Guilty pleasure: the English cozy Midsomer Murders on DVD

Each episode of the Midsomer Murders series is a delicious chocolate truffle of English "cozy" against the background of the idyllic English countryside and the placid domesticity of the Barnaby household. The actual mystery takes a back seat to the superb, nuanced acting and the droll interactions between Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby (John Nettles) and his sidekick, Detective Sergeant Gavin Troy (Daniel Casey), DS Dan Scott (John Hopkins) and later, DS Ben Jones (Jason Hughes). In one of my favorites, Picture of Innocence, the tongue-in-cheek humor abounded; for instance, hilariously, the slow-motion approach of the three leather-clad toughs swinging their point-and-shoot digital cameras as if they were nunchakus, a scene reminiscent of the approach of the Jets in Shark territory in West Side Story. The special treat in this episode: the Dustin Hoffman-esque facial expressions and body language of Eddie Carfax (Adrian Scarborough)  when he was in a scene, but not in a speaking role. Also, John Barnaby and his wife, Joyce (Jane Wymark), are entirely believable as a married couple. Joyce Barnaby's staid sensibility is the perfect foil to her sometimes stubborn husband.

Quaint, archaic technology

In the late 1970s, journalism professor Bert Bostrom at Northern Arizona University stood at his podium and lectured that in the near future, we would read our newspapers on an television screen, and print out only the articles we wanted. (He was most likely hinting the the impending demise of print journalism.) Were my classmates as incredulous as I was? And it has all come to pass, and much more.

Those who have reached the half-century mark: image handing a smart phone to your 30-year-old self and telling him/her that the device was (1) a telephone! and (2) would almost entirely supplant landlines (a word nonexistent back then) within our lifetimes.

Remember when we could guess the decade in which a movie or television show was set by the telltale fashion, say, the 1980s by the big hair on women, the feathered hair style (men and women), leg warmers, Members Only Jackets, and high-tops? 

Now it's the technology by which a viewer can almost pinpoint the year: the gallumphing off-white/off-gray CRT displays, in all their trapezoidal ungainliness. Ha! Or those hilariously unsophisticated non-GUI (graphical user interface) displays. Remember the black or green screen with white text? Or the dial-up modem?

Does anyone remember the Star Trek movie in which Scotty mistook the mouse for a microphone for a voice recognition system?

(Note: I do miss my beloved DOS dot prompt, and, no, the DOS shell does not do it for me. And yeah, I worked hard to become proficient at dBase III Plus and worked on a team that developed a time, deliverable, goal, and money tracking application for a $3 million contract just before dBase III Plus became obsolete. For you young Turks, dBase III Plus was a relational database management system, superseded by the SQL products, such as Oracle.)

And, don't forget the boxy (to accommodate a large battery) first-generation mobile phones with the telescoping antenna. 

As the geeky friend predicted to Peggy Sue in the movie Peggy Sue Got Married, I think I'm going to love living in the future. I do.

All distilling down to the seven-year-old essence

Back to the highly recommended Up series, and the latest iteration, 56 Up. As a recap, the Up series is the perspective on the lives of 20 Britons; World in Action interviewed children at age seven, and every seven years thereafter, asking about their dreams and goals and their takes on love and romance and their perception of their worlds. The voiceover at start of every documentary concept was the Jesuit maxim: “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.”

You know what? The maxim rings true.

Also apparent, although not noted by reviewers and critics, was how similar they all were to each other at age 14. Sullen and shy, avoiding questions and the camera, they were all in the grip of awkward, sullen adolescence. Even the extroverted Tony would not make eye contact with the interviewer, the now-famous director Michael Apted. Nicholas Hichon, the shepherd’s son destined to study physics at Oxford and become a professor of electrical engineering, drew his knees up and buried his head in his forearms. The patrician Suzy faces away from the camera, as does Tony. The three East End girls, always grouped as a trio by the producers, were giggly and fidgety, but engaged with each other in response to the interviewer’s question, maybe due to a respect for authority as well as a feeling of safety in numbers.

The pugnacious Tony from London’s East End morphed into a “hands-on” grandfather, never losing his ebullience and lust for life. The shy, uncertain Paul from the orphanage finds a happy adulthood in Australia with the likable Susan and a happy family, but still admits to self-esteem problems. The elegant, refined Suzy remains so, an upper-class mother in her country home. Even Neil, despite battling mental health problems his entire life, seems to have found himself by serving in public office and in the church.

Some at 21, some at 28, some much later, but as they reached adulthood, the essence of their seven-year-old selves.

Daylight Savings Time, entertaining and informative

Looking forward to springing forward, this essay was written last March.

My home state, Arizona, declines to participate in spring forward, fall back exercises in sleep deprivation/confusion each year. The convention of sliding around the clock to accommodate...what? harvest schedules? military operations? has long outlived its usefulness. Still, I love the fact that, staring last Monday, I can now bicycle home from work in—what's this?—sunlight. By summer, of course, we'll be cursing the sun, but now basking in sunlight after a full day of work indoors is a veritable tonic of nature, not to mention a boon for those suffering from seasonal affective disorder, appropriately acronymed SAD.

What better way to celebrate the start of this phenomenon than the humorous, yet startlingly informative, animation by the inventive C.G.P. Gray.

Dating advice (tongue-in-cheek) to gals in the 50-plus crowd: Pitch a tent, attract a handsome fellow or three

Twice whilst I was engaged in pitching a tent, three handsome, strong, virile young men came running over, unbidden, to help.

First time at the beach in Galveston: as my friend, Pam (an engineer, by the way) and I set upon setting up her beach shelter, three young thirty-something men appeared to help. We were indeed struggling a little due to the breeze off the gulf. Mission accomplished, and they returned to their camp, with our profuse thanks.

The shelter, by the way, was unlike a tent. The "roof" was a separate structure from the side poles. The shelter walls were gauze-like screens that could be tied to the poles out of the way. Due to the constant breeze from the gulf, we double guyed the front poles and did not guy the rear. Heavenly, enjoying the ocean breeze from the comfort of that shelter. (Coincidence that the stabilizing ropes are called "guys"? I think not.)

Second time was at my favorite campground, Oakdale Park, in Glen Rose, Texas. Although I've set up my tent many times solo, I was delighted when three fellows in their mid-30s from a neighboring campsite ran over to my campsite to help. "Don't even try to talk us out of it," one said.

The tent went up in less than five minutes. Thanks, guys, and they returned to their site. I offered to return the favor as they were striking their own camp the next day, but they demurred.

In neither case were we damsels in distress, but, hey, it worked for a moment.

King Corn: Review of the documentary

Two Yale University graduates, sustainable agriculture advocates and filmmakers, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, discovered that they share common ancestral roots in the same agricultural town, Greene, Iowa. They set out from Connecticut to Iowa to lease an acre of cornfield to experience the process of corn sowing, growing, harvesting, and bringing-to-market process as an analog to the ubiquitous role corn plays in our lives. Filmmaker Aaron Woolf directed.

King Corn

The documentary encompasses several layered stories. First the use of corn and corn-based products in prepared food products in virtually everything we eat, including the relatively inexpensive cattle corn feed. (The piece on high fructose corn syrup was especially well done, with the voiceover of the earnest food chemist patiently and protractedly droning instructions of the involved process of cook up a batch of HFCS.)

Lyndon Johnson-era subsidy policies paid farmers to grow an overabundance of corn. The two young men suited up to visit the aged former Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, who championed in the 1960s, and continues to support subsidies enabling the “age of plenty.”

Another theme is the industrialization of agriculture. Using a borrowed tractor, the young farmers planted an acre of corn, more than 30,000 seeds, in a bit over one-quarter hour. Later, they enlist the help of a patient farmer to drive a tractor depositing fertilizer, with Curt appearing a bit frightened by the required speed of the tractor. Interviews with farmers showed them as contemptuous of the product the government paid them handsomely to grow. The corn grown by almost every farmer here was not for human consumption, but for cattle feed, and presumably, ethanol.

The sympathetic portrayal of the hard-working and genial people of this this Midwest farm community draws in the audience from on a personal level. I choked up at the proud parade of high school bands and baton twirlers followed by enormous John Deere tractors with 10-foot-diameter tires. The family of the young farmer who helped fertilize the field was shown enjoying the parade.

And speaking of choking up, a man raised in Greene returned after retirement. He is shown diving into the 6-foot-high corn rows with the filmmakers, and then getting misty-eyed talking about his dreams of flying over cornfields. The farmer who rented an acre to the young filmmakers progressed from skeptical and incredulous over the rental request, to an outspoken critic of the agriculture that has been foisted upon them. Ellis and Cheney illustrated the development of corn with a bit of meticulous and clever frame-by-frame photography.

A serendipitous sighting of a license plate, CORNFED, in a fast-food drive-through led to a meeting with a sketchy guy who revealed more dark secrets about corn as cattle feed. The film-makers followed up with a trip to a grim and desolate confined feed lot, where cattle are “finished” before slaughter. It was, to me, the saddest and most disturbing moment of the film. I was a bit surprised the filmmakers did not touch on ethanol production.

In retrospect, ethanol would warrant and entire feature-length documentary itself. King Corn won the prestigious Peabody Award, and all three man have gone on to produce other documentaries. The documentary was Independent Lens production on PBS.

Particularly interesting are the Behind the Scenes and Filmmaker statement.

 http://www.kingcorn.net

Just doing what an editor does

One of my colleagues called me obsessive-compulsive. It hurt then, and it still hurts a few months later.

For the majority of my working life, and even in high school and college, I worked an editor, and I'm still an editor.

The colleague asked me to review a piece of correspondence. It was full of punctuation errors, including extraneous quotation marks, the period outside the quotation marks (and single instead of double quotation marks at that), missing commas before the conjugation in two independent clauses, and numerous other errors.

I corrected some, although I left the quotation marks.

Her response? She told me I was obsessive-compulsive.

The Metal Men

The local iron and metal scrap yard is like something out of Mad Max: on a typical day, a long line of flat-bed 18-wheelers and old pickup trucks wait patiently in line to be weighed before and after dumping a load of twisted metal, chatarra in Spanish. Beyond the scales and office, spindly cranes literally fling huge pieces of metal across the junk pile. Amazing!

Some of the steel becomes raw material for a steel mill about 45 miles away. It is melted down in a powerful electric arc. A student in my program, a metallurgist for that plant, said each "heat" uses more electricity than the entire one-day consumption of the city of College Station, population about 76,000.

Metal salvage is an entire underground economy of which I was ignorant.

On a smaller scale, men in beat-up pickup trucks troll through the neighborhoods in my community looking for scrap metal. A few months ago, I gave a lawnmower, old grill, and other scrap metal I'd been saving to a grandfather with his two grandsons. He said the local metal scrapyard paid $10/100 pounds. Two grandsons helped out as apprentices. I remember thinking this hard-working man was spending time with his grandsons, the most valuable commodity one can give a child, and teaching the value of a good worth ethic.

A few weekends ago, some nonworking rice cookers, box fans, and some other metal that I set out at the curb were picked up in less than one hour.

On a dog walk recently, I found a broken pantograph-style car jack and some other metal, which I carried home and set out behind a bush until I could accumulate enough to make it "worthwile" to pick up. A man on a bicycle spotted the metal, then knocked on the door to ask if he could take it. Of course! Now I actively look for metal to set out for the metal men to recycle and to help them make a few bucks. This scrapper said that since the economy tanked, a lot more people are turning to scrapping, which decreased the value of his daily collections by almost half.

The cleaner the purer the metal, the higher the price the salvers will pay, with bright copper fetching the highest price.

When recycling some aluminum cans, I saw the metal man there, disassembling what appears to be old electronic equipment. I returned with a tub of mixed metal for him. He carefully separated the pieces, including some brass hose bibbs.

It's a hard way to eke out a living: he works sun up to sundown. Sometimes he finds a job tearing apart an old mobile home: he is paid for his labor, then he can recycle the metal from the mobile home.

I respected this man for finding a way to make a living, difficult as it was.

Okra

[First published in the Brazos Valley Farmers' Market newsletter, September 15, 2012. The prose in The Lost Crops of Africa is sublime.]

A member of the mallow family, okra inspires a perhaps muted allegience from vegetable lovers, and usually general disdain from vegetable nonlovers; however, it redeems itself in its potential for an astonishing array of uses beyond soups and stews: from its seeds can be extracted an oil comparable to olive oil or be processed into a protein source, and the stems and leaves could be animal feed.

But its uses don’t stop with edible products: the mucilage offers benefits of laxatives (owing to the soluble fat, and ranking with psyllium and flaxseed); the gums and pectin can lower serum cholesterol, and can be used as a substitute for aloe vera. Like its relative, kenaf, fibers from okra can be fashioned into high-quality paper. Jokingly, it has been said, “okra: a vegetable so slimy you don’t notice how hairy it is.” Indeed, the Lost Crops of Africa: Volume II: Vegetables leads off its surprisingly entertaining chapter on okra on a 1974 survey of least-liked vegetables.

In African dialects, the word for okra sounds similar to gumbo (http://africhef.com/Okra-Recipes.html), and indeed, it is regarded with reference in New Orleans, where it forms the basis of signature dishes, such as…gumbo.

Published by the National Academies Press, Lost Crops of Africa: Volume II: Vegetables offers a transcendent literary homage to okra. The sheer delightfulness of the language in this scientific volume will bring a smile to even the most mucilage-averse persons. For instance—

“In reality okra could have a future that will make people puzzle over why earlier generations failed to seize the opportunity before their eyes. In the Botanical Kingdom it may actually be a Cinderella, though still living on the hearth of neglect amid the ashes of scorn.” (National Research Council (2006-10-27). "Okra". Lost Crops of Africa: Volume II: Vegetables. Lost Crops of Africa. 2. National Academies Press. ISBN 978-0-309-10333-6)

And later—

“In America, where it appears almost exclusively in stews and soups, okra is usually seen in cross section, cut into disks that look like little cartwheels with a seed nestled between each pair of spokes. Okra is also the key ingredient in gumbo, the famous dish of the American South.”

A study in robustness, okra grows easily in tropical, subtropical, and temperate climates, but can adapt to dry climates also.

Recipes
Okra and tomatoes
Southern Living’s 10 best okra recipes
Curried okra

Water dogs

Two or three times per week, Oliver and Canela go for a swim in a pond about a mile from my home. Adjacent to the railroad track, this pond boasts a notable history. My historian friend, Texas native Jimmy Klechka, said that pond was first impounded in the early 20th century to provide steam engines with water. Later, the pond provided once-through cooling water for a small-ish electrical power plant. More recently, this beleaguered body of water and its downstream neighbors were badly polluted with arsenic by an adjacent pesticide manufacturer. Remediation has been ongoing for more than a decade.

Oliver, a yellow Lab mix and natural swimmer, flings himself into the water with abandon. On cue, using a modern plastic atl-atl (curved throwing stick), I launch rocks into the pond while standing on the railroad tracks. At the sound of the plunk, Oliver swims so fast to the ripple that he leaves a wake.

Canela, a little red hound mix, at first kept right behind Oliver. When he turned, she turned. Now that she has gained more confidence, she swims her own swim with her tail sticking out of the water like a flag. Today she jumped in before I was able to remove her leash. While about 40 feet from shore, Oliver grabbed the leash in his mouth, and led Canela back to shore.
 
Rarely, a freight train chugs by, and I have to scramble out of the way down a talus slope to the shoreline.

One of those days

So.

In the interest of forestalling any administrative problems that might stand between my graduate students and their graduation, I organized a short lunchtime meeting. Topics to be covered: deadlines,  application for graduation, final oral defense, thesis submission, tips for thesis preparation, etc.

With the idea of making the meeting more palatable, I ordered yummy sandwiches and chips. It was a relatively small order, maybe 14 sandwiches, packed in a box, 14 bags of chips, and a gallon of iced tea. Since I bicycled across the continent with everything needed to sustain me—including my knitting—and have brought entire brunches to work on my bicycle, I planned to bicycle to the sandwich shop (driving was difficult due to much construction), bungie everything to the rack, and ride back to the office.

First mistake: the one very long, flat bungie cord was not robust enough to lash down everything. I decided to push the bicycle, as the load was unstable. Twice the entire package slumped off the bike onto the pavement as I was pushing the bike. Finally got back to the office three minutes before the talk was to start.

I asked students to start eating while I changed from bicycle clothing to office attire. Two student fetched ice in a cooler.

Then, haha, I realized I hadn't printed the handout. For the first time ever in my two years here, the behemoth copier jammed. Fortunately, the unjamming instructions were easy to follow, and we were back in business.

The students are wonderful, but it seemed, in total, an exercise in futility, which I probably won't repeat.

My brother the car

Those readers wearing bifocals may get the joke implied in the title of this post: a reference to a 60s and 70s television series starring Jerry Van Dyke, in which his mother was reincarnated as a vintage car.

But I digress.

The elder of my two brothers, Marshall, is a lifelong "car guy," who owns a successful car repair garage in Scottsdale, Arizona, rated a top shop by AAA for the past ten years.

He seems to think of his body in terms of a car. For instance, Marshall, at the office of an orthopedic surgeon, wrote he was getting a shot of—

"some kind of goop/gel to cushion some of the factory stuff that's worn out. Its a three-shot series. Once a week for three weeks. Supposed to get some benefit for like a year."

Note: the reading material in the ortho's waiting room was all motorcycle magazines. I guess he knows his clientele.

Marsh probably makes the analogy between carburetion and metabolism. The list could go on.

In another case, a friend's brother, a mechanic, went to Germany to work. The German mechanics asked why Americans chew gum. His German limited mostly to automotive terms, he replied, "It gives you good exhaust [breath]."

The textbook scam…and a radical idea from a college lecturer

Years ago, a colleague, an electrical engineer, was angered by the speciousness of his daughter’s elementary school textbooks. The textbook cited incorrect data about temperatures of various color stars. It was apparent, from a quick read, that the writers merely randomly assigned temperature ranges to the various star colors. Bad science, and he was justifiably angry.

Fast forward a few years. A fellow technical writer interviewed at a well known publisher of elementary school textbooks. She described the office as a sweatshop, saying, “Whoever was left standing at the end of the interview got the job.”

Now I work in higher education, as the coordinator and advisor in a graduate engineering program. Even at this rarefied level, the scam continues. Professors revise a textbook, making minor changes, and thereby rendering the previous edition obsolete. And thereby quashing the resale market. (Students cannot sell back their books at the end of the semester.) And thereby requiring students in the next semester to pay top dollar for the new edition.

Not insignificant. The average price of a new graduate-level engineering textbook is $230. And so it goes.

What a scam!

Sounding like a chapter that should be in Steven Leavitt’s Freakonomics, to make things work, textbook publishers escalate the ante by sending to professors—gratis— evaluation copies (also called desk copies), feeding the frenzy by enticing profs to prescribe the new drug…um, I mean specify the new textbook. (Leavitt himself is a professor of economics at University of Chicago.)
Stop the madness!

A lecturer (Ph.D., mechanical engineering) proposed a revolutionary idea: make his courses textbook-neutral.

Genius!

In other words, it would be the student’s responsibility to learn the general principles, using whatever textbook or method they chose. Let’s face it: the concepts of thermodynamics and fluid dynamics have not changed much in the past 100 years. Even modern physics (quantum mechanics and physics of solid state) dates to the 1930s at the latest.

In all fairness, some faculty eschew textbooks altogether, instead preparing class notes for purchase.
And graduate students, at least, spend at much more time teaching themselves concepts in early morning or late evening study groups or alone as they spend in class. Even undergraduates are left to their own devices. (Several undergraduate computer science students lamented privately, “I did not spend all this money to go to [enormous state research university] to teach myself computer science.)

The plan—

• Empower students to learn fundamental concepts by whatever method they choose, even an old textbook.
• Reinforce the concepts in class
• Give relevant homework
• Administer fair examinations
• Treat students fairly
• Don’t treat students as cash cows.

Such inventivness!

Just finished reading Out of Time, by Deborah Truscott, a time-travel/romance novel, one of whose protagonists is a Tory soldier transported to the modern-day Pennsylvania countryside.

Aside: great dialog, well-developed characters, fascinating historical detail, punchy ending. Download this book on your Kindle and for a pleasurable read.

To purchase some clamps for the Friends of the Farmers' Market booth, I made a foray out to Harbor Freight. I felt a little like the Revolutionary War soldier who was awestruck by the lawnmower, can opener, car.

There was a knife disguised in a key (to thwart TSA scanners?), a key chain-size utility knife, ceramic kitchen knives, a gas-fired stove that appears to be targeted to survivalists, air compressors the size of water heaters, and just about every type of fastener, glue, adhesive, clamp, clip, bolt, on the planet.

How ironic is this?

Under the heading of great irony, the Northern Arizona News reports that the Cheba Hut franchise in Flagstaff, Arizona, was disenfranchised by the Cheba Hut corporate office because their delivery driver was caught with marijuana in the vehicle. The irony is that Cheba Hut's entire branding is "stoner themed," according to the Flagstaff Cheba Hut owner. The first Cheba Hut was inspired by the founders' observation that late-night deliveries were prompted by tobacco-induced munchies. The names of their sandwich sizes, even, are identical to designators for various sizes of marijuana joints.

Kingston Trio

In 1957, two high school chums from Hawaii, Bob Shane and Dave Guard, joined with Navy brat Nick Reynolds to form the Kinston Trio while all three were enrolled in California universities in the San Francisco Bay area. From beginnings at the Mad I and Purple Onion (where a one-week booking turned into a sold-out run for the next few months) in San Francisco, the trio rode the folk music wave to become the most popular group in the world at the height of its popularity in the mid-1960s.

A popular misconception is the association of the name Kingston with Kingston, New York; Kingston, Massachusetts; or Kingston, Jamaica. Actually, the trio's agent suggested Kingston for a few calypso pieces in the trio's repertoire, but more for the universal—and somewhat preppie—appeal of the name, as the trio was playing the college circuit at the time.

The trademark striped shirts were chosen as a convenience—they were readily available off the rack in sizes to fit the trio members—and again, for their collegiate appeal.

They are best known for re-arranged public domain tunes such as Tom Dooley, M.T.A. and Greenback Dollar, ballads such as and Scotch and Soda, Early Morning Rain, and the war critique, written by Pete Seeger, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, and the raucous Wherever We May Go, which is also the title of a documentary about the trio.

In 1960, the trio won a Grammy for  the newly created Best Ethnic or Original Folk recording.

In 1963, the trio parlayed its success to a television pilot, Three Men in a Hurry, portraying three recent college graduates living in Phoenix and playing music through their connections to the Junior Chamber of Commerce.

As it was part of the musical lexicon in the 1960s, of course I knew of the Kingston Trio, but only vaguely as a kid growing up in New York. Later, a classmate in freshman English at Northern Arizona University wrote an essay on singer-songwriter John Stewart, who replaced Dave Guard as the bass voice in the trio and stayed with the group until its dissolution in 1967 with a final concert at the Hungry i.

The trio was parodied as the Kingsmen in the folk music mockumentary, A Mighty Wind.

There have been several replacements of Stewart and Reynolds over the years, with Bob Shane being the constant. The Trio holds an annual fantasy camp in Scottsdale, Arizona (my home town), home of the surviving original member, Bob Shane. Participants meet the trio, are apparently issued matching shirts, and have the opportunity to play Kingston Trio music onstage with their musical heroes.

Both Stewart and Reynolds passed away in 2008; Shane still lives in Scottsdale.

The food (Ad)venture

Remember the good old days, when fat was the food villain? Or coffee (good in small quantities, though), carbs (the South Beach food imposter diet), salt, pickled foods, aged cheese? And let's not forget tuna, pork, beef (for a multitude of problems), chicken, eggs, any nonfarm-raised fish? Anything with preservatives? And then there was the spinach scare.

And, of course, there's high fructose corn syrup, responsible for the backlash of soft drinks touting their throwback to the very special...real sugar, which was the evil white powder of the 1970s which returned for a repeat performance in the late 1990s. And the artificial sweeteners: cyclamates, saccharine, aspartame. There's the reverse chirality sugar now that wreaks havoc on some digestive systems. And on the good side is stevia.

Now it's gluten, a protein found in wheat and some other grains, that many people are allergic to. Carbs, the staple of my diet during my avid cycling days, cause weight gain. What? No more bagels and pasta?

In my opinion, the concurrent problems of obesity and malnutrition are: processed foods, soft drinks, and the computer replacing active playtime (adult and children).

Cell phones: boon and bane

Cell phones: Yeah, I know, they are a necessary evil. A few years ago, it seemed so surprising that normal, mortgage-paying 8-to-5ers would every give up the safety net of the landline and go wireless, but now wireless has become the norm. My young neighbor remarked, after watching me use the landline, "Do you have a regular [cell] phone?"

I still maintain my landline and DSL, but for seven years, I had a bare-bones prepay phone as a matter of necessity: you know, one pre-buys a finite number of "minutes" and airtime. Not a smartphone. But it fulfilled my limited needs: got great reception, the minutes were relatively inexpensive when bought in bulk, it sent and received text messages. I use my iPod Touch for data and apps.

But for a few months, I had no bars, no reception. Incoming calls were routed directly to voicemail, or sometimes, lost altogether. Text messages failed. This is not good.  If I go incommunicado, I want it to be on my own terms.

Frustration converged with opportunity, and on a whim, I turned into the first cell phone vendor I passed on the main drag: a shop catering mostly the Spanish-speaking community.

The phone and plan I ended up with was exactly what I wanted. How often does an impulsive decision work out for the best? Once the owner understood that I did not want or need an unlimited plan for a fixed amount per month, he found a prepay per minute plan (Total Call Mobile) and a Sanyo Katana phone. the ultimate cost per minute is less than that of the previous phone, the plan does not require purchasing airtime in addition to minutes, the Katana phone (for which he discounted the price) is packed with features that I'm still learning about, the contacts database is more user-friendly, the screen is easy to read, and never has the phone been out of service.

These hallowed halls

I earn part of my daily bread as a graduate academic advisor in the College of Engineering. In other words, the students under my watch are all earning master of science or doctorate degrees in engineering. By definition then, they are organized, directed, analytical, methodical, intelligent, persistent.

One student's experience, though, encapsulates the essence of why I love advising. An self-descrubed lackadaisical American undergraduate in chemical engineering, he found himself at the point of singular dissatisfaction with his job in the oil service industry. He quit that lucrative job to return for an MS, with an idea of specializing in energy-generating materials, earning an MS without benefit of an assistantship. More gregarious than the typical engineering student, he shared with me his ideas and disappointments and hopes. I offered suggestions and contacts, but mostly listened.

He took the initiative to study internationally at the acknowledged world-leading university in his particular field of energy materials.

After successfully completing the physics course well acknowledged to be the most difficult in our curriculum, and also holding his own in the ad hoc study group, the student admitted to me, proudly and almost incredulously, "Maybe I am capable of doing graduate-level engineering coursework." He entered the program with trepidation and bravado and probably a some fear, but persevered and overcame, proving his engineering proficiency and resourcefulness, mostly to himself.

The is the reason I love advising.

He is the only MS student, to my knowledge, to be offered a position with a famous semiconductor manufacturer and developer.

The primary and caucus system explained

Any questions, view C.G.P. Gray's primary primer.

When you've digested that, give a listen to How the Electoral College Works.

Just for fun, it's Coffee: The Greatest Addition Ever.

And before spring forward Sunday: Daylight Savings Time Explained.

Sardonic (maybe unintentionally so), entertaining, and educational.