

I may get a few responses and I may get inundated. If the latter, I won’t be able to respond. Please click the comment link below if you’d like to answer. Indicate at the top of your comment whether you want your response to remain private – I won’t let it go on the site.

And thank you, from the bottom of my heretical heart, for reading my work.

The Habeas Corpus Restoration Act

“The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 9

Senator Patrick Leahy (D – Vermont), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Senator Arlen Spector (R – Pennsylvania), the leading Republican on the committee, have introduced the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007. The bill would repeal the portions of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which denied the right to certain classes of prisoners in U.S. custody.

Habeas corpus is not a difficult concept to understand. “Habeas corpus” is Latin for “you have the body.” The Latin grammar implies “We command that you have the body.” Originally, a writ of habeas corpus meant that a prisoner had to be brought before a judge so that he might determine whether the prisoner was being held legally. Hence, (we command that) you have the body (of the prisoner brought to court). An important point about habeas corpus is that the burden of proof is on the government. If they can’t explain the reasons for your imprisonment to the satisfaction of the court, you go free. This is arguably the most important protection that ordinary citizens have against the power of a government. Having the right of habeas corpus means that, unlike Argentina during the “dirty war,” the government can’t make people disappear. The privilege of habeas corpus has been part of English common law since the Middle Ages. Medieval peasants enjoyed the right.

Congress passed the Military Commissions Act (MCA) in 2006 to define the process for the prosecution of prisoners held by the military, specifically “Unlawful Enemy Combatants” (UECs) captured in Afghanistan or Iraq. See my previous post for a brief analysis of some of the key sections. One section specifically denies the right of habeas corpus to prisoners who are not U.S. citizens and who have been designated as UECs, or are waiting to have their UEC status determined. It is an ingenious legal trap. A prisoner could wait for a UEC status determination forever, with no opportunity to challenge his or her incarceration.

Consider this: Under the MCA, the President and the Secretary of Defense can appoint a tribunal (one or more handpicked individuals, I suppose) with the power to declare anybody – you, me, Senator Leahy – a UEC, without any reason given. Then you can kiss U.S. court system, rules of evidence, freedom from torture and self-incrimination, the works, a quick goodbye. But that’s another outrage.

So, a quick status check.

Is there a rebellion?

No.

Is there an invasion?

No.

Right, then, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended.”

The fact that Senators Leahy and Spector have to introduce this bill at all is absurd beyond the power of adjectives. The MCA is blatantly unconstitutional. Legal scholars, human rights organizations, the ACLU, The American Bar Association, four out of five dentists, and choosy moms all agree.

The Habeas Corpus Restoration Act passed out of the Judiciary Committee on a 10-8 vote with Senator Specter the only Republican voting for it. Senators Hatch (R-Utah), Grassley (R-Iowa), Kyl (R-Arizona), Sessions (R-Alabama), Graham (R-South Carolina), Cornyn (R-Texas), Brownback (R-Kansas), and Coburn (R-Oklahoma) voted against it. Either these Senators are grossly ignorant of the Constitution that they have sworn to uphold, damning them with incompetence, or else they have chosen party affiliation over the Constitution. What is it about Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution that they don’t understand?

Likewise, those in Congress who voted for the Military Commissions Act were either ignorant, not paying attention, favoring party over constitutional law, or cravenly knuckling under to the Bush administration. It was a shameful event.

I encourage my readers, wherever you are, to call or write to your Senators and Representatives and express your support for the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act. If you are Vermonters, contact Senator Leahy and Senator Sanders and thank them for their efforts in this matter. While you are at it, tell them that the Military Commissions Act is an affront to the U.S. Constitution and needs to be scrapped in its entirety.

Equal opportunity amnesty

The bipartisan immigration bill has gone down in flames, crippled by a bipartisan hail of flak. The sticking point, at least on the conservative side, is “amnesty.” The 12 million undocumented workers in the U.S. violated federal law when they sneaked across the border. So, the argument goes, any process that allows them to become either properly documented or actual citizens without serving time in prison or being deported is an amnesty.

I agree. I also could not care less. It’s not a question of lawlessness for me. As I have written in another post, we are a nation of petty criminals. Why should we demand higher standards from immigrants?

By way of illustration, let’s have a virtual show of hands – how many of you have exceeded the posted speed limit? Ok, so now all of us who have ever held a driver’s license are holding up our hands. And you are saying, “So what? Big deal. It’s speeding, not heroin dealing.”

No, it’s not heroin dealing, it’s far more deadly than that. According to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), in 2005 speeding contributed to 13,113 deaths and cost our society 40.4 billion dollars. That is 36 deaths a day and $4.6 million an hour. “Well, I take it easy on the highway. You won’t see me zooming by at 85.” Great, but the NHTSA reports that 86% of speeding-related fatalities were not on the interstate.

An article in Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety placed the number of deaths in 2002 due to heroin overdose at 1,061. There is a rising trend in all drug related deaths, but not to the point where heroin competes with speeding.

Speeding is a socially acceptable, universally practiced petty crime with at least ten times the death toll of heroin use.

How much excess mortality did this country endure last year due to the picking of fruit and vegetables for sub-minimum wage by undocumented workers? Or the mowing of lawns, the serving of food, and other such tasks?

We seem to be willing to give ourselves an ongoing amnesty for the everyday carnage on our roads. It makes the self righteous anger directed towards immigrants look overblown and hypocritical. Their crime is one of paperwork, not of murder, physical injury or theft. Their undocumented status makes them vulnerable to exploitation, which depresses wages and hurts worker’s rights for U.S. citizens. We can help ourselves by helping them.

If we really wanted to stem illegal immigration, we’d roll back our huge agribusiness subsidies that put third world farmers out of business. But that’s another article.

Here’s to equal opportunity amnesty.

Don't think of a billboard

A friend and regular reader suggested that I comment on the media saturation in our lives, and especially advertising:

“I'd love to see you write something regarding the constant advertising, greener grass mongering, that people are constantly inundated with on a daily basis. If you count the number of times a day your life encounters advertising, I think you'd be alarmed. Is this really benefitting anyone? Are all of the gadgets that make you do more for less improving your quality of life? I think not. Hell, you can’t go to the bathroom without having some form of advertising shoved down your throat. Are you in a hurry? Eat this? Too fat? Try this diet. You should look like this... Depressed? Take this. Need a new car? Buy this!”

Since this individual lives in Texas, it made me think of my trip earlier this year, driving from Texas back to Vermont. One of the many things that struck me about the landscape along the way was billboards. I won’t go into any descriptive prose about them, since all Americans are familiar with them, aside from a few children in Vermont. For those of you unfamiliar with Vermont, the reason why children here might not know about billboards is that we banned them in 1968. We decided that they were a blight on the landscape and that the beauty of our landscape was important to us.

This brings me to the concept of voluntary vs. involuntary media. It’s simple, really. People can’t avoid seeing a billboard. People have to turn on a television and select a channel at a particular time to see a particular program. It’s similar for books, magazines, and radio, although the linear tuning of radios can expose us to a lot of unwanted content before we reach our chosen station. The regulation of any media for content is not my focus here.

The medium of roadside billboards is offensive in itself, regardless of content. The billboard companies and the advertisers who use them have taken it upon themselves to build a structure that obstructs our view for no other purpose than to inject an idea into our heads without our consent. Sure, nobody really likes television advertising, but when we turn on a commercial station we are choosing to endure the admixture of propaganda with our entertainment. We have the freedom to travel our highways, and sometimes we must travel. Aside from blessed Vermont, this exposes us to unwanted mental intrusion by advertisers.

It is analogous to telemarketing, another involuntary intrusion into our lives by advertising. Let’s say you live on a quiet country road, distant from other houses. Now imagine that a man from an advertising company stands out in the public right of way with a bullhorn and starts shouting advertising slogans at your house. You could call the police and have him arrested for disturbing the peace. He hasn’t physically trespassed, but he has intruded on your expected quiet and privacy without your consent. So it is with telemarketers.

In the case of billboards, the crime is twofold. It is an unwarranted intrusion with no secondary redeeming value. It is also a blot on the landscape. There is a body of law that holds the general appearance of an area to be public property, a community resource. A community is perfectly within its rights to restrict the commercial modification of the landscape on aesthetic grounds. Given the context of the saturation advertising we experience, as noted by my friend, it is a psychological imperative that we spare ourselves this ubiquitous insult to our collective consciousness.

Some businesspeople may appeal to the 1st Amendment, but the subject is community building standards, not advertising content. We don’t allow advertisers to physically grab people on the street and scream in their faces, no matter what the message. Communities can and do legally regulate signage.

And what of the message of the medium, in terms of McLuhan’s dictum? The message is that advertisers have the right to define our physical environment and our visual experiences without our consent. They do not have that right, and we should deny them the opportunity. Vermont did it almost 40 years ago. What are the rest of you waiting for?