CJC.org

This is a variation on a waffle recipe I found at the Whole Foods website. More or less the same, but smaller proportions and no blueberries.

* 1/2 cup flour
* 1/2 cup yellow cornmeal
* 1 tsp baking powder
* pinch salt
* 1/2 tsp baking soda
* 1/2 cup plain nonfat yogurt
* 1/4 cup water
* 1 tbsp extra-light olive oil
* 2 large eggs

The resulting waffles have a nice gritty/crunchy texture. This makes just shy of 8 waffles on a Krups waffle maker. Extra waffles can be frozen to be reheated later in the toaster.

In terms of the big public arts projects in New York, I kind of liked the cows more than the Gates, now that I think about it. As noted, if the Gates had been done when they were first proposed, it would have been a mighty civic gesture, perhaps the beginning of a reclamation of New York’s public spaces from decades of neglect. That it was done in 2005, long after the hard work of reclamation was already done, it was reduced in possible significance, so that the Gates became only one of a series of big public art works we had in the city. The Cows were the previous large, temporary work that I can remember (setting aside the towers of light in the wake of 9/11), and it may be worth a triffling moment to think about both of them together.

The Gates in many ways is dictatorial. It’s Christo’s vision of Central Park, to some degree exclusive of the visions of others about the Park. True, people moving underneath the Gates and their responses to all that saffron would always be a feature of this sort of public work — it’s interactive — but the look of the Park comes from one man. It’s intrusive: there was a certain amount of “I want my Park back” after a few moments, when the wonder of the Gates wears off.

The Cows, on the other hand, were far more democratic and wide-spread. Individual cows were the creations of local artists working to reflect and comment on each cow’s surroundings: the cows generally didn’t feel intrusive. The cows were also distributed throughout the city and not simply concentrated in Manhattan, so there’s no outer borough neglect with this public art. The cows were charming.

But the Gates seemed to trump the Cows in news coverage. I don’t remember large parts of the Met geared towards the Cows, nor large parts of The Times. That the Cow Parade started in Chicago rather than spring from the mind of a pair of European artists probably didn’t help: the Cows were too American in some sense (though the Parade is now worldwide). The Cows weren’t high art, I suppose, though how that designation gets applied is unclear.

Update: The economic impact of The Gates is apparently staggering, bringing about $250M of business to the city. I don’t think the Cows were quite as big.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with an American Express Financial Advisor (AEFA), mainly because we had gone through a series of sea-changes in 2004: the start of residency, moving to Cleveland, the apartment sale and what to do with the proceeds. Having a third-party look at things was a reasonable idea, and we got a name from the “welcome to Cleveland” booklet that CCF gives new residents.

Most of what we heard was good advice: we have to set up trusts to protect our assets from, say, malpractice suits; if we were to buy a house in Cleveland Heights, talk to CCF residency coordinators, as residents are leaving and moving in all the time and we can avoid real estate agents; our financial planning has to be cognizant of the high tax rates we’ll see when Grace becomes an attending and we need to defer income as much as possible to the future, when our incomes (and tax rates) will be lower; my hodge-podge portfolio contains overlaps and omissions and can be done with lower expenses. This was worth the consultation fee: we’re now aware of tax issues we hadn’t considered but will become important in a few years.

Of course, there’s a reason why a website called AmexSux.com appears near the top of the Google search for these services. The site was in part driven by AEFAs push of variable annuities and other investment vehicles, for which they presumably get high commissions for selling. The allocation plan that AEFA came up with did indeed contain such a variable annuity, as well as a public unlisted REIT. The rest of it was fairly innocuous, concentrating much more on ETFs (replacing index funds) and CDs. Implementing this portfolio (and moving assets into Amex’s management) would also have cost several thousand dollars annually. We didn’t take up this offer, and our AEFA graciously withdrew it, with some advice on managing everything myself through brokerage accounts and the like. I figure that, even if I charge myself my full consultation fee for a full work week to set up accounts and move assets around (and I certainly have enough time on my hands to print out asset transfer forms and mail them off to Fidelity), I still come out well ahead. And the AEFA management fee is in post-tax dollars, I could probably give myself three weeks to do all this and be within shouting distance of the management fee. And this doesn’t touch on issues of control.

In terms of the various investment vehicles that AEFA proposed, the variable annuity (as explained to me) was to be used as an instrument for locking in capital gains accumulated in, say, the ETFs: annually (once the long-term capital gains rates comes into effect), gains could be swept from the funds into the annuity. The annuity has some sort of insurance provision that protects against capital loses. Payouts from the annuity would presumable start during the low-tax-rate period of our lives. This is neat. However, it’s said that annuities are sold, not bought (i.e., if there were no sales force for this investment, no one would buy it). The 2.2% maintenance fee seems very steep for this insurance (similar capital protect can theoretically through options in a brokerage account), and the tax issues won’t be in effect for at least a few years, during which we have time to do more research and set them up properly ourselves (for example, Vanguard’s low-cost annuities). There is a limited case for them, but we haven’t gotten to that point yet, as we won’t max out our other tax-deferred vehicles on a resident’s salary (reminder: set up Grace’s 403(b) soon).

The AEFA also suggested buying into Inland Western REIT, which is focused on shopping centers west of the Mississippi. This is a public unlisted REIT, which, again, may be a vehicle that sold, not bought. Funds would have been locked in for at least four years with something like a 6 – 7% return. Given what I’ve read about these, it’s unclear how the fees would have been extracted. Also, one may be concerned about a potential real estate bubble in the US, which would be particularly bad for these REITs. On the other hand, REIT index funds tend to have a fairly low beta (around 0.3 or 0.4), which is good from a diversification standpoint (though there’s an academic study that notes that REIT betas are assymmetric between up and down markets). It’s something to consider, but probably in the form of a REIT index fund or ETF.

Most of the investments the AEFA recommended were in terms of ETFs. This is fine advice: ETFs tend to have lower maintenance costs than equivalent index funds and are more tax efficient (as redemptions by other people don’t cause capital gains distributions as in the case of mutual funds). The idea would be to replace my index funds with ETFs, and I’ve started moving in that direction. The main disadvantage of ETFs vis-a-vis index fund is that there will be brokerage commissions when you buy and sell them. This makes ETFs very inefficient as a savings vehicle: all mutual fund companies offer a service that takes a few hundred dollars out of your savings account monthly to put into a fund — investment then happens without positive action from the investor (commitment savings). Mutual funds don’t charge for this (they make money on standard maintenance), so it’s essentially free. But if you do the same thing with an ETF, even with a discount brokerage charging $10-$20 per trade, you’re basically creating a very steep front-loaded for your fund of 5-10%. ETF purchases for long-term savings should then be done in large batches, so as to make the broker commissions negligible. As we won’t have excess income to investment for the next few years, we can probably do without mutual funds for the time being.

One question, though, is what to do with my actively managed emerging markets fund? The alternative would be an ETF based on the MSCI EMI. Philosophically, is active funds management superior for emerging markets? Or, phrased differently, are emerging markets sufficiently efficient to be captured by the index? Note that the difference in maintenance fees between the actively managed fund and the ETF is about a hundred basis points. Actually, it looks like the ETF beats out the managed fund over a two-year period. This chart doesn’t go back to the various emerging markets crises of the late 1990s, though.

Now that everyone with a camera (including cell phones) along with their pet monkeys have taken photos of The Gates, it’s time to post my set:

(Most of the shooting was done with the 18-70mm kit lens and with the new 80-200mm bazooka. The big Nikkor actually handles well and has a good balance. I’m getting used to shooting with it, so as not to flub the upcoming Alaska photos. In retrospect, I should have also gotten slightly different perspectives by shooting from knee-level.)

The first (sunlit) bunch was taken around and from the Met. The second was during a stroll (along with the rest of the Upper West Side, apparently) from the W. 81st Street entrance, around the south of the Great Lawn up to Belvedere Castle. In retrospect, I like The Gates more from a distance than right underneath them. From outside the Park, those orange/saffron shower curtains have a surprising quality, sitting atop glacial rock outcroppings or glimpsed at between the trees as your bus heads downtown. That particular quality quickly vanishes when you’re walking through them, along with the crowds. They take on the quality of mere pathmarkers, remarkable perhaps for their size than for anything else. Note that the construction netting on the Met’s roof is a similar color to The Gates.

On the southern edge of the Great Lawn, a number of black-clad, black-veiled performance artists were doing some sort of interpretative dance/Simon-Says-game on some of the Gates. This was vaguely interesting, and perhaps would have been more interesting with fewer people milling about, but then we moved on. Someone remarked that this might have been the result of some flash mob.

I think The Gates would have been more interesting if they were done back when they were first proposed. Crime and the perception of crime made Central Park a no-go zone for the City. The Gates would have served some civic function, perhaps, as a first step in taking the Park back. It would have been a grand, confident gesture. Now, they’re sort of just there: one more temporary New York City happening, somewhat more sublime than the naked guy in the tree, but less exciting.

And, no, we didn’t visit New York just to see The Gates; we came to eat at Babbo. Actually, we don’t have much discretion in terms of when Grace takes vacation, and The Gates just happened to be here.

Last week, I picked up an on-sale copy of Celluloid Skyline from a bookstore in the West Village. There’s a quote from Joan Didion in the preface, something about Northeasterners not quite knowing or understanding the place New York City sits in the imaginations of people further South and West. The book itself is about this other New York, the mythic city that exists in collective dreams and surrounds the real city both as halo and shadow. The book is about how the movie industry, through a thousand films and references, built this city, street by street. Consider Dorothy’s Emerald City, whose towers are visible on the far horizon: this is the figurative New York City of the Kansas farmgirl.

Coming from New York, I can understand this intellectually, but perhaps not emotionally. For me, New York isn’t the not-home of dreams and dangers; it’s the once-literal, now-figurative home, even if it’s far away on the other side of the long, lonely stretch of I-80 in northern Pennsylvania. And even if a permanent return is not in the cards: the cost of living differences are very large, and academic center salaries for attendings in New York are both relatively and absolutely low compared to elsewhere. Coincidentally, The Economist had a survey of New York City the week we were in the city on vacation. The survey closes by noting that this socialist republic run by cut-throat capitalists is traditionally a place people go to and later leave. Perhaps the old adage about having to live in New York in one’s youth is true.

So we had our first trip back after moving out. We were guests, staying at my parents’ house in Queens or at a friend’s in Stuyvesant Town, experiencing that feeling of dislocation that guests have. And yet things are familiar, with only minor changes. (Walking through the Upper West Side less than six months later was resembled one of those “sideways in time” moments from science fiction, where the writer, to indicate that the protagonists are now in an alternate timeline, made different by the flapping of butterfly wings, shuffles around names and places (spuriously if he’s bad, with some sense of why if he’s good). Instead of the Steve Madden shoestore, we have a Nine West in its place. Instead of a Starbuck’s, we have a Bank of America. The awning colors of Ollie’s are now red instead of green, and the produce aisles of Westside Market are now linear instead of perpendicular. But Zabar’s and Fairway are fixed points in this multiverse. I’m not describing the changes wrought be gentrification, as the Upper West Side has long been gentrified. Rather, this is a reshuffling of cards drawn from the same socio-economic deck: the Hale and Hearty Soups instead of the Thai restaurant.) While I had my camera most days, I didn’t feel like I should take many pictures (though I took a number of The Gates, but then everyone else in New York did, also). An odd feeling: not tourists, but not residents, either.

We met up friends, as many as could be scheduled. We got lucky with schedules in many cases: one of Grace’s friends was coincidentally in the city to meet her parents. Another had been scheduled to head out to Rwanda for an internship but hadn’t left yet because of apartment subletting issues. Med school friends and acquaintances had mornings or afternoons free and were able to compare notes on their experiences. There were a number of toddlers.

We did a lot of eating. Besides the Chinese New Year family luncheon on Sunday, our designated restaurant stops were Babbo and Gramercy Tavern. We’ve never been to Babbo before, but this was our third time at Gramery; we had the tasting menus at both. Gramercy is very good in a traditional fine restaurant way, but the meal at Babbo blew everything else away. Simply amazing. One can disparage a celebrity chef cooking on TV, but Mario Batali brings it. Besides these two places on the upper echelon of dining, we also ate at Joe’s Shanghai (soup dumplings!), Meskeremeth (satisfying this Ethiopian food craving I’ve had since seeing this quick mention of Cleveland’s only Ethiopian restaurant), Han Bat, Saigon Grill, Shaan and a renovated Luzia’s for brunch.

We tried to get into MoMA but the line was too long for the cold weather (stretching from the entrance west down 53rd Street, past the Folk Art museum entrance, into this parking lot, to wind around to 54th Street and back down; a lot of this is probably Gates tourists in the city doing the other cultural outlets). We went to the International Center of Photography instead. (We caught a few exhibits just before they closed: Bill Owen’s Leisure was amusing, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s collection was interesting. The whole “Whiteness” thing was neither here nor there.) I went to the roof of the Met and took some shots of the Gates from the roof. Note that you can get up there by stairs instead of waiting on the very long line (which, as I’m writing this, is kind of moot now). While moving from that vantage point to the another vantage point in the American Wing, I stopped and looked at three of the Vermeers in New York. I was a little disappointed to see that a big Diane Arbus retrospective was opening the week after we head home. I was amused by the delightfully deconstructionist “dialectic of imperalism” text in the fashion basement’s exhibit.

And that’s basically that.

I got a clean throw off against a resisting brown belt during randori last night! The instructor was actually standing right there with his stopwatch and pointed it out. He further noted that the brown belt can throw me around for the rest of the randori and I’d probably still feel good about the whole thing. And that was the case: the next time the brown belt and I made contact, he threw me in a biggish uchi-mata-type of throw. I think he swept me soon afterwards, too.

The throw I got off was actually aiki-ish: the brown belt reached in for my lapel with his left hand, and I entered, taking his arm back, to the outside and down. I may have inadvertently prepared the ground psychologically a bit earlier during class, when I was working with him in uchikomi on various throws and chokes. He was going fairly fast with his fit-ins during that part of class where sensei makes us uchikomi a hundred times each (we have ten minutes) and I was actually a bit tired. “Hey, how old are you?” “Seventeen.” And obviously full of energy. We work some more, and I mention that I’m thirty-five and that the body starts to get creaky after thirty. He took it a little easier after that, and was helpful in giving corrections for my body position when we were doing koshi guruma. Possibly, he was still in that mindset when we randoried. Oh, he’s the guy whose teeth gashed up my knuckles last week. We’re about the same weight, though he’s lankier in the way 17-year-olds are.

One koshi guruma note: the way the instructor teaches this throw, it’s not ogoshi with a headlock on uke. The right hand (from a right-handed grip) should remain open and actually palm out. Hips are swung in more deeply than in ogoshi, and the right arm swinging down makes the throw. The right arm doesn’t actually do a headlock on uke, and its finishing position resembles the aikido irimi-nage done such that tori is really driving uke into the ground.

A few months ago, we picked up one of those Imperia Pasta Machine at Williams-Sonoma, as part of a gift certificate we had left over from the wedding. (As a sidenote, I find W-S as possibly the most overpriced kitchen supply store in the universe. I tend to like using Amazon for these things as well as restaurant supply stores. In Cleveland, the closest restaurant supply store I’ve found with a public showroom is Dean Supply Company, which is a ten-minute drive away.) It’s basically a roller for dough, with cutters on the other side to make ribbon pasta from the rolled dough. There’s an optional motor that can be attached to thing, but what fun is that?

We’ve only used it twice so far, since working with dough tends to generate a mess, at least for me. The first time, the pasta generally came out very nicely, except for noodles that stuck together since I wasn’t careful enough with using flour to keep them from sticking. The second time (last night), I think the dough was a little dry, either from less than careful handling after processing through the machine, or originally, because I was a little off on the egg-flour ratio and didn’t compensate by using a bit of water. (According to the machine’s instructions, 2-1/4 cups of flour to 3 eggs. Other recipes I’ve found online call for 1-1 ratio of cups-of-flour to eggs, but I found the dough to be too dry in this case. I suppose I could have fiddled by using some water.) I’ve hand-cut the pasta so far, rather than using the machine’s cutters. This is partially out of preference for not wanting to deal with putting the dough through the machine another time, and also because I like the look of the wide, hand-cut ribbons.

The Amazon page on this product also has a bunch of tips from owners that I’ll try next time.

Anyway, last night’s dinner was the fresh pasta tossed with shrimp, mushrooms, and tomatoes/onion/garlic/basil, with a side of brussel sprouts sauteed in balsamic vinegar and broiled lobster tails. Dessert was this cheesecake, but with a thick glaze of melted chocolate and whipping cream (1 cup chocolate chips + 1/2-cup whipping cream, over a double-boiler, pour on the cooled-off cheesecake, before everything goes in the fridge for a few hours).

(I should have gone to the gym today, but there’s a judo class this evening.)

Usefilm.com has a search engine to show user-submitted sample pictures from different camera/lens/film combinations. Here’s the link for the D70 and the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D combination.

Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have Sigma or Tamron lens in their Equipment Search dropdown list. I’m leaning towards the Sigma 70-300mm f/4-5.6 APO as the light, cheap carry-around long lens, and I’d like to see some photos. The lens can also be used as a macro lens, with is a bonus.

The sample photos are also somewhat small. I don’t see an obvious link to larger versions of the samples.

PBase.com also has a similar lens sample photo thing, but without the ability to look for combinations with camera bodies. They do have shots from that Sigma, though.

Jane Brody in the NYTimes last month had an article about the expiration date labelling on packaged food. The article has gone to the NYT Pay Archive Heaven, but is apparently syndicated to other publications.

Anyway, the gist of the various food dates is:

• Packed on: when food is put into the packaging, and is only marginally useful, as you don’t know how long the fruit (for example) was sitting in the factory before being put in the box. For frozen, use in a few months. For canned, in a year.
• Sell by: the store pulls the food from its shelves after this date. Food can be safely consumed for a bit after the sell-by date, e..g, milk for about a week after the sell-by. (I think NY City actually has a milk sell-by that’s a few days earlier than elsewhere in the state, under some notion that refrigeration may not be as consistent because of the many deliveries to small stores. Whether this is an issue or not, I don’t know. In any case, I tend to use milk to make yogurt, so the sell-by is less of an issue.)
• Use by: the consumer should use up the food by this date if he’s concerned about top quality. The food should be safe to eat for a few days past the use-by date, though. Cereal, for example, has the best-if-used-by date, meaning that the cereal has a higher chance of being stale at this point.
• Expiration date: food with this marking shouldn’t be consumed after this date. This is probably the clearest labelling in terms of whether the food is still good or not. Brody notes that eggs are probably safe for a month after their expiry date (assuming proper storage) because their expiry dates have to do with a Federal regulation that states that the expiry date should be 30 days past their packing date.

Actually, regarding eggs, here’s a trick for determining useability that I remember from Cooking for Dummies: put the eggs in water. If the eggs float, toss them in the garbage. If they sink, then they’re good. Intermediate buoyancy becomes a judgement call.

Of course, one shouldn’t give up common sense regarding bulging canned goods, stinky milk, fruit with unexpected and unfortunate things growing on the surface, etc.

Bizarrely, in the space of a week, I’ve lost a little bit of skin at each of the places I get my exercise, all in consectutive sessions. In the first instance, I was at the gym playing around with this heavy bag I found near the racquetball courts. I haven’t hit a bag or pad in months (no real punching in judo and aikido), so I managed to tear the skin on my right middle knuckle in a few minutes. It’s on one of the “proper” knuckles instead of down near the pinky or ring finger, so at least I’m possibly punching correctly.

A few days later, in the Wednesday morning aikido class, we were doing bokken exercises that were all about taking the center from hasso gedan (tori’s in left hanmi with the bokken down on his right). Uke has his bokken in chudan, and it gets whacked repeatedly by either yokomenuchi or an upwards deflection followed by yokomenuchi. Uke returns his bokken to chudan after each whack. Well, a patch of skin on my left forefinger got worn away by the end of this. I’ve since realized that you get blisters there only if, as uke, you hold the bokken incorrectly, like a baseball bat, rather than with the fore knuckles on the top of the hilt. If the bokken is held correctly, that patch of skin is actually out of the way. But the speed of the exercise made it difficult to do that.

The next day and most spectacularly in judo, I was doing standing randori with a visiting brown belt, a young Russian guy. It’s at the end of our round, and we have ten seconds or so to try to throw. I’m not sure what happened, whether he got some sort of ouchi-gaki or I was sacrificing backwards or we both simply got tangled and lost balance, but we both went down to the mat, me on the bottom and him on top. My right hand is gripping his lapel in the standard judo fashion, in a loose fist a bit below his jaw. My elbow hits the mat and drives my forearm up into his mouth with a bang. He got a bit of a bloody lip, and I got a gash on my knuckle, just below where I skinned it at the gym. Randori was basically over for me at that point, since I would have gotten blood on the mat and on my partners (band-aids don’t stick on sweaty skin), and the rest of class was spent with the alcohol and iodine-laden prep pads they keep in the first-aid kit. Ah, well. Anyway, this is an example of what happens if you punch someone in the mouth: you cut your knuckles on his teeth in an ugly way.

The next day, I stopped by CVS and picked up better-shaped bandages for home, as well as a bottle of Liquid Skin, seeing that my minor abrassions and cuts were in awkward places. I’ve used it, and I’m not sure if it’s all that different from Crazy Glue with a smelly antiseptic mixed in: it stings (a lot!) when you put it on, it’s somewhat discoloring, and you can see the peel marks on the edges of the patches. I’m to reapply it daily. But it’s supposed to be waterproof, and I’ve done the dishes with the stuff on. It’s held out so far, which is better than I can say about the sets band-aids I’ve gone through between the dishes and showering.